Tired of Sony

Sony responsible for Xbox success says former MS exec

It’s too bad companies won’t just call it like they see it AS IT’S HAPPENING. Yeah yeah they want to keep up relations for business’ sake and all that mess, but I’ve been saying this since 2006!

Robbie Bach, who led Microsoft’s entertainment division through the rise of the Xbox, acknowledged that much of the Xbox 360’s success came because Sony squandered the goodwill and massive market share it built with the PlayStation 2.

“Some of the success of Xbox was due to the fact that Sony did some really not so smart things. They mismanaged their 70 percent market share.”

It was vitally important for companies to capitalise on their rivals’ mistakes said Bach, speaking at the Northwest Entrepreneur Network.

“The transition to PlayStation 3 was really, really bad. And really hard. They mismanaged their partners, they mismanaged their cost structure. They made their next platform so complicated that developers couldn’t develop for it.”

source @ Gameplanet New Zealand

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Japan’s Vita sales slump to new low

The system managed to shift just 8931 units in the country last week, down from 12,105.

How much lower can it go? The next software launch of any consequence is a remake of PlayStation 2 favourite Persona 4 due on 14th June. That should offer a bit of a spike, but it’s hardly Mario Kart.

Elsewhere on the hardware chart, 3DS dominated as usual. Nintendo’s system sold 72,115, down from 121,921 the week prior.

source @ Eurogamer.net

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Sony Abandons the Qore - Wait, Qore was still around?

Wait! An unadvertised, experimental PS3-only “service” that hasn’t been NEAR the game headlines or even whispered about in the game scene since it’s initial launch didn’t survive? Amazing. How COULD this be possible?

Sony has announced, via their US PlayStation Blog, that their long running US PSN Video magazine show is coming to an end. Qore had recently lost its famous host, Veronica Belmont, and April’s edition will be the show’s finale – after almost four years.

The final episode is going to be a celebration of the run though, with a retrospective looking at the show’s history. That’s in addition to the coverage of Prototype 2, Sorcery and Ghost Recon Future Soldier.

They’ve also put together a DLC pack for purchasers called the Qore Ultimate Arcade, which features 11 mini games from throughout the show’s run.

source @ TheSixthAxis.com

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Sony Gets Playboy Cyber Girl Jo Garcia To Make PSVita More Sexy?

Product lacking that certain…. something? Or perhaps your product has nothing to offer but you want people to blindly buy it by making walking tna look at them while she’s holding it? Yeaaaahh… Sony if it looks and smells like PC load letter, it’s PC load letter. Pathetic as usual.

With its February 22nd U.S. launch fast approaching, Sony is rolling out hands-on PS Vita showcases in major cities across the country. In addition, the game publisher has partnered with Playboy’s 2008 Cyber Girl of the Year Jo Garcia to host eight parties in eight cities between January and March.

source @ Forbes

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Sony in it DEEP with PS Vita Says Forbes

You know you’re in trouble when FORBES calls you out. Here’s an excerpt, read the rest at Forbes (link below).

During its first week on sale in Japan, PS Vita sold 320 K units. The sales period tracked was just two days, so hopeful fans thought that perhaps the first full week would bring good news.

But the second week brought devastation – just 72 K units sold. When Nintendo launched its latest handheld, the sales of the 3DS declined from 370 K to 210K over the first two weeks. That drop-off led to a steep further sales erosion, which forced Nintendo to implement an unusually early and steep price cut. This cut combined with the launches of big franchises like Monster Hunter, Super Mario Land and Mario Kart turned the fortunes of the 3DS around in Japan. The 3DS has now sold more than 4 Million units in Japan and in the past week it crushed Sony‘s more advanced PS Vita by 484 K vs. 72 K in unit sales.

Sony will likely be forced to cut the price of the PS Vita from 24’000 yen to well below 20’000 yen very soon. The upcoming US launch could be a true debacle for several reasons. Sony has decided to price Vita at $250, higher than the Amazon Kindle Fire. The hottest games like the latest Uncharted are priced at $50, while many other major titles are $40. The pricing seems delusional in light of the Japanese response to the PS Vita. The older PSP handheld console has been a bigger hit in Japan than it has been in the US market.

…Sony clearly had some anxiety about the Vita’s launch – it built it massive early support via an extensive line of launch titles. Despite the fact that Sony’s PSP has been a big hit in Japan, the PS Vita is foundering badly out of the gate – the ancient and heavily discounted PSP outsold the brand new Vita by 40% during the Christmas week. Much is now riding on the Vita debut in the US market in February.

I argued last week that PS Vita could mark the end of the era of portable game consoles. There is no doubt that Nintendo’s 3DS is going to sell at least 20 Million units globally over the next couple of years. But the portable console market may now have entered an age of permanent, slowly accelerating decline.

Sony has approached the PS Vita launch in America with arrogance, pricing the console and games high while opting to debut the device during the slow retail month of February. Mobile app sales more than doubled during the Christmas of 2011 – solid triple digit volume growth. In the meanwhile, even in the Japanese heartland of video games, video game software unit sales are set to decline by double digits in 2011.

Source@Forbes

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Sony’s Ill Conceived New Portable… well… doesn’t work.

Surely you’re not surprised. I for one am not - in fact I’ll go ahead and predict that the PS4 will have similar problems when it releases…. whenever that is. Probably 2 weeks before the next competing platform after said competing platform announces 3 months ahead of said date that the plan is as such.

The good news for Sony is that initial sales of the portable PlayStation Vita in Japan have been relatively strong. The bad news is that many customers appear to be struggling to turn the device on.

…

It’s not clear how many of the problems are with the devices themselves, and how many are the result of users struggling to understand poor instructions. Cited problems include the console not switching on, freezing during play, and location data not appearing correctly. As well as issuing a software update, the company is giving advice with numerous variations on “switch it off then on again”, along with workarounds such as initially saying you don’t want to link the device to a Playstation Network account during set-up, then adding your details through the set-up menu.

One games industry expert noted to the BBC that, while hardly designed this way, the staggered release schedule effectively means Japanese customers are a large-scale testing group and Sony should be able to fix the glitches before the worldwide release.

source@geeksaresexy.net

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Steinberg and Dyer Bail on SCEA

It’s one thing to name a replacement and have a new person move into an old role at a company. It’s a completely different thing to have sudden departures. Everyone knows you have to be partially delusional to work at SCEA in an upper management position, but apparently the pressures of maintaining that deusion just aren’t worth it.

Sony Computer Entertainment America has been rocked by the departure of two more key executives.

IndustryGamers reports that both VP of marketing Scott Steinberg and senior VP of publisher relations Rob Dyer have quit the publisher.

Steinberg was rumoured to have been escorted out of the building by security, though SCEA has since confirmed that he resigned from his role. Dyer, on the other hand, is tipped to have quit for the role of head of partner publishing at Zynga.

The moves follow the shock departure of senior VP of marketing Peter Dille and PSN in March.

There are several theories as to the seeming unrest at SCE’s American arm. There’s little doubt that Microsoft’s on-going dominance in the region – Xbox 360 sold close to 1m units in Black Friday week – will not have been of any help.

source @ MCV

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Tretton Misses Being in the Press - Sh*t talks the 3DS

Infendo said it better than I could - read up! Head to infendo.com to read the whole thing. Link @ the bottom

What do you do in the dog-eat-dog business world when the competition has left your mangled corpse in the dust in terms of sales figures? Inform the press that your rivals are a bunch of poopoo buttfaces , clap the dirt off your hands and pat yourself on the back for a job well done, of course. Total self-delusion is doing wonders for Charlie Sheen — when your career takes a huge nosedive, just fly in the face of all logic and reason, adamantly repeat that you’re still “Winning, DUH” and they’ll believe you. Why not Sony too?

The PlayStation CEO had these violent torpedoes of truth to offer CNN Fortune:

“I mean, you’ve gotta be kidding me. Why would I buy a gaming system without a hard drive in it? How does this thing scale? Motion gaming is cute, but if I can only wave my arms six inches, how does this really feel like I’m doing true accurate motion gaming?”

“Our view of the ‘Game Boy experience’ is that it’s a great babysitting tool, something young kids do on airplanes, but no self-respecting twenty-something is going to be sitting on an airplane with one of those. He’s too old for that.”

Pretty big talk for the CEO of last place. CNN rightly points out that “Sony lost as much as $307 for every console model, and in fact, the Playstation 3 business was in the red until the company’s fiscal fourth quarter of last year”, which Tretton spins as the PS3 finally hitting its stride. The author also notes that “Nintendo’s DS devices have sold more than 146 million units worldwide, while the PSP currently tops out at 67 million.” Even Charlie Sheen would have to admit that the scoreboard doesn’t lie, bro.

Granted, he’s the head of Sony’s PlayStation department and it’s his job to portray Sony’s mediocre performance in both the handheld and console markets as some kind of master strategy, waiting to unveil the true staying power of their products. But anyone that’s not a fanboy can see it amounts to little more than “Oh yeah? Your mom. BOOM”

source @ Infendo

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Peter Dille has left SCEA | Games industry news | MCV

PS3 and PSP are plateauing, 360 and Wii sales are still good - time for folks to start jumping ship!

It has been confirmed that Sony Computer Entertainment America’s senior VP of marketing and PlayStation network Peter Dille has left the company.

Dille spent eight years at SCEA before heading to THQ in 1999. He then rejoined his former employer in 2006.

A replacement has not yet been named, nor a reason for this latest departure given.

source @ MCV

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Sony Reorganizing to Combine VG and Comsumer Electronics

Big news from Sony: big S announced a radical internal reorganization of the entire company today, essentially “dividing” Sony into two different groups as early as April 1. At the same time, Kazuo Hirai, the head of Sony’s PlayStation segment, will be promoted and is said to have good chances to succeed Howard Stringer, the company’s current CEO.

Sony plans to combine its consumer electronics and and video game businesses, its two biggest segments, into a single new division, the “Consumer Products & Services Group”. That group will be led by Hirai who can then call himself executive deputy president as well as representative corporate executive officer.

The second new division, the “Professional & Device Solutions Group” will oversee Sony’s digital components and business-facing products. It will be led by executive deputy president Hiroshi Yoshioka who is currently in charge of the consumer electronics segment.

What happens to Stringer? In the official press release, Sony says:

Sir Howard Stringer, Representative Corporate Executive Officer, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President, Sony Corporation, has extended his commitment to lead the Company through the next stage in its transformation.

But Japanese media are now speculating that the realignment has paved the way for Hirai to become Sony’s next CEO soon.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal however, Stringer himself said today that even though Hirai is the “leading candidate” for the job, the race isn’t over yet.

Source @ techcrunch

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