There's excitement in Xbox land thanks to MTV breaking news that Microsoft is gearing up to release a motion sensing Wii remote wannabe by the end of the year. The news is a long way short of an official Microsoft announcement and it comes from some shady 'insider source', which could mean anything from a high ranking Rare employee blowing the whistle to the wildest imaginings of the latest work experience kid.

But for the moment we'll assume it's true - that Microsoft is releasing its own motion sensing accessory which gives a Wii remote like experience to Xbox 360 owners. We'll also assume that because Rare is supposed to be in charge of it, it'll be a reasonably solid design with some half way decent launch titles.

Now, how and why does that affect the PS3? Because it indicates that Microsoft is giving up the battle for the high end market and that it is moving its focus to the larger, so-called 'casual' player base.

Up to now Microsoft has tried hard to portray the Xbox 360 as suitable for this casual market, but compared to Nintendo it hasn't had a lot of luck. Much of Ninty's success has of course been attributed to the intuitive design of the Wii remote - pick it up and it becomes whatever the game and your imagination want it to be.

Microsoft's best attempt to draw in a casual crowd is Uno, an online version of a decidedly 80s card game. In terms of intuitive controls the best it can manage is the less than stunning Live Vision Camera. So bringing a motion sensing accessory to the market seems like a pretty sensible move - it fills a gap that Microsoft is lacking (so is Sony in fact because basically the Sixaxis is toss) and potentially opens the console up to a far wider market.

However, this is very bad news for the Xbox 360's core market. Microsoft has ever been prone to jeopardise its more serious players so that it can stay competitive on a wider scale. Take the Xbox 360 Arcade model for example - by persisting with models that don't come with hard discs, the Redmond giant is still forcing games developers to design games that do not require hard disc space. Meanwhile the rival PS3 has no such limitation and this factor is only going to become more noticeable as time goes on.

Plus, any motion sensing remote offering is going to be starting a long, long way behind what Nintendo already has in its arsenal. Suffice to say, breaking in is going to take a large amount of effort and, of course, resources to bring an Xbox 360 rival up to the same standard. Those resources are going to be drawn away from other Xbox 360 projects and that means the more traditional, hardcore games are going to suffer or simply not get the backing they need.

At the same time, the PS3 is only just reaching its boiling point - the latter part of 2007 was pretty damn good for PS3 owners and the rest of 2008 is set to be a real scorcher too. In comparison the 360 has already played its major hands like Halo 3 and doesn't have a huge amount left to fall back on.

By the end of this year, the 360 will be three years old - compared to the life of the original Xbox, that's getting on a bit - and though game technologies may well continue to evolve, its golden years could already be well behind it. By now, the majority of serious console players will have made their console choice long ago, and even those who were really holding out will probably have made a decision by the time GTA IV launches. So Microsoft must surely be beginning to question whether there is really all that much of the hardcore market left to conquer. Sony, meanwhile, can continue to lure former 360 players across the divide and focus on encouraging its huge existing PS2 install base to upgrade.

So having been at loggerheads for over a year now, is there really any point in continuing to battle it out for a comparatively small piece of market space? Microsoft is now at a disadvantage in terms of console power and specs, mainly due to the sheer age of its console. The 360 is a noisy beast that's prone to breaking and sooner or later it's going to fall behind the PS3 in terms of game quality. But even then it will still have a superb online content delivery system and multiplayer network - something that the Wii definitely does not have.

Meanwhile Sony's Blu-ray victory has given it a significant technical advantage - despite Microsoft's optimism, downloads still aren't quite in a position to compete with it in the longer term. It will happen one day certainly, but not in this console generation. And Sony's own online network is rapidly gaining strength and has a significant advantage over Xbox Live in that it's free.

So while Sony is clearly committed to taking back its core market from Microsoft, Nintendo is sitting pretty, selling its console at a profit right out of the box and with little else so successfully capturing the imagination of the casual market. It is a lower tech offering that has a bloody awful online system and aside from its own first-party gems, the Wii is drowning amidst a sea of just dire third-party offerings. Seriously, why should it get such an easy ride?

Someday, Microsoft will have to start winding the Xbox 360 down. Because the 360 arrived before the PS3, its twilight years will begin first. Although the PS2 has been going some ten years, the games industry as a whole is still pretty young - there's no hard and fast rule about when a console should start to shift its focus away from one market to another. Therefore if Microsoft is serious about copying the Wii remote and going after the casual crowd - and there is more than enough financial incentive to do so - then it will be starting to abandon its war with Sony. And that day might come sooner than we thought.

Before you write in to tell how much of a Sony fanboy I am, and that I should be fired/shot/castrated/etc (yawn), please do two things for me. 1) Look at the headline. See where it says 'Opinion'. Think long and hard about what that means. 2) Look at the name of this website. See how it's a PS3 blog. Any opinion voiced here is inevitably going to be influenced by that fact, although we do try to be a lot less deliberately pro-Sony than a lot of people would like. Anyone who fails to acknowledge these two simple instructions is admitting to toying with themselves in front of old ladies. Peace out.

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