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Sony drops Router Functions from PS3

Posted by Zonk on Mon Jul 11, 2005 11:24 AM
from the make-it-cheaper,-then dept.
Sony Entertainment Games
astrokid writes "Well, it has begun. Sony announced that the PlayStation 3 will no longer act as a home network router. How long before more news trickles in about the downgrading of other features?" From the GI.biz article: "Whether that means the bank of network ports on the back of the box has actually been reduced to a single port is not clear, however, as the company has previously hinted that it has other plans in mind for the multiple network ports."
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  • I don't thinkt he announcement of the dropping of one feature, is reason to think there is now going to be a flood of other dropped features.

    But, it is disconcerting.
    • Sony will drop features until the PS3 specs are identical with those of Windows Codename Longhorn.
    • Maybe not, but it just proves Nintendo's point. So long before the launch of the next-gen consoles, there's no point in hyping features that won't make it in (Longhorn anyone?).

      Lots of people complained that Nintendo didn't reveal anything about the Revolution at the E3, and that it would lose the console war because the PS3 and the Xbox360 have so many cool features... Well guess what, not only did Sony just get one less cool feature, but they also just got bad publicity.

      Did you really expect to see e

      • Re:Easy . . . (Score:4, Funny)

        by Leroy_Brown242 (683141) on Monday July 11 2005, @02:00PM (#13035406) Homepage Journal
        "Did you really expect to see everything they bragged about at the E3 actually become reality?"

        Yes, and I also want a pony. :)
        • No one even knows what the new nintendo is called except for thepeople who follow e3. Lots of people know about the XBox 360 and PS3

          Hard to say which strategy is the best though. When Nintendo announces the Revolution next year, it'll be "oh so new and shiny" while the PS3 will already be "last year's news" by then.

    • This is immaterial (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Sony has already established themselves (in the mind of the press and public) as the "most advanced console" for the new generation. Having accomplished this through their littany of features and faked gameplay videos, we will now see Sony move back from their original claims: Less features, lower performance, etc.

      I suggest this is brilliant marketing by one of the world's leading electronics companies, and it won't hurt them a bit.

      Personally, it ticks me off, but hats off to them for playing *us* so wel
    • Except you're forgetting two things:

      1) The hard drive's already been dropped (now only to be available as an add-on purchase)
      2) Sony has a long history of doing this - promising big, then cutting feature by feature until they come back down to reality.

      It's amusing and almost appalling how blatent Sony will simply lie and cook things up for a trade. I mean, with such quick cuts, there isn't even a pretense of them having at one time seriously believed they were gonna get that in their box.

      • Was the HDD ever announced to be anything other than an optional feature, though? I don't recall Sony ever announcing otherwise.

        But, hell, I also haven't been paying close attention to PS3 spec announcements for exactly the reason you mentioned.

        • Sony DID bring the hard drive to market. It was only taken off due to hard drive image-copy pirating reasons.

          So technically this router feature is the first in their history.

  • Probably not BOM cost, but service cost (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wowbagger (69688) on Monday July 11 2005, @11:34AM (#13033887) Homepage Journal
    This decision is probably not driven by the Bill Of Material cost, but the service cost.

    The BOM cost is the cost of the parts to build a gizmo - in this case the cost to have a couple of extra ports is going to be pretty small - on the close order of US$10. While for a device that is targeting US$500 or less that is not trivial, it is not a huge value either.

    The service cost is the cost of all the consumers calling in saying "I cain't git this here thimagigitt to work!" Making this thing be a router while it plays games would increase the software complexity (basically, it would have to be running the Linux kernel all the time, and would have to NOT reboot between games - a paradigm shift for game designers).

    So they probably decided that the router idea just wasn't worth the hassle.
      • You make the assumption that Sony would just eat the BOM cost of the feature - a false assumption.

        Sony would raise the ship cost of the box were this feature in place - so they would NOT be out the money.

        However, if they determined that the overall cost of the feature - BOM plus service plus amortized NRE - is greater than the amout the sale price can be raised (greater than the customer utility function), then the feature is dropped.
        • Sony would raise the ship cost of the box were this feature in place - so they would NOT be out the money.

          You're assuming they can raise the price. Too high, and there's no demand. $399 is the last price I heard for the PS3. How many fewer sales would there be at $409? You're now above a psychological breakpoint and fewer people will buy.
  • Big deal. Did anyone NEED their PS3 to work like a router? Aren't routers like $50 now anyways? That seemed like a worthless feature to me and I have no problem with them dropping it.

    That said, I'd like it if they kept the thing working as a simple hub. You can never have to many network ports (especially now that every game console will want to connect to one, not to mention future TiVos, TVs, DVD players and what not).

    • Well one advantage to Sony is that by making the PS3 the router, they could ensure bandwidth is availible for online game play through QoS. That way your P2P downloads don't interfere with your online game.
      • That's true, but it assumes that the cable modem was right where your PS3 was. If that's all you have it for, fine. But if you have computers too, that's probably not a good assumption.
      • The difference is that the console will already have a DVD drive, so why not allow it to make full use of that device?

        I will not be surprised when the extra LAN ports are removed.

  • Looks like PS2 pattern (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Utopia (149375) on Monday July 11 2005, @11:37AM (#13033912)
    Sony has a history of doing this sort of thing.

    They promised a lot for PS2 too.
    But features got dropped when it was finally released.

    Same with PSX.

  • Dropped to make cheaper (Score:5, Informative)

    by TheRedHorse (559375) on Monday July 11 2005, @11:40AM (#13033938)
    If you RTFA, you'd find they dropped it because it was too expensive to manufacture, so I would think they are removing at least 1 if not 2 of the gigabit ports, what does your average consumer need 3 gigabit ports for anyway?

    I'd much rather see a more affordable PS3 than a do-everything PS3.

    • I don't think it's really a question of reading the article. The fact that they've cut some promised feature is not surprising to anyone, and indeed in this case it's not all that disappointing, either.

      What makes the article interesting is how it once again exposes Sony's hype machine. Personally, I think this article stands in excellent contrast with the kinds of things Nintendo has been saying right up front. In fact, though I personally don't like the XBox, in the interest of balance it might also

  • Why? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sylver Dragon (445237) on Monday July 11 2005, @11:49AM (#13034015) Journal
    Why did the PS3 function as a router in the first place? Last time I checked, the reason I would buy a PS3 is to play games on my TV, and I really don't want my enterainment center doubling as my switch rack. I've got enough wires behind it as it is, without bringing in a bundle of CAT-5 as well. The best place for a router is in a closet somewhere, so I don't have to see the half dozen or so wires comming into it.
    I think that this "feature" is another example of Sony and Microsoft pushing way too hard for the "media center" idea rather than making a good game console. We don't need an all-in-one device that does a bunch of different things, but none of them really well. Just give me a game console, where I can pop a disc/cartridge/whatever in, push a button or two and I am pointlessly slaughtering aliens/demons/humans. I have a DVD player, I will soon have a MythTV box, I have a nice NAT/router box, what the hell do I need these features in my PS3 for?

    • The installation base of Gigabit switches and routers is very low right now. Since they want he highspeed networking, they'd also need the consumer to have highspeed networking equipment for it to take advantage of.

      Also, if it's a router, it will have the cable/dsl modem plugged directly into it, rather than being NAT'd behind some other device. This would take care of the port forwarding issue (or, if the router was basically a seperate unit entirely, at least the PS3 would be able to communicate to it us
      • The fact that the PS2 in my old apartment played DVDs prevented me from buying a stand alone dvd player.

        Last night, at a friends house, we watched Electric Boogeleboo on an Xbox after they realized hooking the stand alone DVD player would be more effort than plugging in the DVD remote for the Xbox.

        That said, I don't really know if either scenarios would have made a difference on the purchasing of an PS2 or an Xbox, but one of the factors I weighed into buying an Xbox over a Gamecube was that it could play
      • I guess I can see that, but that still seems like a weak excuse, especially for a gigabit port. The games are probably going to be pushing less than 10Mbps of data, maybe bursting up to the 20Mbps range with a lot of people connected, why not just use 100Mbps ports on it? Also, you can buy a 10/100 hub for next to nothing these days. If you have any friends who LAN regularly, there's probably already one or two available for you. On top of that, the article says that the PS3 was setup as a router, if al

      • Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by daVinci1980 (73174)
        Yes, but that seems like a case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing.

        Sony has already eloquently solved the problem of bringing together multiple gaming units and wanting to play games together.

        The PSP has wireless. Ad hoc doesn't even require any setup. Don't give me 3 gigabit ports on the back. Give me one (if you must) and wireless access.

        And anyone who tells you that there is any appreciable lag in wireless connections is full of crap. This is the pingout from my linux box back to m
        • Wireless is fine, and would be for this purpose. The biggest problem that wireless faces in a LAN environment is that it is effectivly a bus network. e.g. If you have a 54Mbps connection, that bandwidth is shared with all of the clients connected to the same access point. This gets real fun when you have a room full of people all pulling large files across the wireless link. I've seen about 25 people all downloading large GIS shape files through one WAP, everyone of them slowed to a crawl, and then conn

  • Good (Score:5, Insightful)

    by finkployd (12902) on Monday July 11 2005, @11:55AM (#13034073) Homepage
    In other news Linksys announced that their routers will not support playing Doom3 on them.

    If I want a router, I will buy a router. If I want a video game system I will buy a video game system. Making something more expensive by adding features that make absolutely no sense is not going to get my to buy your product. Frankly it wouldn't bother me if today's video game systems couldn't play DVDs either (although I understand why they do, it practically costs nothing to add that when you are using DVD media anyway). What I REALLY want to see is backward compatibility with older systems, which Sony seems to understand. Microsoft clearly does not.

    Finkployd

    Finkployd
    • If I want a router, I will buy a router. If I want a video game system I will buy a video game system. Making something more expensive by adding features that make absolutely no sense is not going to get my to buy your product.

      Well then you're probably not interested in getting a PS3 because Ken Kutaragi himself says it's not a video game console. [slashdot.org]

      • They have recently been scrambling to backtrack on their previous stance against backward compatibility, however even their latest news still leaves a bit to be desired. We do not know how many or which games will be supported by so called "pre-loaded emulation profiles". It is a step in the right direction (for once) but still not nearly what I would call "backward compatibility". More like "limited emulation".

        Finkployd
          • Not ignoring, just initially resisting it, and now it seems attempting to half-ass it. How it will end up remains to be seen but MS has a horrible history of tacking on features late in the game (for example, security and network related interoperability with their OS over the years).

            Finkployd
                • Second place in the USA is hardly something to sneeze at. You may think it's marketing, but you can only survive on a pretty face for 15 minutes, after that you better have something to show for it.

                  Face it. Microsoft is not cutting out of the console market for a long time to come, especially after gaining so much ground in such a short amount of time.

  • Seriously, two things immediately come to mind when I see this announcement: 1) When was the last time anybody had a Sony router that actually worked, and 2) If you need a router, why not just buy one?

  • And... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by All_Star25 (736597)
    This is why it's not always a good idea to throw a list of all the features a gaming console will have too far ahead of its release date. When you make a bunch of claims ahead of time and then are confronted by issues, it's time to eat some crow.
  • I think that the router would have been more for the benefit of non-technical households who do not already have a router and wish to be online who own maybe one computer without a router.

    This would allow kids to have PS3 online access on Xmas morning without having to bug their parents to run out and buy a router or unplug the computer.

    Of course with the increase of routers in the common household it may have been a deciding factor to not include this.
    • I'm surprised more Slashdot-types wouldn't actually be excited about the possibility that more non-techie householes would have routers in them. More NAT routers means fewer zombified, virus-spreading PCs...until someone started "pwning" PS3s, of course.
  • as the company has previously hinted that it has other plans in mind for the multiple network ports.

    What other use could they have? Well, as I have used several PlayStation products in the past, these "additional" network ports will be used to replace the main one once it mysteriously stops working.

    No word on wether or not the PS3 will include other such amenities such as multiple drive motors or multiple laser head assemblies.
    • For the record:

      PSX - PlayStation eXperimental (allegedly the internal codename used as they converted the failed Nintendo CD project into a console. "PSX" has been refuted by Kutaragi.)
      PlayStation - The official name, although the PSX code was used in a lot of mags early on.
      PlayStation 2 - Successor to the PS. PS2 is the code for obvious reasons.
      PSone - Remodeled version of PlayStation. "one" is used to differentiate the chassis from the older PSX-style.
      PSX - Japan-only PS2/DVR hybrid. Don't know w

        • Aha! Very good point. I have a PSX and a PSone but have never bothered opening up the PSone to see its guts or compare them to either of my PS2's.

          The PSone was a great move. Original PlayStation numbers took off for a short time when the PSone came out, helping to extend the original's life and keep the market for PlayStation titles viable that much longer.

          I do regret that my "South Park" edition PSX died when my kids left it on all night. Dead motor...

          GTRacer
          - OMG, TKK! YB!

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