Dryden said:
This goes back to the original PlayStation -- Sony were the pioneers of dumping to put their competitors out of business. The day Sega announced the Saturn was going to be $399 at E3, the Sony keynote speaker walked up to the podium 15 mintues later and said, "two-hundred and ninety-nine dollars," then turned right back around and walked off. There had already been a furor over whether or not Sega, Nintendo, 3DO, Atari, and/or others would file a joint lawsuit against Sony to stop the PlayStation's release in North America on the premise of "dumping" (deliberately selling a product overseas at a loss and significantly less than your domestic price, just to stifle competition). One of the reasons Sony was able to weather the losses on the original PlayStation is that they cut every corner they could to get the price as low as possible in manufacture. One example being that nearly the entire laser assembly was constructed from plastic. This was later discovered to be susceptible to warping and caused a number of failures in the first gen units. Oh well. Another crucial decision was having the PS built around a flimsy, but cheap, clamshell lid instead of a tray or slot loading drive. With the PS3, Sony went 'wrong' in just about every aspect and unnecessarily drove up the price of the console. Microsoft, on the other hand, cut every corner they could. Sure, Microsoft's reliability was terrible at first, but then, so was Sony's back in 1995. All Microsoft has done is copy Sony's own business model from 15 years ago. |
Yep, welcome to multinational conglomerates owning the vodeogame industry. You all better be thankfull that atleast we've still got one "true" game company making systems. Granted Santa's (shigeru) gone a bit crazy lately but he's still got the magic.
Lets not forget the quality of Nintendo products. Never has anything of theirs been crappy built.
“When we make some new announcement and if there is no positive initial reaction from the market, I try to think of it as a good sign because that can be interpreted as people reacting to something groundbreaking. ...if the employees were always minding themselves to do whatever the market is requiring at any moment, and if they were always focusing on something we can sell right now for the short term, it would be very limiting. We are trying to think outside the box.” - Satoru Iwata - This is why corporate multinationals will never truly understand, or risk doing, what Nintendo does.
(Former) Lead Moderator
