| NorthStar said:Ha!!! Thats why Sony has been in fist place in the console market for 12 years right? just go play wit your wee man. (notice i said wee not Wii no fanboy hate please) |
Kutaragi is an engineer. Yokoi was a toymaker. Each PlayStation console has been a great piece of technology. But starting with PS2, each PS console has been needlessly expensive for Sony, and that great expense hastened Kutaragi's downfall.
Imagine if Kutaragi had taken a Yokoi-influenced approach towards PS2, and made PS2 more like Gamecube. Not with the dumb lunchbox design, or the tiny discs, or the lack of DVD-playback... But just with the focus on efficiency over power... Gamecube was cheaper to develop, cheaper to produce, more powerful than PS2... And in the end, other than the DVD-playback, it had the same basic functionality (even though PS2 was talked up as some sort of super-duper living-room entertainment and media hub just like PS3).
And compare the Gamecube to the XBox. There's a perfect example of a console made as a toy versus a console made as a piece of cutting-edge technology when its not the market leader. The toy was profitable, the cutting-edge system would have been a financial disaster for anyone but Microsoft.
Kutaragi's persistence and ambition and dedication to his vision... His perfect positioning of both PS and PS2 to not only cause great growth in the videogame market, but to create the first worldwide dominant consoles... His ability as an engineer to make systems that excited game programmers... The new artistic movements in videogames that came largely as a result of his push for the cutting-edge, first with cinema-style and then sandbox-style games... Hopefully this is Kutaragi's legacy... Not his often misguided hardware design choices that hurt his own companies profitability and led to this dangerous showdown between PS3 and 360.
BTW, great article reverie.
"[Our former customers] are unable to find software which they WANT to play."
"The way to solve this problem lies in how to communicate what kind of games [they CAN play]."
Satoru Iwata, Nintendo President. Only slightly paraphrased.
