VicViper said:
I hated Phil Harrison, but he seems more pro active than Yoshida, don't you think? I mean, I know he is well accepted by Sony fans, but he's the one that was there from Vita's day one, so it's his fault more than any other. I applaud him because he's trying to change... but I'm still not conviced he's the man for the job |
The problem, as it's been with SONY since the PS2 onward, is that they develop their hardware in a vacuum, with little input from the outside world. (Normally Nintendo gets hell for this when it's really SONY that is the biggest offender in this regard, repeatedly.)
This means you end up getting unwieldy cludges like the PS2/3 and vastly overpowered hardware for the portable market segment--*twice*--that's resistant to price cutting and demands much higher dev budgets.
You then have to deal with the reality that, no matter how easy it is to port shader fucntions from PS3, it's still going to cost *a lot* more to create a Vita than a 3DS game, which makes the key selling feature of the hardware--the visuals--an albatross around its neck, dev budget-wise, while the consumer, at heart, is more concerned about the content (and price!), with shiny graphics being a secondary or tertiary concern. That this disconnect existed at all--that graphics and not content were seen as the main selling point*--in light of the success of the Wii and DS, is stunning and goes to show that, at heart, SONY's propensity for being engineer (and not consmer) driven is a large part of their current woes (see: TVs that cost zillions of bucks when there's *no* market for them).
What Sony should have asked themselves when starting the Vita project (especially in light of the PS3's issues) was: is there a developer/publisher market for *portable* games that are going to cost substantially more than 3DS games (never mind iOS et al) to produce and are they going to sell in suffiicient numbers to the end user? When the cost to get into one is in the $300+ range, alarm bells should have been ringing, especially in a world economy that has been on a non-stop downward spiral since the project was started (yes, I know: they have to ignore that, to some degree, due to the vagaries of the world economy, currency markets, component pricing, etc., but even ignoring that, does a $300+ 'toy', that is principally designed to play videogames, have a market at all? Even the greenest MBA should have been screaming "NO!" from day one).
And sure, there's no doubt in my mind they figured they could just go all-in on the Japanese market like they did (or were forced to) on PSP, but when you can't secure the content that sold the PSP, it doesn't matter how good 'x' game looks because it's not about the graphics (within reason), it's about the games, and if you can't get devs to commit content because the ROI is fairly bleak, you get the chicken and egg problem that leads into a death spiral: can't sell enough units because you don't have the right content, but can't get the right content unless you sell enough units.
In any event, I don't envy SONY's current position one bit and, while aboslutey nothing I've said is original thinking, I think it bears repeating if only as a cautionary tale that the vast majority of the world doesn't care about what engineers want**--they care about what they want, the two things not having a whole lot of overlap.
So, very circuitously, coming around to VV's point: no, he is not the man for the job and should be replaced, the hardware should (probably) be scrapped (boo-hiss cries the fanboy!), and SONY needs to (if they haven't already) turn the corporate ship towards what consumers want and away from what mad geniuses like Ken Kutaragi et al want(ed).
*Yeah, yeah, I know: they care about content, but if you can't secure the games that *made* the hardware--primarily Monster Hunter--you should be seriously rethinking your plans.
**We can quibble whehter this is good or bad.
