Baresark said:
Andronicus said:
Baresark said:
Wow, and you would think these guys would actually learn from past mistakes. At times, when a company has large amounts of resources, they invest that resource poorly because they have so much of it (Look at Donald Trump). Releasing a handheld system when people are using smartphones more than ever is risky anyway, but to sell it without making a profit too, that's just ludicrous. You could make a substantial step up compared to the PSP and still sell it profitably. What's worse is, by the time they may become profitable, it'll be un underpowered peice of hardware again. If you look at the Xperia Play (the playstation phone), it is technically better than the PSP in ever single way, why not concentrate on that platform more?
I have no respect for these guys at all anymore. I haven't even gone to collect my free shit from the PSN outage, I'm completely over it.
So, what you're saying is, you lost all respect for Sony because...
...because they're putting more advanced hardware into their devices than they can afford? They want to give the customers all this technology
cheap? How dare they!
They don't get make profit from
consoles. They recoup losses from
games.
Specifically, games sold in Australia.
You're thinking about it from the wrong angle. I don't respect poor business people. They damage only themselves and their employees by doing this. I am fine if they want to release said product, hell, if it has some worthwhile games I may even buy one. But, I can't respect people who throw money away. A good company takes risks with the feeling it will be profitable, money is made, the company expands, hires more people and wealth/quality of life improves for everyone. They are selling them at a loss and predicting profits years down the road, which is actually impossible.
It's a bad business decision and I have a hard time respecting that. That is the sole reasoning behind my comment, I'm not trying to be hurtful in any way.
Also, think about it this way. From a whole other angle even. They recoup costs by selling games. That means that for the life of the system they will be selling software at an inflated price to make up for said decision. Throughout the life cycle of the system, if you own one and play it regularly, you will spend a lot of excess money on the games this way. Anything that artificially raises the price of a good or service is bad for the consumer, which is you and I, and will result in less sales all around. It would be better for all people involved if they made a system that they could sell profitably for $250 and then good games were released for it at a lower price point, which in the end will mean you will spend more disposable income on games that way and everyone profits more. In turn, if they had good software sold at a reasonable or even low price point, more people would be interested in purchasing their unit, increasing the profitability for Sony.
In a perfect world, yes, it would be nice to have cheaper games
and cheap consoles. But this is not the perfect world which you are theorising. It doesn't work that way. From a business sense, it's perfectly reasonable to sell consoles at an artificially lowered price, and then artificially raising the price of the games. What they need to do is get the console into the hands of consumers
as quickly as possible. Sony might not be making any profit if people are buying the system a lower price, but they're
certainly not going to be making any profit if people simply aren't buying their products in the first place. So they lower the price of the console so people think "wow, that's a great deal, and it has some pretty good games too. I should grab one".
Of course, what do the customers do then? Well, they have a games consoles, so they need to buy some games, don't they. And they only games available are these ones at a raised price. And games are things Sony can
consistently make profit on. It's hard to make a lot of profit when the consumers are only buying
one PS Vita, especially if you're still trying to keep the price as low as possible to stay competitive. But if every person who buys a PS Vita buys
several games for the consoles at even a slightly raised price, that's a LOT more profit.
I understand what you're saying. It would be nice not having to get anally raped every time I try to want to buy a game. But do you honestly think that the retailers are going to sell cheaper games anyway? Even if they could pick them up at a lower price than normal, they're just going to jack up the price so they get more profit than the other games, because they
know that's how much people are willing (not necessarily happy to, but willing) to pay for their games.
And don't pretend that Sony are some greedy company who are scheming to get your money. This is what
all the companies do. Maybe not this exact way, but to them, the bottom line is always the number one priority, and they'll do whatever they can think of to make that number as big and round as possible.
