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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.
* 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.
They may also be releasing them with small revisions to each batch. On the other hand, my roommate just bought one with dirt in the screen and made the people at our local GameStop open all 6 units they had in-stock to find one without a defect (besides dead pixels, which none of them had, surprisingly).
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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?
"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.
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