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Playstation 3 Pre-E3 Unveiling
Just as a reminder, the Playstation 3 is going to take it's bow before E3 proper as well. The Guardian has the story that the PS3 will debut four days after the Xbox360's introduction on MTV, at Sony Pictures Studio in LA. From the article: "Sony spokesfolks have hinted in the past that PS3 - or whatever it will be called - will be launched ahead of E3. Past product roadmaps have pointed to an early to mid-2005 launch. The company gave the PowerPC-derived 'Cell' processor on which the new console will be based its first public outing in February." Penny Arcade, as always, has the best grasp of the situation.
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Ask most people in the demographic that M$ is looking to hit if they know what channel MTV is on. Then ask them if they know where Spike TV is.
Most of the Spike TV viewers are Star Trek or wrestling fans. I think MTV has a wider range of people watching it (though, there isnt much MUSIC on the channel anymore).
Its simple to see that M$ is also looking for a channel that everyone with cable actually HAS. I highly doubt SpikeTV has the same amount of subscribers for it, or on the Basic cable listing as MTV usually is.
It took me a while to figure out Sony's strategy here, as I thought it would be best for them to wait till after MS shows what the XBox 2 can do in order to tweak their demo. I believe Sony's strategy here (and before when they scheduled their news confrence 3 hours before Microsofts) is to have a direct comparison between the two consoles, hence robbing MS of any advantage of launching early. More or less the same strategy they took with the Sega Dreamcast. IF (notice thats a big if) the PS3 is a 1Thz machine, then that would make it about an order of magnitude more powerful then the XBox2/next/360, meaning people would wait for it to be released and not buy the Xbox. Then again, Sony could just hype it that way and get the same result.
The end result will be instead of the XBox2 getting a couple of dedicated pages in gaming mags and websites, and then showcasing the PS3 a month later, those mags and websites will instead print comparison pictures of each system side by side. This helps Sony much more then it helps Microsoft.