Making things harder is not a business strategy
January 26th, 2009Or at least, it’s not a very good one, as it makes absolutely no sense.
Sony claims that the PS3 is “intentionally hard” to program for so that, I guess, over the course of its life its full potential will be “unlocked”. As an example, SCE Chairman Kazuo Hirai points to the God of War games and how great they look compared to earlier PS2 titles. Perhaps there’s some truth to what he’s saying here, in that it’s good for a console to still have “unlockable” potential as it gets further into its life, thus allowing it to last longer.
But as far as creating a competitive console, this obviously makes no sense.
Let’s review, shall we? The Playstation 3 was coming out a full year after its closest competition. It cost a minimum of $100 more ($200 for a more fully-featured one) than the Xbox 360, contained a few more features of questionable worth to most people at the time (Blu-ray vs. DVD playing), and while its core processor was massively hyped, it originally had… worse game graphics than its cheaper competitor, a situation which lasted for nearly two years. While its nice that the graphics finally seem to be on par with the 360 and real graphical showcases like MGS4 and Killzone 2 are finally (or nearly) available, it just seems a little late now.
The 360 positively whipped the PS3 this winter. Sony’s biggest exclusive games for the 2008 holiday season, the highly anticipated and reviewed LittleBigPlanet and the heavily marketed Resistance 2, sold 611k and 598k in the US respectively. Even the June-released MGS4 only just passed the 1M mark. Now, maybe these numbers aren’t horrendous, but the 360-exclusive Gears of War 2 sold 2.31M in its 2 months of release in 2008. Incidentally, Gears of War 2 also arguably still has the best graphics in a console game to date.
Whether or not Killzone 2 or God of War 3 ultimately surpass Gears of War 2 is also sort of inconsequential at this point. The fact of the matter is, it’s quite unlikely they’ll look so good as to make the choice between a 360 and PS3 obviously in their favor (I think the Wii basically proves that there are other factors that are not “graphics” that play into a customer’s decision of what to buy).
So no, I don’t think that creating an expensive, difficult-to-program for console which caused multiplatform games to suffer or be delayed is really a good “strategy”.
Posted in Business, Jeff, Sony |
January 27th, 2009 at 9:09 am
Agreed. This is the type of nonsense I thought Sony finally realized wasn’t a good idea to say in public. It’s up there with “get another job.”
January 27th, 2009 at 11:45 pm
1. Nick is right, comments like this are patently absurd and smack of Sony circa 2006.
2. The concept of “unlockable” performance is incredibly stupid. Basically, he’s saying that a way to make games look great late in a consoles life is to let you compare them to games like look shitty early on due to programming difficulty.
3. I’ve always hated games that force you to unlock content. A good example is WarioWare smooth moves. I bought the game for fun with friends and family. The minigames were a blast and I immediately had people over to play. Guess what? I couldn’t play anything with my friends because I hadn’t properly unlocked things in single player yet. So yeah, creating a console with graphics that suck initially just to make them look that much better later on is just as stupid as a multiplayer game that forces you to play it in single player before you can play it with friends.