Sony, Analysts React To PS3 Launch 247
cdneng2 writes "Sony may be aware that something is just not right. There's a reshuffling of management occurring within Sony. Kazuo Hirai is set to head their videogame unit, as Ken Kutaragi has been bumped to the Sony board. Jack Tretton, former COO for SCEA, is now the president and CEO of that arm of the company. There's no word on the reasoning behind these position shifts. On the same day, Namco announced that they must sell 500,000 games to begin making profit on PS3 games. A Financial Times article confirms speculation on how hard it will be for Sony to make money, as analysts with UBS predict that 30 games must be sold per PS3 for them to break even." To add insult to injury, EA CEO Larry Probst has said PS3 numbers were lower than expected. Current thinking is that Sony managed to ship roughly half of the 400,000 units they were promising.
30 Games (Score:4, Interesting)
30 games per console? (Score:4, Interesting)
I am so happy I own no Sony stock, and even more optimistic about having bought Nintendo stock.
Check that reality maybe.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:30 Games (Score:2, Interesting)
Nobody knows how many units Sony will make before they kill off the PS3, nobody knows the component price cuts that will happen before then, nobody knows the unit price drops they will make, and only Sony know the margins, the R&D cost and the deals they have with all games manufacturers. Factor in cross-subsidising of the profit or loss on sales and develpment of Cell and Blu-Ray plus blue-ray movie sales, random numbers for advertising budgets, devkit profits or losses, online service profits or losses and currency fluctuation profits or losses, and you end up with a pretty indefinable number to divide by the analyst's guess at an average profit per game.
Re:PROMOTED??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Japanese executives with high visibility are generally not fired, but rather are basically forced into a psuedo-retirement where they sit on an ineffectual board or something similar. From the outside it may look like a promotion, but (as you said) in reality he's been moved to a spot where he won't be doing very much as far as actual job duties.
Re:Meanwhile In Reality (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:30 Games (Score:3, Interesting)
It wouldn't be the first time MS used this tactic to knock a competitor out...
Re:PROMOTED??? (Score:2, Interesting)
But I don't think that's the case here, not that I'm a big Sony fan but the guy did start the whole playstation project which undeniably took the video game industry to a new level (which has it's good and bad sides offcourse), so he's not a complete idiot. In the end he did make Sony ALOT of money and at the beginning of Sony's gaming division there were few people at Sony who thought gaming was more than a fad.
I think Sony promoted him to keep him away from the press, because like you said, the guy is a PR nightmare.
Alot of people in the industry told me something like this would happen as soon as the launch was over with because the guy simply couldn't keep his mouth shut.
best Blu-Ray player in the market? What Market? (Score:3, Interesting)
If I'm not mistaken, the PS3 is only the 2nd Blu-Ray player on the market... There's the Samsung player, which has been out for a little while now, the PS3, and the Sony one won't be released until just before Christmas, I believe. Pioneer and Philips should have players... eventually... but for now they're getting screwed over by the already short supply of blue lasers going to the PS3. I'm sure the main reason the Sony BD player has been delayed so much is also because of the blue laser shortage.
Given the fact that the Samsung player is already running into Blu-Ray discs it can't play [highdefdigest.com], and the Sony Blu-Ray player is going to need at least 2 firmware updates to play certain discs and to use the Java interactive features [highdefdigest.com] when it does finally launch, I'd say there's not much competition for the PS3 in the current market.
But then I'd be surprised if a $500/$600 dollar game machine can be a better BD player than a dedicated $1000 machine, too... I'm sure the PS3 will have its share of BD problems.
Re:Ouch (Score:3, Interesting)
That's because C64 games are free these days. Just grab a floppy drive, a few dozen double-density floppies [floppydisk.com], and have at it [c64hq.com].
Now if you want to talk about Atari 2600, Intellivision, and Coleco cartridges, I probably have over 300. They're a pain in the butt to store, but they're so cheap to get ahold of these days.
Re:Let's see (Score:3, Interesting)
You have some valid points but Gears of War is definitely in the category of compelling games. Personally I would put Oblivion in that category as well but there are people who prefer to play it on PC because of all of the community-added content available.
I don't like Sony either, but I think their system will be moderately successful after a few years. The current shortages and reported difficulties of developing for the system will hurt them in the short term. After there's more of an install base and developers start taking full advantage of the hardware the PS3's outlook will improve.
I still see Nintendo as the winner of this generation. I don't know how many hours I spent playing Oblivion on the 360 but I haven't touched it since I got Zelda. The new controllers for the Wii make it incredibly fun to play. If they continue to release good games at a lower price point I think it will be very difficult for both Sony and Microsoft to compete.
A Deep Hole (Score:2, Interesting)
Should Sony go after eBay resellers for damages? Could they?
Re:Why do these pixels cost more (Score:3, Interesting)
No you can't.
Character animation -- the illusion of life -- personality --- distinctive movement --- is what separates the men from the boys.
Low resolution makes the problem all the more difficult.
Re:30 Games (Score:5, Interesting)
"While many fret over the high cost and price of the PlayStation 3 compared to the competition, iSuppli believes the console provides more processing power and capability than any consumer electronics device in history. Because of this, the PlayStation 3 is a great bargain, well worth its $599 price and $840.35 cost, iSuppli believes."
Of course the PS3 is a bargain, as they are selling it for less than it costs to produce. Hard to call that a bad deal.
Unless you don't have $600. Or the $800-$1000 needed to get one on Ebay if you want a non-hypothetical PS3. "Great deal for what you get" and "way too fucking expensive" are not mutually exclusive!
Nobody buys a console because its internals are architecturally pleasing (don't get me wrong, the Cell is a sweet chip, but that neither makes a PS3 cheaper nor does it make one appear on the store shelves so I can buy it). They buy it because of the games. And right now PS3 is in the same place Xbox was in. What great games did it have? Halo and... um... Halo.
So the reason so few quote the praise for the PS3 is because it's pretty much irrelevent. We're talking about a console launch. Few doubt that the PS3 is, hardware-wise, a very nice piece of machinery. I certainly don't doubt it. That doesn't make me want one, that doesn't mean I can afford one if I did want one, that doesn't mean I could find one to buy if I could afford one, and that doesn't make Sony lose any less money on the purchase if I am finally able to complete it.
It's simple: A console that is very expensive (limiting demand) and is difficult to produce (limiting supply) is headed towards a smaller marketshare, possibly meaning that fewer games are produced for it. As Sony loses a lot of money on each sale and has to sell many games to turn a profit, this means that if it plays out that way not only will PS3 be a failure in the marketshare sense but also in a financial sense. They need to increase the supply and reduce the price before they can attain a marketshare that will keep developers devoted to them, and thus keep consumers devoted.
Notice how whether or not the PS3 is an engineering masterpiece doesn't enter into it? As an engineer I would really like to live in the universe where whoever has the coolest microarchitectures wins, but sadly it doesn't work that way. A lot of times the coolest microarchitecture is the one that fails the hardest because it is difficult to manufacture and thus too expensive and too hard to supply in volume.
Now if the PS3 was a crappy piece of hardware, and still cost $600 with short supplies, then PS3 failure would be a forgone conclusion. However I don't think anyone worth mentioning is saying it's crappy hardware, so I'm not sure what "thesis" you think that part of the isuppli article is contradicting.
Re:30 Games (Score:4, Interesting)
How can this be modded to +5 when the exact methodology used is described in the article?
You may not agree with their assumptions, but it is certainly not "random".
Re:What is going on here? (Score:2, Interesting)
Never mind the fact that the 360 outsold the PS3 in Japan in the month of November, and during that same period, roughly 3x as many 360s were sold in the US.
Considering that the PS3 has been in production (according to Sony) since October, they didn't even manage to ship 300k PS3s during the month of November? Yet Sony is still confident they'll hit 1 million by the end of the year, which would require a 400% increase in production! Even if this miracle occurs, Microsoft is going to sell more than 1 million consoles this holiday season which is only going to increase the lead they already have over Sony.
Personally, I think Sony will be lucky if they've sold 700k PS3s worldwide by the end of the year.
Re:Let's see (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is not to say that as a launch lineup the PS3 is terrible. All systems launch with a terrible lineup. The 360's best game at launch was Geometry Wars, a 5 dollar download. The PS3 may not seem more powerful than 360's lineup NOW, but in a year once people have learned to harness the hardware and the development tools are more mature, I have no doubt that the PS3 will be stronger. But for now, Gears of War [hardwired.hu] just seems more impressive than resistance [www.thg.ru].
Sony was aiming to conclusively knock one out of the park, and they failed to do that in a very big way. The launch lineup has no killer app. Blu-Ray movies are far from a DVD killer. They wanted to be all-pervasive, but only managed to get MAYBE 400,000 units out there, and now it looks like they actually sold 200,000. Their Xbox-live killing online service has basically failed to materialize. The Sixaxis is too laggy to be a primary input, and is no Wii killer. The extra texture space afforded by blu-ray so far appears to have gone to... umm... The renderers seem to all be very low-contrast, and so aliased as to destroy detail. If your nice-but-cheap 1080i or 1080p system won't go down to 720p, the PS3 will render at a low-rez 480. And lots of other growing pains keep the system from being all that was promised.
Play the system at a friend's house. Or if not, play it at a Best Buy. It's nice, but it's not earthshattering. Certainly, it's not 1,000 dollars-on-ebay great.
Contrast this with Sony's brash bragging about being so great that people will want to get a second job to afford one, and you see why they are considered "in trouble." The game is definitely not over, but they did not come out nearly as strongly as they have been promoting. They didn't come out anywhere near strongly enough to clinch things, and arguably they have stumbled repeatedly.