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Tullaryx
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 Posted: Sat Jul 14, 2007 2:54 pm Post subject: |
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There's a reason for removing the Emotion Engine chip and that's to drastically cut cost of the PS3. Sony doesn't care about the gamers as much as people think Nintendo even cares about the core gamer.
People, people...the big three care about one thing and one thing only: money.
I think the quicker people get their minds around that the less outrage people have over stupid decisions these companies make. To a gamer they may sound stupid, but to people who know business they make sense. It may not make PR sense but they do make business sense.
What Sony just seems to fail at is their PR and marketing of the PS3. It doesn't help that amongst the Big Three they seem to have a much larger group of executives who can't seem to keep their mouth shut. Microsoft has Peter Moore and Nintendo has Reggie Fils-Aime. Sony has a whole team in Phil Harrison, Jack Tretton, Peter Dille, David Reeves and, to a certain degree, Kaz Hirai. You get that many blowhards in one place like E3 and in front of cameras and microphones and fireworks begin.
The question now is whether people will actually see the 80GB PS3 as a bargain once the 60GB SKU is sold out. The only thing the 80GB has over the previous model is 20GB extra in the HDD and a less buggy bluetooth. Oh, it also comes with a free game. While hardcore Sony gamers may find that as a bargain I guarantee that those who stayed on the fence about the 60GB to begin with will not see it so. Part of it is the fact that even with the price cut there was still more people who still saw the PS3 as too expensive. The other thing being even an upgraded system at 599 there's still no games to give people a reason to buy the system.
As the saying went during the PS2/Xbox/GameCube era: It's the games stupid. And Sony has been pretty stupid about not really having any games that matter and sells systems despite being over a year old.
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Son of Liberty
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| Posted: Sat Jul 14, 2007 9:02 pm Post subject: |
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I certainly agree that the gaming industry is business after all and the companies care about profits above all else. But I believe there's better way to do business, especially when it comes to video game industry.
I feels that marketing jobs should be handed out to people who seriously understands the business. As far as I concern, the only one who did the best is Reggie Fils-Aime. Peter Moore is okay, but I think the Sony team were rather lackluster, particularly when they said something that would damage their prospects.
If one takes the PS3 as a Blu-Ray player, it will sell well. But as a gaming console, I cast my doubt. |
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Tullaryx
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| Posted: Sat Jul 14, 2007 10:19 pm Post subject: |
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| Son of Liberty wrote: |
| If one takes the PS3 as a Blu-Ray player, it will sell well. But as a gaming console, I cast my doubt. |
You pretty much sum up the main feelings about the Blu-Ray equipped PS3. Gadgetheads who look at the machine see it as a very affordable Blu-Ray player that's half the cost of most stand-alone Blu-Ray players out in the market.
Console gamers who want games and such see it as causing the PS3 to go up in price that they can't afford even with the price cut. What compounds this is the lack of any exciting titles for the system. I don't know the numbers on this but I have read it many times that of the three systems out right now the 360 has the best attachment rate of the three when it comes to owners buying games for it. Even with a year-long headstart over the other two the attachment rate for the 360 is close to being 6 games per console compared to below 2 games per PS3 and with the Wii having just slightly above 2 gamers per unit.
The Wii I can understand since most of the non-gamers who have bought it only really play Wii Sports. But the PS3 having less than 2 games attachment rate per console should really be a bad sign. People forget that the system has been out over a year now in Japan.
Some analysts see a large attachment rate as being a bad thing since it means there's no growth in consoles sold as time goes by, but I would disagree. Yes, it means that core gamers do have a tendency to buy and own more games than casual gamers, but its those same core gamers who are the main selling point for the nextgen systems.
It's misleading to say that a small attachment rate means more systems are being sold since that logic doesn't seem to be working for the PS3. What a high attachment rate to me shows is that its still the games that matters to gamers. With more games being sold to a particular console it gives that particular console more leverage in determining exlcusivity rights, or at the very least keeping certain titles multiplatform.
So, Sony can tout all the Blu-Ray numbers they want. If no one is buying games for their system and most gamers don't buy Blu-Ray dvd movies then what's the use of owning a PS3 in the early going of its lifetime. Maybe this will change in 2008 when more games coming out are able to better tap the power under the hood, but that's still a big if since some of those games were technically suppose to be launch or early post-launch titles: Killzone 2 and Heavenly Sword being two games confirmed as launch games early on only to be delayed.
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Sir Kan of Grassland
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| Posted: Sun Jul 15, 2007 11:52 pm Post subject: |
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| I don't think that the play station three is going to go down maybe in ten more years or when the play sation four comes out it will go down but there no way I am going to pay 500 dollars for it though it is cute and shiny |
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Assassin01
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| Posted: Mon Jul 16, 2007 6:19 am Post subject: |
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Well in the case of the PS3 getting cheaper it may be safe to say that it will increase the sales of the console. This will probably be aimed at those people who did not want to pay the full price when it first got released. In my case i will probably still not get a PS3 or any other next generation console as i think it is still too expensive, i don't have enough cash on hand for this stuff, and there are no really good games to catch my interest on purchasing a PS3 anyway.
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Tullaryx
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| Posted: Tue Sep 04, 2007 6:46 pm Post subject: |
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There's a good chance that the new 80GB PS3 model may get a price cut from its current price of $599 down to $499 just in time for the Xmas season. Many analyst are predicting that Sony may have to do this latest price cut in order to compete with a 360 that has also seen a price cut with the 120GB, HDMI-equipped Elite being cheaper still than the 80GB PS3.
One investor group in Japan even went so far as to say that Sony may spin-off its insurance division and conduct an IPO of the division to come up with $2.9billion or so dollars to fund any holiday PS3 price cut, prop up its flagging and disappointing Playstation division and also help push its only successful new product, it's Bravia line of HDTVs.
I have to say that if Sony has to IPO its insurance division to continue funding the PS3 through its price cuts to minimize their loss then things must be worst off than people realize or care to admit in the land of Sony. Hell, this is the first time I've heard of a gaming company funding its product through an IPO of another division.
Sony to Raise 332 Billion Yen in Insurance Unit IPO
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Caesar
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| Posted: Tue Sep 04, 2007 7:11 pm Post subject: |
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| Tullaryx wrote: |
| And Sony has been pretty stupid about not really having any games that matter and sells systems despite being over a year old. |
Uhm, I'm confused here. You act like the PlayStation 3 is the only console lacking decent games. The Revolution is very much lacking in games, too. The only reason it's selling so well is because of the price. At this point, you may retort, "Well, the GameCube was cheap, as well, and it did terribly" -- this is because the GameCube came well after the PlayStation 2, and because the PlayStation 2 was several hundred dollars cheaper than the PlayStation 3 at launch. Ultimately, price is what matters most. People will buy a console that doesn't have too many games if the console is cheap. If it's cheap, there's less of a loss if the console winds up failing. I don't see too many people whining about the lack of games on the PlayStation 3, I see people whining about the price. If it were about $250 cheaper, it would have no problem selling, and Nintendo and Microsoft would really have something to worry about. People whining about the lack of games are definitely the minority. Games don't mean nearly as much as the price. You can believe or not. So, claiming that Sony's "failure" is solely attributed to the lack of games is ridiculous, because, as I've stated, the Revolution has a pretty piss poor line-up, too. The only console with some decent games (and I stress "some") is the XBox 360.
Furthermore, it's hardly Sony's fault that developers are chickening out. However, in about a year or two, I very much see the PlayStation 3 picking up in sales. Sony just needs to get that price down. Their only problem is the price.
Anyway, I doubt most are going to take my post all that seriously, especially since being Sony sympathetic is considered being stupid.
Edit: By the way, last time I checked MetaCritic [a few months back], the PlayStation 3 had more higher-rated games than the Revolution. Make of that what you will. You did, however, say it's all about the games. |
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Ujitsuna
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| Posted: Tue Sep 04, 2007 7:14 pm Post subject: |
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| Caesar wrote: |
| Anyway, I doubt most are going to take my post all that seriously, especially since being Sony sympathetic is considered being stupid. |
I thought it was a good post, but generally I feel that Sony has not marketed itself as well as it could have, although I agree that since each new console has been released there have been a lack of quality games available, there only seem to be ones "on the horizon." |
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Tullaryx
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| Posted: Tue Sep 04, 2007 8:33 pm Post subject: |
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No, your post is actually pretty thought out even if you are more of a sympathetic ear for the Sony side of things. I would say that it is mainly Sony's fault why third party developers have been hesistant in supporting the PS3 even with its first year almost coming up. As the market leader before the Wii arrived, Sony had banked on its brand name and what they thought was loyalty to the brand by third-party developers and publishers. This was pretty much extreme hubris on the executives at Sony, but it also didn't help that pricing the system out of the hands of most outside the most loyal and hardcore gamer niche has made their sales numbers slow with no sign of speeding up.
One telling sign was the July hardware sales which included the first major price cut of the PS3. Everyone had predicted that while the PS3 sales for July in North America wouldn't have surpassed the Wii sales for the same month they all agreed that it would dominate the 360 sales. Instead of pulling ahead of the 360 for the month of July in hardware sales the PS3 remained third with the 360 still selling more despite no price cut.
To third-party developers who live and die on sales numbers of their products a console that still can't seem to sell strong always makes for trepidation on whether they should support the console. It's become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The third-party developers and publishers either don't strongly support the PS3 with exclusive titles and/or with complete crossplatform titles (see the Madden framerate issue) because the numbers of PS3 sold is less than ideal. This in turn will make the PS3 even less of a first-choice for the gaming consumer which in turn will continue sluggisg console sales. Then you go back to the first part. It's become a circle.
No matter how idiotic the Red Ring of Death has become as a problem for Microsoft and the 360 it doesn't seem to have kept the console from continuing to sell at a consistent pace. All this even before the release of the King Kong of the gaming year: Halo 3. Sony's PS3 will have titles down the line which will move consoles, but they don't have enough and their very slow start may not get fixed in time to convince developers to fully support the system. The PS3 may be a beast of a machine in terms of power, but developers dont care about that if they can sell more on the 360 than on the PS3.
Sony's exclusive agreement with Epic to better optimize the Unreal 3 Engine for the PS3 was a major coup for them, but with Epic being sued by Silicon Knights and other developers gradually coming out to add some negative press about the Unreal 3 Engine there's a good chance that in the long run the agreement may only be a short-term help. Epic's Unreal 3 Engine is great but from what I saw in E3 videos of id's Tech 5 engine, Unreal has some major competition.
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