Avalach21 said: People keep comparing the PS3 to the likes of the Gamecube and the N-64 etc. and using this to argue that the "PS3 is gonna be ok." No. That's not a good arguement. Nintendo is a self sufficent company. Nintendo needs no one else. Having 3rd parties making great games on a Nintendo system is great, but Nintendo does not NEED them. They make many of their own games and that is enough to have a userbase. They sell their consoles for a profit from the get-go. Sony is a 3rd party dependent company. They throw away their consoles for a loss to get a large userbase. The 3rd parties follow the largest userbase. This is why Sony and 3rd parties have worked so well together in the past. The problem is that the PS3 will not have 3rd party support. Your arguement:"Well the N-64 and Gamecube didn't have a lot of market share, so if the PS3 has the same market share, they'll survive just like N64 and Gamecube did!" No. It doesn't work like that. Sony is already losing tons of money per PS3 they sell. (This brings another point. A PS3 price drop is FARRRRRR OFFFF. They are already losing an absurd amount of money per PS3. Anymore so and it would just be.... ridiculous?) Anyways, they are losing money from their hardware, and they are NOT getting the software to bring that money back. Nintendo had a bunch of their own great games, and when they sold, they made 100% of the profit. Marketshare is just something us fanboys squabble over on internet forums. I'm sure the bigwigs at Nintendo didn't mind that the Gamecube had like 15% of the marketshare that the PS2 did - the Gamecube was bringing in the profits. What's important to a business is PROFIT. Sony is losing the userbase, which in turn is losing the 3rd parties. They are only making a small percentage of income off of 3rd party games (compared to Nintendos 100% profit from first party games). Nintendo could survive without the 3rd parties. Sony cannot. Sony's business strategy DEPENDS on 3rd parties. Please don't compare the marketshare of the PS3 to the marketshare of the GC/N64. Marketshare is insignificant to profits.

Intelligent speaker here.

The comparison *I* would make is that PS3 is more like Saturn and Dreamcast than N64 and Gamecube.

In the marketshare/financial context this is the proper analogy.

It only resembles N64 due to a once-dominator losing its marketshare power in comparison to an upstart. Which makes another tie to the Saturn analogy.

Pyrrhic Victory is the key word here when you analyze Playstations' and XBoxes' business plans.

John Lucas

Taz42 said: In response to auroragb, I think Sony's problems with tools and SDKs have a lot to do with their development being spread out all over the world and lack of overall coordination. For example, if SCEE or SCEA needs some low level OS changes done in order to fix the debugger, they need to ask SCEI nicely and hope they will do it. Sometimes SCEI will do it and sometimes they will not and blame security issues. (in my experience, SCE priortizes security in development kits far higher than actually being able to develop) I'm sure they're making the right call sometimes, but it seems to me they are shooting themselves in the foot a lot. I hear that this summer there will be a tools update that will finally make SPU (you know, those 6 micro CPUs that is supposed to deliver all that supercomputer performance) debugging not suck. That will be super if it is true, but still it is almost 2 years late. You wonder why PS3 titles get delayed?

This is the exact thing that sony needs to get rid of.  The bureaucracy will kill developer relationship faster than anything.  Chief developers from the top tier publishers need direct access to system architect in sony that can make system wide architectural decisions and get them done.  going thru SCEA/SCEE is fine for the smaller developers, but sony needs to do this to hold on to exclusives and build confidence that publishers can succeed with PS3 titles...

auroragb said: Taz42 said: In response to auroragb, I think Sony's problems with tools and SDKs have a lot to do with their development being spread out all over the world and lack of overall coordination. For example, if SCEE or SCEA needs some low level OS changes done in order to fix the debugger, they need to ask SCEI nicely and hope they will do it. Sometimes SCEI will do it and sometimes they will not and blame security issues. (in my experience, SCE priortizes security in development kits far higher than actually being able to develop) I'm sure they're making the right call sometimes, but it seems to me they are shooting themselves in the foot a lot. I hear that this summer there will be a tools update that will finally make SPU (you know, those 6 micro CPUs that is supposed to deliver all that supercomputer performance) debugging not suck. That will be super if it is true, but still it is almost 2 years late. You wonder why PS3 titles get delayed? This is the exact thing that sony needs to get rid of.  The bureaucracy will kill developer relationship faster than anything.  Chief developers from the top tier publishers need direct access to system architect in sony that can make system wide architectural decisions and get them done.  going thru SCEA/SCEE is fine for the smaller developers, but sony needs to do this to hold on to exclusives and build confidence that publishers can succeed with PS3 titles...

I think it comes down to this:

Sony is a very poorly run company. It's run as if it is 15 small, separate entities that don't listen to one another. Imagine it as a huge household with 1 parent and 15 kids trying to run a business. The parent tries to reel in the kids constantly, mostly to no avail. One child may be successful, most others may not. These divisions (children) rotate between success and failure regularly but never achieve a unified vision.

This has been a complaint against Sony for the past 10 to 15 years. It's gotten so bad at times that they've released hardware that came with completely disfunctional bundled software (a Walkman in the UK a few years back) because the divisions didn't agree on a solution for the product. There was no clear leader in the project, leading to confusion, FUD, and multiple theories about how to create a product for a market. That's inexcusable.

I feel that this finally seeped into the Playstation model. It seems to me at times that SCE was forced into Blu-Ray because Sony wanted to push this format, not realizing the potentially disastrous results this could have on the Playstation brand. The same could be applied to Cell, but I'm not sure who started that project in Sony. It could have been SCE itself.

In short, it's been widely known that Sony needs a major restructure for years. I've been reading business reports regarding this very subject for nearly a decade now.

lol all you haters and doom and gloomers are still going to buy a PS3 regardless. lol. You don't have to look far to realise the software for Japan isn't out yet. Anyway it doesn't matter. When Sony's PS3 dominates again all you naysayers will be the first ones to ever deny doggin the system. A hell of a lot of people jsut don't have foresight and can't read btw the lines enough, if they did they would stay the hell away from the likes of the 360 and invest heavily on the PS3. Please, save this and quote me on it in a couple of years - please.

Chubear said: lol all you haters and doom and gloomers are still going to buy a PS3 regardless. lol. You don't have to look far to realise the software for Japan isn't out yet. Anyway it doesn't matter. When Sony's PS3 dominates again all you naysayers will be the first ones to ever deny doggin the system. A hell of a lot of people jsut don't have foresight and can't read btw the lines enough, if they did they would stay the hell away from the likes of the 360 and invest heavily on the PS3. Please, save this and quote me on it in a couple of years - please.

How about we save a bunch of time and quote you in six months when the PS3 is 10m consoles behind both the Wii and 360?

I can't believe how many Sony-lovers are still in denial over this. Yes, 2008 will probably be a good year for the PS3 with GT, FF, and MGS coming. But it will be too late to achieve "dominance" by that point.

Oh, and BTW, I always planned on buying a PS3. That hasn't changed. But I'm waiting until it drops to below $400 to do it. That probably won't happen for at least another 12-18 months at the minimum.

Chubear said: lol all you haters and doom and gloomers are still going to buy a PS3 regardless. lol. You don't have to look far to realise the software for Japan isn't out yet. Anyway it doesn't matter. When Sony's PS3 dominates again all you naysayers will be the first ones to ever deny doggin the system. A hell of a lot of people jsut don't have foresight and can't read btw the lines enough, if they did they would stay the hell away from the likes of the 360 and invest heavily on the PS3. Please, save this and quote me on it in a couple of years - please.

So PS3 domination starts next month?

What always surprises me is that PS3 fans simply don't get that sales on the level of the PS3 (currently) have consequences; when you sell 50,000 per month in Japan, 82,000 per month in North America and (soon enough) similarly in Europe few third parties will want to spend any real money developing games for your system. If the PS3 ends up having a 6 Million system userbase at the end of 2007 (which was unthinkably low at one point) it is unlikely that the PS3 would see any development except for ports from the XBox 360/PC and Wii; being how different the PS3 is from these systems it is likely that these ports would be of amazingly low quality which would only hurt the PS3.

 

PS3 domination starts next month. June 1st, at 10 a.m. pacific time. And if it doesn't start then, well, the domination will get pushed back to July 3rd. And if Sony still isn't ready (or willing) to dominate then, we have an August date (TBD) that will be set for the start of the domination. You see... Sony can take all the time it wants to dominate. Even better, Sony does not even have to have the biggest marketshare or a good size marketshare to dominate. Sony will dominate, because that's what Sony does. And Nintendo makes unfun kiddy games. And the Wii is an underpowered console with a gimmick feature. Sony is not doomed, its just taking its time. Its also waiting for all of us to save up enough money to buy a PS3. Who cares if the console doesn't have any fun games on it-- we just want to own it. Yes, I'm being sarcastic.

ramberk said: PS3 domination starts next month. June 1st, at 10 a.m. pacific time. And if it doesn't start then, well, the domination will get pushed back to July 3rd. And if Sony still isn't ready (or willing) to dominate then, we have an August date (TBD) that will be set for the start of the domination. You see... Sony can take all the time it wants to dominate. Even better, Sony does not even have to have the biggest marketshare or a good size marketshare to dominate. Sony will dominate, because that's what Sony does. And Nintendo makes unfun kiddy games. And the Wii is an underpowered console with a gimmick feature. Sony is not doomed, its just taking its time. Its also waiting for all of us to save up enough money to buy a PS3. Who cares if the console doesn't have any fun games on it-- we just want to own it. Yes, I'm being sarcastic.

Don't forget Christmas, the PS3 can always start its domination in Christmas ;) Or worst case, Christmas 2008, guaranteed... Maybe 2009?

The great thing is, by that time, the PS3 will be so far from the other consoles in terms of market share that domination will feel even better!

Don't worry, Sony has 10 years time to catch up... Remember: "The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up."

yellow15 said: Don't worry, Sony has 10 years time to catch up... Remember: "The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up."

that is a beautiful quote yellow15.

JohnLucas, I loved your analysis of the console generations. Haven't any of you guys ever had a teacher tell you that we need to learn from the past? Each generation has the same pattern. We on this forum don't need to learn the history of games, we need to embrace it. We need to know the past and apply it to the future. If JohnLucas can do it, so can the rest of us.