Sony still doesn’t understand the price/value proposition

Sony just officially announced the PSP Go at E3 (which, as described by Kaz Hirai himself was not really a secret any more), which amounts to a slightly smaller PSP with no UMD drive and slide-out controller.  While I’m personally skeptical that a fully digital portable game device is something most consumers want, I could see how it could fill a particular niche in the market.  However, Sony appears intent on pricing the PSP Go out of consideration for, I’m guessing, the vast majority of their potential customers.  The PSP Go will retail for $250 when it debuts, compared to the retail price of $170 for the current PSP-3000 (the PSP-2000 can still be found and is even less than that).

So, let me see if I understand this.  I have a choice between a product with a larger screen, full backwards and forwards compatibility with games (UMD discs) that can be resold if necessary or another system that is slightly more portable (because its smaller), but doesn’t play UMD discs so cannot play virtually every game already released for the system and cannot be resold if you wanted.  I would think that the choice between those would be fairly obvious, and that’s before I even take into account any price.  Even so, the $80 difference would certainly be a big enough difference to seal my choice.  I’m sorry, the PSP Go basically adds no value to the PSP… in fact, it subtracts a tremendous value from it unless the only thing you care about is having something a little smaller.

Sony’s mistake here seems to be that they are pricing the PSP Go as an upgrade from the PSP 3000, rather than an alternative.  I haven’t seen anything to suggest that it is the former, so it seems very much the latter, and it should be priced to reflect that.

Let’s Remove Its Heart!

A long week.  Sorry for the lapse in posting.

I found the note that Sony is planning on continuing to include Blu-Ray in the PS3 a little puzzling - the BR player is essentially the main reason the PS3 is doing as well as it is.  Why on earth would Sony compromise that in order to attempt to drop the price of the console slightly.

It’s been a running theme of this blog that Sony has, for all practical purposes, lost this generation of the console wars.  This doesn’t, however, mean that the company can’t position itself effectively for the PS4 or whatever its successor will be called.  Games like LBP will help fight a rearguard action that makes sure gamers are at least thinking about Sony when new devices come out.  Keeping the BR player is probably the best way to keep it in the mind’s eye moving forward.

The Demo doesn’t Kill

I downloaded and played through (a couple times) the Killzone 2 demo last week and I’m still left with this overriding impression: “That’s it?”

That’s not to say that the game doesn’t have some potential, but just that the demo really doesn’t do a great job of showing it off.  Sure, it looks pretty, but it didn’t really blow me away as significantly better than, say, something like Call of Duty: World at War (which I just finished playing on the PS3 as well).  To be honest, it really doesn’t play much differently than Call of Duty: World at War either (you seemingly walk slower and a bit more “loosely”, and they switched a couple buttons around like the zoom in and grenades, but most of the other controls are the same).

And with such a short demo (it probably takes a maximum of 15 minutes to play… which is about how long it took me to get through it the first time after spending several minutes trying to figure out what “bridge” I was supposed to blow up and what “elevator” I was trying to get to), there’s just not much to sell me on why I should buy Killzone 2 if I’ve already played Call of Duty or other recent first person shooters (or why I should buy Killzone 2 over Call of Duty if I haven’t played either of them).

In order to play the Killzone 2 demo I had to pre-order the game from Gamestop, but playing the demo was actually making me question whether it was still worth getting the rest of the game at the full $60 price.  Based on my skimming of some reviews, it sounds like the multiplayer is where the game really excels.  If that’s really the case, Sony really should’ve included some multiplayer or even made it the focus of the Killzone 2 demo, because I think they’re ill-served by the one currently out there.  I actually think the game will probably turn out better than the demo, but the fact that the demo is a Gamestop exclusive right now is probably a good thing for Sony, as I’m honestly not sure how many people this demo would sell on the game who weren’t already almost definitely buying the game (and yeah, that includes the priceless fanboys who will love the game no matter what and are actually upset with Adam Sessler’s 5/5 review of the game.  Wait until they see Edge’s review!)

Making things harder is not a business strategy

Or 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.

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Geoff’s Games Of The Year 2008

I’m going to be in Steamboat Springs and Australia starting at the end of the week, so I’m getting all of the game of the year nonsense out of the way before I go.  I’ve always found the idea of anointing one game “the best” of its peers to be subjectively absurd at best and downright flamebait at worst.  So why am I doing it?  It’s entertaining and I think it’s worthy of debate, if not resolution.

So herewith, my games of the year, for each console which I own.

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So Now What?

Chris Kohler asks the excellent question apropos of the recent Xbox 360 price drop.  He makes the valid point that the console wars are effectively over; Nintendo has won this generation, and neither Microsoft nor Sony are going to reach the position that the PS2 managed to hit in the previous one.  So what is Microsoft doing?

I think that Kohler is largely right in his analysis.   But you need to consider that  that Microsoft isn’t really strictly competing with Sony any longer for the core gamer set: there are outliers, but many gamers have chosen to purchase one or both of the systems at this point.  Both Sony and MS, then, are trying to figure out how to get those remaining holdouts to take a chance on the console they didn’t purchase… and since the feature sets are set at this point, price is basically the only lever they have to pull.  That’s why Microsoft has dropped its pricing for the holidays - not to get people to purchase a 360 instead of a PS3 per se (although I’m sure there are some people who haven’t gotten either yet), but to get people to buy a 360 in addition to the PS3 they’ve already got at home. 

By the way, I’m guessing that with respect to those who haven’t gotten any console yet, I’m guessing a Blu-Ray player isn’t a particularly compelling feature.  Either they’re just unimpressed with either console’s line-up (which I suspect isn’t too likely at this point, even if they’re only passingly familiar with gaming), or they’re just very frugal - and are thus unlikely to have the higher-end hardware required to take full advantage of Blu-Ray in the first place.  So the price drop seems pretty smart to me… Sony’s already lost a ton of money on the PS3 and probably isn’t too interested in losing more in the short term, and thus probably won’t respond too aggressively to the move.  Microsoft can take advantage of that fact.

Naivete

I don’t want to downplay the significance of natural resource-generated conflict; anyone familiar with the story of oil in Russia or DeBeers in Africa, at a minimum, is likely aware of the problems that can be caused by demand for scarce resources in low-income nations.  But to blame Sony for the Rwandan violence associated with coltan seems to be a little naive. 

As the article notes, coltan is a key component in a whole host of electronics components, including cell phones and computers.  Demand for the metal allegedly resulting from Sony’s launch of the PS2 caused a coltan-fueled rush in the Congo (confusingly, the article mentions both the Congo and Rwanda, but doesn’t elaborate on whether or not the issue resulted from Rwandan troops, which have periodically invaded the DR Congo’s borders), and resulted in slave labor and similar atrocities. 

That said, it seems a little silly to absolve the actual aggressors here of responsibility for their own actions.  They were not forced to take the steps that they did, and denying them agency is irresponsible in and of itself.  Given that the violence was not imminently foreseeable - and it appears it was not - I don’t really see how you can fault Sony for this.  Additionally, the company’s response seems to have been ideal.  Once it became aware of the issue, it stopped purchasing Congolese coltan and now sources from a variety of other mines.  The simple fact that people will want to obtain a valuable resource is not a sufficient reason to avoid pursuing it at all.

Microsoft Gains First Strike and Scores a Critical Hit!

You’ve probably heard by now that one of Sony’s biggest theoretical exclusives, Final Fantasy XIII, is coming to the 360.  To be honest, even before I owned a PS3, this was never a huge concern of mine.  To begin with, I knew the game was basically never coming out.  And as much as I liked Final Fantasy IV, VI and VII, I never really got too into any of the other ones (got close to the end in VIII, barely started IX, played a little bit of X… X-2 and XII are on my shelf unplayed).

But, yeah… I know there are a lot of Final Fantasy fans out there and this will make probably half of them ecstatic, a quarter furious, and a quarter who don’t care.  Either way, this is, at the very least, a major psychological blow to Sony and a big coup for Microsoft.  A friend of mine was literally trying to sell his 360 to pick up a PS3 MGS4 package because he figured he could play MGS4 and (what he most wanted) Final Fantasy XIII whenever it finally came out.  Based on this news, that is no longer going to happen and he is keeping his 360.

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E3 Sneaks Up Next Week

Kotaku was nice enough to point out that E3 was coming up next week and while I’m sure we’ll hear more about games like Gears of War 2, Resistance 2, Far Cry 2, Rock Band 2, and Killzone 2 (that’s a lot of 2’s), I’m actually more interested in seeing if we’ll get more information about games that we DON’T already have some decent information about.  So, here’s my list of things, divided by platform, that I’d like to see next week (and that I have no clue if they’ll be shown or even exist):

• God of War 3 (PS3)
• New Ico/Shadow of the Collosus team game (PS3)
• Heavy Rain (PS3)
• New Zelda (Wii)
• New Nintendo IP (Wii)
• Peter Jackson Halo collaboration (360)
• Amplitude 2 (Non-Rock Band Harmonix game, perhaps the name “Wavelength” would be more appropriate) (Multi)

Admittedly, there are other games I’d still like to see more about (including the ones listed before, and others such as Resident Evil 5), but these are ones that we basically have hardly any information on, or don’t even know if they exist, and would make great surprises for E3.  What does everyone else think?

The Difference Between Fads And Trends

The title of this post is slightly misleading, but I think that Microsoft and Sony may be on the verge of compounding a major strategic error with another strategic error.  The jumping-off point for this post is a New York Times article that reviews GDC speeches by the major manufacturers and developers, with the nominal topic being social gaming.

Naturally, there’s a hagiographic section on Nintendo’s prescience in identifying the gaming casual market, and highlighting how successful that strategy has been.  But I’d like to focus a bit more on the competition’s response.  Read the rest of this entry »