Sony Shifting PS3 Marketing to Focus on Blu-Ray 151
Tabernaque86 writes "What started as joke among gamers Sony is now using as a Christmas advertising campaign. Kaz Hirai, president of the games unit, has been quoted as saying that the PlayStation 3 'makes a great Blu-Ray player'. That theme will be central to a wave of ads in North America and Europe. From the article: 'Sony on Thursday disappointed analysts by failing to cut the PS3's price, but Mr Hirai did not rule out a future price cut. "Going aggressive only on price without being able to back it up with content doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me," he said. A price cut would have a "real impact" on sales only if there were enough software titles to support the PS3. But analysts were skeptical and said Sony could miss its shipment targets for the year. "Without a price cut close to Christmas, reaching 11m shipments is going to be very tough," said David Gibson, analyst at Macquarie in Tokyo.'" This is regrettable, too, because there really are a number of strong titles coming out for the console this year.
Re:Strong Titles? (Score:3, Informative)
I cancelled my pre-order of Stranglehold because the PS3 demo didn't play as well as the 360 one... The controls felt off, and I'll probably rent the 360 one instead.
Folklore's demo sucked. I was looking forward to it until I played that.
Looking forward to Ratchet & Clank and Bladestorm, though I pre-ordered Bladestorm on the 360 before I had my PS3. Might change that.
The Orange Box... I really only care about Portal, though.
Uncharted looks neat.
So there's plenty of 'strong' titles, just no 'strong' exclusive titles. I'm guessing that's why Sony has decided to push the Bluray player thing harder again. As a player -and- a game machine, it's very nice. As just a game machine, I could get away with just a 360.
BTW, the PS3 is the best media player (DVD, Bluray, streaming) that I've had yet. The original XBox modified with XBMC is the second. Sony finally got that aspect right, and the remote is very nice.
Re:Games, games, games (Score:5, Informative)
It didn't work out very well for the PS2 for quite a while. Games were a bit slow at the start. It took quite a while. The best thing Sony had with the PS2 was the huge demand. Coming off the PS1 (which took Sony from not in the market to #1 by far), developers wanted to be on the PS2. They were willing to put up with the tough times until tools got better and middleware started to appear. I've read things by developers that said that was a HUGE screw-up on Sony's part. If they had tried to pull that with a new console (say the PS2 was their first video game console) they may have failed.
The XBox had (from what I've heard) fantastic development tools. But that's what you would expect from MS and from someone trying to woo developers. I seem to remember reading that the dev tools for the PS1 were very good and one of the reasons the platform took off as it did (N64 cartridge prices and the Saturn multi-CPU setup being some of the others).
The PS3 doesn't have the momentum this time. The 360 had a head start. The XBox put up a very good fight in the last generation (relative to how well the Saturn or Dreamcast did). The 360 is simpler to develop for (thanks to the CPU and tools). The PS3 is very expensive (down from incredibly expensive). At $300 tons and tons of people wanted to get a PS2 for their kids. At $600, the PS3 was.. to put it charitably... a little more of a luxury item. Compared to the cheaper and already out 360 and the yet cheaper and innovative Wii... the PS3 didn't have the golden-boy status that the PS2 had.
The PS3 may end up doing quite well, and may turn out to be the most powerful. But if it does, it will take quite a while to hit it's stride the way the PS2 did.
Re:but it runs linux (Score:5, Informative)
It runs Linux like crap because it doesn't provide access to hardware accelerated graphics. And by "hardware accelerated graphics", I don't just mean 3D games and Compiz. It doesn't even have 2D acceleration, so you'll see redraw lag just scrolling in Firefox.
Basically Linux compatibility was just a scheme to get into a different import tax bracket in the European Union (where computers have a lower tax than video game consoles or media players). Actual usability wasn't a design goal.
Re:Games, games, games (Score:3, Informative)
The (lack of) PS2 developer tools was a case of Sony not seeing the forest for the trees. They had shipped some decent developer tools for the PS1 early in its life cycle, but after 6 years or so on the market every developer had either built their own specialized set of tools or moved to middleware that provided more functionality "out of the box" than the Sony tools. Upon seeing that nobody was using the PS1 tools any longer, Sony decided not to invest in tools for the PS2. That was a mistake, because there was nothing to bootstrap PS2 development. They tried to apply the end-game state of the PS1 to the start of the PS2 without realizing that it takes time to build up a proper library of specialized developer tools. Apparently they failed at this again with the PS3.
Unlike the PS2, the PS3 doesn't have a year on the market to itself. The Xbox and Gamecube shipped a year after the PS2, giving developers time to work on their tools before fighting strong competition (the Sony marketing machine had already killed the Dreamcast). This time around, the 360 was out for a year before the PS3 and Wii shipped, which means that "another year until really good games make it to the PS3" is really two years into the "next generation". Sony was banking on momentum from the PS2 without realizing that they had killed a lot of that with their arrogant attitudes (show of hands for people who got a second job in order to buy a PS3? There ya go, Kutaragi).
Re:Strong Titles? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Heavenly sword -- killer app? (Score:3, Informative)