Sony, Analysts React To PS3 Launch

cdneng2 writes "Sony may be aware that something is just not right. There's a reshuffling of management occurring within Sony. Kazuo Hirai is set to head their videogame unit, as Ken Kutaragi has been bumped to the Sony board. Jack Tretton, former COO for SCEA, is now the president and CEO of that arm of the company. There's no word on the reasoning behind these position shifts. On the same day, Namco announced that they must sell 500,000 games to begin making profit on PS3 games. A Financial Times article confirms speculation on how hard it will be for Sony to make money, as analysts with UBS predict that 30 games must be sold per PS3 for them to break even." To add insult to injury, EA CEO Larry Probst has said PS3 numbers were lower than expected. Current thinking is that Sony managed to ship roughly half of the 400,000 units they were promising.

Comments

Re:What is going on here?

[PygmySurfer]

Why? The PS3's performance effect's Sony's bottom line NOW. We know plenty, like the significant loss Sony is taking on each console sold, the exceptionally low number of units available, and the increasing number of former exclusives dumping Sony and going multi-platform. The linked stories include facts such as Sony having to sell 30 titles per console to make a profit, versus 8 for the PS2, Namco has to sell 500,000 units to break even, etc. There are also educated guesses (not just fanboy guesses but educated guesses by top people at EA, who would know this sort of thing) that Sony has shipped about half of the units they claimed they were going to ship (which was already cut drastically prior to launch). We also have other launches to look at, like the 360 (not so great), Wii (pretty good), and the PS2 (pretty good). Microsoft sold 900,000 units in North America by the end of 2005, another 500,000 in Europe (Can't find much for 2005 in Japan - 62,000 units in the first 3 days, and 103,000 units by April of '06). Sony probably won't even sell as many Worldwide (well, Japan and North America, since they cut out Europe) by the end of '06 as MS did in North America alone in '05.

Nintendo sold 600,000 Wii's in North America in the first eight days of it's launch, and they're aiming for 4 million worldwide by the end of '06. Obviously, it's been a success for Nintendo. Since they've been on the market for the same amount of time, can we not claim the PS3 launch hasn't been that great, and that Sony is hurting?

Re:Why do these pixels cost more

[NeutronCowboy]

Here's the problem with high-resolution graphics and lots of polygon-pushing: someone has to create the art for it. In Mario's times, you only needed to be able to approximate a plumber using about 200 pixels and 256 colors. Quite frankly, I can do that. In about 1 hour. For $5. Well, okay - I probably would have to get an artistically inclined friend to do it who knows how to handle Paintshop. But the point is that I don't have to worry about shading, proportionality, or anything like that. Compare that with today's creatures: they need to look good while at a resolution of 1920*1080, have proper normal maps, be based on great-looking models made by quality artists (no sucky part-time artist will be able to make stuff that looks good with these requirements). Not only that, but you need lots of art. Far more than for other games that didn't have that space or that processing power. Let's see - 6 million dollars, assuming 50K per artist, that comes to about 50 artists working for 2 years on a game. Sounds about right these days, especially when you're talking big-budget game.

Can you make low-budget games? Sure can. But expect to get ripped on sucky graphics, just like the Wii Sports series did.