We all know the story about the 360 in Japan, but in North America the 360 is "a powerful enemy" for the PS3, which could ultimately lead Sony's game business to continue to lose money in the next fiscal year.

The folks at popular gaming blog Kotaku got their hands on a translation of an interesting article from the Weekly Toyo Keizai that details the PlayStation 3's hurdles. Rather than being Japan-centric, the piece takes a hard look at the North American marketplace, where Microsoft's Xbox 360 is currently leading with over 10 million consoles sold.

The article notes that the PS3 is "at a crucial moment" and that a "powerful enemy" (i.e. the 360) currently "blocks its way" in North America. Part of the problem for the PS3 is quite obvious: there aren't enough really good titles to justify the $600 price tag yet. "PS2 owners are still waiting and seeing how many and what kinds of PS3 games are going to be released. Several promising PS3 games are going to be released in the second half of this year, which will regain the hardware sales," commented Enterbrain (publisher of Famitsu) exec Kouichi Hamamura.

The Weekly Toyo Keizai piece goes on to speculate that Microsoft could really "squash" Sony if they decided to cut the price of the Xbox 360 in the near future. An executive at a major software company was cited saying, "I suppose that Microsoft will start a big price drop within this year and Sony should follow that or they'll lose their market share."

The problem with that, however, is that Sony may not be able to afford a price drop. For the current fiscal year, Sony's game division is expected to lose around 200 billion yen ($1.6 billion). And while Sony intends to break even on its games business sometime in the next fiscal year (and possible outsourcing of Cell production may aid that endeavor), if Microsoft slashes the price of the 360 Sony may be wind up losing a significant amount of money in the next fiscal year as well.

"...if Microsoft massively drops the price of the 360, Sony's plot will fail in no time. Industry analysts of major securities companies are forecasting that Sony's game division keeps making a loss which will be more than 100 billion yen in next fiscal year, supposing that Sony will drop the price of PS3," the Keizai piece concludes.