Sony vs Atari and fallout regarding the videogames industry...

[Zappykins]

I don't think the comparison to Sony and Atari is quite analogous. People didn't just stop buying Atari games, but stopped buying console games as they were moving to Computers. The Apple II, Atari and Commodore were what people were gaming on. Plus, yes some terrible games and mistakes that Atari made, like not updating their console and wasting money on things like the ET game. (I was genuinely surprised Nintendo was able to resurrect the console.)

But the biggest blunder of all, in my opinion, is the contractor in charge of the Atari Amiga computer had in his contract that he could keep his work. He had some fight with Atari management and left and thus went to another computer company and out came the Commodore Amiga. Commodore wasn't as good as in marketing, and while superior in many ways to the PC and Macintosh, it wasn't able to survive. Had it stay as the Atari Amiga, computer might be very different today.

Sony really burned themselves with the HD format Disk war. The war was unnecessary, and while they did win, it came at such a cost that it is an empty victory - as they lost so much money. And it gave streaming a chance to catch up and surpass Bluray. I have a Bluray, I like it, but I also think it's a dead end. With streaming, downloading, Ultraviolet, etc. I don't think I will be buying many disk at all. The numbers show I am not alone in this.

I don't see Sony as a brand as significant single item like Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic is IMO still more recognizable than anything Sony has to nongamers and people of all ages. Now, that being said, Sony does had a powerful Playstation brand. But there is no reason they couldn't do what Activision did on the Atari 2600. They could bring the Playstation brand to the WiiU and X720 and just make games. It could be "Playstation on the PC, Phone, Tablet and Consoles."

Having worked at Sony, I can say it's biggest problem is often itself. It's arrogance, not recognizing talent, and lack of ability to work with others creates it own problems. Sony's stock is now in junk status, and yet they are also the 3rd biggest manufacture in phones. They could use a hit on their hands and I am not sure if it's a low cost console, exiting hardware and just making tons of multiformat games, being bought out by someone else, or something new the new head guy has in mind. Especially as it looks as soon there may be another console or two in the market.