Your Hot Cup of Rant

I imagine that there are more than a few people who have already chosen to comment on this, but being a player of video games I feel obligated to toss my proverbial hat into the ring.

For those who are unaware, Sony has officially announced a price drop for the Playstation 3 console… sort of. The 60GB model will drop from, essentially, $600 to $500, while Sony will also release a new 80GB model of the console, which is expected to retail for, unsurprisingly, $600. This is all well and good if the issue the common gamer was having was one of “bang for the buck”, but that was never the issue in the first place. The issue was, and still will be for a lot of people, that $500 American is an insanely large amount of money to pay for something that, in effect, is used to play video games.

Now, to someone who does not have any sort of experience in the field of financial analysis and is therefore unqualified to make any sort of valid or reasonable suggestions to a company on how they could make money, it would seem to me that the obvious solution would have been to also drop the price on the 20GB PS3 to, say, $400-450, thus appealing to three markets:

1) people who don’t want to pay $500 for a Playstation 3,

2.) people who want a cheap Blu-Ray player, and

3.) people who don’t really have much use for a 60 or 80GB hard drive, since they don’t want to download movies or television shows onto their video game system.

Sony feels differently, however, as they’ve essentially eliminated this SKU entirely. As noted, I’m not qualified to offer an insightful opinion on the matter, so be aware that when I say I think this is batshit insane and will ultimately resolve nothing, it’s more “unqualified opinion” than anything meaningful.

Of course, I’m not the only person who feels this way. Says Kazumi Kitaue, Konami’s NA/EU CEO, “I don’t expect a substantial impact,“… says George Harrison (the Nintendo VP, not the dead Beatle who did music for Time Bandits), “A $100 price drop won’t make a difference.” Now, granted, Nintendo isn’t exactly the company to ask when wants a fair and unbiased opinion of their competitor, but Konami’s less-than-stellar outlook on the situation is rather unsettling, especially when one considers they are developing one of the few “system selling”games for the PS3 in Metal Gear Solid 4… which they are once again hinting may go elsewhere.

Combine this with Bandai-Namco’s announcement that Beautiful Katamari is now XBox 360 exclusive, Sony’s announcement that backwards compatibility will now be software emulation-based only, which is substantially less dependable and more likely to not work (which is shades of Microsoft, only after the fact), and oh yes, Virtua Fighter 5 (one of about four exclusive titles the PS3 has that do not suck) will not only be coming to the Xbox 360, but will feature Online Play (something the PS3 version lacks), and one cannot help but mentally envision that Sony is now run by Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick.

Springtime for Hitler, indeed.

This sort of thing is pretty common when the game console market changes generations, to be fair. Nintendo had no idea what happened when the Sega Genesis came out in front and managed to stay there for several years. Neither Sega nor Nintendo was prepared to see Sony dash out in front and stay there through two separate consoles. Everyone assumes what used to work will continue to work forever, and they’re always caught unprepared when someone else manages to take them out of their top spot. Sony should have been prepared for this; they should have known this was a distinct possibility, and they should have arranged contingency plans in case of such a thing. Instead of doing so, however, they chose to instead rely on their silly new technology and the strength of their brand name, both of which they could have easily avoided if they had bothered to pay attention to the events of the past.

Your new technology is lame and no one cares about it. Blu-Ray technology is important to people who want the best and brightest picture in their movies and to people who are too lazy to change a disc once or twice in their gaming adventures. Anyone else would look at such technology and see useless, expense-adding technology that they personally have little or no use for, either because they’re perfectly okay with changing a disc or because they see no reason to own something that allows them to own a slightly sharper version of “Groundhog Day” for $35. You, perhaps, might be agreeable to purchasing a movie player that would allow you higher resolution images of Bill Murray’s large, pockmarked nose, but the vast majority of people are quite content with the DVD version of the film and do not require said high-quality proboscis.

More importantly, your brand name is bullshit. Okay? Let’s not mince words here. No one cares about your brand name because no one cares about brand names, period. And I’m not talking about the branding concept within the world of video games either; at the absolute most, a brand name equates to a certainty that the product in question won’t maim or kill you when you operate it. It does not equate to “loyalty” for the majority of consumers because the vast majority of consumers either want what’s newest, what’s cheapest, or what fills their needs, and right now they’re choosing the Wii and the 360. If your brand name meant anything, and I mean ANYTHING, you wouldn’t have gone from first place to last place in the console war in the span of a year.

I don’t care how devoted a Sony fanboy you are. I don’t care how much you buy into market speculation and analysis. Sony as a company is doing the most ass-backwards things they can in an attempt to try and boost sales of a system that would sell much better if there were actual games available for the console that people wanted to own. Most of the “must own” games of 2007 and 2008 are not exclusive at all, and those that are may not stay that way for much longer. Eliminating the low-end model and simply shifting their present console designs around a bit does not rectify the fact that $500 is entirely too much money to spend on a video game console if you do not have tons of disposable cash lying about. Those of you who are defending Sony need to stop, because your valiant and chivalrous efforts amount to little more then the bleating of sheep in the face of the insurmountable big bad wolf. Your chosen product is in free-fall, and until the creators of the product realize what it is, exactly, that they have done wrong, their opponents (and in some cases their own allies) will continue painting the target upon the Earth below in anticipation of the eventual crash and burn.

And in conclusion, the world needs an enema.