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"Sony has some good news"

Sony can at last cut themselves a little slack as their share price has hit a 5 year high today. They hope to make much less of a loss on their PS3 sales than during the various launch phases and although they're still not likely to (ever?) see a profit on the PS3 itself, it's considered highly likely that sales of the console will pick up further, allowing Sony to make money back from games.

To help boost this, and take some of the sting out of the arguement that the PS3 is currently not worth buying due to the lack of original exclusive games, they've also announced that they're pushing for at least 15 exclusives this year (though they mean financial year, so expect some of these by March 08). These do include downloadable games such as Warhawk, though.

Many people think Sony needs to cut the price of the PS3 to keep up with Microsoft and Nintendo, but they're obviously trying hard in other areas to make the console much more of a worthy purchase. The main launch game which attracted people, Motorstorm, is getting an upgrade soon to provide more, much needed, game modes and a few bug fixes. They really need more online modes for it as well, though, in my opinion.

Sony are now launching a PS3 with an even larger hard-drive in South Korea. The network infrastructure there is so well advanced that many homes have on demand access to a very high speed internet connection, so Sony see a potential increase in downloads there.

Unfortunately, there are no plans for them to do the same anywhere else at present. Maybe if BT get their act together in changing over to Fibre Optic (their current plan is to gradually replace all the copper wire in the country, but at BT's usual speed this technology will be outdated by the time they even get started) we could see similar plans over here, especially since the 360 will have it's larger hard drive available soon.

Even if the cut was down to £350 they'd make it up by the increase of game sales reasonably quickly. Their tactic of hoping there's going to be a sudden rush to buy the PS3 is only helping Nintendo and Microsoft. You'd have thought they'd work out by now that it's not going to happen.

"Ubisoft CEO says PS3 price must come down

Following the lackluster sales of the PlayStation 3 in April, the CEO of one of the top third-party publishers has called for the console's price to come down. Speaking at a Reuters technology summit, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot expressed his belief that the gaming platform's price is putting off many would-be buyers. Reuters reported Guillemot as saying that Sony needs to lower the price "quite significantly" and predicting that Sony would certainly have a reduced share of the market in this generation of consoles. As for Ubisoft's PS3 support, Guillemot said the publisher was planning a game exclusive to the system, for release in Europe."

NORTH AMERICAN HARDWARE SALES FOR APRIL 2007:

DS: 471k
Wii: 360k
PS2: 194k
PSP: 183k
360: 174k
GBA: 84k
PS3: 82k

What amuses me is that Game Boy Advance outsold Playstation 3 in Japan recently (according to Gamesindustry.biz)

Good news for Nintendo methinks...

FantasyMeister wrote:
> Basically they launched too late at too high a price with not
> enough games.

Always thought they launched too early actually.

Hedfix wrote:
> "Ok guys... the game division's dragging us down we need
> some original ideas..."

"Release a stripped down PS3 that plays PS3 games and regular DVDs but doesn't worry about anything else, then price it somewhere between the Wii and the 360?"

"..."

"...."

"You're fired."

pb wrote:
> To help boost this, and take some of the sting out of the
> arguement that the PS3 is currently not worth buying due to the
> lack of original exclusive games, they've also announced that
> they're pushing for at least 15 exclusives this year

Sony still don't get it do they? It's not the lack of original exclusive games. It's a console that's priced as it is because it includes 30+ features that most gamers don't want. Even the XBox360 has about 20 features I never use, but I don't care, it's cheaper, it came out earlier, it has a huge catalogue of games for it.

By the time Sony do get around to bringing out 15 exclusives nobody is going to care, except the people that still own PS3s.

Basically they launched too late at too high a price with not enough games. Despite the gaming market being colossal now compared to 1993, well, remember this?

"For a significant period of the product's life cycle, 3DO's official stance on pricing was that the 3DO was not a video game console, it was a high-end audio-visual system and was priced accordingly, so no price adjustment was needed."

The 3DO stuck around for 3 years then was discontinued. The similarities between its conception/birth/demise and the current PS3 should be ringing alarm bells at Sony HQ.

"Ok guys... the game division's dragging us down we need some original ideas..."

"er...THREE MORE SPIDER-MAN MOVIES!"

"GENIUS!"

"...just in time to launch the Playstation 4!"