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Saturday, September 23, 2006

A WTF Moment From Sony

There have been a few times in the past when I've ragged on various sites for continously quoting certain key Microsoft employees for repeated relatively vapid and often completely unfounded statements as if they were some kind of source of news.

Listening to one executive bash another company's product is generally two steps away from listening to two fanboys duke it out in forums. The only difference is that the executives use better grammar and the fanboys are often better informed.

Just to prove I'm not playing bias here, lemme add Sony to the list:

"[Nintendo and their DS] are appealing to the same audience that Game Boy has always appealed to. And if you look at the adoption rate of the DS over the first 17 months, not only does it trail the PSP but it also trails their other platforms ... They're potentially losing some of their core audience and they're not really expanding beyond that, and we think we're expanding into a completely new audience as we did with PlayStation ... we'll dip down to the younger consumer eventually, and we'll ultimately appeal to that vastly Earth wide audience we carved out with the original PlayStation."
-- Sony: Nintendo is losing audience, not expanding it [Joystiq]

Firstly, Nintendo has titles like Brain Age which has gone on the books for scoring highly with non-gamers. The PSP has nothing remotely similar. Secondly, the Nintendo DS has spanked the PSP in sales like a naughty schoolboy. If anyone is trailing anyone else - Sony is doing the following.

Thirdly - Earth wide audience? WTF. Oh wait no - that actually makes perfect sense.

Sony executives are Martians. It explains why their PR is so bizarre and why they can't communicate very well to consumers. English is their second culture.

Well, welcome to Earth Sony execs. Now, please hire a decent translator and start explaining why the PlayStation 3 is worth it's price tag for the holidays.



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2 comments:

Greg Tannahill said...

As much as I loved my PSP, I'll just observe again that at TGS Sony couldn't even make their PSP look exciting when Nintendo weren't even at the show. My current advice to PSP owners is when you're done with Metal Gear Portable Ops and Vice City Stories, put your PSP down and start investing heavily in a DS library.

(My post entitled "PSP Games That Don't Suck" continues to be the highest traffic page of my blog, all of it coming from search engines, which I take as evidence of something.)

Josh said...

This is the day I've had ... I actually though I had already responded here.

Sony seems to be making the same mistake with the PSP that they are with the PS3. It's not that reality is so bad for them - it's that they act like it's perfect and they don't need to change anything. The PSP has good points, but Sony isn't willing to address any of the bad.

Unless they either get a better library or improve it's form or functionality in 2007 - Nintendo will bury the PSP once the Wii has an audience. Assuming the DS will be a decent satellite product to the Wii, Nintendo will have given a killer argument towards it compared to Sony's "well, it will have some PS3 integration."