The PS3 is About Potential
Filed under: PlayStation 3
This post is a continuation of a series that takes a look at the state of the major home consoles. I have previously covered the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Xbox 360, so today I look at Sony's PlayStation 3.
Where Nintendo changed the gaming landscape and put out a strong launch, and Microsoft had clearly laid out a long roadmap of things to accomplish, Sony's approach has, so far, lacked the same finesse.
Sony Invests in their Future
Let me be clear, I'm not saying that the PS3 is a bad piece of hardware. On the contrary, it is both impressively designed and manufactured. I'm saying that Sony's approach has affected its ability to easily sell an otherwise solid piece of hardware.
So when you look at Sony's and the PS3's strengths, they don't as much lie in what you see now, but what you will see over the lifetime of the console.
It's all about Content
Sony is an entertainment company first and that really shows. Of all the console makers they have the largest number of game developers and have a rich set of intellectual property and publishing rights. This includes God of War, Gran Turismo, Ratchet and Clank, and SOCOM, along with new properties such as Resistance:Fall of Man, Heavenly Sword, Lair, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune and Folklore.
As an entertainment company Sony is willing to spend money to experiment with how to entertain. I've commonly used the ethereal flOw and gorgeous game/game-maker LittleBigPlanet as examples, but other games such as the off-the-wall Pain and the Eye Toy-based game Eye of Judgment are more great examples. While obviously Sony wants these games to sell well, even if they don't they still paint Sony as a company looking to bring innovations in gaming.
But games aren't Sony's only content strength, which is important as consoles expand to become media hubs; Sony is a movie and music powerhouse. While not eliminating Sony's need to negotiate with other content producers, this gives them a huge leg up in providing content over their yet-to-be-announced, but undeniable download service (along with specialized games like SingStar).
New Technologies
In a market where technology still follows Moore's law with products that have a minimum of a 5 year life span, console makers do what they can to limit how dated their consoles feel as they mature. With that in mind Sony invested heavily by banking on new technologies, mainly the Cell microprocessor and Blu-ray optical drive.
The Cell processor is a departure from the more traditional concurrent processing abilities of both SMT and multi-core CPUs. While the Cell's abilities are less general purpose than, say, the Xbox 360's triple-core SMT CPU, the theoretical peak floating point performance of the chip is staggering. As developers discover the ideal ways to use the PS3's components, I have a strong feeling we are going to see some extremely beautiful games over the next few years that will be hard to duplicate on the Xbox 360.
Blu-ray's advantage is more immediately obvious. While DVD9 is generally sufficient for most games now, the Xbox 360 has already seen its first multi-disc game and more will undoubtedly come over the next few years. While Blu-ray discs are currently more expensive to produce, they provide more freedom and less constraints for the game developers. This eliminates any engineering efforts that would otherwise be required to optimize game content to fit on a single disc.
Updates
Where Microsoft makes updates to the 360's Dashboard every 6 months, Sony has preferred to do near monthly updates. While many of the updates are minor, a few such as 1.60 and 1.80, have added some important and truly interesting options. What is clear is that Sony is working hard to provide new features and to get them out to the consumer as quickly as possible.
Even if the number of changes in a 6 month time period only equaled what is seen on the 360, the continual releases keep the core platform feeling more fresh. Add to this the idea of Home and you see Sony not only extending the platform features but attempting to innovate with how people use their console.
So How Did We Get Here?
While the PlayStation 3 is a solid piece of hardware from a strong entertainment company, the PlayStation 3 is not selling anywhere close to what Sony is looking for. So what has gone wrong?
Public Image
This is the least of the issues, particularly when the PR issues made Sony look bad mostly, though not entirely, to the hardcore gamer (and those issues are largely behind us).
So instead of digging deeper I'll note a trend. The recent image being portrayed by Sony, at least in North America and Europe, is much less Japanese; in fact it feels British. Perhaps it is meant to distance itself with Ken Kutagari's outlandish comments, but with Howard Stringer at the helm and Phil Harrison being the new PS3 front-man things have definitely proceeded down a smoother PR path. Sony has successfully turned the staggering number of false promises, bizarre statements and variety of false steps into a thing of past.
New Technologies
New technologies are risky. They tend to be harder to manufacture, have lower yields and tend to cost more to produce.
Spring 2006 was suppose to be the world wide launch of the PS3, but with Cell yields low and the Blu-ray drive's blue LEDs hard to come by Sony was forced to not only delay the Japanese and North American launches until November 2006, but Europe and Australia saw an entire year delay.
Independent of delays, new technologies tend to increase retail prices. With a $600 US price tag some analysts are suggesting a $200 price cut to the PS3 before mass market acceptance begins to kick in. While Sony has been working hard to reduce costs by moving to more yield friendly 65 nanometer chips, removing PS2/PS1 compatibility chips, and decreasing the cost of Blu-ray drives, with recent SCE losses in the $1.9 billion range Sony has continually echoed that price cuts will not be coming any time soon.
Even if Sony doesn't want to price cut, the competition is likely to force it this holiday season and both Nintendo and Microsoft should both be able to maintain their lower prices this entire generation.
Where are the games?
For owning the most number of gaming studios it seems odd for Sony to be in a situation where there aren't a lot of titles, particularly when you consider the original notion of a Spring 2006 release.
This obviously has an impact both on console sales and attach rate. The following statistics from VGChartz is perhaps the best illustration. In Japan, Sony's home territory, lower than anticipated hardware sales have still allowed Sony to sell, in just over 6 months, nearly 2.5 times the number of PS3's as Microsoft's 18 month old Xbox 360 (934,800 vs 391,231), but Sony has yet to sell more games (1,195,052 vs 1,310,161). In particular, this shows that the average PS3 owner in Japan has only 1.2 titles.
Even with the solid set of releases coming as we head towards holiday 2007 there are some concerns. Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid were heavy system sellers for the PS2. Grand Theft Auto is not a timed exclusive, Final Fantasy is confirmed to be a 2008 release and Metal Gear Solid is looking like a 2008 release. Let alone FF and MGS continually attract rumours that they will not remain exclusive. People tend to buy well established franchises and new titles with a lot of buzz. Unfortunately for Sony this holiday season's most anticipated exclusives are in the hands of Microsoft and Nintendo.
Summary
Sony has used the word 'potential' to describe the PS3 and that is an appropriate word. There is no denying this is a solid, well engineered piece of hardware. However, mass market acceptance isn't going to hit until the price is much lower and a larger set of anticipated games are released. Unfortunately for Sony it doesn't appear that this is going to happen until 2008. That puts a lot more market capturing potential in the hands of Sony's competitors.
I'll close up this series in the next article which takes a look at the changes in the industry and how those changes have an impact on what winning means.
Articles in the series:
- The Nintendo Wii
- The Microsoft Xbox 360
- The Sony PlayStation 3
- A Look at What Winning Means (coming)
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... so said 'Tony' on 06/05/2007 @ 04:37:22 AM [Direct Link]
Good article, very good, article. I agreed with everything you said, except about the games at the end of this year. With Drake's Uncharted, R&C, SingStar, Eye of Judgement, Home, Warhawk, GTA4 (yeah i know multi-plat, but it will still sell games), and many more that I cannot mention (list is to long), you can't say the games are not there this fall nor can you say it belongs to MS since FF13 and MGS4 has been delayed until 2008.
... so said 'Sherwin McGhee' on 06/05/2007 @ 07:46:12 AM [Direct Link]
Hey Sherwin, glad you liked the article.
Sony definitely has some strong titles coming out this holiday season. All three consoles have some great titles; a good time for gamers. But the issue is highly anticipated exclusives.
Microsoft and Nintendo both have games that are more highly anticipated by the mass market. If rumours of 5 million pre-orders are even close to true (and yes, that number should be taken with a large grain of salt), then Halo 3 alone should make Sony nervous.
Again, I'm talking about mass market recognized buzz/appeal. This isn't to say that PS3 titles won't be quality titles, but the mass market doesn't follow gaming like we do. FF13 and MGS4 are two of the most well known PS3 games and it sounds like neither will be here for holiday 2007.
This still doesn't ensure a PS3 failure, but it makes Sony's need to have a strong 2008 all that more important.
... so said 'Joseph Molnar' on 06/05/2007 @ 08:55:02 AM [Direct Link]
I wanted to clarify one thing, the title 'Investing for the Future' is not a reference to gamers investing in consoles. As you can see from a previous post (http://blogs.spouting-tech.com/thepensivegamer/2007/02/curiousity_3_th.html) I don't believe buying a gaming console is an investment.
The investment being referred to is Sony's investment in the technologies, the gaming studios and the future of the platform. I'm going to change the title to ensure this is understood.
... so said 'Joseph Molnar' on 06/05/2007 @ 08:26:57 PM [Direct Link]