When will PS3 lose its momentum?!

[albionus]

Sorry this is somewhat long. Sony’s problem is that it is getting dangerously close to falling into the video game spiral of death. It’s somewhat less apparent at the moment since there are a string of good third party games coming out for the PS3. The reason as mentioned before is that these games were planned, budgeted, and developed over a year ago. Now game companies are looking a year into the future and they see a Wii that will have sold 15+ million (possibly approaching 20 million given the huge casual gamer vein Nintendo tapped) and cost half as much to develop for, an Xbox 360 that will have sold around 15 million and while expensive it’s something they already know the ins and outs of, and the PS3 which short of divine intervention will still be well short of 10 million sold, relatively new development-wise, and costing over twice as much as the Wii to develop for. The game companies are doing that math and understand that the PS3 is not worth supporting alone, or possibly altogether in some cases. The PS3 is going to have a hard time breaking out of this spiral since as someone mentioned “it’s the machine of the future”. Blu-ray offers no benefit unless you have an HDTV which 75% of Americans and 85% of Europeans do not (according to Sony bosses). Even with an HDTV the difference between Blu-ray and DVD are less than that between DVD and VHS. Also the PS2 was $300 not $600 (a price that better stand alone Blu-ray players will soon drop below). PS3 games themselves look little better than Wii games played on SDTV as some developers have noted. Sony has essentially lost the casual gamer who propelled the Playstation and the NES before it to #1. Sony fanboys will of course buy it regardless and that will be enough to sustain at least a Gamecube level existence. However, that is a sad place to be for a former market dominator as Nintendo discovered. Another question would be if Sony can even afford market dominance anymore. Sony is a big company ($60 billion revenue I believe) but the PS3’s losses are enormous even for a company of that size (almost 2 billion so far). They’ve put themselves in the kind of trouble American auto companies are in, they can sell more by lowering price but then they lose even more than before. Shareholders are profit fanboys and nothing else. They loved the PS2 gravy train but will not long tolerate massive losses of the scale the PS3 promises, especially since Sony only recently turned around its troubled money losing electronics division. Despite far greater company profits and lower video game losses even Microsoft is beginning to run into shareholder resistance over the price of the Xbox to company profits. Meanwhile, Nintendo is privately held and raking in more money than all other video game companies combined. Whatever happens this generation the only certainty next generation is that Nintendo will still be there.