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Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Sony unveils PS3 ... why?

So the cat is out of the proverbial bag (and I'm sure there's more where that came from).

Why? Yeah, yeah ... OK ... it's E3. People love to announce things at E3. Missing E3 to announce things is apparently like not sending thank you cards in the game world.

Somehow, I think gamers would forgive. Here you have Microsoft who did a little viral marketing here, a little MTV special there, some covers on TIME ... ya know ... a marketing blitzkreig.

At this point all Sony really has accomplished is reminding the world that yes - they have a product too and yes, it should be every bit (perhaps more) as powerful and they'll have some games on it as well. However, they are also going to be drowned out by all the noise of E3. 360 news, Revolution news, gajillion product launches and probably a good deal of trance music. At the end of the week, people are going to be noting something like "Oh yes, and Sony unveiled the next PlayStation. Now Bob with Sports..."

Microsoft is very good at crafting a message. They had a crack team of scientists figure out years ago that if you end anything with "X", it makes it sound cool. Sometimes it works if you begin with "X" too. They've turned Bungie's love for injokes and project hoaxes into a powerful form of internet meme-play.

Since Sony isn't going to be launching for Christmas ... why bother with the interference now? It will be just some details that will get trampled over and probably give some craft XBox developer the notion to build their own EyeToy.

Course, I imagine every gaming forum on the planet probably has at least one thread dedicated to "XBox 360|PS3|Nintendo RULEZ OVER " type quibbling. Dang Sony, couldn't you let us have a couple months of peace?

2 comments:

Winkyboy said...

I don't get why it's so important to them who reveals their next console FIRST, or WHEN... So we wait a few months and we'll all have rumors & facts galore. We wait a little longer and the systems will be here.

Whoever's sitting on pins & needles waiting for their release is wasting their time. There's ALREADY so much to play out there that there's no way any one person can keep up. And that's just talking about games that get 85% reviews and up.

I think it's "addiction" that's currently keeping the gaming industry going as it is.

Josh said...

I don't even have an XBox or GameCube ... so I've got whole libraries to catch up on. I didn't think I'd ever say this, but thank goodness for backward compatibility.

It just feels like information overload right now. And E3 has barely begun. Personally I find all the ad showboating more annoying than impressive ... I'm no more likely to buy a PS3 because they released this information now than if they did 3 months before the real launch.