I read these articles http://www.explosion.com/will-this-be-sonys-last-generation/ & http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/why-sony-and-the-playstation-brand-is-in-way-more-trouble-than-you-think which basically stated the dire situation Sony is facing at the moment. Do you agree with this sentiment? With the sales flop of the Vita, and increased competition from both Nintendo and Microsoft that lead to the PS3 being unprofitable this generation( if you add up all the losses since first being released) it's hard to debate the situation that Sony is in troubled waters. What can they do to stay afloat and not go the way of companies like Kodak, Palm, etc. Will cutting their losses and dropping the Vita help? Here's an expert from the article thanks to N4G:
It seems like Sony is going the way of the Kodak camera. Although they initially outclassed many of the other systems on the market by offering incredible hardware, the XBOX 360 offered a significant leap in graphics that put it ahead of Nintendo and arguably on par with the PS3. From this new vantage point, Microsoft cut into Sony’s niche of high-quality, high-priced, exclusive games…while lowering the entrance fee. Even if Sony’s hardware is a better bargain for the price, because it barely outperforms the gaming capabilities of the XBOX 360, it can’t compete with the XBOX 360’s price.
The lackluster sales of all of their current-generation systems may have pushed them into a rut that discourages their continued involvement in the games industry. Sony hasn’t always focused on gaming: cameras, HD televisions, and those archaic things called ‘CD players’ used to be their main industry. Those industries were pretty solid, and excluding the bit about CD players, they had a solid company model. In the past few years the games industry has grown, but perhaps not as much as Sony had anticipated. It wouldn’t be unreasonable of them to choose now to dip out of the industry entirely.
The price of the Vita, and what it will cost Sony
The design of the Vita is also going to come back to haunt Sony. The $250 system, complete with expensive, proprietary memory, is sold at a loss, with Sony hoping to recover that money in game sales and volume. The system has hit a rough patch at retail and, once again, it’s likely Sony is simply unable to lower the price to take advantage of the strong software support that’s on the way.
How bad are Vita sales? Sony hid the sales numbers of the Vita in its financial report by combining the sales of the PSP with the Vita. The results were still dire. “In a newly released earnings report [PDF] for the quarter ending in June, Sony revealed that the PSP and Vita combined for just 1.4 million sales worldwide. That’s less than the 1.8 million units the aging PSP sold by itself a year ago at this time, and less than the 1.86 million 3DS systems Nintendo sold in the same quarter this year,” Ars Technica reported. That’s not to say that Nintendo is in the free and clear, as both Sony and Nintendo are scared shitless of Apple’s market penetration when it comes to gaming. Neither are likely to repeat the successes of past portable systems, but Nintendo is at least in a better position with lower-priced hardware that isn’t trying to replicate functions of your smart phone.
