Android 3.0 Game Phone.... by SONY

[famousringo]

superchunk said:

famousringo said:

I view this as Sony basically bowing out of the handheld gaming market. It's Google's platform now, Sony is just one amongst many competing hardware vendors.

What's to stop HTC from making an almost identical handset that runs all the same software?

How is this bad for Sony? They would still make money from the hardware they do produce as well as a potentially exponential growth in PSN and what woudl have been similar to 1st party titles on a PSP on all Android devices.

From a long term growth point of view for Sony's gaming division this is really smart and I would want this phone.

Not to mention, most other hardware vendors wouldn't want to build device with those gaming controls, especially if this device becomes available on all of the carriers.

This is bad for Sony because, historically, they don't make any money on their gaming hardware. They subsidize the hardware and make money by charging licensing fees to software publishers.

Now pretend you're a publisher with a game that you've made for the PSPhone. Your game is perfectly capable of running on many other Android devices, so why restrict yourself to the revenues from the PSPhone only? You could be selling to an install base that is much, much larger. And if publishers really can persuade the whole Android Market to go for their games, you can bet that HTC, Samsung, and/or Motorola is going to build some competing game-centric hardware.

The console business model relies heavily on exclusivity. Android is about as far from exclusive as you can get.