Sony And Nintendo Have Next-Gen Consoles Too

GameDailyBiz has some coverage of the PS3 and Revolution, to contrast with the avalanche of 360 information in advance of the console's launch in November. First up is a look at how making fun of the King of Kings may have been a bad decision. From the article: "Moving from the theological to the practical implications of Sony's snafu, the company couldn't have picked a worse time to offend its customers ... Sony has already conceded a six-month head start to competitor Microsoft in the upcoming market-share battle for the next generation of game consoles. Microsoft's Xbox 360 is expected to debut this fall; Sony's PlayStation 3 will not arrive until the spring of 2006." Meanwhile, Jim Merrick of Nintendo Europe has thoughts on marketing, online play, and the Revolution's potential. From the article: "If we follow what Iwata-san calls 'the past success formula', if we keep refining the existing model - more power, more pixels, more polygons, more levels, more enemies, better AI - we're actually making the games for a narrower audience playing those kind of intense games. We need to take a step back and refocus on a broad audience where we reach to everybody otherwise we're going to see the market start shrinking - as we're already seeing in Japan." Finally, Joystiq interviews Miyamoto, and he says wacky stuff. Who would have guessed?

Comments

Burning Sony at the stake

[Iriel]

Okay, this one is in reference to the first article and my attempt as making sense of it:

Sony ran this ad in Italy, and Catholics were infuriated. I really can't blame them because I feel that Sony actually made a really dumb ad. Their use of the word 'passion' doesn't line up with the religious symbolisim in it at all. I really am trying to understand the ad better so can someone answer this: Does '10 years of passion' mean that we've been crucified for Sony for a decade? If so, I just think the ad is plain stupid. Missing the point. Go figure.

However, I don't think that Sony is going to suffer a fiery fate by the hands of the horned one for this ad. While it mentions that Catholics in Italy were offended, I don't recall any mention to religious gamers and their actual reactions to this. Besides, 1 billion baptised Catholics != 1 billion practicing Catholics. I'm not knocking any religion, but people don't always follow the faith they were raised with. Screwing with statistics. Go figure some more.

Finally, I'm not really sure if this could even be conceived of as any major detriment to Sony's PS3 sales in the US (the article even lists that there are about 66 million Catholics in the US, which is why I bring this up.) given that this ad was run in Italy and I'd never even seen it before reading this article. Secondly, I don't play video games for their religious conviction, nor do I make purchasing decisions based on a company's devotion. I know some people that do, but it usually doesn't relate to gaming (While I'm at it, Microsoft has done PLENTY of things that deeply offend me, but I still may buy the 360 ^_^). It's not as if this bad use of symbolism is being used in the game, it was just a poor ad. Missing the target audience. I'm still figuring, and it could take all night.

(I am not claiming that my opinion is everyone else's, but I want to clarify that I think most gamers (whom I've had experience with) that are also religious, usually don't mix faith with game. It's just like religious scientists and evolution vs. creationism; most of them don't mix faith with science.)