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.'"

Comments

Sony has lost its way

[Anenome]

"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

Re:Sony has lost its way

[KDR_11k]

Kutaragi the hyperbolist was later fired for that mistake.

I prefer the experession "first against the wall when the Revolution came".

Re:Sony has lost its way

[AuMatar]

You forgot to add that Sony has now lost more on the PS3 than it made on the PS2 and PS1 combined, and still loses money on each console sold. All for third place.

Re:Sony has lost its way

[TheRaven64]

At least one laptop manufacturer is including a chip with 4 Cell SPUs and IBM is selling Cell blades, so some people are using them. Unfortunately, because they aimed for the graphics market they only included single-precision floating point which meant that a lot of their potential market in high-performance computing ignored the chip (they all believe they need double-precision floating point, even the ones that are mainly running integer-only FORTRAN code).

There is still a lot of potential for the Cell. Toshiba, for example, are considering using it in HDTVs to decode all of the available MPEG-2 digital TV channels in parallel so there is no delay switching channels on digital DV and you can see channel previews easily. A lot of the early failures of the Cell were due to poor compiler support, but now LLVM has a Cell SPU back end this may change - it matches up very closely, for example, with OpenCL. Now that modern GPUs are adopting very similar designs to the Cell (i.e no fixed-function pipeline, just lots of SIMD units), it may start to be competitive in other areas.

The Cell hasn't exactly taken the world by storm, but it's probably premature to claim it's dead.

And as with all their products...

[Mnemennth]

... Sony had taken a brilliant innovation and nearly destroyed it by insisting on some form of proprietary hardware or another. Be it battery packs on their cameras or proprietary memory cards on almost everything they've ever made, they STILL don't understand how trying to OWN the standard almost guarantees you will NOT be compliant with whatever standard eventually develops, and therefore drives many potential customers to look elsewhere for products they would love to buy from Sony...

mnem

Where's the BetaMax?

The "Mass" Effect (no pun intended...)

[derGoldstein]

"One of the crucial points in the campaign to win hearts and minds came when Sony offered a solution to the problem that Japanese game publishers had no production capacity or supply infrastructure themselves. After all, under the Nintendo model, Nintendo would make and distribute their software for them ... One of the crucial points in the campaign to win hearts and minds came when Sony offered a solution to the problem that Japanese game publishers had no production capacity or supply infrastructure themselves. After all, under the Nintendo model, Nintendo would make and distribute their software for them"

This was the real force behind the success. It brought a massive amount of Japanese-culture into game design. Game developers didn't have to make everything "culture agnostic" if they didn't want to, and this was a big turning point.

The real problem was Blu-Ray

[derGoldstein]

If you look at the manufacturing costs, the real problem was the Blu-Ray drives. They were so desperate to win that format war (and that was truly a phyrric victory), that they upped the PS3's manufacturing costs through the stratosphere. DVD would have been more than enough, and the Cell's price has gone down, as all architectures eventually do. The reason the price is still this high is that the combination of the Cell *and* BR drives is simply too much.

Imagine having access to PSN with a sub-$200 console. They would dominate by this point, if they just had their priorities straight.

Re:Taking over the market?

[Anenome]

"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.

Re:Taking over the market?

[KDR_11k]

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.