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Sony Produces Fewer Units, Not Sorry About Delays
Sony has ordered its suppliers to produce fewer units of the PSP handheld, 1up reports. From the article: "While meeting with suppliers, Sony reportedly plans to manufacture only 12 million units, reports Next Generation from Japan's Nikkei BP. Previously, suppliers had expected orders in excess of 18 million units for the portable hardware. No reasons were cited in the original article, and representatives for Sony Computer Entertainment America were not available for comment." Meanwhile, GameIndustry.biz is reporting that the company is unrepentant about the PSP's launch delay and the consistent PS2 shortages. From the article: "...despite the constant criticism of the company, which will launch PSP in Europe in September nine months after the Japanese launch, in fact, 'we like this - we don't want to go first.'"
Wouldn't that be a tacit admission that the hardware wasn't really ready at the time of the first launch?
Still can't figure out why they'd want to produce less units though, unless they figure it would be better to undershoot and have a higher demand for a smaller number of units than to overshoot and glut the market, but if true that also wouldn't sound too good once you decyphered the market-speak.
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Sony Computer Entertainment, even with the translation gaffes and communication errors, seems to be one of the cockiest and unapologetic companies in the gaming business. The PSP alone has already generated a myriad of problems, all of which are dealt with from indiffference to outright hostility towards their customers:
Yes, the PSP is beautiful. Yes, it's sleek and sexy. But honestly, I swear Sony made it for themselves, with customer satisfaction as a distant afterthought.
http://www.megatokyo.com/strips/0033.gif
* Dead pixel:
I agree. Yeah I agree:D. F*ck it.
* X Buttons:
Sony has fixed this problem before US launch and you/I don't have the problem. You are believing a rumour which is about a year old. And you don't have anything to back your claim up now. I owns PSP and I can see its quality is no less than that of home console machines.
* UMD:
UMD has been somehow in successful position. I have no doubt with this. Compare it with DVD at its first year. DVD was protected tightly as well. I guess if it is fully opened and rewritable by anyone, UMD and PSP wouldn't be this successful. Seeing bubbling interest in piracy on internet recently, I don't have any opposition about it. For game developers, actors, movie directors, and Sony, it must be too dangerous to make it open.
Everything has cons and pros, so.
I see them everywhere, they're just trying to keep the price high through the winter, by reducing supplies.
Which almost nobody has since it had only a short production run towards the end of the NES's lifespan.
Fixing a major design decision like that of the cart-loading mechanism costs a hell of a lot more than just changing the quality of some of the parts, the latter of which is the main issue with the early PSPs.
They're probably just trying to keep the demand up until the holiday season so that they can get big Christmas sales.
They're probably hoping that they can keep the price high enough for now that only the most interested people will buy PSPs. Then, word will get out on the street about how cool they are and everyone will get one for Christmas at an only marginally lower price, thereby making Sony look like a god of holiday toy/electronic/video game sales.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
Recall the drive issues with first-generation PS2s and XBoxes.
Recall the lid issues with current generation PS2 systems. I've read horror stories of the disc drive lid breaking off after a week.
Has anyone else noticed that Sony continues to loose market share in their electronics division to smaller companies that are producing a better product at a lower price?
Honestly, Sony is their own worst enemy. A couple of years back the name Sony on any product meant that it was higher priced than its competition but the extra quality of the Sony product usually made up for the extra cost. Now it seems to me that every Sony product I have purchaced or even examined lately is a lower quality and yet still higher priced product. Now, with the less than stellar quality (manufacturing quality that is) of the Playstation, PS2 and now PSP are we to expect disc read errors and an in general lower quality product with the PS3?
" UMD has been somehow in successful position. I have no doubt with this. Compare it with DVD at its first year. DVD was protected tightly as well. I guess if it is fully opened and rewritable by anyone, UMD and PSP wouldn't be this successful."
It's 'universal' in the sense that it does more than simply play music or video. It plays games and presumably other types of media, too. It's 'universal' in the sense that the V in DVD means 'versatile'.
"Derp de derp."
The square button/mis-aligned sensor feature has never been fixed. All that was fixed was the problem where the button would get stuck. I consider that completely broken, and Sony had damn well fix those/
The UMD is currently used by one device... One. I will not consider it a success until there are non Sony products using it. Some people would call Mini-Disc a success. They would be wrong. Considering that a portable DVD player with a much larger screen is available at your local Sam's Club for $100 less than a PSP, I don't see the PSP pushing any UMD revolution.
All the comments I've read so far deal with some kind of theory about making supply short to increase demand.
Maybe they just realized that they aren't selling a gazillion PSPs and decided to only produce enough for current and future demand? I know it sounds crazy, but maybe it's just a duck.
-- I have fans? Wow.
* X Buttons:
Sony has fixed this problem before US launch and you/I don't have the problem. You are believing a rumour which is about a year old. And you don't have anything to back your claim up now. I owns PSP and I can see its quality is no less than that of home console machines.
Uh...it would almost be hard for Sony to build a handheld that was put together worse than a PS2.
I'll take two dead pixels over 'disc read error' any day of the week.
"A couple of years back the name Sony on any product meant that it was higher priced than its competition but the extra quality of the Sony product usually made up for the extra cost."
Let me tell you what Sony meant a couple of years back.
For example if you bought a TFT. Everyone else quoted TR+TF as latency (time to rise + time to fall). Sony was the only company left which quoted only either TR or TF. So your l33t 25ms TFT with a Sony logo would typically have _higher_ latency than a 40ms from Iiyama, LG or Samsung. (Which also cost less than half the price.)
For example if you bought a Sony "MP3" player: it was the only "MP3 player" which couldn't in fact play MP3. Sony actually stuck to their own crappy codec, which is arguably the worst at a given bit rate, and capped to some 64 kbit/sec anyway. So you'd rip your MP3 at, say, 192 kbit/s, and get a little audio loss. Then you'd upload it to your l33t Sony MP3 player, and it would get uncompressed and recompressed to Sony's codec, at a whole 64kbit/sec. (Actually lower on some models.) And get a LOT of audio quality loss extra.
And so on. Sony never was that big a name for quality, it was just a name for big marketting and high prices. All you got for that extra money was the name "Sony" and quite often _less_ quality than an equivalent product. (E.g., again, see how Sony's "25ms" wasn't quite the same "25ms" anyone else used, or that the ISO standard defined.)
Don't get me wrong, I still did like their Playstation and PS2, because of the massive developper support they had. But if we're talking Sony's own part in it, again, at launch they were shamelessly mis-represented as being far more capable than they realy were. Typical Sony marketting running amok, really.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Maybe they're just losing money like crazy.
I seriously doubt they're profiting on these little machines. Not that that's new for them, of course.
But what IS new to Sony is not having a massive game library. How do you make up losses on system sales when you hardly have any games worth the effort it takes to lift the UMD?
Anyway, arrogant, arrogant, etc., their lies killed Sega, etc.
Releasing the PSP nine fucking months after Japan takes the biscuit. If I had the money I would've bought a US or Japanese PSP by now. (I may not have any money for the UK launch either unfortionatley...). When Nintnedo launches hardware in Europe faster than you[1], you should realise that you're being too bloody slow.
:-)
Sometimes living in the UK really sucks...
[1] But still months after everywhere else, although they do release games at about the same time as everywhere else now, instead of months (or in Animal Crossing's case, years) later. Sometimes we even get games first. But that's probably more down to the GameCube tanking in Europe, and imports taking sales for handheld games.
I'm not sure if there's any point to this rant.
10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU ";
20 GOTO 10
"Hmmm. Well. Here I am at the old game store and there's still no more PSP games out. On the other hand, there are some UMD movies here. Yeah. I think I'll spend my money on a movie with fewer features than a DVD with worse audio/visual quality. It's a good deal because the price is only a LITTLE higher than DVD and I can play the movies on my PSP...well, only my PSP...Come to think of it, I think I'll head over to Blockbuster and get some DVDs."
Obviously, the issue isn't really about whether we want the console early and broken or late and working, it's about what the difference is between the eastern/NA markets and the European one that justifies a different release date in Europe.
A more mature platform with more games? Sure, but that still leaves the question of why you didn't extend this courtesy to the Eastern/NA markets, Sony?
But there must be some logic behind this move, it's just that noone seems to have any idea what it is. What do Sony have to gain by releasing the console later?
True, but on the bright side, they've got this incredibly shiny PSP they bought a while back just sitting there, because they've played the very few decent games available on it.
Look! It's a small portable screen, and it's playing a movie! Isn't that amazing?
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Honestly... I hadn't heard people having as much problems with their Gamecube. Even with their first generation ones.
This is the death spiral - they'll prop it up for a year or so, but all y'all that bought one wasted your money on a device that will end up in the bargain bin.
And really, if you were a little more delicate than the average 8 year-old kid, you wouldn't have that problem to begin with.
I can't stop 8-year-old video-game-playing cousins from visiting my house. Now what do I do? Should I just hide the PSP and let people play the GBA alternative to Lumines?
Point well taken, but the post I was replying to said that Sony was somehow synonimous with quality a couple of years back. Now I know that "a couple" is a very fuzzy interval, but I figure about 5 years back is a reasonable starting point to safely cover most definitions of "a couple of years".
And yes, they're a prime example of the company's current state of crappiness, as you very aptly put it. That's what the last couple of years (well, ok, more like over a decade) of Sony has been all about: lots of marketting, inflated prices, and crap quality.
Now if we're talking the 70's and 80's, ok, maybe Sony was better back then. But that's IMHO a lot more than "a couple of years ago".
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Samsung is the Sony of the 21st Century.
They now make the quality, well-designed products that Sony used to make until the mid-90s.
(I just wish they'd make Bluetooth phones.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
If Sony actually wanted to increase demand, they'd have display units like Nintendo do. I'm sure as hell not going to buy a PSP until I've seen one, and to date I haven't seen one--just boxes locked away in cabinets.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
It wasn't a rumor, it really happened. It wasn't a year ago, more like a few months ago. I will gladly back up his claim for you if you really want.
yes it's Region encoded, but (a) the 50Hz/60Hz thing doesn't count here, as the PSP doesn't have a TV out, and so ignores the PAL/NTSC standards
So? This forum message from Lik-Sang strongly implies that come September, European UMD Video titles will not play in Japanese PSP units. It's to be expected, as one of Sony's other PS Family products enforces TV-system lockout even if it doesn't have to. If I'm playing an all-region PAL disc on a PS2 NTSC U/C system (if it matters, it's Wobbl and Bob vol. 1), it still says "TV system doesn't match" instead of outputting a 50 Hz signal or converting the video. On the other hand, my Apex AD-1200 dedicated DVD player (purchased for $60 roughly 2.5 years ago at a Wal-Mart store in Terre Haute, Indiana, USA) can send the PAL 50 Hz/576i signal through or even convert it to NTSC 60 Hz/480i.
There's a really dull reason for that. The NTSC PS2's DVD driver doesn't have a large enough framebuffer to display a PAL image, because Sony are fuckwits. The PAL machine will play NTSC discs just fine.
I don't doubt that UK UMDs won't play on a Japanese machine, but since I already import all my DVDs from the US I can't say it particularly bothers me. My main point is that UMD films are a dumb idea generally.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"