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

Pride Goeth Before A Fall

[TripMaster Monkey]

Tying to sell a console without games is like trying to sell a gun without ammunition. Reeves' blithe assertion that their 'brand equity' will induce gamers to shell out 600 clams for their console, despite the dearth of available games, is pure fantasy. There are other consoles out there, that are far cheaper, and have games now. I personally can't imagine how Sony's going to move any of these consoles before the games become available.

That said, perhaps Sony would have a better chance of moving said consoles if it didn't take its customer base for granted in such a shockingly flippant way. The $600 price tag is bad enough, but Reeves' interview with Computer and Video Games probably cost Sony a lot of business from spite alone.

Also, from the IGN article:

In word, Sony downplayed the disparity between the $499 and $599 PS3 versions, citing the primary difference between the consoles at the time of the announcement as the difference in built-in hard drive space, namely 20 GB for the low-end and 60 GB for the high-end. Within minutes, however, journalists homed in on a variety of factors that placed the lower-end PS3 into contention for the dreaded "tard-box" classification of crippled-console.

Sony, if you've got so much frelling 'brand equity' that you can try to sell us a console for $600 without any games, why do you feel compelled to market a separate, 'tard-box'?

narcissism

[eldavojohn]

Etymology

After Narcissus, the fictional Greek hero who became obsessed with his own reflection.

Pronunciation

• 'när-s&-"si-z&m

Noun

narcissism

1. Egoism; egocentrism.
2. Love of oneself.
3. Sexual desire for one's own body.

--

I grew up on a farm. If there's one thing that pisses me off, it's people who walk around with their noses in the air. Yuppies, politicians, etc. are prone to this behavior.

Sony's elitism sure is getting underneath my skin. I enjoyed their console but anymore of this "only-the-rich-are-worthy-of-experiencing-this" attitude and I'm going to take my ball (money) and play elsewhere.

They do realize that many of their customers also buy their competitor's products, right? By stomping all over Nintendo and Microsoft, they may be alienating a large selection of their consumer base.

Yeah, everyone will buy one. Suuuuure.

[PSXer]

In 2000, everybody wanted a PS2 even though it didn't have any real "must have" games. That might have been because of DVD (but DVD in 2000 was a lot more popular with the mainstream than Blu-Ray in 2006) Or, it might have just been the next "must have" item and people wanted it because people who had one were "cool"

Granted I don't have my finger on the pulse of the entire world, but the people I hang around have nothing but bad stuff to say about the PS3. Sorry the market's so fickle, Sony, but 2001's "xbox is heavy" and "Gamecube is for kiddies" is this year's "PS3 is expensive"

Re:Yeah, everyone will buy one. Suuuuure.

[Lave]

You've hit the nail on the head. A lot of the playstation generation (despite what they may claim) were not around for the sega/nintendo years.

Nintendo were full of themselves, sublimely arrogant and they snubbed everyone around them, released very expensive games, and were convinced they could do as they like. Sega was the same, pushing out cookie cutter games and walking around like nothing could hurt them.

Sounds familiar?

Within one generation their empires collapsed. Sega went bust (effectively) and Nintendo fell to 3rd place in the home console market.

There is no reason this cant happen to Sony, and as you say it based purely on popular opinion. Sony became cool and shot to number one, and now - they seem anything but.

The real question is, not whether they will fall, but if they will survive it. I doubt they will go bust (but financially they are no where near the shape the public thinks they are) but I do expect them to lose a large amount of market share.

This is the best thing that could happen to them, whilst sega dropping out of the hardware market has crippled them, Nintendo's 3rd place is the best thing that could happen to us the cosumers. The amount of innovation and free thinking thats come out of them, now they know they have to try, is outstanding.

I think Sony could do with its own wake up call.

Woah, that's weird

[Doomstalk]

I looked up the word "hubris" in the dictionay, and there was a picture of the Playstation 3.

Goodwill equity does not exist in a market

[dada21]

It is false to believe that a free market offers any value in "goodwill equity" of any sort. I'm a businessman, and every time I provide a product or a service for my customer, the only equity that exists is the expectation that I will perform exactly as I am supposed to for a given payment, and that customer will pay me for my performance. The believe otherwise is a quick way to end up out of business.

I see it every year -- some kid takes over pop's huge business because the old man had a heart attack. The kid (usually in his 30s or 40s) drives the business into the ground and below within 2 years. He believed that the business didn't need to constantly re-win back old customers solely because they'd been around for years. Sony is no different than the businesses I see failing every year, even ones who have been around for 100 years and are now gone.

Every time a customer makes a purchase, it is with an expectation. No law is needed to protect the customer, because the customer can destroy a business in no time -- if each and every customer who is "hurt" by a previous transaction refuses to make a future one. Does "goodwill equity" give a customer a reason to buy again? Certainly. Does it mean the customer will be willing to accept one grievance or one mistake? Absolutely NOT.

To think that previously happy customers will forgive a mistake is to think that life is all happy-happy puppy-love bubble-gum and kisses. It isn't. This is business. You give the customer what they're paying for, or you go away.

Sony, go away. Please go away. You made too many mistakes, and the only goodwill you should be seeing is the clothing charity.

They Had My Money

[MBCook]

They had my money. They built up brand equity. I was ready to buy it. Even if they pulled a 360 and charged $400.

Then they announced it would cost $600. And did I mention that there aren't really any games I really want to play? Just MGS4 and maybe Assassin's Creed.

Nice try Sony. You lost your brand equity. It was alredy eroeded with the PSP (how about some good games for once?). I was full-on Nintendo before all of this. I still like Nintendo best and will buy their console.

But I won't be buying a PS3 for over $400. I may even wait for $300. I won't be buying a 360 for over $300.

Three consoles, two shot themselves in the foot (as far as I'm concerned). Who will win? The expensive one, the MORE expensive one, or the reasonably priced one with about a dozen games that I want to play?

Hmmmmmm......

What does Grandpa Sony cry about every night?

[ofcourseyouare]

What does Grandpa Sony still cry about every night? About losing the VHS vs. Betamax war back when he was a lad.

The way to understand Sony's otherwise inexplicable behaviour is this: games on PS3 are just a means to an end. For Sony (and for MS/Xbox), the prize is not to control gaming; the prize is to own every home's entertainment computer, and the format it uses to show movies.

As they say in the interview, Sony have clearly decided that they will still sell five million PS3s, even at this price. And let's face it, when you count the Japanese market, they're probably right.

Sell 5m PS3s and they establish a user base for Blu-Ray - and kill HD-DVD. Thus they hope to win this decade's version of the Betamax vs. VHS war. Thus Grandpa Sony can stop crying at last and young Mr. Sony feels heroic.

That may be the strategy - but of course that doesn't mean it'll work. Sony's repeated desire to corner the market with a new content formats (UMD etc) has led them to disaster before, and may do so again. Perhaps in years to come young Mr. Sony will be crying every night about destroying the PlayStation franchise...

Xbox 360 price cut

[Animats]

Fry's in Palo Alto just announced a price cut on the XBox 360. The base machine is still $299, but the higher-priced bundles just dropped over $100. This makes sense; some of the accessories were way overpriced, and there's a huge glut of unsold XBox 360 accessories left over from the holiday season. eBay prices are now slighly below retail.

With that happening to the XBox 360, Sony is going to have real trouble at a higher price point.

On the developer front, the general reaction to the Cell processor is "groan". (Except for audio guys, who finally get their very own CPU.) The Xbox 360 is a 3-CPU shared memory multiprocessor driving a conventional graphics chip, something well-understood by developers. Porting from an x86 PC (or an original XBox, which is an x86 PC) to an XBox 360 is straightforward. The Cell is a new, wierd architecture, little limited-memory CPUs with bulk DMA access to main memory. (Architecture people will remember unsuccessful supercomputers of the past organized like this.) In fact, Sony already has had a huge architectural disaster. Originally, the Cell was supposed to do the rendering. That was a dud, and Sony had to put a conventional graphics chip on the back end, running up the cost.

It's certainly possible to develop good games for the thing, but the extra work required means the games willl be out later. It took about two years before the PS2 hardware was really being used effectively. The PS3 is completely different from the PS2 and will require new techniques. So Sony is launching late on a machine you can't just port to. Not good.

What's really going to happen is that the early PS3 games will be doing most of the game work in the main CPU and the graphics engine, mostly ignoring the Cell processors. If the game talks to the network, one of the Cell processors will be handling that. Audio work will be in a Cell processor. PS3 games will probably have really good sound, because there's plenty of extra Cell CPU capacity to devote to audio. As Lucasfilm people like to point out, good audio will compensate for lousy graphics, but the reverse isn't true.

Re:ps3 will be on top again

[Wdomburg]

Atari lost a near monopoly on the console market. Nintendo lost a near monopoly on the console market. Anyone who thinks it's impossible to "magically" (for values of magic equal to misjudging the market) lose a gigantic market lead is fooling themselves.

True up to a point

[SmallFurryCreature]

I find the entire discussion as to wich console will win a bit amusing. Price is the funniest since it seems to never have had an effect before.

But what is even more amazing is how unbalanced fanboys can be.

For totally nuts check this out. A lot of 360 owners slam Sony for not having the cool controls of the Wii. Hello? Doesn't the 360 have zero innovation in its controller? So you slam Sony for adding only 1 small feature vs Nintendo redesign while being the proud owner of a console that has that same old controller that been used for the last decade?

Pot calling kettle black?

I seen a lot of complaining about 360 not being fully backwards compatible. Both the PS3 and Wii promise to be different so how come MS ain't slammed for that?

It seems that a lot of people got something against Sony. Perhaps it is just a David vs Goliath syndrome, we love to see the big guy taken down a notch and perhaps it has to do with the root kit (then again if you run windows surely you gotten used to be rooted by now)

However fanboys vendetta's do not make accurate sale predictions.

So far as I can see the consoles all got their weaknesses.

• The Wii is simplest, it is underpowered. How long can it last in the years consoles are supposed to stay current. It is not just about CPU, it is the only one to lack a HD (People who buy the lesser version of a console like the 360 core are like people who buy Celerons, not worth talking about) and that means it can't do games that require data storage. I am curious where the Wii is supposed to store all those downloadable old games.

  Will it matter? We will know in 2010 when the next-next generations consoles will start to be talked about.

• The 360 weakness is that it is the most boring of the three. Not the supposed power beast that is the PS3 and not as innovative as the Wii. It is just x-box version 2. Games look pretty but not earth shattering and not really all that different from what came before. To me the console seems to have lost a lot of its luster and even the fanboys are now just talking about actual upcoming games rather then having wetdreams about what might happen.
• The PS3 weakness to me seems that the Cell just doesn't deliver its hyped power. There are some nice demos out but they all seem to be cutscenes. Even if they are rendered live this mean little. When you know where the camera is going to be you can optomize a lot. Actual gameplay footage is rare and what is out there just doesn't tell me "supercomputer in your living room". With so many cores why am I not seeing thousand unit air battles?

  In short the real weakness of the PS3 is that it might just not be able to actually produce any games that are richer then the 360 or even worse, the Wii. Rich for me means AI, Physics, unit count, size of area etc etc. NOT resolution.

Not that any of the console companies are likely to care but I predict that PC gamers will once again look at consoles and go, "nice game kid". Pat the player on the head and go play a real game.

Or put another way. Console fanboys eat my keyboard!