This just in…
Sony lost a lot of money in the games division last year.
I was going to post this in the comments, but I figured that I should create a new post about it so people could post their thoughts here.
I think everyone will agree that Sony’s game division numbers aren’t very good for them. They’re really quite bad and there isn’t a positive way to spin that.
But the way I’m looking things… why should I even care who sells the most consoles? The whole thing seems to have become a yearly pissing contest between Sony and Microsoft of who can lose the least money and get the most hardware in the home, so they can fuel their own marketplace plans.
Microsoft doesn’t seem to care about failure rates for the hardware that they’ve put out (based on Peter Moore’s comment, “Y’know, things break.”)
Sony doesn’t seem to care about pricing their device too high for mass market appeal.
Nintendo…well, they’ve always been an entity unto themselves….
Sony has good games coming out this year.
Microsoft has good games coming out this year.
Nintendo has good games coming out this year.
Do I care that Sony sold 80,000 PS3’s last month? Nope. Not one bit.
Other than the demand for them surprising the hell out of me, do I really care how many Wii systems sold last month? Nope.
I’ve got my systems.
I’ve got my games.
I’ve got plenty of great looking/sounding games on the way for all three systems.
That’s enough for me.
May 18th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
I see your point to a degree, but I think gamers should care about the performance of the “big three’s” consoles. What if even one of them goes the way of the Dreamcast in the next year or two? That would be an investment of over $1000 (in most cases) for a lot of gamers that just lost support and new products.
All have their warts, no doubt. I don’t really care who “wins.” I just want mine to be around for a few years!
May 18th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
You can bet people in the industry are watching. Big time.
Gamers should care, too. The success or failure of a console’s initial 2-year push can have a direct impact on the types of game that are made for them, their price, and their quality.
The failure of the PS3 is news — important news. Just like the success and demand of the Wii is news. I understand not caring either way, but it is definitely worth dicussing.
May 18th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
I see both of your points.
I understand that the investment is large. I know what I’ve spent on each console for this generation and I know that I would like to see all three companies continue to compete because they all do offer something different.
When I bought the 360, I thought it was a cool console with some very nice games at launch and bought it.
When I bought my Wii, I loved the concept of the control and the games that Nintendo was talking about making for it and bought it.
When I bought my PS3, I wanted a HD movie player and being able to get a region-free game console along with a Blu-Ray player made it something worth buying.
I had a Dreamcast as well and was bummed when Sega pulled the plug on it, but I understand why they did and I’m glad that they stayed in the game as a developer rather than sticking it out in the hardware industry and possibly having to exit the gaming business all together.
I never said it wasn’t something worth discussing, I just get bored with all of it because I think it distracts us from talking about the games.
Also, I guess, I do tend to get tired of the “Sony is t3h doomed” talk, when I just got the best baseball game I’ve ever played on their console. For me, that game alone, along with all of the Blu-Ray films that my wife and I have watched have made that system good enough for me, even if Sony pulled the plug on the whole thing tomorrow.
People seem to want to jump all over Sony when talking about their system, when Microsoft seems to be squandering most of the momentum that they had built up. Nintendo has roughly 35% of the market, and started 12 months later this generation.
This should be a huge matter of interest to the “HD” gamer. Both Microsoft and Sony hyped the HD aspect of their gaming systems to such a high degree and consumers seem to be saying that Nintendo’s cheaper system, that is “fun to play,” seems to be where most of the consumers are going.
In my opinion, if Nintendo ends up with more consoles in the home, that will impact things for gamers more than Sony’s issues will.
May 21st, 2007 at 1:18 am
Yep, I can attest to publishers losing what little desire they had in publishing PS3 games, as that kind of thing falls directly in my line of work. Keep in mind that publishers only made PS2 games because it was wildly popular, not because of any quality inherent to the platform. A couple even came out and said they wanted to see it fail because of how costly it was to develop games for the PS2. So I can’t see how Sony is going to keep publishers to commit to the PS3 without moneyhats.
Here is the only way Sony can recover: drop the price by $300 and hand out moneyhats for exclusives. You can bet that MS will respond to any price drop with a $50-$100 drop of their own, and Sony’s so far behind that they need to be *more* appealing than the 360 in terms of price, because the game selection this holiday season sure won’t do it.
How much would the price cuts set them back for 5 million consoles? $1.5 billion. I don’t think Sony is prepared to lose that much, so what will probably happen is that they concentrate on the moneyhats, probably in the order of $15 million+ per AAA game. I think the MGS4 on 360 comments from Kojima are just a ploy to extract said moneyhats from Sony.