Sony: What the hell is going on over there?

If you are going to come in here and do anything along the lines of "LOL $onI SUKS!" or "ST*U NOOb SONY RAWKS" be warned that your life is in forfit and I will damn your soul to eternal torment. Thank you.

Ever since about 2004 or so, around the time the PSP was really getting hyped up, Sony seems to be little by little losing their collective minds. First when there was problems with the button sticking with the PSP they denied any problem and then made a bizare analogy liking the PSP to some sort of gate in a palace. It didn't makes sense and I think they quitly fixed the problem. And then their marketing division appears to believe they are minor dieties. "The next gen doesn't start until we says it does" or "PS3 is a home computer" and the like, which seems pre-Iwata Nintendo arrogant. Now some of you know around the N64 era and a little before Nintendo was pretty much acting like dicks. At least their upper management was. They managed to drive off both Square Soft and Enix, and ruined a deal with Sony that managed to make Sony their number one competator. Then they quickly dropped in sales and found themselves, while still hugely popular, a place unfamiler with them, less then #1. And now it seems that Sony has decided to emulate their behavior but Supersize it.
Let's talk about their E3 showing. They pull out a bunch of charts and graphs that lend the appearence that they are winning the handheld war, when they are in actuallity getting trounched by the DS. Ok, understandable. They do not want to make their competetion seem more favorable. Then they make thinly disguised insults on Nintendo's philosophy saying that they are about quality and not gimmicks. And then unveil the PS3, with a presentation that was questionable at best. " Real Historical Combat GIANT ENEMY CRABS" " RIIIIIIIIIDGGGEEEEE RACERRRRR" and so on. Then they talk about the PS3 motion sensing, which is not a central feature of the controller and appears to me to be tacked on. Gimmicky even. And they then promise world wide launch with enough consoles. I won't talk about the price because it's debatable if that is a mistake or not.
So as the year progesses it more and more Sony is inable to keep their promises. They can't make world wide launch and there is even less consoles then we could have imagined. But their marketing division keeps insisting that everything is fine and alright and that people "will work to play our system", like it is something amazing that will change everything and that it will run in 4d. I don't even know what that is. Meanwhile the PSP still fails to garner a huge audience and while the DS becomes a cultural phenom in Japan and pretty cool little thing everywhere else. And then developers start getting wary.
I think most of us agree that MGS4 is the PS3's super star. So it would be smart to keep Kojima happy. Instead a week before E3 they call him up and demand that MGS4 use the motion sensors. He didn't know about the motion sensors before this call. Now I am sure he will put it in perfectly but still. And Square-Enix makes an announcement saying that they will "be careful not to support the PS3 too much". This coming from the company whos FF games are often hailed as the reason to get Sony consoles. And other developers say that the PS3's core make developoing difficult. And the most recent announcement of Dragon Quest IX going to DS is ...I don't even know. If it didn't want to go onto the untested next gen areana the most probable place to see DQ IX would be on the PS2. Instead it goes to DS, a admittedly weaker system.
And again a spokesman talked about the competition and referred to it as "More fun." This added with their advertisements that do more to frighten then to convince people to buy...I just can't imagine whats going on at that place currently.
Can any of you?

Here are some quotes
Ken Kurtagi

"Beating us for a short moment is like accidentally winning a point from a Karate master, and Microsoft is still not black belt."
About Microsoft's Xbox Live

"Is just an Xbox 1.5 and stated tha

 

I almost forgot the thing that promted this little bout in the first place.

This attempt at viral marketing is just insulting.

And OH DEAR GOD WHAT IS THIS

 

Excellent work Soontir-Fel! There are many truths of which you speak.




"Some have said that the PSP is our answer to the (Nintendo) Game Boy. Well, here?s how we view the world: PSP will elevate portable entertainment out of the handheld gaming ghetto and Sony is the only company that can do it. We happily accept this challenge and, dare I say it, the baton has been passed."

This is by far, the dumbest thing ever spoken by a human being. A handheld gaming ghetto??? Obviously, the way to get rid of a ghetto this is with GTA!

 

Yeah I agree sony isn't acting its smartest...(even though I'm a huge PSP fan).

I think there acting so stupid because competing with Bill Gates is a lossing battle...IT like Normandy attacking the USA or Britian...

And I'm not saying this because I'm necesarrly a xbox fan more of the fact Bill gets what he wants...

 

Yeah, like Normandy attacking the US. That's a fight you can't win, guys.

 

Sony better start making some smart business moves (outside of movies division), because if they keep spewing crap like this, they'll be bankrupt in no time.

A handheld ghetto? Never heard that comment before. Honestly, if Final Fantasy were to jump to 360, I would definitely not buy a PS3.

 

Aw Man, Soontir beat me to the punch! I was toying with the idea of a thread like this.

I was going to call it "Sony's weekly 'What the heck are they thinking?' moment", although 2ndQuest would probably switch it to daily.

Isn't it amazing that all the staunch Sony 3rd party support is just disappearing? Square-Enix has 13 games in the works for the DS and 3 for the PSP. EA spilled on Sony having less than 300,000 units at launch, and some other 3rd party (I forget) said they have to sell 500,000 (half a million) copies of a game to break even with PS3 development costs.

Is Sony trying to dig their own grave? Then again, this is right about where Nintendo was between the SNES and N64.

Back in 1996 (and 2006, whoa, spooky)

SNES was hugely popular and Nintendo just released the N64. (PS2 is hugely popular and Sony just made the PS3)
Sony made a machine more powerful than the current SNES offering but less powerful than Nintendo's 64. (Nintendo makes a Wii more powerful than the current PS2/XBX/GCN offering but less powerful than the PS3)
Nintendo makes the N64 use a rather expensive format, cartridges, so they can corner their market and maintain control (Sony makes the PS3 use a rather expensive format, blu-ray, so they can corner their market and maintain control)
Every developer flocks to the easier to develop Sony (Every developer flocks to the easier to develip Wii)

Is this just history repeating? Difference is, if SCE goes down, Sony's out of games. Nintendo hung in there because Nintendo is games and only games. Sony will simply cut their losses and disband SCE and that will be the end of it.

 

I heard George Bush is at the helm over there.

 

Yeah,Ken shouldn't be allowed to talk. Though he is good for a laugh.

I was thinking about the PSP earlier and how the DS is owning it's ass.

lol@Chim

 

It would probably be better if they focused on making them affordable.

 

uess we were trying to be just a little too clever.

There was nothing clever about it.

 

You don't get it, whitey. It's for us straight up gangsta playahs.

ALLIWANTFORXMASISMAHPSPS

 

Well said. Outside of focusing on tech-specs, instead of making next-gen games that look FUN to play, affordability is one solid reason why Sony's lost a lot of loyality amongst friends. (Myself, I'm right there with them. Don't get me wrong, for I still enjoy my PS2, but that's about as far as I'm going to go with Sony.)

 

In Japan, DS is like crack. I just checked the Japan sales board coutesy of GameInformer magazine.

of the top 10 games selling in Japan (for all systems), the top 9 are DS games, with a PSP title sneaking in at #10. That isn't the DS winning, that's the DS owning Japan.

 

That's because Nintendo knew what the hell they were doing, unlike Sony.

 

I don't know whats wrong with Sony, I think it's possible they've been infected with some sort of viral marketing.

They just... man I don't know, it's like they can't imagine not being awesome or that you may not recognize them as being the top d(aw)g.

 

I get the feeling that Sony's video game strategy has been taken over by high-level suites and they want to use the Playstation?s previous success as a way to push their corporate agenda (i.e. BlueRay, UMD). These guys just don?t understand one basic and fundamental aspect of gaming, which is that people want a reasonably priced system that provides them with many good options (games). Combine that with the arrogance, which comes along with being #1 for quite some time, and it?s a formula for disaster.

The PSP was the first step in the wrong direction. It?s a nice piece of technology, but has a limited audience because of its price and the lack of ?fun? games compared to the DS and previous GBA library.

The PS3, I believe, will ultimately be a disappointment for Sony. We learned that better technology doesn?t always equate to more sales. Nintendo already learned this lesson, and I think that Bill Gates understands it as well. By the time the PS3 is cheap enough for the masses to buy and game companies are able to utilize its full potential, it will already be too late.

 

Wheeee! I get to quote myself!

Nintendo learned the hard way that if you make a console inaccessible to developers, even if you make the best system out there, it won't be as sucessful, and you will lose marketshare.

Now Sony, the brand notorious for laughing at Nintendo, is doing the same mistake.

 

Frankly, I don't quite understand Sony and Microsoft's obsession with making the most powerful system available. If you look at the PS2/GCN/XBOX gen, it was the least powerful system, PS2, that sold the most consoles. Strange that they automatically assume it would be the opposite for this gen.

 

Great read, good job.


Sony's whole attitude as of late has really turned me off from them, period. I mean, it's a video game console, as in, nothing to get concieted over. Do I want a PS1 + PS2 + PS3 + Bluray player + cheap gimicks/copy-cats? No, I'd rather get a gaming system for games.

No really the PS3 isn't a gaming machine, they're losing their first-party titles! Honestly, the PS3 is the PS2.5 more than the xbox 360 is the "Xbox 1.5" considering Xbox is gobbling up their titles like GTA (a major problem for sony in my opinion since that was the driving motivation for non-rpg players to get PS), while Wii is heading for innovation and fun for a reasonable price.

It just gets me steamed when a company has the cojones to openly isolate a core chunk of their own market base just so they can profit off of cheap gimicks like blu-ray (again, do I want to watch movies? No. Especially if I have to gamble in another bloody format war thanks to sony) and then on top of that act like they're the best thing that has ever happened. Then look at how even though it had time to advance in technology, costs more, and supposedly has such good technology it looks like 360 games. I mean, come on! What were they doing other than trying to copy the Wii's motion censor?

 

Hmm, hard to argue all those points. I agree with you guys 100%. I also think they shot themselve in the foot not only with the price being astronomical, but to not have previous Final Fantasy and Gran Tursimo titles be backward's compatible.I don't think it was smart decision. Somehow, I think that Sony has misfired this time.

 

I think Sony will lose market share, but I think over the lifetime of this generation they're going to do better then a lot of people think at the moment.

 

Remember when it was implied that the PS3 was too cheap? They fixed that.

2,500 AMERICAN DOLLARS


HAUGHUAGHUHAUGH