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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.
...and here I am, still unable to buy a nunchuk (not from an ebay scalper) Yes, I am nintendo's b****/fanboy
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
Hey, now, to be fair, all they would have to do is drop the price tag down to 200 dollars and the system would be a rousing success.
I mean, they'd lose more money than M$ lost on the first XBox, and would almost certainly never turn a profit, and it might even be serious enough to damage Sony the company as a whole... but 10 years down the road, people wouldnt be looking back saying "PS3? Man. that was a mistake."
Of course... that wont happen, so you're probably right. But in my dreams, I own a 200 dollar PS3.
What are all these posts about how well/bad the PS3 is doing on here? First, we have discussed and read about it twice a day for a week now and second, it is all total BS. We can not and should not be saying anything yet because we dont know anything. It will take months, at the earlier to be able to gage what all three systems are doing in comparison to each other. The 360 is the only system that should have stories like this. This time next year I am all about reading how the PS3 really did bomb and how the Wii sold 60 million units. Right now though, it is retarded.. why? Everything is sold out everywhere the second it gets there. Let the market saturate, supply and demand to even out, give a year of manufacturering costs and shipments numbers to adjust, then we can talk okay?
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30 games per PS3 is really a lot. Not being much of a console gamer myself, I don't know what the average games-per-console is, but that seems pretty high. Of course this figure depends on how much Sony can bring the cost of manufacturing down. Did the analysts assume that they would and factor it in, or did they assume a constant cost/console?
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."
As much as I would like to poke fun at Sony for this seemingly high mark, they can also make a profit by selling a combination of PS3 games and Blu-Ray movies. It is much more reasonable for someone to have lots of movies than lots of games. Assuming of course the purchase is made at a retail store so Sony gets the profit, rather than a used dealer.
What is particularly mind-boggling about Sony is that they continue to spend money advertising on Television to sell a console you cannot buy and a console that will require no advertising-induced desires to be able to sell any that Sony can manage to get on the shelves.
Plus, a 30 game attach rate to break even? That is mind-boggling and cannot be possible. Sony could not be that stupid.
Ken "nutjob" Kutaragi gets promoted? WTF is wrong with them? This guy is a walking PR desaster spewing comments like "we have created the most beautiful thing in the world" in response to the misaligned PSP button sensor issue or "people will want to get a second job to afford a PS3". Their situation is bad enough without rubbing it into people's faces with arrogant comments that show he doesn't even feel bad for screwing up like that.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
It's simple logic: the console that 'wins' will have the most games made to work on it (and I don't mean just backwards-compatible). People don't want a loser, since it'll mean they have decidedly fewer games for later on.
Because this generation requires such a huge investment, people want a decision to be made in the console war quickly enough that they can avoid buying a 'losing' console and wasting their money.
If you can find a way to solve this, let us know.
Good lord, just how many new games do they think the average gamer buys? At $50 a pop that's $1500. I have that much disposable income, but I'd certainly not blow it on paying top dollar for games. I'm sure I don't have more than 20 games total for my PS2, and all but 2 of those I fished out of the bargain bin.
I am so happy I own no Sony stock, and even more optimistic about having bought Nintendo stock.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Most folks that bought PS/3's bought them to sell on eBay. 100% of the poeple I know bought the PS/3 with the intention of eBaying the console. They did not buy any launch titles--just the PS/3. Another newsflash--the auctions are closing on the PS/3's in the thousands of dollars--but no one is paying for the auctions. One of the folks I know ebaying a PS/3 was estatic when his auction closed for $5,000. ($5K!! Damn--you could have bought a PC in 1981 for that kind of cash!) The win bidder though seems to have dropped off the face of the earth. All the hardcore gamers I know have picked up a Wii and rave about how much fun they have with console. Time will tell the true victor in the console wars. Personally I have 360 now, plan to get a Wii before Christmas, and will wait until until there is amply supply of PS/3's and several top rated titles before spending my cash.
Given the amount of truely idiotic and genuinely hostile things Sony has done to consumers, they deserve nothing more than utter failure.
Sadly, way too many people have short memories and don't care that computers were scrambled by willfully malicious sony music CDs.
Or the fact that they love to sue music cust^H^H^H^Hpirates into submission. "Don't even have a computer? Give us money anyway cause we KNOW you've been pirating!"
Hell, the last sony laptop I got my hands on, had so much advertising crap on it that it actually *slowed down* the machine significantly, until I uninstalled all of it.
I'm sure I'm forgetting plenty of examples of Sony's heinous, arrogant behaviour.
I'd hardly call a product that can't remain on the shelves a failure!
You're right. Companies strive to produce a product that loses money hand over fist.
I'm also tempted to link the relevant VG Cats strip, but it's just too obvious.
What does this even mean? We have a blu-ray disc that holds lots of data, sure, and accordingly scaled up textures; but in any sort of process like this you are continually downscaling from practically any 'artistic' original source to begin with. Why does this cost more to downscale less than you were originally? Is it just harddrive space? That seems historically low.
And this doesn't even seem to take into account the idea that some games have different budgets? Why can he not make a game for both the Wii and PS3 that uses basic motion sensing? I think its a good idea if multiplatform games look as uniform as possible, and after all, "its not about the graphics anymore", right? Seriously, I'm asking, if any one can credibly enlighten me as to why Namco would say this? (I am a graphic designer by trade but I do not work in the game sector.)
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Companies strive to produce a product that loses money hand over fist.
Yeah, but they'll make it up on volume!
Oh, wait...
Now, right before Christmas, the 360 is selling for $100.00 many places. If it is doing well, the price would stay high until after the first of the year.
Please tell me where. Microcenter has the "best deal" and that requires $100 rebate, $100 voucher for getting opening a credit card, and a $200 voucher for getting Vonage for 2 years. That's ONE place and its Microcenter, not Microsoft, offering the deal. The best you can do is about $340 from Overstock or Dell, though I think those deals are over now. Amazon had its $100 deal for 1000 Core systems - and Amazon's servers were hosed, along with endless bitching about it being a scam on digg. Amazon's server crashed. That just doesn't happen unless demand is there.
But please tell me where I can get a $100 Xbox 360. I would bet 75% of slashdot readers would get one at that price as well.
the reviews of the PS3's BluRay features and playback are absolutely gushing and calling it the best player on the market
If I'm not mistaken, the PS3 is only the 2nd Blu-Ray player on the market... There's the Samsung player, which has been out for a little while now, the PS3, and the Sony one won't be released until just before Christmas, I believe. Pioneer and Philips should have players... eventually... but for now they're getting screwed over by the already short supply of blue lasers going to the PS3. I'm sure the main reason the Sony BD player has been delayed so much is also because of the blue laser shortage.
Given the fact that the Samsung player is already running into Blu-Ray discs it can't play, and the Sony Blu-Ray player is going to need at least 2 firmware updates to play certain discs and to use the Java interactive features when it does finally launch, I'd say there's not much competition for the PS3 in the current market.
But then I'd be surprised if a $500/$600 dollar game machine can be a better BD player than a dedicated $1000 machine, too... I'm sure the PS3 will have its share of BD problems.
Damn. I would consider myself a rather big fan of the Gamecube, it is the console I own the most games for, and I own far less than 30. It's more like 18 or so. I only have 6 or 8 PS2 games. I don't know how Sony is going to pull themselves out of this mess, but they better think fast...
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
That's because C64 games are free these days. Just grab a floppy drive, a few dozen double-density floppies, and have at it.
Now if you want to talk about Atari 2600, Intellivision, and Coleco cartridges, I probably have over 300. They're a pain in the butt to store, but they're so cheap to get ahold of these days.
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Over the life of a system, thirty really isn't that bad. I mean, I recently counted that I have just a tad under one hundred ps2 games (not a single one of them a sports game). That's more than any other console I've owned, though I easily have more than half that number in PS1 games as well as Game Boy Advance games. My DS library is moving up too.
My point is, thirty games does seem like a hell of a lot when a console first launches, but over the life of a system it's a lot easier to do that than you may think. If the PS3 lasts about as long as the PS2, then this might be fine. Of course, I'm also one of the people that won't even think about buying one at $600, so who knows.
What? After all the good decisions they made over the past year? I think they could be that stupid, or to say it 'politically correctly' They are "over-confident".
Sony releases a small number of systems. People stand in line, to sell them off at ebay, some crooks start a shooting because of the obvious get rich quick scam going on. The consoles sell out almost no games are bought due to the reselling over bay. No real interest into the consoles, the prices fall very swiftly for the resold consoles and settle down a little bit above the street price. Thats the harsh reality!
Think I'm just going to wait until someone can decide what the criteria are for judging who wins a contest like this before I try and make my predictions. Some thoughts...
Microsoft have had a full year selling the Xbox 360, which overall has undeniably been very succesful. It's online service is highly regarded, and we're now starting to get games which are pushing the console. In all those respects, it's a winner. However, they're still losing money on each unit sold, and they're backing one of two Hi-Def standards, and it may be the loser, but at least they've made it optional, so if it fails it's not going to taint the machine as a games console. If I was a serious gamer, I'd already have an Xbox 360. People know exactly what it can do, and whether they want one or not. Very few people will buy an Xbox 360 and be disappointed, it's already relatively mature and lack of novel user interfaces aside, the others are going to be playing catch-up for the next two years.
No matter what anyone says, Sony have made a phenominal number of mistakes with the PS3. However, many simply boil down to marketing goofs, and a "they'll want what we tell them" attitude which has certainly made them no friends. They're using the console to push other technologies of their own, and that is by far their biggest risk, and also the thing that's likely to keep the component price of the console high for longer. All that said, once the less than stellar launch is forgotten (that'll be around January), there's stock on the shelves, and we start seeing well written games which make use of the phenominally powerful hardware (probably in around a years time), and after whichever price drop brings the high-end console down to around half of its launch price, I'll probably get one. However, I suspect there'll be many people who are disappointed with what the machine achieves within its first 12 months of public life. It's the sort of console that if you owned one you'd want to show it off and shout about. It's a nice looking piece of consumer electronics and there are going to be some impressive looking games, but it's very much like the flash cars you see at shows (you know? The ones that cost more than your house) that you want to just stare at. You'd try and encourage a friend to buy one, so you could go for a spin in it every now and again, but you'd never consider buying it yourself, even if you could afford it.
I'll openly admit however, that my personal enthusiasm is for Nintendo's Wii. But then I'm not a hardcore gamer, and what excites me may well not excite the next man in line. I think the technology is easily good enough to give me games which are visually stunning, that sound good, are innovative (which is something I've come to appreciate more as I get older) and are fun to play. When I get around to buying a Wii in the New Year, I think it's also very likely I'll start getting Virtual Console games on a regular basis, as I'm of an age that I remember them the first time around, and there are a good handful of full games which I'll be looking to pick up when they launch. Nintendo have a good business plan, which all but ignores the other two players. It's practical, manageable, and it also means that they make money every step of the way, instead of losing a lot now, and trying to claw it back over time. The Wii does not set itself against the competition, simply alongside. It doesn't promise the earth, and then struggle to deliver, because all along Nintendo have played down what the machine is capable of and re-itterated that it's all about the games. Until the DS showed how effective that strategy can be, I doubt anyone believed them.
What it should really boil down to is which consoles are of interest to us personally, and that will ultimately depend on which game genres and series appeal to us, and how strongly they are represented on each platform. Let's not forget that the PC is now a very strong gaming platform, much more so than when the last generation of consoles launched, and that will divert some
You have some valid points but Gears of War is definitely in the category of compelling games. Personally I would put Oblivion in that category as well but there are people who prefer to play it on PC because of all of the community-added content available.
I don't like Sony either, but I think their system will be moderately successful after a few years. The current shortages and reported difficulties of developing for the system will hurt them in the short term. After there's more of an install base and developers start taking full advantage of the hardware the PS3's outlook will improve.
I still see Nintendo as the winner of this generation. I don't know how many hours I spent playing Oblivion on the 360 but I haven't touched it since I got Zelda. The new controllers for the Wii make it incredibly fun to play. If they continue to release good games at a lower price point I think it will be very difficult for both Sony and Microsoft to compete.
"Seek first to understand." - Socrates
... easily could have sold them for over $1,000 a piece. That is still less than the average price on e-bay for the premium units.
Maybe I have odd timing but lately when I search eBay for 'PS3' I see that most of the PS3 units with less than 10 minutes remaining on the auction have bids in the $700-$800 range for 20GB model and $800 to $900 for the 60GB model; most of the auctions that have starting bids at $1000 or higher end without a single bid on them. Now, I don't doubt that some systems have sold for more than $1,000 but I think that those are becoming the exception not the rule.
If Sony set the MSRP at higher than $1,000 it would have been a disaster even if the system sold out initially because for the next 2 to 3 years any advertizement on TV that showed a PS3 game people would think "I don't wat to spend $1000 for that;" even if they reduced the price when supply went up (and advertized it heavily) all people would think is "The PS3 went from $1,000 to $600 in 6 months so it should be down to $300 by next christmas. I can wait for that before I buy the system". I believe it was Iwata who said that it wasn't a good idea to reduce the price of a system too early or too often because customers would begin to anticipate price drops.
Okay, how many fewer games are being bought because of the low supply/high demand/eBay mark-up trend? The money to purchase games for the console has to come from somewhere, and I'd suspect it is all going towards just getting a PS3 console into a home.
Should Sony go after eBay resellers for damages? Could they?
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
So far I haven't seen an article that anyone got a fully bricked Wii through the update. All the 'Bricked systems' reported have only affected the online function, but you can still play games until Nintendo Support sends you a new system (since the Firmware according to Nintendo, exposed a hardware problem that needs fixing.) Now I'm not saying it isn't possible, I just haven't seen it. All the 'Bricked' articles I read were still offline functional, if you have a link of a completely bricked system (in all seriousness) I'd be interested in reading it.
Thanks.
> As for the '30 game rate to break even' 30 games isn't that many
> (Should imagine they're are quite a number of people with 30+ ps2
> games), and don't forget Sony get money on Blu-ray discs too.
I don't know... "quite a number" I will grant you. But more than half? More importantly, all things considered, does the mean work out to 30 or more? I would seriously doubt that.
You have a point on Blu-ray, but it may be a catch-22: Sony intended for the PS3 to rocket Blu-ray to the top as the new standard. If the PS3 fails, though, Blu-ray may not end up meaning much more than UMD.
"Sony releases new PlayStation model and people stand in lines for a week or so to buy it and it sells out in 10 minutes"
That's not hard if you only have one to sell.
The thing that's really hurting is that, depite all the hype and the astronomical price, it's not substantially different or better than what the XBox 360 is offering. At least the Wii can claim lower price + novel controller; all Sony has is their brand, and the market is showing that there are some $600+ pills it won't swallow.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
Not to sound like a fanboy or antifanboy, but "cutting edge games AND BlueRay movies" is quite a stretch. Right now, their best game is, Resistance: Fall of Man, which unfortunately won't blow away anyone familiar with normal PC FPS's. The rest of their lineup are either ports from existing 360 games (EA Sports), or minor updates of existing games (Ridge Racer 6 to 6.1... I mean 7).
Which is not to say that as a launch lineup the PS3 is terrible. All systems launch with a terrible lineup. The 360's best game at launch was Geometry Wars, a 5 dollar download. The PS3 may not seem more powerful than 360's lineup NOW, but in a year once people have learned to harness the hardware and the development tools are more mature, I have no doubt that the PS3 will be stronger. But for now, Gears of War just seems more impressive than resistance.
Sony was aiming to conclusively knock one out of the park, and they failed to do that in a very big way. The launch lineup has no killer app. Blu-Ray movies are far from a DVD killer. They wanted to be all-pervasive, but only managed to get MAYBE 400,000 units out there, and now it looks like they actually sold 200,000. Their Xbox-live killing online service has basically failed to materialize. The Sixaxis is too laggy to be a primary input, and is no Wii killer. The extra texture space afforded by blu-ray so far appears to have gone to... umm... The renderers seem to all be very low-contrast, and so aliased as to destroy detail. If your nice-but-cheap 1080i or 1080p system won't go down to 720p, the PS3 will render at a low-rez 480. And lots of other growing pains keep the system from being all that was promised.
Play the system at a friend's house. Or if not, play it at a Best Buy. It's nice, but it's not earthshattering. Certainly, it's not 1,000 dollars-on-ebay great.
Contrast this with Sony's brash bragging about being so great that people will want to get a second job to afford one, and you see why they are considered "in trouble." The game is definitely not over, but they did not come out nearly as strongly as they have been promoting. They didn't come out anywhere near strongly enough to clinch things, and arguably they have stumbled repeatedly.
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Where do you get the idea that they're NOT selling at a loss? Analyst estimates of the cost of making the PS2 were always substantially higher than retail value; I've seen estimates of $300 THIS year.
... you live in a very special world don't you. Again analysts always predict console X sells at loss Y but there has ever only been 1 that has been confirmed to sell at a lose. Most analyst use retail or wholesale component prices. Those prices were only ever valid for the first exbox all the rest had some large portion of custom gear made in house. The PS2 was said to be sold at a loss for the first 2 years by analysts but sony came out and said, aside fromt he initial few months the PS2 made them money. All nintendo's consoles also make them money as does the 360. The idea of selling at a loss is something business avoid because there is never a garentee that they will "buy enough" of your other product for you to make up for it. The whole business has never sold at a loss. Thats an urban myth.
Sony gets substantially less than the retail price, too.
I have no reason to believe that Sony has ever made money selling a console; it's always been game licensing.
When people say that only the Xbox has been a loss, they mean the WHOLE BUSINESS is a loss -- Microsoft lost money even taking licensing into account. Without licensing income, nearly all consoles are losses.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
SCE were the guys that shut down Bleem. SCE were the guys that shut down lik sang. SCE registered a patent to prevent used game sales. SCE spouted off numerous incidents of FUD, lies, and sheer arrogance. SCE fucked EQ and SWG... etc. etc. Would you like me to continue on SCE?
And as to the rest, they're all Sony. If you care enough to have the rootkits and various other sins upset you, you care enough to boycott the company as a whole. Period.
And yea, I mean, who would blame the average SS rank and file for the holocaust, right?
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."