Sony Continues To Lose Ground In Mobile Gaming 202
donniebaseball23 sends this quote from an opinion piece at Industry Gamers:
"On Monday, news came down the pipeline from SCEE president Andrew House that Sony wants to focus on a younger audience for the PSP with future titles. My immediate reaction was one of shock and confusion. After all, in an interview with IndustryGamers at E3, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime noted that, 'the way I would describe the market for the Nintendo 3DS would be the launch market that we had with the Nintendo DS plus the launch market that maybe PSP had.' When your primary competitor is looking to the exact market that you've catered to, why would you abandon that market? There was a time when Sony Computer Entertainment was a trailblazer, bringing things to the industry ahead of everyone else. Nowadays, however, it seems that Sony is content to merely fall in step behind everyone else and simply try hard to not fall too far behind."
Re:Trailblazer? (Score:5, Informative)
Have you not seen the PSP Go and what a big mess up it is?
This sums it up, paying more and getting less:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/reviews/2009/10/psp-go-review-sony-is-charging-you-much-more-for-much-less.ars [arstechnica.com]
Sony's position is its own fault (Score:5, Informative)
The PSP's dead man walking state is completely due to Sony's ineptitude. I blame is on corporate ego, after winning two console generations in a row the attitude seemed to be that they could just push their way and gamers would just fall lock step into whatever Sony "blessed" them with, regardless of price, features or support. While pushing all the "features" that the hardcore audience would appreciate, they completely neglected the most important features, games. Gran Turismo portable for instance was demo'ed at the PSP launch announcement and was even featured on the box but didnt ship until last year. The rate of first party titls has been anemic since it launched and the 3rd party support has been shrinking. Piracy can be partially to blame but an equal blame should be laid at Sony's feet for not focusing on the right aspects of the device and supporting it properly. UMD was stillborn, which IMHO was a missed opportunity, I would have gladly paid for a UMD player for the house or car but Sony for some reason chose to keep it locked up deeming the format useless, yet rather than focus on the gaming they chose to advertise it as this do everything media device while basically downplaying its gaming prowess. As a result the much less capable DS has completely buried the PSP despite the inferior hardware.
I have been trying for months to sell a PSP bundle with over 2 dozen games (admittedly nothing as recent as the last year and a half or so) and cant get any interest at any value more than the joy of taking outside and stomping the crap out of it.
Re:Young audiences grow up (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hmm (Score:2, Informative)
This data just convinces me that the industry manufactured console hardcore gaming market is about to pop. Kinect will sell them another 10mil if they're lucky.
Re:Who trusts Sony? (Score:3, Informative)
No true Scotsman (Score:3, Informative)
The iphone has no buttons. Not a true gaming console.
The assertion that button presence defines a console sounds silly to me. A PC has even more buttons than an Xbox 360 with four controllers plugged into it. So is the PC "a true gaming console" to you? What about mobile phones running Android OS, many of which have a texting keyboard? I'd like to clear up no true Scotsman fallacies [wikipedia.org] and get Layne's Law of Debate [c2.com] out of the way so that we can know what each other is talking about.
No kidding (Score:4, Informative)
The original PS was a good console not because Sony blazed a new path but because they didn't. Sony put together a bunch of good, largely off the shelf hardware, for a good price. An important factor was using CD-ROM when Nintendo stayed cartridge. While it had loading times, it brought unit costs of the games down a whole lot. The electronics in cartridges ate up a non-trivial amount of the sale price, especially as they got larger. Also the PS was very easy to program for. It has a MIPS R3000a processor, a GPU that works much like PC GPUs, video decompression hardware that works with standard formats (at the time), sound chip very similar to the SNES chip (which Sony made) and that largely worked like more advanced Amiga MOD files and so on. Because the unit itself was a good price, the CDs allowed for good profit on the games, and it was easy to develop for, developers loved it.
The PS2 did blaze more trails, I suppose, with the Emotion Engine, but that was a piece of shit. It succeed inspite of that, not because of it. It was difficult to program for. However the large library of PS1 games helped it sell well and companies target the big platforms. Also the other consoles of that generation weren't great showings. The Gamecube just didn't catch on with many people and the X-box was over a year late to the game, not to mention being made by a newcomer to the videogame market. Plus Sony was able to secure some important exclusives, meaning you had to have their hardware to play some hot games.
The PS3? Well we all see how well that's doing. Sales of the console itself haven't been good and game sales have been weaker still. Many people get them "Because it is a blu-ray player," which is fine and all but games are when bring in the big money for consoles, not the hardware (sometimes that is even a money loser). Programmers are having difficulty using the Cell so often times many SPUs sit inactive, meaning that the game could potentially be better but isn't. For that matter the Cell itself was a mistake they refused to admit. It was supposed to be the graphics chip. However it turned out that it was nowhere near as capable as modern GPUs. Rather than throw it out they repurposed it as a CPU. This also meant they were behind on getting a chip designed for them, and so their GPU is sub optimal (normally you want to share system and video RAM in a console GPU, however nVidia didn't have the time to redo the memory controller when making the RSX so it splits it like you do on a computer).
More or less Sony has fooled themselves as to why they were successful. Had they stuck with the strategy of producing good hardware from available parts, good chance they'd still be on top. No it isn't innovative but that isn't always what you want in a consumer product.
Re:No true Scotsman (Score:4, Informative)
The iPhone/iPod touch/iPad are not primarily intended to be portable consoles. They are, respectively, a smartphone, a PDA and a tablet. They happen to play games and they have accumulated a large library over time (enough to advertise as a feature) but they are no more consoles than the Palm V or the Nokia N900 are. I think that a comparison between portable consoles makes the most sense when all involved devices were designed and intended as portable consoles. For instance, a lot of iPhone buyers bought it as a smartphone and not for its gaming capabilities (although I do admit that the PS3 has a similar problem as some people buy it just as a Blu-ray player.).
Semantics aside, more relevant to the discussion is that the NDS had easily twice as many sales as the PSP. In fact, the measuring stick would be the original Game Boy series (Game Boy/Pocket/Color/Light). It's widely known as a raging success, having enjoyed good sales on virtually unchanged hardware for a full decade.
Using Nintendo's 2008 annual financial report [nintendo.com] as a source we see that in 2008 Nintendo has sold about 81 million Game Boy Advances and about 119 million classic Game Boys. Even if we assume that the classic Game Boy continued to get sales it's unlikely to be far above 120 million units today. So Nintendo has sold more DSes in six years than classic Game Boys in twelve years (assuming that all classic Game Boy sales stopped when the GBA was introduced in 2001). The PSP doesn't even measure up against the Game Boy Advance although it's newer and can still overtake it. It's obvious that the NDS fares tremendously better in the market than the PSP does.
Also of interest are the other figures: As of 2008, Nintendo sold 25 million Wiis, 22 million Gamecubes, 33 million N64s, 49 million SNESes and 62 million NESes. Even allowing for the Wii being new and the N64 and the GameCube being failures, this illustrates that stationary consoles don't sell as many units as portable ones. The markets seem to behave differently, thus a direct comparison between the respective sales numbers may be pointless.
Re:Trailblazer? (Score:2, Informative)
- Nintendo DS: first console with a touch screen
</p></quote>
Tiger Game.com actually. It was better than it should have been, but mismanaged. It really could have been something. It also had internet access.
Re:Who trusts Sony? (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, I haven't turned mine on since I played and beat uncharted 2 in 1 week right after it came out...i think that was sometime back in 2009, and before that i didnt turn it on since i first bought it..2007?
...
Anyone wanna buy an 80GB PS3 with about 10 games and 3 controllers??? $500$ and i'll throw in a blu-ray remote for free!!
So let me get this straight, you have 10 games for a system you barely played? I play mine all the time and I have 14 games, and no I don't trade them in.
And you brought a remote for a BluRay player you apparently never turned on either.
No sir, I'm not buying your story.
Re:No kidding (Score:3, Informative)
The PS3? Well we all see how well that's doing.
Doing pretty well at 38+ million installed. [ign.com]
Sales of the console itself haven't been good and game sales have been weaker still
Looks like your info is somewhat out of date. The PS3 is right on the heels of the 360 [wikipedia.org] which had a year headstart and will probably overtake it this year or next. Sure, neither is a Wii, but then again I think that's something a lot of us are glad of.