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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.
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).
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
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.
"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.
"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."
Honestly... I hadn't heard people having as much problems with their Gamecube. Even with their first generation ones.
The difference is that the PS2 had little or no competition, while Nintendo is expecting to sell 20 million DSs in the next year. It's a good strategy to create artificial demand, but only when you have no chance of driving consumers to your competitors.
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