DanneSandin said:
Kresnik said:
As Sales rightly said, Sony are in the worst position out of the three - no doubt.
What I think varies. There's so many points to consider.
On the one hand, this generation (in home consoles) is definitely Sony at their worst. High initial price point with few games; incredibly difficult hardware to create games on; a not-quite-as-good-as-the-competition online service, so on and so forth.
As the generation went on, however, Sony seemed (at least to me) to completely change. With the launch of the slim in 2009 the PS3 just gained so much momentum which arguably it still hasn't lost yet; the online service was greatly improved; the games have been great, there's so much to love about my PS3, and I think the sales have reflected that.
So, by that logic, if Sony carried this momentum through to the PS4 with one other change (make it easy to code for - which if Vita is anything to go by is a virtual certainty) then they could definitely hold on to - if not improve their market share.
I'd say another positive is that they're popular in all 3 markets. They have a bigger dominance in Europe which I can realistically see them holding - the US is going to be hard against Microsoft but there's no reason why they can't sell a bucketload of all consoles in all 3 main regions. The Playstation name is still a relatively big name.
There's some stuff they're gonna have to improve though. Marketing being the main culprit.
On the other hand, the competition is now far greater than it ever was during their eras of dominance. Wii-U may or may not be the next big thing in gaming and Microsoft could conceivably back Sony into a corner by going with a powerful console and selling it at a massive loss.
There's also the main problem, which is throughout the PS1 & 2 era Sony relied heavily on third parties to shift their consoles, and we're moving increasingly back towards all of the big 3 getting all the games (which admittedly happened a lot during the PS2 era, but many of the 'huge' games were secured on timed exclusivity for Sony). I think Sony are offputting this by working hard on a great network of second-party studios, exclusivity deals etc. I think the relationships with many of the big publishers are still there, but as we've seen from Vita - they can't always be relied on.
But that brings me to Vita, which is a different case altogether really. Definitely the last dedicated handheld I see Sony releasing. Whether or not they incorporate it into PS4 remains to be seen, but I certainly don't think it's a bad idea.
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This pretty much sums it up rather nicely. I just wanna add Sony's financial state they're in right now.
Sony's in trouble alright, but not doomed. If PS4 flops as hard as Vita it's over - but that won't happen.
I think MS might be in the best position to win next gen; they've got the money and they've taken a lot of market share this gen.
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Agreed with both statements lol.
Only thing I would add is Micrososft is probably the only one in the position to also kill Sony if they wanted to by releasing a powerful consoel and selling for a huge loss. That is assuming they will bait Sony into playing the same game Micrososft does,
What Sony needs to do is work out what Sony wants to do and nto what Micrososft is doing.
Look at N64 and gamecube as examples. Both consoles sold pretty shit, hwoever they where profitable for Nintendo. At the end of the day does it matter if you sell 100million consoles or 30million consoles? as long as you profit that is what should matter.
