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Sony's PS3 Strategy Brilliant or Insane?
1up's Jeremy Parish has a piece wondering out loud about the sanity of Sony's PS3 strategy. From the article: "The veil of mystery surrounding the PS3 is downright maddening, and a little worrying. Consider that by March 2000, the company had already set the PlayStation 2's October 26th release date in stone. Yet here in March 2006, Sony has only been willing to commit to a 'spring 2006' launch for its latest console. Less than ten days from winter's end and gamers are left scraping together scraps of conflicting information trickling from the company's various divisions to try and get a sense of the bigger picture." We may find out which side of the coin they're on tomorrow; The current rumour is there will be some sort of big announcement about Sony's next-gen console on the 15th.
It's brilliantly insane! Or is that insanely brilliant? It's one of the two...
This guy's the limit!
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I call it INSILLIANT!
No matter how brilliant they may be, or how badly they screw up, I wouldnt expect this to be the end of the PS. Fanboy support alone should get them near at least a break even point. I think their biggest threat these days would be the hype over the xbox360. If MS can get a major hardware volume release, combined with a couple of good games just before Sony deploys they should be able to slap down the Sony marketing a bit.
In any case, it should be interesting.
The BR drive is slowly killing the PS3. Sony chose to push their new format rather than do what is good for the gamer.
This "poor man's blu-ray" will not fit into any market. Home theater enthusiasts will buy a professional HD player and the average gamer could care less.
What is making this decision so horrible is the fact that these Blu-Ray drives will push the PS3 to around double the price of the 360 even when selling at a considerable loss. The Cell processor, while powerful, in the real world doesn't have much on 3 3.2 ghz processors (besides a lot of $$$). Sony has an advantage over Microsoft in terms of "branding," but Sony has made a ton of poor architectural decisions.
It is simply inevitable.
All Sony has to do is turn out a powerful console equivalent to the xbox360 and sell it at the same price the xbox360 was at during release (make no mistake, this was on average $800+ after the console plus all the force-bundled crap) and they're set. Sony has 2 generations of backwards compatibility to ride on, games coming out still for the PS2 (see Final Fantasy XII, the be-all and end-all of console moving franchises,) and the fact that Playstation is still a very powerful brand.
The XBOX360's lead time has proven to be little advantage, as Microsoft seems to have lost in Japan entirely as a result of not having crap for games available, and is having supply issues abroad. 6 months will not make the xbox360 any better unless better games come out for it, and they don't have any console-moving titles coming out save Halo 3, and that won't help them in Japan.
The big announcement of course being that Sony is skipping the Playstation 3, ditching the Cell and going right to Playstation 4 which is powered purely by marketing.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
This sums it up nicely, we'll know which it is only after the release
Bruce Feirstein:
The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.
Sony have known for a long time that the Xbox 360 would be first to market. Rather than watch their potential customers make a huge investment in a competing system they are obviously going to do whatever it takes to make buyers wait for the PS3, which means constantly dangling the carrot of a possible huge announcement in the near future infront of the gaming public... which is exactly what they are doing. Hardly 'brilliant' or 'insane', their strategy strikes me more as 'bleeding obvious'.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
"see Final Fantasy XII, the be-all and end-all of console moving franchises"
Complete BS. Not many at all care in the states about the FF series. I've seen about 2 billion Halo LAN parties - I've never seen a FF lan party.
Zelda/Mario single handedly kept the Gamecube in the black.
1) What was Microsoft supposed to do? Wait until AFTER Christmas to release just to have a few more consoles? It was a business decision to make a select few who got the console early happy rather than make EVERYONE wait. There is no sense in having unused consoles in a warehouse waiting for others to be made.
2) The 360 has set a record for most games sold per console up to this point. There are a TON of games released already with 9.0+ ratings. COD2, PD0, PGR3, GRAW, FNR3, etc. With Elder Scrolls 3 coming out in a week the 360 will have an absolute ton of top-end titles.
3) The console costs $300, you lost all credibility when you claimed almost 3x that. There are a ton fewer broken 360's than PS2's when it hit the market.
There is an article here practically every day that has a headline basically asking "has Sony lost its mind?"
Everybody seems to be missing the fact that the PS2 outsold the 360 in January. Sony does not need to rush to market with the PS3 when there are still some KILLER titles coming out this year. I'm not trying to be a troll, honest, but please stop posting these insufferable articles.
My vote is for brilliant. Sony controls the media, so sony controls the market.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-TJ
While I think the premise is interesting, the article has some really loopy conclusions. First, there seems to be a lot of MS love, considering the author's assertion that Nintendo is now a distant third and the 360 is primed to take over the market. The 360, which is plauged by issues and being outsold by the PS2?
Plus, his idea that every decade the industry just changes itself is a little bit absurd. The changes he cites came about for different reasons. Atari failed because of public indifference to "games" (hence "entertainment system"). Nintendo's failure was more technical than social, even against trumped-up charges of mistreatment regarding developers (which were serious, to be sure, but definitely not the main reason everyone jumped ship). Just taking periods of time and saying "hey, they're similar!" and then basing your entire analysis on that is ridiculous.
As for the secrecy potentially being a huge problem for Sony, I agree completely. He should have fleshed that idea out more, however, rather than just throwing around poorly-informed speculation.
...Yes.
While I can't be sure what their release srategy is, Sony knows that they control the majority of the console market. With this, they can continue to play and prod with release dates, demos, and specs. With each new tidbit, they make the fans drool all the more over the system, increasing the hype. (To be fair, Nintendo does the same to us Nintendo fanboys, only we get less promises and specs, and at a much slower rate.)
However, one has to wonder how long they can hold this off. I'm sure PS2 hardware sales are already dropping as game stores start pushing for reserving a PS3. Eventually, the numbers will reach over into game sales (where Sony makes up profit loss on the console), becuase no one will be buying a new PS2, and thus won't get Grand Theft Auto 10 or whatever. If they hold off too long, this could give them a big bite, though I'm sure that software sales will surge (including PS2 titles) when the PS3 comes out- assuming it has backwards compatibility.
In fact, the same thing is happening across the board, excluding the XBox (360). As news of the DS Lite travels, regular DS sales will slow as people decide to hold off for a few months to get The Next Best Thing. Same thing goes for the Gamecube and the PS2.
I think we are seeing what happens when products try to be all things to all people. The muddled information about the PS3's launch is understandable because everything else about the system is so muddled. How much will it cost? Will it be backwards-compatible? I've not seen answers to those are very simple questions yet.
And I think the reason we don't know the answers to the simple questions is because Sony hasn't yet answered all the hard questions internally. It just doesn't seem like there is a solid plan or a road map for the PS3 other than being "faster." Why are they using blu-ray? What is the H-D plan for the PS3? Why are they using bluetooth? What are their online plans? I should not have to dig through countless gaming sites to find out these details.
I think Sony has taken a lot of things for granted with the PS3. It could be that the installed base of the PS2 has clouded their thinking. But Sega proved that a next-gen machine had to have more than just technical superiority to succeed (and they were first to market with the Dreamcast!)
Sony needs to get the public informed about the PS3, and they need to do it soon. Else, the XBOX 360 may do to the PS3 what the PS2 did to the Dreamcast.
Between the awesome lead XBox 360 has been able to gain given its earlier release date, this may be the end of Playstation. The next-gen Playstation sounds like it is a potentially superior product. But on one side, there's XBox 360 and the potential release of Halo 3. On the other side, theres Nintendo Revolution and its very unique controller. If Playstation doesn't find something to set it apart from these other two consoles, I believe Playstation's days are numbered.
Class excercise:
1)Replace every instance of "xbox 360" with "dreamcast."
2)Replace every instance of "revolution" with "gamecube."
3)Replace game references with similar titles available for dreamcast just prior to PS2 launch.
4)Go searching for the resultant string in the archives of gamer forums and see how many matches you can come up with.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
It seems, in fact, that even the components are going to be copied: the bad bad Cell (anyone even remember the supposed promise of the Emotion Engine?) will be used in computers.
They're poorly trying to play catchup on the Xbox Live|SNES/NES download services. Downloading a dual-layer PS2 DVD sounds very bizarre, if their service is ever built to the specifications they listed. Certainly we will have the ability to, one day, get 9GB file via Wifi in Tbilisi, but what's the point now?
And where are the exclusive PS3 titles? Metal Gear, Gran Turismo... I know there are enormous fans of these games, but my inclination is "so what." I'll give you Symphony of the Night, but can anyone name another PS1 game that anyone truly cares about playing again via their download service? It seems that most of their decent earlier games (as in 8 years ago) are available for the N64. Sony simply does not have the franchises that Nintendo has cultivated and Microsoft has basically bought for Xbox Live.
Even the bluray will be available in other devices. (That, of course, bodes well for the bluray format, but does it really matter with the PS3?)
The PS2/Revolutionalike controller scheme honestly reminds me of the 32X, and we all know how badly that went.
I was about to write, "Like every videogame war, it comes down to the games..." but I attended E3 in 1999 and remember the amazing promise of the Dreamcast's games, which gave the system the most quality-game-heavy launch in the history of videogaming since the NES. With the iPod now the gold standard in consumer electronics, it's about creating a complete experience for the user, and I can easily see the PS3 as all-things-to-all-people.
Xbox360 is a 1.5 upgrade. PS3 is copycatting. Combine this with the rootkit fiasco, the accompanying media hype (always impossible to meet) that blurays require a DRM-friendly HDTV, kaboom.
Nintendo all the way. I don't doubt a great deal of hype accompanying it, but it will be more of the "look at this weird thing" variety, much like the DS, and look at the DS now.
True enough...MS is a lot stronger competitor than Sega was with the DC. And the other reply to you is correct; my primary objective was to point out the foolishness of the GP saying "this looks like the end of the playstation." I mean, the PS2 is still the top-selling console by a huge margin....it seems at the very least a bit counterintuitive to be reading Sony's eulogy.
But also, I think it is worth noting some of the parallels. The biggest one is failure in Japan....consoles (historically) just flat don't do well when the Japanese don't buy them in large numbers.
And then of course there's the counterpoint to the ridiculous conclusion drawn by the author of this article. He says:
But if Sony's really hoping to make Dreamcast 2.0 a reality, now would be a very good time to change tactics. Relying on obfuscation and hype is only likely to work once, especially for gamers who believed tall promises about the PS2 Emotion Engine's ability to present the most impressive game worlds imaginable but actually received a system only moderately more powerful than the Dreamcast.
This strikes me as completely ass-backwards. After all, it did completely annihilate the DC. Which is to say that a "moderately more powerful" system was plenty. Is this author suggesting that everyone should have just bought the Dreamcast? Or is he suggesting that this time, knowing that the PS2 was only a bit more powerful than the DC, that gamers won't be "fooled again" and will just buy the 360? None of that sounds reasonable to me. It seems to me that a gamer who was looking at history would say to himself, "Well, the last time Sony brought its console out later and said it'd be faster....it was only a bit faster, but the competing product was stone-dead within a couple months. I probably ought to hold out for the Sony console, lest my 360 lose dev support overnight."
Now, obviously, that's not going to happen; MS was willing to buy game developers left and right to get game support for the first Xbox, so even in the worst case they can do that again. And they aren't likely to have to anyway. But my point is that it seems silly to me to suggest that bringing out a faster, better console later "won't work again" because last time it wasn't faster enough. Right?
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
so long as all the blogs and media outlets are talking about Sony, talking about Blu-Ray, and talking about the really cool games that are coming with the PS3, they keep you from wanting to buy an xBox360.
Most people I know are waiting until all the consoles are released before they buy, and I live in xBox360 central (Seattle), so you know it's working.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Beware the ides of March!
BEWARE!
Et tu, nintendo?
Sigh. Like anyone reading Slashdot these days finds this funny. Back in my day... et cetera.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
what is a decent game in your opinion? People need to calm the f down and to remember the difference between "I don't like a game" and "it's a bad game". As another poster put it, the games have scored consistently high, remarkably so for a launch. Compare these games to Smugglers Run, Timesplitters, and Kessen that came out with the PS2. Oooh, and Summoner too.
Also, for the poster who said they're all sequels, who cares? You think the PS3 isn't going to have the same issue? Or the Revolution? Any launch is going to have a bunch of sequels because they're proven sellers. There will also be a couple of original games, and usually they aren't much good unless your company's name is Nintendo. But the 360 did have Condemned and Kameo, both of which are new franchises and both of which are pretty darn good games.
I just don't understand it when people have such an agenda when they write about games and consoles. It feels like the cold war, but more ridiculous.
If all you care about is graphics you can get an xbox 360. If you want good games get the Revolution. What is the point of the PS3? The only people that I can see buying one are people who are hooked on GT, or PS2 fanboys who would buy a PS3 if all it did was make toast.
Sony has created the Playstation 3 (PS3), not as a game machine, but as a vessel to float the company into new lands. They are burdening the system with a new movie format (BluRay) unheard of levels of digital rights management for music and video, Memory Sticks and more.
The results are already starting to show. A year ago, Sony promised to launch the PS3 in Spring 2006. Instead, they waited till Spring 2006 to announce that they won't be launching the system until November 2006, in Japan , with other regions perhaps as soon as Spring 2007. Why? Digital Rights Management issues with the upcoming BluRay format.
The other divisions of Sony are dragging the PS3 down. The Playstation Portable (PSP) suffers from the same illness; too many hands in the basket. The PSP was designed around a slow-loading UMD format for distribution of movies which makes the machine less than ideal for game playing. Compared to ROM cartridges, UMDs are too slow loading and consume too much battery time. They make the machine more fragile and introduce problems with additional moving parts. In short, they are a sacrifice to the movie industry arm of Sony; giving up on the optimal game experience for the opportunity to sell you movies you probably already own on DVD.
The delays brought about by making compromises to the core functions of the system will put a great strain on Sony. Currently, their ark is full of holes and loaded with baggage. The flood waters rise. How many gamers will wait until this time next year in order to pick up a PS3 when Xbox 360 games are available today and are getting excellent review scores? How many will pass up the Revolution this holiday season when it is affordable and fun? How high will the waters rise before Sony can launch the ark?
Will it float?
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Not to nitpick, but Sun Tzu was Chinese. As for the 360, I figure why not wait a few months for Rev. 2 to come out? I don't really want to be a beta tester.
~nate