Posts by Fletch

  • Playstation 3 - Home

    I don't think they're liars, cheaters, or scumbags. I think they're poor businessmen.

    Let's look at business screwups:

    1) DESIGN - People prefer smaller, sleeker consoles. Ms learned this when they designed the 360. So did Nintendo. Sony made theirs much bigger, rounder, and uglier (and I'm using the fact fact multiple design agencies have said so, not just my personal opinion).

    2) LAUNCH TITLES - Resistance? Really? That's all they could come up with? Sony Entertainment has literally hundreds of franchises to work with, and their premier title was Resistance? First off, John Q public had never heard of the game. Second, it didn't look light years better than stuff already out on the 360. It's not a system pusher. Third, it's not a game that you see at a friend's house and immediately turn around and say "Shit, I need to go get a PS3."

    3) PRICE - $700 to play games? Whu? I get it has Bluray, but seriously... A very small fraction of the hardcore gamer market can even afford that price point, let alone spend the money willingly. Bluray as a tech is still #2 in the market, and neither of the HD formats has gotten any sort of market traction warrneting the purchase. All that aside, if you're banking on the top .01% of the market to be your launch base, you need to treat them better (see below). At the end of the day, it's hard as a consumer to want to buy one when you can get both a 360 and Wii for the same price and get two consoles with multiple "must have" games.

    4) NO-HASSLE - It takes less than 5 minutes to get a 360 up a running and have an XBL account set up. The Wii only needs a few boxes of info filled in. The PS3 clocks in at about 15 minutes. The UI is atrocious, and there is no excuse for that. People are excited when they turn on their console for the first time. They can't wait to play their first game. Making them sit for 15 minutes, going through endless prompts and "Are you really, really sure?" boxes kills that joy, so the first taste is disappointment.

    5) CUSTOMIZATION - The 360 has XBL avatars and achievement points. Nintendo has Miis. Sony has... a feature to be delivered nearly a year after launch. I understand when companies can't be feature complete out of the box, but when something comes a year alter, that pretty much means that it was never targeted for launch.

    6) RESPECT THE CUSTOMER - This is where Sony fucked up the worst. Let's see, first they lied about the degree of backwards compatibility in both America and the EU. Then they claimed they outsold the Wii, when they didn't. Then they called the Wii a console for little children. Then they called people liars for saying there were a lot of PS3s just lying around stores. Then they claimed their feature set was greater than the 360, which is just a dumb statement to make. Then they blamed the fact it doesn't run on certain HDTVs on the manufacturers, when it was a Sony firmware flaw. Then they went off on Kotaku, who were probably the last people saying anything nice about their console. Sony just keeps fucking up. Shit, hire a PR director who knows what they're doing. Look at Reggie over at Nintendo. When the Wii was announced and everybody made fun of the name, he brushed it off with a good joke at E3, and then everybody backed off and said "Hey, it's not that bad of a name." When people take pot shots at Sony, they send them cease and desist letters. If you're going to sell a feature incomplete console at $700 with no AAA games, you need to make damn sure your base is happy. When that base abandons your console, you're just left with overpriced hardware that no casual customer is going to touch (Sega Saturn).

  • Playstation 3 - Home

    I'll be the first to admit, i love the idea on paper. You're playing HL2, unlock an award, and all of a sudden, you've got your very own HEV suit for your Home Avatar. It's pretty cool. Like Animal Crossing and XBL Achievments.

    But man, do I have any confidence that Sony won't fuck this up? Hell no. They've managed to fuck up everything about this console. I've stopped giving them the benefit of the doubt. If they deliver it as well as they promise it, then they'll win back some credibility, but until then, I'm just taking it as PR bullshit.

  • January US Console sales

    Quote from Furyo

    Reno, it's called marketing Those retailers are saying that just so people aren't completely scared and they don't end up with all that lauch allocation in their warehouse too long

    I got the same thing going into a Gamestop the other day. The guy made a comment about whether I had any next gen consoles, and I said I had a Wii. He then asked if I was interested in getting my hands on a PS3, to which I said no. He then said that I should get it now while they had a few in stock because they were selling like hotcakes. Of course then I could go across the street to Target or Walmart and see 3 or 4 at each store, or go to the Best Buy next to work that has had a stack of over a dozen just sitting there in the wide open for a month now. PS3's might be selling, but they're selling at a rate less than the stocking rate. Wiis on the other hand are always gone within hours of a shipment getting in, and the shipment sizes are much larger and faster than Sony. It's the Sega Saturn all over again.