| ZenfoldorVGI said: I blame the coasting strategy and the loss of 3rd party games like GTA, due to short term thinking and bad leadership. Today sony said: That, my friends, is called coasting. You are resting on your laurels. You are not competing. You are saying, "we can stay afloat without competing, well enough to make a profit, at least." With Microsoft's agressive strategy and Sony's apparent lack of concern about it, I wouldn't be very shocked if Sony ended up 3rd this gen, and I would be mildly shocked if they weren't guarnteed that spot next generation. They are more concerned with pleasing the shareholders immediately, than they are in the long term interest of their brand. Final Fantasy and GTA are no longer associated with their brand, for the exact same reasons, shareholders. Those are quite large games to disassociate from your brand FOREVER for simply a smaller loss in 1 quarter, consisting of 4 months. Somebody didn't want to get chewed out or fired, so they let GTA slip to a multiplat to save money. That's lack of leadership. Nobody is looking out for the big picture over there, at Sony, at least from a gaming division perspective. Letting some of these IP's dissassociate themselves from Sony was a bad move. A very bad move, and a costly one, though not necessarily in the same quarter the decisions were made. A lot of you didn't believe my coasting theory had any merit. You believe it now, don't you? |
What many people fail to understand is how much say shareholders have over a public company. There is no one out there who wishes to invest millions and then start losing them. The PS3 is making a loss with every unit they sell due to production costs, the shareholders are losing money with every unit sold. If they drop the price, Sony will lose even more money, thus the shareholders will lose more money. At the same time they can't afford to let the competition slip too far ahead before production costs are lowered and a price cut is issued.
However, the competition (360) is not doing great given it has just dropped price below the Wii. It is only out selling PS3 by 25/30,000 units given its next to nothing price.
Sony are just being patient. They are selling now even at £300 and next year, when costs are lowered, they can afford to drop the price, keep their fans as well as shareholders happy.
We must understand, there is only so much loss a company can take before it starts to take hits. Sony lost out on important I.P's due to their losses. If they would take any more losses then they may even start losing some of their Teams. Considering the way most games are going multi platform, Sony has has done better thinking of the long term and securing their teams instead of having to pay someone (where MS could if they wanted offer more money) who may or may not be with them next time around.
The only real loss they have made is Tekken and FFXIII. However, they still have WKC and several other games that have replaced the IP's they have lost. It is not a big a deal as people make it out to be. What they need to do now is work on a Fighting game within their own studio so they won't have the need of relying on Tekken.
