Sony's Harrison on Sony Arrogance
Joystiq had the chance to exchange a few words with Sony's Phil Harrison at the UK Develop Conference. They asked him some hard questions about the crazy comments that have been coming out of the company since E3. From the article: "There's always going to be a risk when you are market leader for ten years that we start to lose perspective; and we have to make sure that we don't lose perspective. But I don't think we're arrogant, I think we have to recognize that we're in a highly competitive industry and that anything that we say will be eternally editorialized by professionals and consumers alike. So we're always in the spotlight." After the tape was off he snarked that he hadn't been asked very nice questions. Poor guy, having to answer questions that aren't 'How awesome is the PS3 going to be?'
Hard to be arrogant when you just shelved your main media distribution...
Compare that to MS who while not great did show a wide variety of games and had some good announcements (GTA no longer exclusive to PlayStation for one).
Then there was the "little guy", Nintendo. A fantastic showing of tons of games that got tons of press. People were interested in much of it. Wii Sports, Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Red Steel, Wario Ware: Smooth Moves, Super Smash Brothers Brawl, and more. Name 7 big upcoming games off the top of your head for either other system.
I've gotta say, I thought the PS3 would be a scarce but big hit with great graphics. Now I'm starting to get much more interested as it seems the PS3 will be overpriced with great graphics and a fair helping of "what are they doing now."
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I don't know, I'd call the CD spyware thing arrogant. Selling portable audio players that required users to convert their entire libraries to ATRAC in order to play them is pretty arrogant. Sony thinking they could sell movie UMDs at nearly the price of the DVD counterparts was pretty arrogant, in my opinion. The DVD "+" writable standard was pretty arrogant, IMO, they didn't get accepted so they joined HP in making it anyway. I don't think the Blu-Ray standard counts as it's not a Sony format, but a format co-developed by at least a half-dozen major companies like Pioneer, Matsushita (Panasonic, JVC), and all the other hardware makers on the DVD consortium save two.