ThrowBack Article "Why the Ps2 will fail"

[Bodhesatva]

Parokki said:
Oh my, there's some serious wishful thinking going on in this thread. First of all those arguments for why the PS2 would fail are completely bogus.

The Dreamcast was already dead when it launched. It was a nice console, but wasn't in any position to compete with anyone. Sega had lost a huge chunk of its fanbase, financial resources, and most importantly developer support with the Saturn. Heck, even Segata Sanshiro was dead. You can't make a console without Segata Sanshiro.

The price factor was also completely different back then. The difference between $300 and $200 is only a hundred bucks, and we can safely say that kind of an amount doesn't make a huge difference. Not to early adopters anyway, as a vast majority of PS2s only got sold after the machine dropped to $200 and below.

The Gamecube turned out to be much later than this guy though, and it didn't exactly have a stunning launch line up. Luigi's Mansion was ok, but no system seller, while the next Mario was Sunshine (probably the weakest game in the main Mario series) and the next Zelda was the impressive Wind Waker in late 2002/early 2003. I love my Cube, but there's no denying it was in a very weak position to compete against the PS2. The same with the Xbox really.

And no, people in general were not saying the PS2 was going to fail. Most people knew it was going to do very well, and the people spelling doom were about as attached to reality as the people who think the PS3 is doing well now. Anybody else remember this gem? That's what the news was like back then.

The PS3 on the other hand has a price twice as high as any succesful console has ever had and has practically no chance of ever lowering it to mass-market levels. The launch games were average with one great title, the first year contains only a few gems, the big titles have been pushed into very late 2007/early 2008, and most importantly the next destination of virtually all big third party games is extremely uncertain.

Then there's also, how instead of launching a year before the competition, the PS3 came out last/second last, instead of having a 15M lead has a handicap of 7M that's growing daily, and how instead of weak competiton is facing one console that is doing substantially better than the 24M seller last round, and another that is having the best first year of any console in history. It's doomed and there's no way around it.

Oh, and please stop saying Sony consoles last 8+ years. Succesful consoles last that long, the company had nothing to do with it.

You're wrong. The vast majority of the people love the box.