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Sony Continues To Lose Ground In Mobile Gaming
donniebaseball23 sends this quote from an opinion piece at Industry Gamers:
"On Monday, news came down the pipeline from SCEE president Andrew House that Sony wants to focus on a younger audience for the PSP with future titles. My immediate reaction was one of shock and confusion. After all, in an interview with IndustryGamers at E3, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime noted that, 'the way I would describe the market for the Nintendo 3DS would be the launch market that we had with the Nintendo DS plus the launch market that maybe PSP had.' When your primary competitor is looking to the exact market that you've catered to, why would you abandon that market? There was a time when Sony Computer Entertainment was a trailblazer, bringing things to the industry ahead of everyone else. Nowadays, however, it seems that Sony is content to merely fall in step behind everyone else and simply try hard to not fall too far behind."
After their repeated rootkits, engineered incompatibility, engineered obsolescence, higher-than-market prices, and lengthy history of consumer-hostility, why would anyone want to buy a Sony product?
I sure don't. My house is Sony free. Of course, I have had to side with the lesser of a handful of evils, but that is still better than submitting to Sony.
I haven't actually had a PSP title for a few years that I actually liked enough to play more than a week. Most didn't even last a day. Going the DS route won't help either. What they really need is good games that people want to play.
Don't you need to gain ground, prior to losing it?
The PSP was pretty amazing when it launched in early 2005. It's still a neat system. There is a large, diverse library of games for the machine. They've sold millions of units. The only thing they've done "wrong" is to be in 2nd place.
Sony's "core" audience has already abandoned them for jobs and taking care of their families, and it is time to get a new one (i.e. focus on the kids, who can be easily won over with a couple marketing dollars and a hip spokeskid)
Headline should have been "Sony to change focus to younger audience - targets Nintendo's market" - with the submitter's opinion stated *after* the summary of the linked article (start quote at 2nd sentence if you want to be lazy).
Where does the actual source article say anything about Sony losing ground?
How does the submitters' description of Nintendo doing exactly the same thing somehow lend support to that story? Sony's story, which is not contradicted by IG in their article, is not dissimilar - they're strong in one market, better than ever, but wish to grow on their weak markets (i.e: focus on your competitors' market for growth, not the market you own and saturated already).
This summary has almost nothing to do with the linked articles, and it's 90% opinion from the submitter (donniebaseball23)
I happen to agree with his opinion on both Sony's rationale and their chances, but that's not really 'news' and it misrepresents the actual 'news' part as if this is what something Sony admitted to, or actually stated as IndustryGamers' analysis.
The professionalism of Slashdot editors... what is the job description again?
You better get those PSP sales up, Marcus, or it's right back to the orphanage for you!
Nobody I know with a PSP has upgraded to the PSP Go. It just doesn't make sense.
You can't play a game, complete it then trade it in for another game. The games shops lose and the customer loses too.
Before launch it was said that you would be able to swap a PSP UMD for a digital version for the PSP Go. This didn't happen, so it made migration expensive if you had an existing UMD collection.
Another problem is downloads, your PSP Go has to sit there while you download the game, which could be hours.
Have you not seen the PSP Go and what a big mess up it is?
This sums it up, paying more and getting less:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/reviews/2009/10/psp-go-review-sony-is-charging-you-much-more-for-much-less.ars
3D is always better, for everything, ever. Haven't you heard? Where have you been for the past 15 years? No matter the resolution, or the kind of gameplay, or the art style; 3D is always better.
The PSP's dead man walking state is completely due to Sony's ineptitude. I blame is on corporate ego, after winning two console generations in a row the attitude seemed to be that they could just push their way and gamers would just fall lock step into whatever Sony "blessed" them with, regardless of price, features or support. While pushing all the "features" that the hardcore audience would appreciate, they completely neglected the most important features, games. Gran Turismo portable for instance was demo'ed at the PSP launch announcement and was even featured on the box but didnt ship until last year. The rate of first party titls has been anemic since it launched and the 3rd party support has been shrinking. Piracy can be partially to blame but an equal blame should be laid at Sony's feet for not focusing on the right aspects of the device and supporting it properly. UMD was stillborn, which IMHO was a missed opportunity, I would have gladly paid for a UMD player for the house or car but Sony for some reason chose to keep it locked up deeming the format useless, yet rather than focus on the gaming they chose to advertise it as this do everything media device while basically downplaying its gaming prowess. As a result the much less capable DS has completely buried the PSP despite the inferior hardware.
I have been trying for months to sell a PSP bundle with over 2 dozen games (admittedly nothing as recent as the last year and a half or so) and cant get any interest at any value more than the joy of taking outside and stomping the crap out of it.
Yet I think everyone will agree that Kevin was a much better spokesperson/campaigner than Marcus ever will be.
The PSP Go was a terrible decision. As it stands, there are new games coming out now that the PSP Go can't play, simply because they won't be released on PSN.
Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep is just the most recent example.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
The iphone has no buttons. Not a true gaming console.
The assertion that button presence defines a console sounds silly to me. A PC has even more buttons than an Xbox 360 with four controllers plugged into it. So is the PC "a true gaming console" to you? What about mobile phones running Android OS, many of which have a texting keyboard? I'd like to clear up no true Scotsman fallacies and get Layne's Law of Debate out of the way so that we can know what each other is talking about.
I just don't like having to draw on a screen to play my game.
Then anybody who has played a PC game relying on a mouse has different tastes from you. Graphical adventures such as Myst sold millions on PC, even if the DS port might have been crap.
So, what trailblazing has Sony actually done for consoles?
Sony's innovations aren't really developed with the consumer in mind. The Universal Media Disc, memory sticks, ATRAC-only music players, etc. are all, in varying degrees of blatant-ness, attempts by Sony to drive people into using Sony's own proprietary systems. They announce them as if they're "consumer innovations"; but I imagine the spokespeople have to practice in front of a mirror for a while to be able to keep a straight face when saying that.
You really have to wonder what goes on in the minds of that company's leaders. What other company would develop a PC rootkit and then act surprised when people rebelled?
#DeleteChrome
The original PS was a good console not because Sony blazed a new path but because they didn't. Sony put together a bunch of good, largely off the shelf hardware, for a good price. An important factor was using CD-ROM when Nintendo stayed cartridge. While it had loading times, it brought unit costs of the games down a whole lot. The electronics in cartridges ate up a non-trivial amount of the sale price, especially as they got larger. Also the PS was very easy to program for. It has a MIPS R3000a processor, a GPU that works much like PC GPUs, video decompression hardware that works with standard formats (at the time), sound chip very similar to the SNES chip (which Sony made) and that largely worked like more advanced Amiga MOD files and so on. Because the unit itself was a good price, the CDs allowed for good profit on the games, and it was easy to develop for, developers loved it.
The PS2 did blaze more trails, I suppose, with the Emotion Engine, but that was a piece of shit. It succeed inspite of that, not because of it. It was difficult to program for. However the large library of PS1 games helped it sell well and companies target the big platforms. Also the other consoles of that generation weren't great showings. The Gamecube just didn't catch on with many people and the X-box was over a year late to the game, not to mention being made by a newcomer to the videogame market. Plus Sony was able to secure some important exclusives, meaning you had to have their hardware to play some hot games.
The PS3? Well we all see how well that's doing. Sales of the console itself haven't been good and game sales have been weaker still. Many people get them "Because it is a blu-ray player," which is fine and all but games are when bring in the big money for consoles, not the hardware (sometimes that is even a money loser). Programmers are having difficulty using the Cell so often times many SPUs sit inactive, meaning that the game could potentially be better but isn't. For that matter the Cell itself was a mistake they refused to admit. It was supposed to be the graphics chip. However it turned out that it was nowhere near as capable as modern GPUs. Rather than throw it out they repurposed it as a CPU. This also meant they were behind on getting a chip designed for them, and so their GPU is sub optimal (normally you want to share system and video RAM in a console GPU, however nVidia didn't have the time to redo the memory controller when making the RSX so it splits it like you do on a computer).
More or less Sony has fooled themselves as to why they were successful. Had they stuck with the strategy of producing good hardware from available parts, good chance they'd still be on top. No it isn't innovative but that isn't always what you want in a consumer product.
Is they are used to that in the professional arena. Sony has had some great success in the pro world of forcing an all-Sony solution. The best success is Betacam, the professional cousin to their failed Beta consumer format. Betacam SP was the standard to which everything was compared for the longest time. Nearly all TV was shot on it. When digital formats were coming out it was always talked about like "This looks as good as Betacam SP," or "This gives slightly better colour resolution than Betacam SP." Companies would have all Sony cameras, decks, etc.
What the seem to continually fail to realize is that such a thing doesn't work so well in the consumer space. When you are the sole owner and producer of a technology, your competitors will try and make their own. They'll also try and undercut you, which isn't hard to do with Sony. The consumer market is extremely price sensitive, unlike the pro market.
they have a real mentality of "We can tell you what things are going to be," and get surprised when they don't work out.
There are two problems with cellphones as a primary gaming platform, one that you really can't fix:
1) Controls. Cellphones are not well suited to games. The reason the gamepad has endured is not coincidence, it is a good tool for the job. Yes you can add a gamepad, but that makes the phone much larger and people don't like that one bit. While the problem isn't completely unsolvable, it is difficult.
2) Battery life. When you do anything else with your phone, you drain the battery. There are no new magic battery technologies out there that will extend the life a long time. Play games, your talk time goes down. There's just no way around this, other than larger batteries.
This idea that everything unifies on a single device is silly, and you need only to look at other areas of life to see it is not something that happens all the time. You probably have an oven, a microwave, and a toaster in your house. Well why? That oven makes perfectly good toast (try it if you don't believe me). It is also far more flexible at cooking things than the microwave. So why do you have those other devices?
Well you have them because they do certain tasks, tasks you want, better and/or more efficiently. It is worth having the dedicated device because of that.
Games on cellphones work fine when it is a minor distraction kind of thing. You carry around some games so if you are waiting in the doctor's office you can play for a bit. They don't work for longer periods of entertainment. Spend a 4 hour flight playing a phone game and you may find you can't call your ride when you land at the airport.
They pushed 3D gaming hard, their policy of discouraging developers from releasing 2D games whilst providing them with strong 3D capabilities (so strong they forced Sega, who thought 3D wasn't ready yet, to add an additional CPU and create the develpment nightmare that was the Saturn).
Sony brought gaming to a much wider audience than Sega or Nintendo had managed before. Remember the first Wipeout? Remember how wowed everyone was that they could listen to Progidy and chemical brothers whilst they race? Suddenly gaming was cool amongst nightclub going 20-somethings, not just kids and geeks. They created Gran Turismo, a game with a level of depth and wealth of content that no one had been able to match. They pushed Tony Hawk's Skateboarding, gave FFVII a huge marketing pushes. In every area the PS1 was pushing gaming in new directions and providing rich experiences.
Maybe you weren't part of the generation who grew up watching the consoles go from 8bit to 16bit to 32bit but I find it amazing anyone could brush off Sony's acheivements with both the PS1 and PS2.
at launch Apple didn't allow third-party software
Apple has done been plenty of launches since then: iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2 ("There's an app for that"), iPhone 3GS and iPod touch 3 (faster CPU), and now iPhone 4 (retina display).
They happen to play games and they have accumulated a large library over time (enough to advertise as a feature) but they are no more consoles than the Palm V or the Nokia N900 are. I think that a comparison between portable consoles makes the most sense when all involved devices were designed and intended as portable consoles.
If game developers have largely abandoned a portable console (in this case PSP and PSP Go) in favor of a platform that handles gaming well yet is not originally designed as a portable console (in this case iPhone and iPod Touch), then having been originally designed as a portable console isn't much of a bullet point. Besides, even the PSP wasn't as gaming-focused as the DS was at launch, given Sony's initial push for UMD Video.
stationary consoles don't sell as many units as portable ones.
A stationary console has two to four controller ports (except in the case of the TG16, but then almost everybody had the 5-port hub for that once Bomberman came out). A handheld has one controller. So mom will buy one DS for Abigail and one for Chester but one Wii and one extra Wii Remote+Nunchuk because then they can both Brawl at once. So to get a number that compares fairly to handheld sales, try adding controller sales to console sales.
I quite don't understand people bad mouthing PSP. It is not about size, hardware, performance, but about having fun playing game on the go. I used to be a PC game player. Never had a console. I bought PSP last christmas, just because they are now quite cheap (new ~130, used ~80) and have large selection of good games (for adults), can be used as media player on trip and also go online if needed. Now months later I played it almost every week, multiple days at a time, had tons of fun, own more games than I am able to regularly play and not having need to try different console or put it down any time soon. Whats more, I just bought another one for the family to share for watching movies on trips. From my standpoint PSP is really really good. Very nice hardware, very nice price, very nice games, who cares what other people are saying and doing.
- Nintendo DS: first console with a touch screen
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Tiger Game.com actually. It was better than it should have been, but mismanaged. It really could have been something. It also had internet access.
I would argue that Sony's innovations are developed with consumers in mind, but are implemented with Sony's micromanagement needs in mind. I can't think of a Sony technology that was bad per se. ATRAC isn't bad. Memory Stick Duo isn't bad. Betamax isn't bad. I suppose UMD isn't even bad. But Sony can't help but control the consumer's use of that technology. Sony doesn't know how to just sit back and let go. You did mention the PC root kit finally. That's one move I still don't understand after all these years.