| Pristine20 said: December 16th, 2008
Why All The PS3 Hate?by Torrence Davis If there’s one thing I’ve noticed this past couple of weeks, it’s the increased amount of disdain for Sony’s Playstation 3. It’s almost as if the whole industry has something against Sony for winning the last two generations. First Time Magazine, then Alleyinsider and now Kotaku. There’s a name for this and it’s called media sabotage. And what follows is fanboy whining. Look, you win, expectations are higher. If the Royals have a losing season next year, no one will blink. But if the Phillies get 90 wins and fail to make the playoffs, it'll be a disappointment. It is not unfair to criticize Sony for owning 70% ofthe gaming community just 2 years ago, and letting it all slip through their fingers. They deserve to be beat about the head and shoulders for losing touch with the gaming community, just as Nintendo was a decade ago. Who would have thought that after the NPD results were posted that sites like Kotaku would start kicking Sony while their down? That's when you kick someone. Well, truth be told the media only kicks when something is down OR up - otherwise its not making headlines or selling magazines. But don't expect the media to put a happy spin on "Sony loses 50% of gaming market; flushes a decade of profits down the toilet." Sony isn’t down though. They’re performing well considering the cost of the system. Sony will be doing well when fanboys can say its doing well without putting qualifiers on the statement (like "considering the cost of the system.") Of course many wouldn’t know this if they took some time to read some of the headlines on N4FB(News 4 Fanboys), Alleyinsider or Time Magazine. Since when is Time magazine experts on video games? Isn’t that our territory? Time Magazine made a huge mistake in a story they wrote about Home last week. They quoted the PS3 as having sold only 200,000 units in the US.
How is it that such a respected magazine as Time, fucks up so hard on the numbers? I was happy to see that gamezine.co.uk put them in their place and got them to correct the mistake not once, but twice. Yep. They fucked up the numbers. Media blows gaming news. Nothing new here. But Time covers EVERYTHING - politics, economics, entertainment,technology etc. One missed point doesn't mean Sony's doing well. Now let’s take a look at Alleyinsider. Eric Krangel posted an article stating that Sony’s PS3 is a sinking ship based on their November performance. Sony sold 378,000 PS3’s in November this year and sold 466,000 in November last year. Because of this, their numbers are technically lower than last year, Not technically. They DID sell fewer consoles this year, period. For the first half of the year everyone pointed to how sales had IMPROVED over last year to support how much better the system was doing, so its only fair to use the same benchmark now. but how is selling 378,000 consoles a bad thing? Because fewer people are buying it this year than last. What's hard to grasp here? When was the last time a console in its second year saw significant declines year over year? Eric said some pretty harsh things that are sure to put off mom and pop from buying the console this Christmas. Let’s look at some of the crap they were spewing:
This is a true statement but why did he say the PS3 was flopping? If you want to know what it’s like when a console flops, take a gander at the Atari Jaguar. That was a flop…but still a fun system. Not only did Sony move a ton of consoles in November, but they also moved that same number in Blu-Ray players thanks to the PS3. Just because the PS3 isn't flopping (which isn't the word I would use) as badly as the Jaguar, a poster child for flopping consoles, doesn't mean the PS3 is not flopping.
So let’s correct his statement here. First of all, people DO care about high definition. Do you think people are buying HD televisions because they don’t care? Of course not. They want HDtv. Most of them may not understand Blu-Ray or HD-DVD for that matter, but once they see it, I’m sure they’ll invest more money into it in the future. It’s not as popular as DVD at the moment and I think that in the future DVD will always be there, but co-existing with Blu-Ray. As far as not seeing a difference between Blu-Ray and DVD on tv’s less than 50″, he’s wrong on that too. I would have to say that 42″ is the cutoff where there is a blur between Blu-Ray and DVD. It may even be less than that. The smaller the screen, the harder it is to make out the details. On those tv’s larger than 42″, Blu-Ray looks marvelous. Lots of people still don't know what BluRay is, and saying "they'll care once they see it", beyond being an unsupported supposition, doesn't mean people are wanting BluRay now. Even so things are not what they were 2 years ago, when the PS3, even at $600, was the cheapest BR player around. Now you can readily find $300 BR players, and even cheaper ones ifyou go for earlier models.
Ok here is where the author really must have been beat by the idiot stick. How in the fuck can you say that the PS3 doesn’t have any must-have titles exclusive to the console?!!? Metal Gear Solid 4, Heavenly Sword, Uncharted and Resistance 2 are all MUST HAVE TITLES. LBP has generated more than a buzz. It’s becoming a cult sensation. Does this guy have an internet connection? As far as Home goes, it’s a beta, leave it alone until it’s a finished product. You lose all credibility when you cite "Heavenly Sword" as a "must have" title. And "cult sensations" are not must have titles either, or they wouldn't be "must have". A must have title, as used in context of this article, means a game that significantly impacts the market. There are very few of them each generation - Mario 64 and Final Fantasy VII two generations ago, Grand Theft Auto 3 and Halo/Halo2 last generation, and, so far, WiiSports this generation. Speaking of Home, that has been the center of a lot of negative attention from the press. Why oh why are we slandering a product that is in beta form? Get on Home, use it and put it away until it’s updated again. I think it’s funny that you have to wait for an alley to free up so you can take a turn at bowling. Isn’t that what it’s like in real life though? Maybe Home is being "slandered" because it is more than a year late and no one seems to really care about it, at least not enough to lure new gamers to the console. Last on my hit list is Kotaku. They posted an article about the poor performance of Little Big Planet and Valkyria Chronicles. Little Big Planet has passed the 1 million mark. How is that a poor performance? Valkyria Chronicles still needs more time. I’m sure fans of Japanese strategy games will pick it up accordingly. Kotaku has had a Sony chip on their shoulder ever since Dave Karraker blacklisted them for posting info that was embargoed. Even though they got their A-list status back from Sony, they still continually post negative articles about the PS3. This is just one of many. Deep down this article is a call to PS3 owners to start buying more games, but it’s execution is poor and wreaks of more media sabotage. Many were expecting LBP to sell 4-5 million. If it had those sales it would have a chance of being a cultural phenomenon that could improve the PS3s fortunes. Instead, its Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles. Sony is doing a fine job of handling the PS3. Other than losing the market it used to dominate, and losing every last penny they had made off the PS1 and PS2, and continuing to lose money going into the consoles third year, yeah, its doing a ****ing phenominal job. Unlike the PS1 and PS2 before it, this time there are other consoles competing against PS3. N64. Saturn. DreamCast. GameCube. XBox. I'm beginning to suspect you couldn't buy a clue with Bill Gates VISA card. As for Time magazine and Alleyinsider, let the game journalists handle the game journalism. You’ve done a piss poor job at it. Please stick to politics and finance. Kotaku, you don’t even need the traffic. Please post more responsibly. Yeah, as long as they piss on the console you love, they should shut the **** up. And since I voted for McCain, I'd like them to stop covering politics too. And come to think on it, I don't like the way they're saying bad things about the economy. I think they should just stick to printing letters to the editor. At last a gaming journalist agrees with me. I wouldn't expect our resident sony informant, Gebx, to post this one so I had to do it |
Funny how the one journalist who has a clue is also the only one who happens to agree with you.
