Dallinor said:
Borkachev said: This attitude, I think, is a prime example of what's wrong with Sony's strategy: instead of convincing consumers to support the PS3, they try to trick them into supporting it. Instead of giving consumers something they want, they give them something they don't want and tell them they do. They trick people into supporting/buying the PS3? 5 million PS3's do not get sold because consumers simply got 'tricked'. 5 million PS3's were sold because Sony sucessfully generated the need/desire in the consumer to own one. Your also obliquely saying that people do not need a PS3, which is also not the case. This pattern goes back to the beginning. "The PS3 is too cheap," they said before release. "BluRay is necessary for HD games," "Rumble is incompatible with motion controls." "Rumble is a last-gen feature." When the first price drop came, they claimed the new 80 gig model would be the only version available soon, and that it would have no price drop. When the 40gb came to Europe, they claimed the other, BC-enabled, models would be phased out so people would run out and buy them. And so it goes on. The PS3 was sold at a loss to begin with, so technically it was cheap. The rest of the quotes are Sony hyping their own product. Very understandable. Take their rivals Microsoft for example: "1080p at 60fps is not possible" and "HDMI isn't needed". Business's make fradulent statements like this all the time, it's all about putting your product in the best light possible and making it look the best. |
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I didn't say anyone who bought a PS3 was tricked: I said that trickery has been a major part of Sony's strategy for selling them. My problem with this scheme is that it insults the consumer and buries the genuine merits of the platform under mountains of lies and distrust.
Hyperbole is different from fraud.
Telling people that prerendered movies are real-time, in-game captures from a PS3 is fraud, but unfortunately there is no equivalent to SEC when it comes to marketing.
Some of those quotations can be viewed as hyperbole, but the most damning are these three, which cannot:
-Claiming in NA that the more expensive 80gb model would be the only one available after the 60gb was sold out.
-Claiming in Europe that all future models of the PS3 would not include backwards compatibility, and that the ones that did were stock-limited.
-Cutting backwards compatibility from the 40 gig to artificially create demand for upper-model PS3s and PS3 games.
These three moves were designed to force consumers into buying things they didn't want. Because they were all based on deceptive business practices or straight-out lies, I think "trickery" is definitely the right word.
