Sony And The No-Confidence Vote

Sony continues to spend the goodwill it has achieved over the last generation of consoles. As widely reported over the weekend, last Friday CEO for SCE Europe David Reeves spoke to the press. "We have built up a certain brand equity over time since the launch of PlayStation in 1995 and PS2 in 2000 that the first five million are going to buy it, whatever it is, even it didn't have games." This 'you'll buy it anyway' attitude has further annoyed gamers already rankling from the announced pricetag. Next Gen and IGN talk about the two sides of the coin, with IGN laying into the company for the lack of HDMI output in the cheaper model, and Next Generation saying that Sony is far from defeated.

Comments

And he might be right.

[Sarusa]

This is like the old slam on Apple fanboys, where Steve could crap in a box and call it iShit and people would buy it in droves. Please don't flame on whether this is 'accurate' or not about Apple users, it's just the insult that immediately came to mind when I read this.

He's basically saying they could crap in a box, label it PS3, and you'd pay $600 for it.

And he might be right.

And thus history repeats itself...

[nmaster64]

I seem to remember another big game company that had unbridled consumer loyalty and ruled the video game industry practically uncontested...where are they now? Oh yeah, last.

Guess what Sony? Your don't have near the success and loyalty Nintendo did in it's hayday. If Nintendo can go from "taking over the world" to last place in the console race in a mere decade, then your in a position now to be completely shrugged off within a few years. Your arrogant and your screwing over what a good thing you had going, not unlike Nintendo in the past, and if you keep going this way you'll be doomed to repeat your competitors mistake. Nobody's invinicble in business, and there's no such thing as a permanent success.

Sony's Gambit

[spoonboy42]

The predictions of doom surrounding the PS3 (especially with regards to the very high launch price) are, of course, flooding the Internet. Nevertheless, I think they are very premature.

In a historical context, the PS3 is somewhat like the Neo-Geo home system, or the 3DO: It is a console with vastly more raw processing and graphics power than its contemporaries, but also a significantly higher price tag (although, it must be said that 50% over the 360 pales in comparison the the massive price difference between, say, the 3DO and a Super Nintendo). The Neo-Geo and the 3DO were, for all their technological superiority, failures. SNK, the makers of the Neo-Geo, only had experience in the arcade market prior to the introduction of their home system, and were used to selling very expensive arcade boards, since a steady stream of quarters could be counted on to offset the initial purchase cost (unless you charge your friends to come over and play, this model doesn't work for a home console). Although SNK supported the Neo-Geo with a number of excellent first-party titles, their history as a proprietary arcade supplier and tendency to keep the system's design very close to their chest meant a dirth of third party developers interested in writing games for the console. The 3DO, on the other hand, was made by a group of licensors with little to no background in the video games industry, and only a few publishers made any effort at bringing a few games to the system. Many 3DO games simply weren't very good, and of those handful that were, several were ported from the PC, or were later ported to more mature systems that followed like the Saturn and the original Playstation.

I believe, however, that Sony has the ability to avoid the collapse suffered by the Neo-Geo and the 3DO. Those two systems were the first home consoles from the companies who made them, who had no prior relations with 3rd party developers whatsoever (and in the case of 3DO, no first party development studio and no street cred with gamers, either).

Sony, on the other hand, is right about their own momentum. They did not come out the clear victors in 2 console generations by luck: they did it with games. Even then, I'm hard pressed to remember many launch titles from either system that really stand out as excellent. But, over the lifetime of PS1 and PS2, a library of thousands of games, most from 3rd party developers, and hundreds of them excellent, built up. The reason for this, in the beginning, was that Sony gave developers what they wanted: a CD-ROM drive offering vastly more storage space and multimedia capabilities than the competitors, and a good C-based API for writing games (and an assembly-based devkit later on to really max out the system). Sony managed to woo away many developers from Nintendo and Sega by providing them with a better canvas on which to create their visions, and the accumulation of amazing titles on the PS1 caused gamers to purchase it in droves.

Fast forward to the PS2: it's a more parallelized system, it's a bit harder to program for, but on the other hand, it has a DVD drive (just when consumer interest in DVD movies was skyrocketing), and is backwards-compatible with almost all PS1 games. The PS2 managed to sell extremely well even without any truly great launch titles, if only because people were drooling over a device that would play a library of hit PS1 games AND the hot new movie format. In the meantime, developers who had witnessed the runaway success of the PS1 were already writing a new generation of games, banking on similar success for the PS2. And they were right: the PS2 was a great success, and their investment paid off (and their games also helped to drive sales of the PS2, an example of success driving success). Stellar third-party titles in series like Fin