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Gamestop Managers Worried Over PS3 Launch
The Opposable Thumbs column has commentary today from some managers who attended the annual EB/Gamestop preview event. The reaction from the attendees to the PS3/Blue-ray presence is not inspiring. From the article: "The difference between HD DVD and Blu-Ray was striking as well. 'Blu-ray had a tiny presence in the very back of the show floor, while Microsoft had large displays and surround sound systems in their hospitality suite so you can take a look at what their HD DVD drives would look like. It was impressive, and gave the feeling that HD DVD was real and Blu-ray wasn't ready for the show.' I asked him his feelings going into the PS3 launch with no word on allocations or preorders, and no news on what will happen towards the holidays. 'It's going to be ugly, there is no way this launch is going to go well.'"
But that's retailers fault more than Sony's. Even if Sony supplies enough quantity, and it does what they say it will, Gamestop and EB have been selling the short game, what they have on their shelves, all year long, and as a result, consumers have been hearing mostly baseless FUD about a potential $600 purchase.
In addition to that, Microsoft fucked up whatever trust the retailers ever had in suppliers int he industry.
FanFictionRecs.net
Quickly, Sony fans, tag this story as FUD or your favorite company may end up looking stupid.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Time to break out those "zonked" tags!
TFA:
Remember last year? Remember Microsoft botching the XBox 360 launch? Booking too much retail shelf space and not delivering product? Furious retailers? A product with heat dissipation problems? A weak selection of games at launch?
That's where Sony is this year.
2007 for the PS3 will probably look like 2006 for the Xbox 360. The PS3 will slowly launch over the next year, and finally start to sell in volume for the Xmas 2007 season. Probably at a lower price. This will give developers another year to get the Cell processor figured out, so the games will be better.
This is the price of increasing console complexity - the launch phase has more problems.
I have been calling EB Games daily and you still can't pre-order. With the launch 6 weeks away it's kind of disconcerting. I plan to pre-order the Wii and a bunch of controllers myself but I have been asking about the PS3 pre-orders out of curiousity. I wonder when that will be decided, does anyone have any inside information?
Regular Meta Moderators are not more likely to get mod points.
There seems to be a big difference between the industry's perception of the PS3 and the public perception. Most average Joes I run across seem to be anticipating the PS3. But they can't explain why beyond the branding. "Oh, I really like the PS2, so..." Industry people and industry watchers are talking more and more about Sony's lack of strategy, Blu Ray concerns, hardware problems, price, etc. More and more, the assumption that Sony will once again dominate is dissipating. So I think the most interesting thing about the PS3 launch will be watching what happens with word of mouth once the console is out. Should we expect, "Oh man, the new Playstation might be expensive, but it's so cool! You need it!" Should we expect, "Oh man, my brother got a PS3 and all the games suck." What's going to happen? Is the PS branding going to crash and burn? Will everyone just save up to buy it because PlayStation has become synonymous with game console to them? Will it just do okay? I'll be sure to read all about it during my short breaks from the Wii.
http://nerdcartoons.com/
Sony has a huge mindshare... there are a whole generation of kids who use the word "Playstation" interchangably with "Game Console". There is a huge Sony fanboy presence on the internet. Sony is in decent shape.
They might lose a lot of ground to the 360, but they are not going to be wiped out of the market. The console race will just be more of a split, instead of Sony dominating everything like the last generation.
1. Sony has already slashed the number of units being delivered, due to anticipated lack of demand in the US and EU. This will create an artificial shortage so that they can try to spin it into buzz about how people want PS3 consoles. They already figure that the Wii will sell four times as many consoles in the US and EU as the PS3 will. Shipments prove this.
2. If you don't have a really big HDTV that currently uses 1080p, you probably won't care one whit about Blu-Ray for at least three years - by which point there will be another choice of better game consoles to be concerned with.
3. All of the DRM flavor is still baked in. Yum!
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The XBox 360 and Playstation 3 will give you 1080, while Pretendo will give you Piss. Sony & Microsoft are at least thinking ahead while Pretendo simply repackaged the Gamecube as another system and still decided to use 'Never Twice the Same Colour.' HDTV sets will be less expensive next year and the average Joe Sixpack should be able to purchase it in no more than two years, Standard Def in no more than one year. The reason why I call Nintendo 'pretendo' is because they pretend the world is not moving forward with better technology. If they don't wake up soon, they may join Sega by getting out of the console business. They also pretend that mario, link, pikachu, and other old overused characters will still save them.
Well, considering the fact that at every Gamestop/EB games the official party line seemed over the last 1.5 years to be that the 360 was the end all be all of gaming systems and the PS3 was horrible, why am I not surprised. Seriously, when he was off the job the local gamestop manager actually was talking about how he was looking forward to the PS3, and yet go in and ask him, and suddenly he attempts to push 360 superiority. Recently this changed, but for a while, they basically bashed the PS3 as store policy. And now they're saying they think it will fail? I smell a combination of stupidity and possible payoff.
(...finished typing This text; as adapted to a skit easily found at Google Video of the Ol' Big Man ranting about Starbux. Enjoy...)
Hey, the big customer's back. www.bestbuysux.org.
The big customer got up this morning, you know.
Felt like buying a video-game system for my child,
with an extra controller so I or his friends can play along.
I wound up in one of them Best Buy's, you know.
I knew the joint wasn't right soon as I walked in, you know.
I seen these blue-shirted people walking in circles around the entertainment Screens, chanting for some idiot, walking around the isles then stopping to pose, and acting like they was too fuckin' busy to be bothered unless they caught you looking at them, you know.
Finally I arrive to the register at a girl.
Before I say a word, she asks "Do you want to buy a Warrantee, pick-up your property in the Tech, or attend an employee-hiring session?"
I say, "Listen honey, I don't know what kind of fuckin' place this is, I just want to buy a fuckin' good video-game system and extra-controller for my child."
She says, "The PlayStation 2 and XBox 360, either with an extra controller is US $600 dollars."
Plus, she had the fuckin' balls to ask if I wanted to purchase a Best Buy warrantee on top of that for an extra US $200 dollars."
I says, "Seven-hundred fuckin' dollars for a fuckin' console and a fuckin' extra controller? Fuckin' stick it!"
I went right around the corner to a fuckin' video-game shop, I take an oath to my son, I buy the fuckin' Wii special: two wireless controllers, Wii console, network adapters, two game titles, with all the ease of on-screen multimedia features you can use, threw in a extra demonstration game as I walked out the door, and for an extra buck and a half they gave me a fuckin' issue of Nintendo Power.
I walked out of there fuckin' buffed.
Cost me US $300 and a Grover (US $50) for the whole fuckin' ball o' wank.
I couldn't stop playing for 2 months.
What's a fucking working man supposed to do?
You go to one of them fuckin' Best Buys; the poor working guy, what do they think they're fucking selling over there?
Fuckin' golden bars of DRM?
Fuckin' console and an extra controller for US $600?
Stick it up your ass, fuckin' Worst Buy!
What about the fucking workin' man?
Anyway, think about it
this is the ol' customer. he he!
www.bestbuysux.org
and the customer's always happy to see ya!
I am the nightmare of nightmares.
Um, no, it's not due to lack of demand, it's due to lack of components. Apparently the US government ordered too many for their special operations sharks.
Yes the sets that do 1080p are still a few k (but dropping).
However people have been buying sets for some time capible of at least 720p, with 1080i input allowed and downsampled.
Even at 720p HD content looks WAY better than DVD's. So there are a lot of people who are going to benefit from the new content, even if the displays they have are not the latest thing. For those that do have 1080p... well I envy them. But I'll not have to for long as display prices are dropping pretty rapidly.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"The room was filled with geeks drinking Rum-and-Jolt, ready to participate in the console unveiling ceremony. At last, the moment arrived: a giant mecha burst through the styrofoam wall, and walked in a straight line until it met the side wall where it could walk no more. The top opened: and inside was a dead nerd., clutching a bloody joystick. Our intrepid investigators arrived mere minutes later."
Where were you when the voynix came?
Glad the 360 and Wii are DRM free...
They slashed the number of units being delivered because they can't produce enough units. Sony is still in their magical Kutaragi bubble where everybody will get a second job so they can buy a PS3. If it was just a matter of anticipated lack of demand, Sony would be full speed ahead and damn the torpedos. Which they are doing anyway, it's just "full speed" means "a paltry amount of consoles for NA and Japan, and none for EU".
The Wii will sell four times as many consoles in the US because they will ship four times as many (if not more). And they'll sell infinitely times as many consoles in EU because Sony's not shipping there yet. It's a numbers game -- if you can only get 400,000 consoles on the market, there's no way you're going to sell 1.6million.
And this is why it's stupid for Sony to try to shove Blu-Ray down our throats. That said, the extra graphical horsepower of a PS3 or Xbox 360 will still be impressive on an SDTV simply due to more polygons and more budget for effects. You won't get the benefit of higher resolution textures, but PS3 games will still look much better than PS2 games on the same TV (just as 360 games look better than Xbox games).
As for another console being out in three years, don't bet on it. Maybe that will be true if Microsoft holds to the same 4 year cycle as they did with the Xbox, but I doubt that will happen. They entered this generation early because it was imperative to beat Sony and Nintendo to the punch. If that pans out for them, expect the Xbox 360 to have at least a 5 year lifespan before there's an Xbox 720 (or whatever it'll be called). And Sony expects the PS3 to last for 10 years, so don't hold your breath for a PS4 unless you can wait until 2015 ...
Is even at that price, they are likely to sell out almost immediately. Ok great, except that means that many people will be left contemplating another option. The word of mouth that will be dangerous is word of mouth about the Wii, but particularly the 360 (since it's more expensive and a more direct competitor). If they miss out on the PS3, but they hear great things about the 360, maybe they decide to take the jump. Once they do, that's probably it. For most people, 1 expensive next gen console will be it. They might get a Wii as well because of the price but the 360 and PS3 market will be pretty small.
That I think is the real concern here. It's not that the launch has to meet up to some certain standard of Sony quality, it's that it has to be good enough to convince people to hold on to their dollars and wait for more PS3s to come out rather than get a 360. I'll bet you MS drops a $100 price reduction and Halo 3 on the launch as well.
Quickly, non-Sony fans(and fanboys of other systems), post some crap about the EVIL company that will end up looking stupid.
....... Do I need to dig up similar crap posted here from before and after the first Xbox launch?
Apparently the US government ordered too many for their special operations sharks.
Are those the ones with the frickin Blu-Ray lasers on their heads?
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It's the same thing folks threw out with the 360 launch. They couldn't imagine that people would actually be willing to buy the console, so there MUST have been an artificial shortage
It's going to be the same with the PS3, but worse. The production of brand new hardware always has wrinkles in it, as well as general quality issues. Then there's also the news of a shortage of blue lasers, which is affecting high-def DVD manufacturers everywhere.
Despite all the (seemingly unending) bad news about Sony, there are still going to be legions of fanbois clamoring for a console come launch day. And there will undoubtedly be a lot of entrepreneurs hoping to snag a PS3 or two (or a dozen), so they can resell them on eBay for big bucks. Anyone remember the awful rumors of GameStop employees hiding 360 boxes in the backroom, so that they could sell them for a huge profit later? Expect a repeat of that again this year.
All in all, a shortage is not a good thing for a console manufacturer, even for one that is sold at a loss. The sooner you get the platform in people's hands, the sooner they can start buying games and high-def movies. Sony's already has mind-share and buzz, even though it's not all positive. It doesn't need anymore negative news of parents and gamers complaining that they can't get a console and are looking to spend their $500-600 elsewhere (Wii or 360).
-- jchenx
And this is why it's stupid for Sony to try to shove Blu-Ray down our throats. That said, the extra graphical horsepower of a PS3 or Xbox 360 will still be impressive on an SDTV simply due to more polygons and more budget for effects. You won't get the benefit of higher resolution textures, but PS3 games will still look much better than PS2 games on the same TV (just as 360 games look better than Xbox games).
Agreed, but I just can't see an ad for the PS3: "Now, with extra polygons!"
Yet another FPS or sports game with extra super polygons really just doesn't work. We want Hillary Duff in Sim 2: Pets, or Katamari Damacy, or Dance Dance Revolution: Sudden Death Danceoff, or Super Mario Underwater Twister Teleport Tango, or Spore.
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Might be a bit off-topic, but I noticed many of you still bring up that crashing "issue" from that article posted a few days ago. A UK-based PS3 magazine, PSM3, was given a Playstation 3 to play with for a day. Here are the links of the write-ups:
u p_pics_and
p sm3_the_aftermath
http://www.psm3mag.com/page/psm3?entry=ps3_power_
http://www.psm3mag.com/page/psm3?entry=ps3_meets_
They talk about impressions, heating, noice output and stuff like that. Given that it's a Playstation magazine site, it is a pretty insightful read on how the final PS3 models will, hopefully, work. Hopefully it can put to rest some FUD and shine some light on the PS3 and reveal the fingerprints of truth. (And yes, apparently it gets dirty much like the PSP. Ick.)
(I'm ignoring the PS3's attempt at their own network service, as they haven't really talked much about it, or their own motion-sensing controller, as those don't really distinguish themselves apart from the others
Network services for the 360? Big hit for a lot of folks, especially considering broadband penetration in the US is rapidly increasing. New control scheme for the Wii? Very popular, particularly with gamers that are becoming disillusioned with the current type of games (more graphics, less gameplay, and less fun).
The trend that Sony is focusing on, unfortunately for them, is something that the vast majority of users won't care about. They don't have an HDTV, much less one that does 1080p or perhaps does HDMI.
What Sony SHOULD have done is just focus on their massive developer support, and on the games themselves. They've certainly talked about it with the PS3, but that message is diluted too much with the rest of the Blu-ray, 1080p, SIXAXIS talk going on. If all they did was thump their chest and focus on the games, they would have sold a lot more people on the PS3 (myself included).
-- jchenx
In high definition, the player can see farther away without having enemies turn into a blob of pixels no bigger than a micro-goomba from Super Mario Bros. 3. By similar triangles, a screen that's twice as tall (1080i vs. last generation's 480i) should allow over twice as much useful draw distance.
Okay, three options here: You have never played Nintendo games and simply don't know what youre talking about; you're a Sony/MS fanboy who choses to ignore reality; you're insane.
Take your pick.
Nintendo generally doesn't actually do sequels. They do franchises.
Now, first of all, let's get the sequels out of the way: there are Nintendo published sequels. Pikmin 2, Metroid Prime 2, Super Mario Bros 2 (Lost Levels, not the US/EU doki doki panic version), lots of the Pokémon games.
But most of Nintendo's so-called sequels actually aren't.
Is Super Mario 64 a sequel to Super Mario World? Is Wind Waker a sequel to Ocarina of Time? They re-use gameplay mechanics, they re-use characters and storylines, but they're totally different games. This is not "Madden 2004 vs. Madden 2005." Lots of these "Nintendo sequels" actually get tons of heat because they're too different from the previous versions - Double Dash, for example. And what about all the wholly new franchises which Nintendo creates?
Yeah, Nintendo re-uses its characters a lot. There's a Mario entry in every genre except first person shooters. That doesn't mean these games are "carbon copy sequels," and this is not a matter of opinion, either.
Nintendo used to be synonymous with video games, man. That didn't stop them from losing most of the market they once had a monopoly on when they made a series of terrible mistakes with the N64. And the sheer number of stupid moves Sony has made with the PS3 puts Nintendo's N64 fuck ups to shame. No one is invincible. Nintendo got arrogant and paid the price for it. Now it's Sony's turn if they don't deliver.
-Moses
My local EB manager today was being grateful his isn't an inner city store. There's really a potential for people to become violent as this thing is released. Given the 360 stories I was hearing this morning (while waiting to preorder my Wii), I think these guys have some very legit concerns...