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.'"

Comments

Sony - Arrogance Inc.

[Japong]

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:

• Dead Pixels - Initial response: These are natural, and if you have them after dropping $250 on your PSP, well too fucking bad. Live with it.
• Broken "Square/Circle/X/Triangle" buttons on the pad: It's the consumer's fault for buying our system. In fact, we designed it this way on purpose. So there.
• Universal Media Disc: It's Universal and Propietary at the same time! So you can use them and buy them from any company you want, as long as that company is Sony and you only use them on the PSP.

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.

Heh

[Moraelin]

"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.