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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.
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.
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.
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.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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