Sony and its deadly-poison Blu-Ray.
This is the first installment of “g’s Corporate Management S-List,” a supernicety.com exclusive.
Background: The PlayStation 3, for those of you who haven’t been following, is going to launch at $600 this November. Yeah.. six hundred dollas. People originally speculated it would $400-ish like M-soft’s Xbox400, except Sony decided to foist its high-capacity and high-cost Blu-Ray HD movie drive on gamers. Because GAMErs buy GAME consoles primarily to watch HIGH-DEF MOVIES on, I guess? Also note that the PS3 was originally slated for a spring ‘06 launch, but that too was held up because of Blu-Ray.
Gamers around the world are pissed off at Sony, but our hurt feelings aren’t main the reason we won’t be buying PS3s. The reason PS3s won’t move is that we don’t need a Blu-Ray player, and we especially don’t need one that costs SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS.
For my part, I loved my PS1 & 2, and I still buy games for my PS2. But I’m not sure if I’ll ever buy a PS3. If I do, 3 conditions will have to be met:
1. The price has dropped to the $250-300 range of its competitors.
2. I have incidentally acquired an HD-capable TV.
3. Blu-Ray and the PS3 haven’t bankrupted Sony.
In other words, for me to buy a PS3, Sony and I both still have to be into games in 2008 or 2009.
Conclusion: If Sony managed to price a devoted gamer and PS fan like myself out of the market, then their market share is soon to collapse. This is a very frightening time to be a Sony shareholder.
Sunday, September 17th, 2006 @ 9:12 pm 
Consumerism, Gadgets, General, Technology
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September 19th, 2006 at 10:34 pm
Well, of course I know you really *do* understand the reasoning behind Blu-Ray in the ps3. It’s a loss leader to try and goad studios and then retailers to adopt the format. Sony wants to be able to say “Yeah, it’s a new and unproven tech, but we have X million players already installed in the very same high-disposable-income households y’all like… HD-DVD doesn’t.”
It’s still bad for gamers, I think, who, aside from waiting too long and overpaying for the thing, will endure even longer wait times for data loads and even more meaningless video content that adds little to that magical thing we call “gameplay”.
How many times have you heard it said that the Xbox “looks better”? A billion? It does, but I don’t play games just because they’re goddamn pretty. I play them because they’re *fun to play*. All this one-upsmanship / prick waving about graphics capacity amounts to fuckall if the games aren’t fun.
Nintendo’s games look more fun, to me, than what I’ve seen for Xbox or heard about for PS3. So, that’s a big deal, what with being the POINT and all.
Add to that the feeling of betrayal and the high cost of acquiring hardware I don’t fucking want in order to support the existence of a format that I find unnecessary (because, really, I want to have to buy all 200 of my DVD’s again, for sure), and it’s no surprise you won’t find me in line for one of these.
I don’t see it as a death knell for Sony, partly because they’re diversified horizontally, vertically and probably in the third dimension too. Still, I think it’s gonna be slow selling and as far as game systems go, they may well cede the number one spot this go ’round. Fortunately, they’ll still make money on content (movies, music, etc).
‘Course, that assumes their computer batteries stop catching fire, too. That can’t help.