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PS3 Problems Cause Sony Stocks to Slide
eldavojohn writes "Gamespot has an article describing PS3s operating erratically at conference demonstrations.' In its defense, Sony said the PS3 failures were caused by unusually high temperatures created by having many of the next-gen consoles operating in close proximity to each other. 'It's not a problem with the PlayStation 3 unit itself,' Sony spokeswoman Nanako Kato told the AP. 'For a normal player at home, there shouldn't be any problem.' As a result, Sony's stock slid 2.75%. I guess they should have thought first before releasing five times the number of kiosks as they did with the PS2 — they're causing each other to overheat. There goes my PS3 beowulf cluster idea!" Update: 10/04 20:40 GMT by Z : anti-human 1 wrote in to mention a GamesIndustry.biz article, with a flat denial of overheating issues from Sony. "As could be seen on the TGS floor by the tens of thousands of media and public attendees, both the hardware and software worked flawlessly."
If there weren't such a huge recall of Sony batteries over the last few months, then a news item like this probably wouldn't have affected Sony's stock all that much. But I imagine analysts are worried now about the general quality of Sony products.
-- jchenx
Except that the analysts specifically mentioned concerns about the "entertainments division".
We have adopted a cautious view of the impact of the [Sony] game business on the electronics business this term,'' Goldman Sachs analyst Yuji Fujimori told Bloomberg. Fujimori downgraded Sony's rating from "buy" to "neutral" citing "confusion over the release of PlayStation 3 and concerns [about] disappointing sales of [the] PlayStation Portable,
Are you telling me Sony was not around before 1996? Then who created the Walkman and the Betamax?
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
You're actually trying to claim that the Sony stock slips 2.75% because a PS3 demo unit overheated? You don't think it might be because oh.... EVERY BATTERY EVER MADE BY SONY IS BEING RECALLED? Do you have your Wii pre-order from EB framed in a shrine?
This a) compares favorably with E3, and b) is in line with what you'd expect from beta software, especially since the last bugs you find are the kind of crazy tiny 'soak-test' memory leaks that tend to come out when you play the game constantly for 8 hours w/o rebooting, as you see at TGS.
IMHO, this whole thing is FUD; some analyst who saw a game crash and is trying to justify his trip to Tokyo.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Wii is as powerful as an Xbox, but with no hard drive. So it probably isn't going to overheat.
Disclaimer: although I work for Sony, this isn't official.
They weren't overheating. Some pre-release software was crashing. Imagine that! The shock, the horror...
Game dev and music blog
The Nyko Intercooler is not a good idea.
It does bad things.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
"Overheating demo game console units is no reason for stock of one of the largest electronics manufactures to slip."
I would think that "one of the largest electronics manufactures" would by now have a firm grasp that semiconductor by their very definition (semi = partial & condutor = conducts electricity) do not conduct electricity well, and the inefficiency produces heat. If you design a case to look good and/or have a small foot print by pushing the cooling to the minimum, then you get "overheat demo game console units." Sony bashing aside, I think that any electronics company should know the heating limits of the products they produce. This information should definiately be know by the people giving a demo where they may be asked simple questions like, "how hot does it get?" To not show this proficiency in a companies field of experties should cause the stock to drop.