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Why Sony is Ready to Self Destruct
jammmma writes "Before even launching the PS3, Sony is ready to self destruct." From the article: "PS3 is doomed, thanks to Sony's ignorant attitude. None of us had the chance to seriously evaluate PS3 and the experience it has to offer. It's impossible without a series of titles and an official product at hand, but from where we stand, Sony's damaging attitude is all it takes to diminish the value of PS3. Kutaragi may be right in defending PS3; after all, he can't criticize his own product, but instead of exciting users with valuable features and winning them over so they can start saving, Kutaragi makes bearish statements in response to Nintendo's announcement and Microsoft's take on Sony. Last I heard companies were at E3 to impress media personnel, which yielded positive publicity, not make childish remarks when chances were against them."
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Sony IS losing money. Just do a Google for "Sony Profit" and look at the troubled times they have had these past few years.
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... situation is that Sony is in nearly the EXACT same position Nintendo was in when they "fell from grace".
Nintendo simply didn't have enough games to push the N64, where as the competition (mainly Sony) did. Now Sony is on the losing stick of console exclusives and with the loss of GTA4 exclusivity, I can only see more titles making the leap as developers realize the 360 cant be taken for granted.
Nintendo used a format that was not in the best interest of the market (cartridges). Blu Ray simply isnt going to be what its made out to be, and with the cheaper PS3 not able to utilize high definition content like the more expensive model, then whats the point in having Blu Ray? Its simply forcing us to pay for something that many wont get to use, or use properly.
Nintendo felt that their name alone would sell games. Sony fits this perfectly.
I wont go as far as to say "SONY IS TEH DOOMED", but it doesnt look good for them in the slightest.
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Sony IS losing money
really?
and when i do a google search, the 3rd result states that " Sony's profit jumps 68 percent ".
Wave upon wave of demented avengers March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream
Are you sure Blu-Ray will be the dominant video standard? It's more expensive, and very few people (10%) have the ability to play HD video at full resolution (although I am one of them). Sure, it has more storage space than HD-DVD, but how many MOVIES need 25GB or storage? None that I've heard of. 25GB is great for GAMES, but let me go out on a limb and say that MOVIES will decide the dominant format that people will buy MOVIES in. It's a novel concept, I know.
Plus, look at Sony's track record with introducing new formats:
Betamax - lost to VHS
MiniDisc - lost to mp3s, but probably could have lost even without mp3s
Memory Stick - minimal market penetration, Sony fanboys seem to love it, but that's about it
UMD - lost to NOTHING!
Blu-Ray - Do you REALLY think that with a track record like this, being MORE EXPENSIVE than HD-DVD, launching LATER than HD-DVD, having NO APPRECIABLE ADVANTAGE for MOVIES over HD-DVD, and forcing companies that want to use the format to pay a LICENSING FEE is a recipe for success?
It will probably be great having 25GB on one disc, but once Samsung comes out with a dual-format player (and you know they will), Sony will have no way of strong-arming companies into paying their exorbitant licensing fees, since HD-DVD will be just as viable an option.
They pioneered the MMOG, in a significant way, with Everquest, but since then, they seem to be dedicated to destroying valuable intellectual properties.
Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) was one of the most hyped games of all time. As the first Sony follow-up to EverQuest, with one of the best SciFi properties out there, EVERYONE expected this game to be great. The pre-launch registered users who contributed to the SWG forums daily was ridiculously high. Every gamer was desparate for info about SWG because it just looked so hot. Sony bragged on and on about all the features the game would have: you could occupy any planet, play any race, take up a multitude of professions, buy a starship, go into politics ... etc.
Well, as the launch date approached, strange things started to happen. First, the features that were cut were small. I think the first thing that was cut was owning property. Everyone said, ok, you won't be able to buy a house at launch, but with all the other features, who cares? Then came the deluge.
Amid a sea of rabidly eager fans, Sony cut the feature list in half about a month before launch. Needless to say, the release was a fiasco. Even the features that were left in were buggy, and the development team was slow to react.
The impression from the Dev team was: the higher-ups forced us to release a product that wasn't ready yet, just to get the revenue flowing. So the game was stagnant; eventually they fixed a lot of the bugs, and the addons added some of the features that were left out, but by then it was too late. Now the game is all but dead.
Outside of the MMOG arena, Sony has been similarly unsuccessful; they have some great licensed games (God of War, GTA), but the games developed in-house tend to be god-awful crapfests (imho).
I also boycott Sony products btw, but more as a response to SWG, EQ2, and rootkitgate than anything else.
burrocrisy
and that would be what? Ruling by jackasses? Never has a slashdot misspelling been more apropos
If you actually read the article you linked to: "Sony's earnings were inflated in the past business year by windfall profits at its life insurance unit". Sony expects to lose about $900 million dur to PS3 launch. Since this article is about games, the context indicates that "Sony IS losing money" is about their games business.
To be more specific, Nintendo has reported only 1 loss (partially due to the dollar-yen exchange) in 116+ years.
While anyone drools over a nice car, or nice clothes, or an expensive home, a game console sits somewhat hidden inside an entertainment center. Instead of "wow, you have a PS3?!!", the general reaction of the knowing gamer would be "why in the hell did you waste your money on that thing?!!"
It comes down to parents buying for their kids. If little Johnny can brag to his friends or if Susie Homemaker can tell her neighbor how they bought one for little Johnny it becomes a status symbol. I remember this from when I was a kid. I was jealous of the kids that had a computer or cable tv or a newer car than we did. Fortunately my parents weren't ones to make bad decisions just to impress my friend's parents.
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This sounds very much like IBM's problems in the 80's. IBM had a very proprietary attitude regarding busses (MicroChannel Architecture), networking (LUA / SNA), and probably others. My impression (and I worked at IBM for a while) was that IBM figured it could get away with designs that required end-to-end IBM'ness, because the big customers would buy ALL their kit from IBM anyway. And in that sales situation, why let other companies have an in?
While you are quite right with regards to IBM's general attitude back then, MCA isn't a very good example of it, it is actually an interesting incident.
As you may know, some companies (Appricot comes to mind inmediately) produced MCA machines as well. Compaq could have if they wanted to, but had its own reasons for wanting an alternative.
What happened was that those companies that actually produced, or could produce MCA machines had settled outstanding licencing issues regarding dma and some other patents used in pcs. This was basicly a requirement for obtaining a licence on MCA technology.
It never caught on for various reasons, the fact that you could mostly get IBM hardware for MCA was an important of them (I do have MCA cards from quite a few other companies here, including 3com, creative, adaptec and intel).
(former IBM employee during the late 80s and all of the 90s)
"While I will wholeheartedly agree that the price is about $100 too much on the PS3, is it really THAT big of a deal? Nope. Everyone planning on getting one before the announcement will continue to do so. They're early adopters who pay for the masses to buy at cheaper cost. How is this different from any other product launch?"
This is untrue. I make plenty of money, I am an early adapter, and I buy video games and video game systems at the drop of a hat, if there's something that I like on it. The price tag for the non-gimped PS3 is really, really high. There's no way I'm buying a cheaper system that is unupgradable to a better version. I am the target audience, and I no longer want it at that price.
Actually, it sounds to me that the author was just bitter he didn't get to play with the PS3 much.
"None of us had the chance to seriously evaluate PS3 and the experience it has to offer."
Not that that is a good sign about the PS3, but the early adopters of the PS3 have already decided to buy or not, and, if sony wants to tell the other media people to go rot in hell, they're free to. It won't affect sales more than a few units, probably units that aren't at market yet due to shortages.
Remember the bogus claims that Sony made about the PS2? Even the dated Dreamcast outclassed it in most every way. Don't get me wrong. I like the PS2 and its games, but most of its bread and butter have been from third-party titles. The most recent exception is probably God of War, which is quite outstanding.
There is nothing saying that the strong third-party support that Sony had with the PSX and PS2 couldn't end up moving to the Wii or the 360, which will both be reasonably priced and offer all the performance that is needed in a game console right now. Remember when "Big N" got cocky after two generations of success? Everyone jumped ship to Sony. It wouldn't surprise me if we see things shift a bit with this next round of consoles.
I believe the handsets are actually made by ericson. sony only co-brands it and gives ericson a sales channel in japan, plus the "walkman" brand for the MP3 capable models
What ? Me, worry ?
If you think the launch was bad, you should see the game now.
Overall, even with all the faults that SWG had at launch, it still was really one of the most innovative MMORPGs out there. You really could follow your own path in the game. It appealed to all kinds of people, both male and female. If combat was your thing, there was plenty of choice in that path, and plenty of challenge. If you'd prefer to sit on the sidelines, non-combat professions were a very valued part of the community. Even people who just prefered the social aspects of the MMO world could server a purpose. From a community simulation perspective, it was easily the most flexable game around.
But, there was a serious lack of game content at launch. Promised features like player cities and vehicles were conspiciously missing from the game. Other features like instanced battlefields that could support massive numbers never worked correctly outside of the test lab and were abandoned shortly after launch. Quests would lead nowhere (Vader says, "Go speak to the Emperor." The Emperor says, "Go speak with Vader."). The overall point of the game (the Galactic Civil War) wasn't even really implimented, as PvP battles served no purpose other than virtual chest beating and bragging rights, and had no big-picture impact on the game. The game itself was beautiful, but shallow. Players tried their best to make up their own content, with player-hosted events and pointless (but still fun) battles in NPC cities. But by December of '03, the game was really bleeding subscriptions badly.
Then, some brilliant person at SoE decided that what everyone really wanted was to be a Jedi, and that would magically stop the exodus from the game. So, instead of adding the missing content, they dangled the prospect of unlocking a Jedi character in front of every player (something they had promised would not be the case). And it did keep a certain element from cancelling. Thus was born the Great Holiday Hologrind, which severly damaged the social aspects of the game, and also wrecked havoc on what had been a fairly healthy in-game economy.
Eventually it was passed around that the big, mysterious secret to unlocking it was nothing more than just mastering every profession in the game in turn. Now, Jedi were originally planned to be *extremely* rare, even to the point of being random and only a handful on each server. Since god-mode characters are generally not a good idea in an online game, their power would be offset by the threat of perma-death for the character, forcing you to start all over again. When enough people started unlocking Jedi characters, the ritilan-addicted "power gamer" element whined and complained about perma-death, SoE capitulated, and it was removed. Now, you had high-level Jedi running around one-hit killing everyone with no consequences. Even if by some miracle you took one down, it did little good. PvP battles became nothing more than competitions to see which side could pull out the most Jedi. People who had no interest in playing Jedi (otherwise defined as "subscribers with real long-term potential") were forced into hiding.
SoE made one blunder after another after that. Each modification to game balance seemed to throw the game further and further off-base. This can directly be traced to overpopulation of Jedi and the fact that they were never meant to be a balanced profession in the first place. The type of player who was attracted to playing a Jedi (and who could sit there and grind combat XP for 16 hours a day for a month) seemed to be the type of person who had little to no patience for complex combat systems that required forethought and strategy. So, SoE took their unique "HAM" multi-health-bar system, and turned it into EQ-style combat, dumbing it down to simple hack-and-slash.
Eventually, SoE made the amazing decision to eliminate the profession system altogether, and force everyone into clones of the same 8 "classes" and dub it the "New Game Experience". They completely eliminated
According to Nintendo's Company History, the games produced in 1889 apparently looked a whole lot like Japanese playing cards.
(I freely admit that I initially scoffed at the '116+ years' history for exactly the same reason that you did.)
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
Sony always owned the rights to Everquest; they spun off 989 Studios and Verant to develop it, but the rights were always in Sony's hands. When EQ proved to be a hit, they pulled Verant more fully back into teh fold, and respun it as Sony Online Entertainment (SOE). (Don't forget, Qeynos is Sony EQ backwards)
No-one (outside the Sony troll "community") claims "16 terraflops", but it's not uncommon to see claims that the Cell can pump out a solid 2 teraflops. However, this is inaccurate too, and is based (surprise) on Sony marketing.
Each SPE in the Cell can manage a more humble 25.6 gigaflops, when running at 3.2 GHz, and that only if it's doing nothing but matrix multiplication. Similar for the PPE, giving a total of 204.8 GFLOPS for the PS3's 7-SPE Cell. Reality, of course, usually involves fetches, stores, branches and pipeline stalls, bringing the useful total down to a rather smaller figure, and that's assuming you actually have 8 separate things to do all at once.
The difference between the Cell's performance and Sony's claimed 2-TFLOPS figure for the PS3 is of course mostly made up by the RSX GPU. Since it has 48 pixel pipes each bristling with shader ALUs, texture samplers, blend units, depth comparators etc, it's total theoretical performance is around 1.8 teraflops. Not that it's particularly useful for anything except rendering 3D graphics, and likewise never gets fully utilised in reality, rarely even faintly close.
Fact is, any single PC with a modern high-end GPU has a total compute capacity similar to the PS3, but if that was actually useable, universities everywhere would be tossing out their expensive supercomputing clusters in favour of a couple of quad-SLI machines.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
But VHS had a lower resolution than Betamax.
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