maximara said:
hydrolythe said:
maximara said:
Uriel_Hayabusa said:
I think Jim nailed it in an earlier vid when he said that Sony is basically begging for piracy. It's such a pity that they still haven't learned their lessons.
I think it goes back to what Moviebob said in his Game Overthinker V39 "The Emperor Has No Clothes"--thanks to Nintendo and Saga majorly dropping the ball in the early 1990s Sony became a major player in the game company market without really understanding what they were doing. They were the man with one eye in a kingdom of the blind but the blindness didn't last and now it has been a case of watch Nintendo and Microsoft do a much better job of selling their consoles.
I don't agree with this statement. I think its bullshit since Sony was already making video games long before anyone thought that they would make a console. Granted, most of the time their games were crappy, but it would rather be idiotic on Sony's part if they did not use their time and energy to understand nintendo's policies.
But we are not talking about making games but making consoles. Apple tried it with the Pippin and well given how well the thing is even remembered we all know how well that worked.
Nintendo the day after Sony showed off their prototype of a NES with a built in CD at the 1991 CES announced that they were scrapping the project...and the decision had been made a while ago. Nintendo's next brilliant idea was to partner with Phillips and give us the CDi resulting in what are regarded as the some of the worst licensed Nintendo games ever made and a very limited gaming console. Sony had been paying attention to what they were learning while Nintendo's partner and as Nintendo continued to figuratively shoot itself in the foot they ran with what they learned. Microsoft first effort was effectively locked out of an entire market (Japan) and Sony reaped the benefits of that along with Saga's total meltdown as a console maker.
Sony's efforts in 2004 to get into the handheld market shows they really didn't know what they were doing and PS3's price point combined with Microsoft catering to the rapidly emerging United States market and Nintendo going for the "casual" crowd resulted in a clock cleaning that indicated that Sony really didn't have a clue about the console market either. The mismanagement of the Vitae seems to bear out Moviebob's contention that Sony's 1990s success was due them to having luck that would have broke Vegas and not to them actually knowing what they were doing.
I definitely agree that the launch of the PS3 was a disaster, but that is not enough to justify that Sony indeed does not know what they are doing, because I still believe that I know what they are doing for the following reasons:
1: They have a monopoly in all PAL markets (with the exception of the UK, where the Xbox 360 was the largest selling console). This is only due to them understanding that markets outside of Japan and the United States are viable markets as well. No where is this more clear than in Brazil, because Sony released many versions of the same console over there because the next version would always be cheaper. Since they are pretty much the only console company that genuinely cares about those foreign markets they will forever be remembered there. This is mainly reflected in the fact that the FIFA series of sports games comes out on the PS2, but neither on the Gamecube nor the Xbox.
2: They used all their time and effort mainly in the development of consoles that would be more graphically powerful than their competition. You may say that the PS3 had a bad launch, but I doubt that anyone can call it a failure due to the high sales of games such as Uncharted 2: Among Thieves that take advantage of their graphical superiority.
3: They have such ties with indie developers that all other first party companies have almost no good indie companies left that could make games on their respective consoles. This is mainly because Sony started early with the attraction of indie developers on their system, those ties may already go so far back as 2009.
In conclusion: I admit that Sony has done many missteps in its life (releasing the PSP Go as competition to the DSi was just one of the many) but saying that Sony is incompetent in the console gaming business is for me just a step too far. That feels to me like saying that SNK was being idiotic just because they did not market their Neo Geo Pocket series of handhelds well.