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The Making of the PlayStation
Edge Online has an in-depth look at the beginnings of the first PlayStation console. It starts at Sony's partnership with Nintendo, the purpose of which was to integrate a CD-ROM drive into the SNES. A falling out between the companies led Sony to stubbornly pursue a market dominated by Nintendo and Sega. The console's technology and Sony's unusual position in the industry quickly attracted the interest of many developers and publishers, eventually leading to sales that emphatically won that round of the console wars.
"'There was a huge resistance inside the company to actually being in the videogames business at all,' explains Harrison. 'The main reason why the Sony brand wasn't really used in the early marketing of PlayStation was not necessarily out of choice, but it was because Sony's old guard was scared that it was going to destroy this wonderful, venerable, 50-year old brand. They saw Nintendo and Sega as toys, so why on Earth would they join the toy business? That changed a bit after we delivered 90 per cent of the company's profit for a few years.'"
"That changed a bit after we delivered 90 per cent of the company's profit for a few years."
- Yep, PS2 was the only thing keeping Sony afloat as a company for awhile there. Then they spent some $2 billion making the over-hyped Cell chip for the PS3 and actually thought they didn't need a graphics card, instead one was put in last minute -- what a fiasco. Kutaragi the hyperbolist was later fired for that mistake.
Meanwhile, Sony is losing its rep as a hardware manufacturer and facing stiff competition in sectors it once dominated such as TV's and now LCDs. Of the three console makers, Sony relied on its console receipts the most in order to keep their company afloat. Even Nintendo survived on owning the portable gaming market through Gameboy and now the DS when its console offering was weak. Microsoft of course had Windows, Office and its other software sales.
Sony was willing to spent billions to make sure the PS3 was number one like its predecessors. It virtually bet the company on it. The market's rejection of that bid has been one of the great business-move blunders in recent memory. Remember, Sony built its own Cell chip-fab (then couldn't produce enough while it cut its teeth on managing the facility). Sony believed the Cell was so awesome that manufacturers would buy it for all sorts of products, such as TVs, DVD players, and... COMPUTERS. That's right, Kutaragi actually thought computer makers would install a Cell chip. I already mentioned that Kutaragi thought the Cell as CPU and GPU alone was better than an added graphics processor.
We all know the story about the Wii taking over the market with a new input scheme, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention this: Johnny Lee's use of a Wiimote to create positional head-tracking creating the illusion of true 3D, you've got to see this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
"There's very few good 3rd party games on the Wii as is. There's a considerably higher ratio of shovel ware to good games than the other consoles."
- I actually don't blame Ninty for this problem, it's largely called by the controller. Call it the learning-curve on a new controller paradigm. The Wii revolutionized the market by introducing a control scheme that the public has embraced. There's no going back on that front, and I fully expect to see a Sony and MS version of the Wiimote next gen. This generation has seen the limits of N's original Wii technology which, in retrospect, isn't great. N recently released a gyroscope based add-on which makes the controller a true 1:1 input device (as far as tilt goes, someone will add positional tracking eventually) and will likely be standard in the next console.
I also wouldn't be surprised if a very large number of people whom grew up with the NES and SNES love the Virtual Console and are today buying games on it both for nostalgic value and to share with their own children, which by now are in the newborn to 10 y.o. range.
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
Microsoft isn't Sony's problem. Nintendo is.
"Perhaps St Augustine was right and there is only one story: of creation, fall and redemption. In PlayStationâ(TM)s case, weâ(TM)re now waiting on the latter."
The Sony tale is one of how to take huge market share and massive goodwill from your business partners and throw it all away by convincing yourself you are different from all the others and that the rules don't apply to you. (George Bush post-9/11 parallels anyone?)
Sony is an electronics company that makes it products out of pcbs and transistors like any other, but they forgot that and seemed instead to be arrogantly convinced they had some divine right to dominate the console market and could do whatever thet want.
Nintendo has done with the Wii what Sony did with the PS1 - create a system the market wants. Instead sony built the machine it wanted to make (replete with technologies like cell and blu-ray)and tried to use its strength and dominance of the previous generation to force the market to like what it had built. We all know the result.
Is Bluray really doing well in the market? It did better than HD-DVD, but that seems to be like comparing SACD with DVD-A, and ignoring CDs and MP3/AAC downloads. A lot of people think DVD is 'good enough' and will likely only buy BD if it is cheaper than DVD, which won't be for a few years. BD video is only 30Mb/s, and home Internet connections are likely to be faster than that by the time BD becomes cheaper DVD - they already are in some parts of the world. With 10-15Mb/s and some buffering, you can stream a BD-quality movie if you remember to start the download three quarters of an hour or so before you want to watch it.
The installed base of BD is about 6 million in the USA (figures from end of 2008, so maybe 8 million now if we're optimistic, but that's including all PS/3 units, even the ones that are plugged into non-HD TVs and so don't benefit from BD at all). DVDs have an order of magnitude more installed and I wouldn't be surprised if the number of people in the USA with 10Mb/s or higher Internet connections is greater than the number with BD players.
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Also the shovelware problem, when you are trying to quickly throw out a mediocre game, it's easier to make something based on an existing game and just tack on half assed support for the control system, rather than designing a game for the control system.
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A general problem with pointing at third party software not selling on the Wii is that not all software is equal. When a third party loses against Nintendo it's often not a battle of Nintendo's brightest vs that third party's brightest, it tends to be a battle between Nintendo's brightest vs the third party's outsourced port team that can barely spell OpenGL. While I won't dispute that Nintendo's brightest are extremely bright and it can get very hard to beat them they're definitely not going to be outdone by some third rate effort that got funded by the leftovers in the annual budget. That's in part because publishers don't understand the Wii market, many go in with the wrong assumptions about the userbase and obviously fall flat as it turns out the customer their game was intended for does not exist.
What should also be pointed at is the tie-in ratio (software sold per console on average) which was 6 for both the Wii and PS3 the last time I've seen a story about it (beginning of 2009 IIRC), either the PS3's audience has the same buy-one-game mentality or the Wii's does not and instead simply doesn't buy games it doesn't like.
Potentially a huge market but there is a problem, they are by definition, unending games. You don't finish them. So you don't need to buy the sequel, or a clone, or even a different take of it. If you bought the Wii to keep fit, then that is the only purchase you will make for a LONG time. That is NOT the way the other markets work.
Works fine for board games. Hell, even videogames didn't always end, in the early arcade age it was normal for a game to go on indefinitely until you either ran out of lives or the game glitched out and yet games kept being developed after that. There's always new ways to give the player new experiences. I don't think this whole "play through once, then trade in and buy the sequel" approach was really in place before the invention of FMVs, games had a length of ~30 minutes in one run but you'd play them over and over to get better at them until you could beat Contra on one life or something.
Will developers be able to keep the PS3 alive for as long as the PS2?
That is not a matter of ability but willingness. The PS2 receives games because it was by far the biggest selling console of its generation and there are still many people with PS2s hooked up who will buy PS2 games so devs release PS2 games to sell to those masses. I don't think the PS3 will end up in the same position, no matter how much Sony promises a 10 year lifespan (which I also think was only caused by the #1 position on the PS1 and PS2) they won't be able to convince developers to care about the PS3 over the next gen systems unless it finishes as a clear first and that is extremely unlikely from what we've seen so far.
The X-box aged fast, how fast is the 360 going to age?
The XBox didn't really age faster than the other systems but it got abandoned quickly because it was pretty far back in sales and they hoped to get an advantage by moving first this time (and I think it did work out for them to some degree).
Is the market going to want its sequel when the PS3 and the Wii will be cheaper and perhaps even just as good?
Yeah, that's the real question but it can only be answered if we know what the next XBox will do different from this one. If it's going to be another graphics update they won't stand a chance as graphics are pushed as far as the customer cares (and further). I'm not saying technology won't improve but I'm saying people don't care. Sony could easily run into the same problem though, if they make the PS4 another attempt at pushing graphics further they'll suffer just as much. If either console offers a significant improvement (in the eyes of the customer) then it could very well succeed more. For the record I don't expect the 360 to get a sequel long before the PS3 does though the Wii might end up lasting longer since its primary values can be improved without replacing the console itself.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
This is silly this argument that people are going to watch movies over the internet; what exacty would a person want to watch the show on a tiny 17" screen.
Nice straw man you've got there. I take it you've never seen anything like the AppleTV? You know, a little, cheap set-top box that plugs into a TV and delivers, uh, movies over the Internet? You've not looked at the latest HD-TV designs from the likes of Samsung which has an ARM CPU inside and can connect to an ethernet connection to, uh, watch TV from over the network?
I already watch TV over the Internet. It was trivial to set up - plug in an old laptop to a projector (if you can plug in a SCART lead, you can do that), it was recognised automatically, and I just click on the full-screen button in iPlayer to make it work. The laptop is a bit too old to handle the HD content that the BBC is streaming now, but a machine with hardware H.264 (i.e. anything with a recent ARM chip) could do it easily and now that the content is there expect to see companies start offering this kind of machine. Most HD TVs use HDMI, and if you can plug in a BluRay player with an HDMI output you can plug in a computer or Internet-enabled set-top box with HDMI.
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