| theprof00 said: I should've stopped reading after your first sentence but I willr ead the rest. Keep in mind that this sentence is utterly false. DS is incredibly disruptive. The second and third paragraph I agree to. Sony made a half hearted counterattack. Your next sentence about paying no attention to vita? Well it's been out ww for one week now. Surely you should give it more time before you write something like that as if it's fact. The next paragraph is very interesting, in just how much I can possibly disagree with it. Yes it is a life-or-death for Sony. That's what I wrote in the OP. I also wrote that it is the only way it's similar to the Wii. So, what? The next paragraph, well, I agree with that too in the OP. It's a half hearted attempt, but SOny's thinking is all backwards. They think people will buy a vita for apps, when it's supposed ot be the otherway around. People buy smartphones because they need a phone, first and foremost. The apps just help guide them to which phone they should buy. In this way, vita is incapable of using the features that I've acknowledged to any real success.
Oh and 3ds IS upstreaming, and so is wii U. Sony's bastion of hope with the PSP was it's strong "gamer's lineup". Nintendo made a concious effort to not only make sure they got a system capable of monster hunter, but they also snatched up a lot of devs. These are really things Nintendo has never cared to pursue, but now they are. Don't you wonder why? The answer is because they are upstreaming, trying to push Sony into more and more hardcore games, and it's working.
As I said in the OP, Sony has some ways out of this mess, but it's going to take a lot of work and new thinking that I don't think Sony is capable, or willing, for the matter. |
The DS wasn't disruptive. It was simply the next generation of handheld. Just as Nintendo wasn't disruptive when they introduced the analog stick on the N64, adding a touchscreen to a handheld doesn't make it disruptive. The DS followed in the footsteps of the GBA. To be disruptive, it has to change the rules. On the other hand, the DS was a blue ocean product, in that it targetted the expanded audience. Part of the demonstration of this takes the form of this simple question: "what was the DS meant to be disrupting?" - it's not the GBA. The PSP hadn't established itself yet. If it were consoles, they wouldn't have then released the Wii.
My comment about Nintendo ignoring the Vita is valid. It has only been out for a week in america. It's been out for longer in Japan. More importantly, it has been in the news, etc, for longer than that. And Nintendo's response? Nothing. I'm not sure they've even commented on it, except perhaps to say things that group the 3DS and Vita together against smartphones, etc. For contrast, when Nintendo unveiled the Wii, Sony and MS couldn't shut up about their opinions of it (mostly negative).
And yes, the Wii released to massive fanfare. It may not have been amongst the internet "gamer circles", but that's entirely irrelevant. Guess what? Most gamers don't spend much time on the internet talking about it. Meanwhile, the press was huge for it, launch night queues were massive, the system was pretty much kept out of stock for something like two years, despite a fairly strong flow. The Wii broke records left, right, and centre. That's what I call "massive fanfare". And I said nothing about gimmicks. Also, the Wii was not successful solely due to the "expanded market". Why do you think that Brawl, Metroid Prime 3, and Zelda sold so well? Why do you think that Resident Evil 4 managed to sell more than 2 million copies, despite being a previous-gen game? In the end, it was third parties holding the Wii back from selling more to the "core market", by refusing to release quality titles. In the rare cases where they did, those titles performed quite well.
And no, the 3DS isn't upstreaming. It is bringing in more third-party support earlier on, but I think that's mostly because of the cookie that Nintendo included to entice them: 3D. The 3DS doesn't need to upstream - most gamers already own DSes. And the 3DS doesn't have anything that would be described as encroaching on Sony's turf. Note that I said nothing about WiiU, which is most definitely upstreaming. And Nintendo is strongly pursuing third-party support for 3DS because more support for 3DS with "core" games will mean more support for WiiU. Nintendo has had a very hard time getting third parties to support their consoles in meaningful ways, but their handhelds haven't been quite so troubled in that way.
I should now point out that not all of my previous post was meant to be criticising your OP. Generally, it was intended as me passing comment on the issue, with some criticism of certain points along the way. I just didn't see a need to specify when I was just talking about the topic.
