Slashdot Mirror
Sony CEO Confirms Limited $499 PS3 Stock
If you were confused about yesterday's stock announcement, you wouldn't be the only one. Thankfully Kaz Harai, SCEI CEO, has clarified the situation: the $499 60GB PlayStation 3 is a limited offering. They'll only be selling it here in the states until their current stock of the system is cleared out, at which point the only SKU remaining in the states will be the $599 80GB + Motorstorm bundle. The catch is that there is probably enough stock in hand for several months of sales at this price; hence the confusion yesterday about a 'fire sale'. Hirai confirmed this to a Norwegian videogame news site, and the video of the interview is available online. For some perspective, Next Generation has a commentary piece on this strange matter. "Now Sony looks as though it's been spinning consumers. The smart thing to have done would have been to come out and say that the 60Gig version is being discounted and discontinued, and that the bells-n-whistles PS3 at $599 is better value than ever. That didn't happen, and what many have seen as a pretty successful E3 for Sony has been marred by confusion over the future of the platform's strategy. So in those meetings next week, Sony will have cause to look back and consider how things might have been done better."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
1. Load gun.
2. Aim at foot.
3. Shoot.
4. Repeat as often as possible.
(Yes, I know, "Step 5: Profit!" should go there, but seriously, have you looked at their quarterly reports recently?)
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Oh please, you know exactly why people are upset about this. It's become clear you're a Sony astroturfer. You've posted in the other story on this topic and people were pretty clear why there were upset about it.
But to make it clear, it's that "cut the price of the 80GB console" part. There's no proof that's going to happen. People have been clamoring for a PS3 price cut for ages. There's clearly demand for the PS3, but not at the $600 price point. People have been wanting to see a pricecut.
So what Sony has announced is that there's a pricecut, but then they're going to sell a version that has about $20 worth of storage extra and a version that's not as backwards compatible with PS2 and PS games. (That's assuming $1/GB, which is high - it's closer to $0.75/GB.)
So, ultimately, Sony is announcing a new, worse version of the PS3 for the same price. That's why people are upset.
That assumes, of course, you're interested in playing PS2 games on the PS3. At this point in time, with the PS2 game library dwarfing the PS3 game library, it's a fair assumption that people would want to do that. You can also debate how much worse the PS2/PS emulation is, especially since the new emulation is already used to enable upscaling in the existing model.
However, this still comes off as Sony saying that they're selling a new, worse model for the same price, while trying to ditch the old model. Not completely true, but it sure sounds like it.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
If I was Howard Stringer the first thing I would do is fire the entire marketing staff. So far their advertising and handling of everything related to the PS3 has been bungled. From the crying baby advertisements that were outweirded only by Sega's Dreamcast campaign, the early arrogance in the press, to the latest price cut, its not a price cut debacle there hasnt been one element of their PR that has worked in their favor.
There is a new rumor that the 360 will drop to $199 for the core and $250 for the "real" 360. If this rumor holds true, then Sony might as well pack it in, as there is no way a $599 system will be able to compete against a system that is 90% it's capability at more than 1/3rd the price. Sony Bots have been touting the "Incredible capability" of the PS3 and what an awesome value it is. My biggest question is why the PS3 is not significantly better than the 360, especially given the year's lead time? I own a PS3 and a 360, so don't mark me as a flamebait. I am still smarting after this past Christmas day when my friends (all in their 30's, who have owned every game system ever, like me) came over to see the PS3 and play Resistance: Fall of Man. They could not stop laughing at me and the game. The consensus was, "You paid $800 for this?!"
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
Here, as I understand it, is the situation. Hopefully, if I get anything wrong someone will correct me...
Backwards compatibility goes down with the newer 80GB US models.
As others have pointed out, the newer systems lack an in-built Emotion Engine chip, so they rely on software emulation rather than hardware emulation.
The emulation is decent, but it's far from perfect. Sony themselves quote a figure of 88 percent compatibility with the software emulation rather than 100 percent with the hardware emulation.
And, even amongst those 88 percent of titles that work there are some glitches: it's not the case that 88 percent of titles work perfectly while 12 percent have some problems or won't run, rather it's the case that 12 percent won't run at all and 88 percent will run to some degree.
You can read that many ways, but to me it seems to suggest that 88 percent is a marketing person's figure more than anything else: if a game won't get past a fixed point, it has audio or visual glitches all over the place, or if it falls over all the time then you're stretching things if you consider that game in your 88 percent.
Of course, Sony isn't exactly advertising the fact that the newer 80GB models aren't as backwardly compatible as their predecessors. Granted, it won't matter to everyone, but it will matter to some, and those people won't thank Sony for their penny-pinching and shortsightedness.
I don't know what the hell is going on with Sony. When it came to the original PlayStation they ran a flawless campaign and sucked millions of new users into the console market. With the PS2 they didn't put a foot wrong and cleaned up again. But with the PS3 it seems like they've decided to see how much they can piss away the goodwill generated by their previous two generations and opted for one boneheaded move after another.
If they're not careful they're going to end up as yet another sorry story on fuckedcompany.com.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
More info, from Wikipedia's PS3 page:
On March 20, 2007 Sony released a compatibility list; 1,782 of the 2,451 PS2 games (72%) released in Europe had noticeable issues, minor issues or no known issues, with the remainder being incompatible with the console.
As I understand it, the European PS3's only had software emulation. So, by Sony's own admission, backwards compatibility is at 72 percent, and may actually be even lower than that.
If I had any Sony stock I would have sold it a long time ago. These guys are finding new lows of stupidity every other day.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg