Ken Kutaragi's Famous Last Words

When we look back on this E3, I think one of the moments we're most clearly going to remember is the dead silence in the Sony press conference following the price announcement. Eurogamer and GameDaily has coverage of Phil Harrison's spin work, trying to recover from that moment, discussing how Sony is not ripping off Nintendo and Microsoft probably won't meet their 10 million units goal. More interestingly, they discuss an interview with Ken Kutaragi conducted by a Japanese website. From that piece: "SCEI president Ken Kutaragi has defended the PlayStation 3's high price tag once again, declaring that not only will consumers be prepared to pay the cost but that the console is 'probably too cheap.' In an interview with Japanese website IT Media, partially translated by IGN, Kutaragi said: 'This is the PS3 price. Expensive, cheap - we don't want you to think of it in terms of game machines ... For instance ... Is it not nonsense to compare the charge for dinner at the company cafeteria with dinner at a fine restaurant? It's a question of what you can do with that game machine. If you can have an amazing experience, we believe price is not a problem.'"

Comments

Re:Sinking Dollar to Blame?

[AKAImBatman]

It's caused by two effects:

1. The exchange rate. £410 is equivalent to what we pay in the US, but thanks to the exchange rate that gets jacked up by 27%.

2. VAT. Up to 20% in taxes really sucks. Sales tax isn't reflected in US prices, but it's usually about 5-7% over the store price. Thus a $399 machine will go out the door for as much as $426.

Sony is not used to "loss leader" console

[acomj]

Sony made money or came close to breaking even on every console it has made.
The too cheap comment is probably the fact that sony feeling competion from MS subsidizing its consoles heavily has to do the same. And with that Blu-Ray drive the console probably cost more than they wanted it too.

Remember the 360/xbox where/are "cheap" because MS has lost about 2 billion+ dollars getting into the console business.

Re:Yeah, well...

[DerekLyons]

But just how fancy are we talking here? I don't think this analogy is valid, ESPECIALLY in today's world. 'Fancy' usually amounts to an Olive Garden or some other such chain restaurant, whose prices are reasonable.

Fancy may amount to that to the uneducated, (understanding food, like understanding tech, takes experience and education) - but I can take you to at least four different restaurants in my town where you can get gourmet cooking at Denny's prices.

If we were talking about the 1600's, this would be a different story, of course. Fancy restaurants were all the rage, because it wasn't about being full, it was about impressing people.

It would be awful hard to impress someone with a fancy restaurant in the 1600's - they didn't exist. The modern restaurant is a child of the French Revolution.

Re:The Dual Shock Wii

[dorbabil]

Direct Pointing Device. It's Nintendo's name for whatever technology they are using to make the wiimote function like a super sophisticated light-gun (think about how aiming weapons in Zelda and Metroid works. You point and shoot, it's not like the controller just acts as a mouse in free-look mode).

Re:I Eat at Expensive Restaurants

[twistedsymphony]

I think your parent was correct in saying on a 480p or less they'll look the same.

Both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 are HD machines. EVERY game made for the 360 and (probably) every game made for the PS3 will be programmed around a 720p (1280x720) resolution or HIGHER. that means that AA, poly count, particle effects, etc. all have to be downgraded to a point where they can pump out those graphics at that high a resolution. Similarly for the games to look THAT good they have to crank up the texture resolution as well. If you're only using all that power on a 480p set a MASSIVE portion of those console's power is just sitting dormant. The graphics don't dynamically adapt to shift their optimization to a lower resolution. In the 360s case some games are actually rendering internally at 720p and downscaling the output.

on the other hand the Wii is expected to not run any higher then 480p (640x480) which means that it does NEED all the power to crank out stuff at a high resolution and the graphics can be optimized around a low 480p output.

I forget who it was but one of the early 360 developer interviews the developer claimed that they would have 10 to 20 times the amount of graphics power to put towards the poly count, and other graphical effects if they only had to output in 480p. Considering there are a lot of games that look identical between the Xbox 1 and 360 when running in only 480p it's definitely feasible that at that resolution the Wii can compete...

Besides Nintendo is fantastic at that stuff, the GC was way underpowered compared to the Xbox 1 yet it had comparable graphics in a number of titles. Optimization is the key and from what I've heard Nintendo is the king of easy to program consoles. One PS2 game developer I spoke to claimed that his company prototypes all their games on the Gamecube and then ports to PS2, despite the fact that they don't even make GC games, it's THAT easy to program.

Re:Fancy vs. Family

[batkiwi]

The original statement was that if you watched a blu-ray movie (a big draw of the PS3), you're limited to 480p output unless you use an encrypted digital output (HDMI).

Sony about 6 weeks ago said that they would NOT enable that flag on their first run of blu-ray movies, and now we know why... but that doesn't mean that NON sony movies will not have that flag, and it also doesn't mean that sony won't switch it on later.

Basically by getting a non HDMI blu-ray player, you are limiting your ability to play blu-ray discs at HD resolution.