The Console Race: Did Sony Diet Too Early?

[heruamon]

Sony was desperate, and had they not launched Slim for this holiday season, they would have seen their WW numbers drop even further behind 360 and Wii this holiday season. Even with the price cut for the PS3, and the great numbers to date, a simple fact remains…It cost MORE to develop software for the PS3 over the 360 and Wii…time and people equals a greater resource load on the bottom-line, so every publisher/developer has to fact that in.

The articles outlining Japanese developers pretty much summed it up, M$ provided some seed funding to help with start-up cost, and Sony comes along and demands extras for free…sure that works with Japanese developers, and for ONLY for there Japanese market games. Looking at something like Lost Planet 2, The 360 version is going to substantially outsell the PS3 version, imho. It doesn’t matter that the 360 outnumbers PS3, DEVELOPERS STILL HAVE TO SPEND MORE MONEY TO MAKE PS3 GAMES…that’s the bottom-line business decision.

PS3 Slim looks to be a great piece of hardware, and it provided a boost to PS brand, but M$ and Nintendo are sitting back and now have an opportunity to respond. We’ve heard that their will be no radical redesign 360 on the horizon, but we all know that’s a bluff to not have buyers long-eyeing that future console. I honestly believe we will see a redesign (even if only internally) 360 in 2 iterations. An updated arcade with version, with perhaps 4-8 GB of internal memory, and a pro model with 200+GB of memory will probably be the 2 main iterations. Chances are, we might see a integrated Natal box as the premium model as well. The chipset of course will be shrunk, but is it going to be 45 or 32 is the question…either one would radically reduce cost, but I think if the 32nm is ready we will see it. As for the Wii, I think Nintendo is going to roll out an HD without a doubt…It’s still going to be subpar compared to PS3 and 360, but it’s going to be much better than the current Wii…and we might even see better utilization of internal memory. Sony is kinda locked into the Slim for at least a couple of years, which means next holiday season is going to be another challenge for it, imho.