So I'm one of the lucky many who've bagged a pre-order for the PlayStation 3. Only now it's becoming clear that everyone who wants one in the UK will probably be able to get one. And now I'm not sure if I should cancel my order. What's this about?

Our relationships with brands are complicated things. I remember a creepy day back in the 1980s when I went around my house and checked the brand names of all the electronics kit I owned. It was like the trailer for the current Jim Carrey movie, The Number 23, in which he suddenly starts finding this magical number everywhere. I checked my bedside clock radio. Sony. TV? Sony. House phone? Sony. VCR? Sony. PlayStation? Sony, of course. Was it a conspiracy? What did it mean. Why had Sony stolen all my gadget pound? I realised with some embarrassment that everything I owned with a plug was from the same company. I had been snagged. I had bought the message totally. I would no more buy Phillips than vote Conservative. It was hard-wired. Now, of course, as a gadget pundit, I'm harder to snag: I have a Philips DECT phone, a Denon DVD player, and so on. But in those days, I was the creature of one particular Japanese corporation: I was their boy. Sony, right. Everything else, wrong.

My Sony DNA is under pressure now with the launch of Sony's next-generation gaming console, the PS3. I remember setting up my first PlayStation, and I remember doing the same thing with my PlayStation 2. There was a sense of expectation about what the graphics of the PS2 could do when it came out that was actually met the first time you got the thing going: I remember gazing in wonder at the speed and responsiveness of the games on the screen, a sense that I was getting away with something – as though I'd managed to smuggle an arcade game home from a dodgy emporium in Leicester Square. A few weeks ago I pre-ordered my PS3 with little conscious thought: it's what you do if you're a Sony fanboi. I don't want the ride to stop.

This decision makes no rational sense. I have played around with an XBox 360 but simply don't have enough time to play console games for them to get really fun. There is so much competition for the screen in my house that hogging it for 36 hours straight to play Gears of War is just not going to happen, unless I fake a serious leg injury and take time off work. And the pundits are pretty clear on this: the initial launch titles for the PS3 aren't anything to write home about anyway. At this stage in the game developers aren't cranking out anything from the hardware that we haven't seen on the Xbox 360, although that may happen later on. My launch bundle from Game (usually an expensive way to get a new console) even includes the PS3 version of Call of Duty 3. I've already played the Xbox 360 version, and Gamespot reliably informs me that is basically the same, only not quite as good.

My Game.co.uk bundle of 60GB PS3 and three games will set me back a hefty £554.96. So why do it? Well, because. Because I have a sentimental relationship to the platform. Because I'm intrigued by the idea of a media hub in the living room that is attached to my TV and that doesn't come from Microsoft, in the form of an Xbox 360 or a Media Centre PC. Because I bought the first and second platforms in this architecture and I'm signed up for the Sony ride. Because I quite like the idea of getting access to a Blu-ray player without adding another box to my already groaning Ikea TV pedestal. Because I have fond memories of playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on my PS2 into the small hours (I was unemployed at the time, and didn't need to get up early.) That's a particularly daft reason, given that Rockstar Games have said that the next GTA game will come out on Xbox and PS3 at the same time.

I appreciate that all of this is rather personal and not very logical, but then spending a lot of money on a toy like the PS3 is a very personal and rather illogical decision. It's also a key decision for the future of Sony's business. The question for Sony now is how many people are like me: knee-jerk Sony clones who for whatever complex mixture of emotion, history, former glory and years of marketing indoctrination, can't bear to say goodbye to Sony's big leap into next-generation gaming, even though the actual games, which are sort of the point of a games console, aren't going to pull people in initially? If the answer is "many millions" then the platform's success will have a huge impact on the company's future fortunes, the success of the Blu-ray movie format, and the hardware infrastructure of the modern living room.

I was chatting to a colleague at Gamespot.co.uk who has been trying to gauge early demand for PS3s, and it's very hard to call. It doesn't look as like there are the shortages we saw with the Wii in the run up to Christmas, so fewer people should be disappointed. But then, the PS3 is more expensive, and it's not Christmas anymore, and everyone's broke. The retailers are talking up the launch but are being less than forthcoming about actual pre-order numbers – which were available to the press during the run up to the Wii launch. We'll find out hard numbers soon enough after the launch of the PS3 on March 23, but I can't help wondering how many ageing gamers (let's face it, not many teenagers will be able to afford the bloody thing) are sitting in front of a web browser, staring at their PS3 pre-order and feeling almost let down that the thing is available. Like me, they're wondering whether to press cancel or let the order go through. Sony's future hangs on a finger poised above a mouse button. What do you think I should do?

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