| davygee said: In my opinion, Sony should have delayed the release of the PS3. It is a vastly superior platform to anything else on the market, with the 360 coming closest. And could quite easily be classed as a generation apart from the Wii and 360. Sony still has a huge PS2 audience and an growing PSP audience coming in around 22m worldwide. I reckon that they should have taken a step back after all the delays etc and made a very serious decision to delay the universal launch of the machine. BluRay players will undoubtably reduce in price over the next 6-9 months getting to a more realistical pricing along with the costing of the hardware involved. Yes Nintendo and MS would sell a load of units, but there are always people out there wanting to upgrade to better model and if it was introduced worldwide in November 2007 they would probably be able to reduce the price significantly due to lower BR prices and have a bigger catalogue of games. This would have given them time to get a huge supply of them shipped as well and if it was introduced around the $450 (£269-£299 in the UK), it would have made a killing. |
I disagree with you in almost every possible way.
1. PS3 is not vastly superior to Xbox 360 (nor Wii in my opinion, but if you only look at horsepower your claim would be valid there). A machine usually is as powerful as its weakest link, so even if it has the upper edge in some departments, to be vastly superior you need to have it in every single department. I don't think that is the case with PS3 and at the moment there is not 1 game that proves that PS3 and Xbox 360 are not of the same generation.
2. PS2 is still selling well, but for how long? When PS2 starts to feel outdated and with a growing library of Xbox 360 games more and more PS2 users might be tempted to jump ship. And once they bought an Xbox 360 already, will they still put out 400-500 dollar to buy a PS3 once it comes out?
3. With delaying PS3 the userbase of Blue-Ray would not grow yet, which only increases the chance of HD-DVD winning. That increases the chance of PS3 ending up supporting Blue-Ray which only is used in PS3 anymore.
4. They will not have a bigger library of games when they launch later. You don't seriously expect developers to just put their finished games on hold until Sony finally launches its hardware do you? I rather expect them to change platforms so they can make money as soon as possible. Also they will not enjoy the idea of having 100+ titles available at launch... too much competition which will result on bad sales on average.
5. They will not have huge supply if they want to take advantage of lower costs, if they want to have massive supply they need to start producing the units early 2007 while prices of components are still higher than they will be at the end of 2007. But even at the end of 2007 I don't expect prices to have dropped that much for them to be able to sell PS3 for 450 dollar without losing money on it.
6. By the time PS3 launches at your suggested retail price of 450 dollar Microsoft and Nintendo will be able to respond and just lower their console by 50 to 100 dollars, which means PS3 will still be expensive in comparison with its competition.
Sony just made a gaming device which is too expensive at the moment, and they have to fear PS3 will have to suffer the consequences during its entire lifetime.
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