| fooflexible said: What hasn't been addressed enough here, is not the console ps3 sales, it's their software sales. Granted everyones first reaction is that, "Wait till the good stuff get here!" but no one who's buying the system is a gamer, gamers aren't buying the ps3. Heck only one game per 3 consoles is being sold. And thats the ratio if you don't count the existing 900,000+ userbase, if you add them only 1 game is being bought with a system per every 4 or 5 systems sold. Even if you think the ps3 is a trojan horse that will later convert its userbase to sales, I don't see how that'll happen, if you don't want to buy a single game when you first get the most state of the art video game system, you most likely won't want to get a game at all. That means most of the ps3 sales are blu-ray movie player sales. Their attach rate is falling through the floor. Now publishers have to say to themselves, it's not selling well, and most of what's selling isn't for games. And what's going to kill Sony is they lose money on the system sales, and make it on software, what good is a system that sells, when no one is buying the games? And don't tell it's good enough to just push blu-ray movies, if that were true why bother investing billions in the gaming industry, and just give out cheap blu-ray players from the start. The attach ratio right now is a huge siren going off. Even the X360 is selling more games, and thats more important to publishers then a userbase, if they don't believe the userbase is here to buy games. |
I agree with that from a video game perspective, but it is true that Sony intended the PS3 primarily as a trojan force for bluray. The PS2 was a powerful catalyzer to the nascent DVD market and Sony figured why not control the movie format this time also. The problem they face of course is that they may not win (they have a lead in a tiny market which is good but it doesn't portend victory yet), most people won't be ready to upgrade to HD movies for many years, by the time they are most will probably prefer DVD quality digital downloads over expensive HD players and discs, and regardless of what happens Sony appears to have done permanent damage to their video game division. The PS3 should be used in business schools as the textbook example of how not to ruin the most profitable part of your company. Whatever happens, Sony wasn't simply looking at software attach rates, bluray sales also factored in. What Sony forgot in its quest to outdo Nintendo's famed maltreatment of 3rd parties was that 3rd parties only care about software sales.
