Head of product planning, Naoya Matsui said that Sony has “planned to release a PSP model without a UMD drive since the very beginning,” but that if “we had simply released the hardware, there wouldnt have been much for everyone to enjoy,”
Yeah! Makes perfect sense! Sony are teh geniouses I always thought they wuz! Failfail for you.
Sony exec says UMD-less PSP was “always the plan”
Here’s a well written piece (though not really new news). I always search for sites with a realistic approach to gaming journalism. You know, one not tainted by Sony’s spin machine, one that looks objectively at the facts and presents them well. Seeking Alpha seems to be one of those! Hit the jump for the whole article, I just hit the Sony highlights of course:
The problems of the PS3 are multiple. It has a quirky new CPU architecture and a poor GPU which acts as a bottleneck, hobbling the capabilities of the machine. If this weren’t enough, there is the unavoidable fact that the PS3 isn’t selling very well. We are in mid cycle now, the point at which sales volumes should be ramping up. And for the PS3, they aren’t. The main reason for this is price, the PS3 is still vastly too expensive for the market and is cruelly exposed by the bargain that is the Xbox 360.
Sony are caught between a rock and a hard place. The PS3 design contained so many newly developed bits that it was, and remains, very expensive to manufacture. But Sony are not in good financial health so do not have the resources to subsidise a price reduction. Already they have lost billions on the PS3 project. It has proved to be probably the biggest loss maker in the history of video gaming.
In the real world very few games are actually developed for the PS3. They are mainly developed for the Xbox 360 and then converted to run on the PS3. So things are very bad when that conversion cost is becoming uneconomic.
Rofl - I won’t repeat my blahblah about Sony and their lack of decent business relationships again, but here we go with the proof. Sony goes public instead of dealing with Activision man to man.
One comment must be made: Relationships of any type can’t be maintained without eye contact. Eye contact can’t be held by men who aren’t honest and who can’t stand by their words. Troof? Yessir! Sony’s public response below:
“PlayStation has tremendous momentum coming out of E3, and we are seeing positive growth with more than 350 titles slated to hit across all our platforms, including many anticipated games from our publishing partners,” said spokesperson Patrick Seybold.
“We enjoy healthy business relationships with and greatly value our publishing partners and are working closely with them to deliver the best entertainment experience.”
I read something like this and I think to myself, “If Sony actually had a decent semi-working relationship with it’s devs, they could work something out.” You don’t ever see MS or Ninty’s 3rd party folks PUBLICLY stating that they want to drop the company, even back in Ninty’s 64 and Cube days! Their devs HAD RESPECT for them. They cared about their working relationship because MS and Ninty did too. That’s the way things work.
But here’s Sony, notorious for disorganized babble in the public spotlight, getting no love. *insert sarcastic comments here* Call it karma, call it eye for an eye, this is nothing new. This is Sony getting what it puts out: concern for the dollar, not for the comsumer, not for the devs, not for each other. Read on!
In an interview with The Times, Activision CEO and president Bobby Kotick reveals that the publisher of such notable video game franchises like Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, and Tony Hawk, is giving serious consideration to dropping all support for Sonys consoles, the PS3 and the PSP.
“Im getting concerned about Sony; the PlayStation 3 is losing a bit of momentum and they dont make it easy for me to support the platform. Its expensive to develop for the console, and the Wii and the Xbox are just selling better.”
“Games generate a better return on invested capital on the Xbox than on the PlayStation. They have to cut the price, because if they dont, the attach rates are likely to slow. If we are being realistic, we might have to stop supporting Sony. When we look at 2010 and 2011, we might want to consider if we support the console - and the PSP too.” -Bobby Kotick
What I’m reading/hearing most are echoes of Sony’s marketing lines. Specifically the “we have yet to discover the full potential of the PS3″ line that they have been using lately. So here’s the question: What kind of company makes a product that they have such a lack of understanding of that 2 YEARS+ down the road, they “have yet to discover” THEIR OWN PRODUCT’S “full potential”?
Let’s take this one back to the 1980’s. Nintendo releases the NES stateside and what is known at that time is this: It’s an 8-bit video gaming system. WTF did that MEAN? There were no PC’s back then, no one understood motherboards or RAM or processing power! Nintendo knew the market, so the licensed 3rd party Companies like Capcom, Konami, and Square and gave them a dev box to work with. What could they do? Well, they had standard guardrails to avoid like number of moving sprites on screen, number of audio channels and voices available, ram paging and processor limits, but it was up to the developers to CREATE what they wanted. Nintendo knew what they had, gave the devs a ready-to-go development tool with complete instructions UP FRONT with details as to what their limits were. But what the devs could do within those limits was only limited to their imagination.
Read that paragraph again and replace “NES” with “SNES” or “Genesis” and you have 10+ years of the beginnings of mainstream gaming done right. The companies in question knew what they had, they presented the full package to devs and let them run wild.
Now enter Sony and the PS3. For years Sony hyped this 8-core processor they were developing only to find out in the long run that a) it didn’t work b) a max of 6 of the 8 cores were usable and c) they would have to dev a new processor because the original CELL was a flop. Sony advertised for years “DUAL HDMI OUT” and “Full backwards compatibility”, 2 things that never came to fruition. And then when time came to release (early 2004) they delayed it. Then when time came to release (late 2004) they delayed it. Then when time came to release (2005) and the Xbox360 was out Sony started hyping OTHER features of the PS3 that no one cared about in order to distract from all of their other BS (time buying BS) and the delayed it. 2006 rolled around and Nintendo gave the world a firm release date of Nov.19 2006 for their new system. Sony panics and decides that it’s more important to NOT BE THE LAST SYSTEM OUT then to release a half-finished product, so Sony does the Freudian thing and says to the world “PS3 is releasing ONE WEEK before the Wii!”. Only to be released to mediocre fanfare, complaints galore about the HUGE online update that HAD TO TAKE PLACE before any games could be played, serious overheating issues, BluRay videos that wouldn’t play, games that froze up consistently, lack of decent titles, and ridiculous hard drive install times amongst other things.
I guess the easy way out of what could be a HUGE rant is this:
This is the company you’re dealing with at Sony. It’s easy to say your system is going to have a “10 year life span” when you realize that you don’t know a damn thing about what your system is.
When your R&D team consists of the end product of management not considering their ignorance yet saying “put more of them megabytes in than the other guys” and then when “the other guys” up the ante, saying “put some more of them megabytes and add on some of them megahertz in there too. AND throw in a bigger hard driver yeah” then you get yourself one gigantic clusterf*ck - in this case, one that has a name: PS3. Stop reading what Sony puts out on the wire, stop reading Sony fanboy sites and start looking at the facts. THE REASON SONY IS JUST NOW GETTING TO THE POINT OF “realizing” the PS3’s “FULL POTENTIAL” is because they began with $$$ at the forefront of their minds, not you - the consumer. Ever since the PS2 was 3 years old, you have been playing second fiddle to the interests of management who knows nothing except what their PR people tell them: basic stats, mindless comparisons, and how to talk as if they have something you want. /rant off
p.s. At e3 Sony showed their love of Nintendo by trying again to copy them with eye-toy based motion controls. They demoed Modnation Racers, a very Nintendoesque kart racing game. They hyped their previous sales numbers and hyped a bunch of sequels to games (i.e. more of the same). They shrunk the PSP and did away with another failed proprietary format: the UMD. Did you care? Didn’t think so =)
I like the wording “because of a shift of business operations”. How it makes sense I’ll never know, but America’s such a touchy feely p.o.s. country now that we can’t say “fired” anymore. We’ve tried “pink slips” and “moving in a different direction”, we might find that you’d “be better suited for another job at another company”, we get “separation notices” when we quit that ask us to “rate” our now previous job and comment, but we don’t just FIRE a MO#@&$F)(*(r anymore. Pansies.
Phil got his ass demoted. End of story. You tried to pull a Sony on Atari, but apparently Atari doesn’t like your inconsistent “go where the money is; I have no integrity; I’ll do anything for a dollar” line of b*llsh*t. ‘Grats on doing it for the money since you don’t have any other motivation Phil. Grats. By “grats” I mean “rot”. And also w3 h8 jo0.
But on a nice note: Congratulations to Atari and good luck in all your future ventures. Speaking on behalf of the entire gaming world born before 1985, we are glad that you aren’t letting Sony mentality run you. Go do your own thing, don’t try to appease the dollar bill and do it like it was 1981. We ALL miss that.
“Because of a shift of business operations to the US, Phil Harrison will move from the role of President to that of non-executive Director of the Group. As all Board members, he will continue to assist, support and guide the Companys strategy.”
NIntendo - #6
Microsoft - #30
Sony - #126
Of 600 Companies covering the gamut, Sony is WAY behind the 2 other industry leaders. There were companies in here like IKEA, Disney, Toyota, Lowe’s, etc…
Here’s my normal disclaimer: Surprised? Nope, but it IS worth noting (and putting out for be seen by the fanboy and otherwise blinded-by-Sony’s-hype public ).
Masaru Ibuka started Sony, humbly, in post-war Japan above a department store, 53 years ago today. Their opening charter warned, “We must avoid problems which befall large corporations.”
Ah, so soon are the words of our founders forgotten when we find there to be individual personal gain in the form of money.
The founder of Sony—Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company, as it was known then—also insisted that it should “create and introduce technologies which large corporations cannot match” and that the company was founded “to establish of an ideal factory that stresses a spirit of freedom and open-mindedness, and where engineers with sincere motivation can exercise their technological skills to the highest level…the organization would bring untold pleasure and tremendous results, regardless of the meagerness of its facilities or the limited number of employees.”
So much has changed. Sony is the big company, slow and outpaced by younger companies grounded in the computer age.
Thanks Gizmodo, for posting this up. Everyone head there and read the rest of the post.
Surprise!
We wish we could say that this came as a surprise, but nope, we kinda figured that the little Rolly was on The way out. The Sony Rolly has been discontinued in the U.S. The good news is if you are located near a SonyStyle store, go check it out to see if they have them in stock. Thy are having a fire sale with a price of $99. That’s $300 off the original price.
Surely Sony is sitting around in it’s offices saying to itself, “Well, we were ahead of the curve again. Rolly was WAY ahead of it’s time. We should have waited 5 or 10 more years to release it - maybe we should just invent things and put them in a vault until the world can handle them. Yeah. We’re so far ahead of the curve.”
They’re always confident aren’t they? Like when PS3’s were locking up “on purpose”, or when the PS3 wasn’t going to have motion sensitive controllers, or when there were NO PS3’s on shelves anywhere in America within the first 6 months of release. Good track record, I’d say
Senior vice president of marketing Peter Dille:
“We’ve talked about this next year being the most aggressive marketing year in PlayStation’s history. It clearly falls into the ‘we can’t comment on rumour and speculation,’ but we’re confident in our plan, and we’ll just leave it at that.”
“We’re not going to make a price move for PS3; we’re not going to be packing five free games into a promotional strategy.”
Yeah, that pack in games strategy NEVER works. I mean LOOK at those NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, and/or Wii sales numbers. Pathetic right? pshhht!
In a follow-up question, Dille hinted at the possibility of a cut later this year, saying, “Well, what I’ve said is that it’s not going to drop in price today.”
Though Sony’s plans for 2009 have not yet been revealed to the press, many third party publishers and retailers were given details at February’s invite-only Destination PlayStation event.
Wow, they’re actually talking directly to their 3rd party guys instead of ridiculing them in the public media? Nice! This is a rarity with Sony here -
“I think it might be fair to say that some people came into Destination PlayStation curious about what our plans were,” said Dille. “I think they all left really fired up about the year ahead because, once they understood what our plans were, we didn’t hear any of that grousing that you’re talking about - certainly not from the folks that attended.”
He “thinks” a lot.
“I hope that people know by now that we are serious when we talk about 10-year product lifecycles. I don’t know; maybe sometimes guys in your business think that it’s spin. If it were spin, you wouldn’t have PS1 and PS2 doing it; we’re the only company that’s ever done it.”
I could repeatedly TALK ABOUT going to shine my shoes with pig dung every other day for 10 years, then do it, then say that I was the only one who had ever done it, but the question is: Is it worth the trouble and re-re-re-re-reiteration to a public who doesn’t care? We just want you to deliver to us what WE want Sony. We, your customers, your lifestream (see what I did there?), your product’s consumers just want you to stfu and give us stuff that’s worthwhile. Your neverending empty promises and pathetic hype for products that don’t deliver aren’t keeping you in business: your parent company’s subsidiaries do that.
/rant off. Danke por jour readings of it. =P