Gamer Tag
It won’t surprise anybody who’s been paying attention that Sony won’t be delivering the PlayStation 3 to anyone this month. What might surprise you is that even Japan will have to wait until November:
The delay was a painful admission that packing all the newest high-tech goodies into one machine won’t be an easy task. When completed, the PS3 will play all PlayStation games, old and new, as well as high-definition movies. It will let users surf the Internet via a broadband connection and sport a 60-gigabyte hard drive to store downloaded games or music, a wireless antenna to link to other Sony gizmos, and a tiny camera for chatting with friends over a video hookup. “This is not something I like to publicize, but the hardware is going to be costly,” Kutaragi said.
How costly? It will probably cost Sony $800 each to make consoles they won’t be able to market for more than $400. Ouch.
Give away the razor, sell the blades.
What I am worried about is whether they do the “We’re selling it, but you won’t be able to find one anywhere to buy for the next year or so” thing again.
That’s wearing thin.
Yipes. I guess that ruins my idea to give them away as Secret Santa presents at work, the whole “under $10″ thing and all.
oh geez.
Why on earth is Sony working so hard to make this thing backwards-compatible to the extent that it will play original Playstation games when the company and the merchandisers are only printing, distributing, and selling about a dozen titles anyway? These are not even the best titles for that original system.
What’s worse is that absolute backwards compatibility of this sort makes the Playstation 2 systems totally obsolete. The PS2 plays its own games and that retroactively labelled “PSX” but if PS3 plays all of these… then I won’t need my PS2 at all, will I?
bah.
Chris: … You won’t “need” it, no. But Sony doesn’t care if you need a system they’ve already sold you, do they?
The number of people buying a PS2 now is pretty low, comparatively – by which I mean the majority of sales have already been made, since the majority of the gamer market has had plenty of time to buy one, and I wager the XBox is eating their lunch on new-gamer sales (ie, the kids getting old enough to get mom and dad to buy them a non-Nintendo system, or buying it themselves; every year’s new game system sales).
(They still sell the PSOne, but cheap, and I can’t imagine they sell many, in comparison.
When the PS3 comes out, they’ll probably stop selling the PSOne, and lower the PS2′s price even more.)
I assure you that Sony doesn’t care about an End-of-life-already-technologically-obsolete platform being made obsolete by their new platform.
Back-compatiblity is a sales point for the PS3; that way people with an investment in PS and PS2 games don’t incur any opportunity cost in buying a PS3 and selling or giving away that old PS2.
Yikes, a $400 loss per unit? That’s a lot of razor blades.
The thing is… whether or not they care isn’t a question. I can’t stare into the brains of Japanese technologists or anybody like that. What I am wondering about is why these fools are building product for a market that doesn’t quite seem to exist as well as a market that they are either willfully or negligently attempting to destroy.
Backwards-compatibility is only a successful selling point when you sell razor blades for your razor. I bought my PS2 instead of an XBOX because I wanted some PS1 games as well as a faint promise of future games. The PS3 makes the same promises of backwards compatibility to a greater extent but the actual catalog of games seems smaller. In a market that is already flooded with newer games, and a large portion of that glut being the same game ported for two or more additional systems there isn’t a space for older games and the older games aren’t in continued production.
Mind you, books do reprints.
Video games and other electronic media don’t dedicate space to sell old-format merchandise yet they’ll waste tech resources and R&D time/money to make them playable? I think Sony is full of idiots.
Think about the worse: when PS2 was first being created and just before it was marketed it was created in mind to do so many things and theoretically the technology is still in that box I have under the TV. How many of those things did it end up doing? I can watch DVDs, play two different formats of Sony games, do Eye Toy, excercise PS2 Online game options, and store stuff on a hard drive. Is there more? Not in practice and not for the present.
Will there be a market for Blu-Ray discs in November 2006 ot November 2007? I don’t know but three months ago Blue-Ray was a promised capability for PS3.
Yeah, the more I think about it the less I care about backwards compatibility. I never had a PS1, but I have bought a couple for use on my PS@ and they, well, stink. Oh sure, I imagine some nostalgiacs have some PS1 games they want to play, but the graphics are so primitive that most folks won’t bother. I play on my PS2 alot, and I love TOCA and SOCOM, but when I get a PS3 (assuming it is ever actually offered for sale) am I going to play SOCOM 3? Heck no! I’ll want SOCOM 5 which will have the super graphics and even better online play and takes advantage of the horsepower of the PS3. So screw all the money wasted on backwards ability.
When I got my PS2, I quickly found out that there wasn’t a single friggin’ game out there worth a dang.
Well, maybe Fantavision. But that’s it.
So, for the first year, I played stuff like Final Fantasy IX on my PS2. I felt dumb for buying a PS2… until FFX came out.
Hmmm… multimedia, 60 gigabyte hard drive, WiFi, video…
Sounds like a PC to me.
PS3 is looking to be Sony’s biggest gamble since Betamax. The Blu-Ray format was licensed to a number of DVD manufacturers last year. Those units are expect to cost at least $1000.
So, if Sony is actually able to squeeze out the PS3 this year, why would anyone in their right mind buy the Blu-Ray DVD units? A few of the DVD manufacturers are not 100% onboard with Blu-Ray. LG and Fujitsu-Siemens are hoping to create a “Ultra-Multi” hybird that plays both.
A two other things that still irk me regarding the arrogance of Sony:
DRM debacle, and they are still trying to push Mini-Disc! Mini-Disc! I mean, WTF are they thinking?
Microsoft has two more cards to play even if Sony releases something this year: 1) price cut on the X-Box 360 (duh), 2) and Halo-mutherf’ing-III. Granted, MS will likely shoot itself in the foot whatever their move.
As someone with a number of old PS1 games, and a rather large collection of PS2 games, but enough other components under my TV already, I was quite pleased to hear that the PS3 was going to be backwards compatible. Do I really care if a piece of equipment I bought four years ago becomes obsolete? At the price I paid for it, the number of years of use that I got out of it, and the fact I won’t have to go out and buy a whole crapload of new games when I get the new system in order to rebuild my collection, the answer is NO. I’ll be able to just buy the new games that I want. A number of the PS2 games already display at 1080i resolution – and that’s as much as my TV will handle anyway. Maybe I’m weird, but if I enjoyed playing a game, I’ll play it again later, even though I’ve already beaten it and unlocked everything.
Books do re-prints, but it would piss people off if they already owned the book and had to go out and buy it again when it was re-released. Reprints are for people who don’t already own the item. And it isn’t the backward compatibility that’s causing the delay – it’s copy-protection for the blu-ray disc.
I’m disappointed that Sony is having to delay the release of the PS3, but that just means I’ll keep buying PS2 games that I like, and upgrade to the 3 when it comes out.
PS3 is looking to be Sony’s biggest gamble since Betamax. The Blu-Ray format was licensed to a number of DVD manufacturers last year. Those units are expect to cost at least $1000.
Who’s going to spend $1k on a Blu-Ray DVD player when you can get a PS3 to play them on for less than half of that?
Microsoft has two more cards to play even if Sony releases something this year: 1) price cut on the X-Box 360 (duh), 2) and Halo-mutherf’ing-III. Granted, MS will likely shoot itself in the foot whatever their move.
Ah, no. The price cut on the 360 is probably going to happen, but I wouldn’t call Halo 3 a PS3-killer.
I bought an Xbox specifically to play Halo, and I wasn’t particularly impressed by Halo 2. Simply put, the weapons in Halo were *useful*- they all had something they excelled at, but could also be used to accomplish most other things in a pinch. In Halo 2, they downgraded the weapons from excellent to merely adequate for certain things, and mediocre-to-poor for everything else…. and then they cut how much ammo you could carry in half, and end the story right when it got interesting.
(the remainder of this rant is unprintable on family website. Suffice it to say that once again, Microsoft took a great thing and f’d it up)
Yeah, i was underwhelmed by Halo2 as well. I hardly use my xbox, frankly, except to play Ghost recon2. I’d much rather play Socom on the PS2.
It’s a lower cost than it was originally was anticipated to be – anywhere from $800-$1300. Meanwhile, theXbox 360 is pretty much the same quality that the PS3 will be, and the cost will most likely be less by then (and more widely available than the PS3 is likely to be, judging by past releases of console systems). Most of Sony’s games are great for graphics and that’s about it anyway.
Btw, it’s not just Halo 3′s convenient release date that’ll cut Sony’s sales. The Nintendo Revolution is anticipated to be released at the same time – and may have a controller that’s more like a remote control (as in if you’re in a sword fight, you actually wave the controller around). Can’t remember off the top of my head whether or not that’s been verified officially or not, though, sorry.
Try ign.com for details and releases on this sort of thing – I live with a video game programmer; I’m not a gamer myself.
And I hear about all this way, way too often. It’s sad when a non-gamer can rattle this off automatically off the top of their head. My brain cells are dying.
Update: I forgot to mention yestderday that the Revolution is expected to sell for around $200. Compare that to Sony’s price….
Well, as a non-gamer, the new graphics quality of the XBox 360 and the potential of the PS3′s Cell chip has me interested in games for the first time in decades. I like realism and only now are we finally getting to see it. Add in the new Nintendo motion-sensor controller and the gaming industry is finally producing stuff I’m willing to buy and play.
While Sony’s Blue-Ray efforts have delayed the PS3 and given Microsoft a year’s head start, the inability of MS to meet demand on the 360 is probably a big mistake. They seem to be minimizing their losses on consoles until game software profits kick in on games like Halo 3. They’d probably have been better off to follow the TV manufacturer’s tactic of pricing high at first and then reducing the price as production kicks in. Instead, MS loses on each unit while consumers still are paying more than MS’s cost to build when they buy it on EBay. Selling at a loss only makes sense to grab market share, but only if you have sufficient production to grab that market share.