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."

Comments

It's probably both.

[jchenx]

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.

Re:I don't buy this argument.

[zstlaw]

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,

Re:There is no problem with the PS3

[iocat]

I was at TGS and a) it was about 1000 degress inside; b) the PS3s were in tiny plexiglass containers with no visible ventilation; c) it was pre-release software; d) it's probably running on test kits, which aren't notoriously reliable; and e) I was in the sony booth, looking directly at games, for >90 minutes and saw one crash only.

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.

No.

[MaestroSartori]

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...