Sony in dire times, implications for the gaming hardware?

With what?

Microsoft has virtually no worthwhile in-house development anymore, they have virtually no 3rd party exclusives, and after a few years the Kinect has a game library more shallow than the 32X's.

And with Call of Duty and Battlefield, and with Bungie gone, I'm not sure Halo is going to be able to continue to pull their ass out of the fire.

If anything, I would predict MS will be forced out of the console business after the next generation, unless they do something dramatic.

 

MS is still hanging on, almost every game seems to be selling better on 360 than PS3...and I can't think of a single worthwhile PS3 3rd party exclusive off the top of my head.
What happened to the gaming market? The Wii happened and showed that overhyped gimmicky waggle shit is really popular and the rest of the manufacturers jumped in. But what happened to XBLA and PSN? It seems like most of the releases these days are just pooped out ROMs, and actual original games are getting really rare...

 

Sony still has the Yakuza games and a few others. Really though, 3rd party exclusives are pretty stupid these days.

But Sony has much more in terms of first party abilities. Microsoft has damn near NOTHING.

Right now the 360 is ahead, but I think with the next generation of consoles that's going to change unless Microsoft pulls their head out of their ass and invests in some in-house development. If they don't have anything exclusive, then why bother getting the next Xbox over the next Playstation?

 

MS still has Forza (although Forza 4 somehow managed to sell a lot less than GT5, and let's face it, GT5 is a shit game and the only real reason to prefer it over Forza 4 is fanboyism) and Halo, but yeah, that's about it. Then again, you could just switch Xbox and Playstation over in "If they don't have anything exclusive, then why bother getting the next Xbox over the next Playstation?". Seems like non-first party exclusives are slowly dying and outside of (maybe) Uncharted Sony doesn't have anything that spectacular either. As a game Heavy Rain is nothing special, it has a good atmosphere but the plot is laughable and full of holes.

 

Right, but what I'm saying is that Sony has a more robust stable of 1st party exclusives (and people to develop them) than Microsoft.

Uncharted, Resistance, Killzone, Little Big Planet, whatever from Team Ico, Twisted Metal, God of War, etc.

Microsoft currently has, as you pointed out, Forza and Halo. And Halo isn't being developed by Bungie anymore, so who knows how that turns out? Sure, they still have Lionhead, but without Peter Molyneux I'm not sure how good they'll be. They also have the guys who made the Kinect Star Wars, but we all know how that turned out. And then there would be Gears of War, but Epic has already said that after the trilogy if they made anymore GoW they'd be interested in the series going multiplatform.

My point was, Sony has a bunch of exclusives and the in-house teams to make them. Microsoft technically has a rich stable of IPs (Halo, Forza, a bunch of stuff from Rare, maybe Crimson Skies, Lost Odyssey, etc.), but they don't have anyone to make the games (good), and they seem more interested in chasing the ghosts of fads than delivering anything resembling a quality gaming product.

 

Not sure if its a coincidence but they announced the Vita Metal Gear Solid collection US version for June release. Originally the June release was Japan only and US for winter. Thats the first sign I've seen in the gaming division that something could be up and rushing to get releases out.

I think the fact that the head of sony entertainment Kaz was chosen to lead sony back to success shows that the gaming division is fine or they are not worried about that particular division. The Television and phone divisions are really suffering. It used to be that a Sony CRT monitor was the best in the industry and used in tv studios as default monitors. Thats far in the past now and sony has to get that elite status back.

 

Sony's feet are too big for their boots, that's the way I see it. They try too hard to best other people simply by spending money instead of providing a quality service that's actually worth paying for. Sure they have the most powerful machine on the market, but generally multiplatform conversions are poor and their online service is inferior (imo) to their competitor. When you get people who do interesting things with the hardware and finally make it worth buying (imo), they sue teenagers and take them to court, they raid people's homes and sieze all their computer equipment. Sony's plan to bully home brew communities and protect them selves from piracy inadvertently backfired and turned their own customers against them. Piracy is no doubt a problem, but Sony's attitude is also a problem; you are not an unstoppable force, you can't stop piracy as much as you try, especially if you're computer security is as poor as it was on the PS3 it's laughable to think you are invincible, and it shows in Sony's attempts to rectify their mistakes by going back on their word and turning their back on their customers.

Imo Sony threw a ton of money into an expensive powerhouse machine with sub par software and expected to win the generation. When their plan backfired they tried to scare everyone into exposing their poor software and unlocking the full potential of the machine to save what little money they had from developers. Nintendo did the complete opposite, they threw a little bit of money into a sub par machine and focused solely on software and gameplay experience. We all know how the story goes.

 

It's very weird how SONY is struggling more than Nintendo and Microsoft when their console is the "most secure". They can't blame piracy, so who are they blaming now?
While mentioning Nintendo (again), how many games actually use the light up dildo they call the "Move"?

Sony has always been pretty expensive with their accessories too, $99 for a controller, $60 for a crappy bluetooth headset and so on. I just think their pricing needs to be reviewed.

I know for a fact if SONY ever, ever decided on making the PSN a subscription service it will be more expensive than XBOX Live... With all this DRM bullshit becoming a possibility they'd have to make sure it's way more secure than SecuROM (ahahaha secuROM) and that's only more costs they will pass onto the consumer thus making the damn console expensive again -_-

Did anybody actually lose faith in SONY after their servers got hacked last year?

 

Afaik PS3 hasn't been sold at a loss for some time now.

Sony could merge with another company, but they would never do that unless they ended up with majority control.
Backwards compatibility with PS3 has always been very unlikely due to the Cell cpu, and if they go ATI for PS4 the RSX could cause problems too.
PSN could swing either way, but if Vita is any indication they'll be sticking to the current model.
Game locking to system is unlikely, but locking to accounts could happen.

 

i recall reading in wired magazine a year or two ago about sony hiring their first western CEO ever, and that he was putting the entire future of the company into 3d. 3d gaming, movies, etc.

a shame. I hate 3d myself. If i wanna play games with sunglasses on and a dim picture, i can do that without an investment in a new tv, thanks.

 

The Vita doing poorly is entirely their fault. Rushed to the market, poor decisions all around and then pissing off PSP owners, making them not want to upgrade at all to a Vita.

And no one is going to buy an underpowered Next-gen machine period. It won't happen.
Especially if they nix BC and then bring it back in the form of "REMASTERS LOL" or "PS2CLASSIX YO"
As well having a PC like platform if it comes with all the same issues PC gaming itself comes with , will just serve to turn a ton of people off. Console gaming is all about acessability , ease of use and convienence. Something that PC gaming is not most of the time. Especially when it comes to getting the absolute best Performance/Imagequality trade off. That takes a lot of time, tweaking and testing.


Also: The PS3 is hardly "Secure" , it's been hacked for a while now hasn't it?

And haven't people used that to cheat in games too?

 

I dont know if sony could do what apple did: imagine if they only had 1 TV model, 1 phone model, and 1 walkman/pmp model

In the 90s I remember apple had like 20 different Mac models, it was a mess. They threw almost everything to the trash including the PDA newton and started all over again with a clean slate

Then again apple was waaaaay more fucked than sony is now, they didnt have even ONE successful product.

The only advantage of doing the apple-thing is costs: because it would be just 1 TV model instead of 20 or 30 like now they dont have to make so many different parts, they can make one very high quality model for the same price of an average unit.

Is kinda like the console system, except consoles are subsidized so they can't go crazy with details like unibody aluminum casing...

 

If it means need to go online and login to something i'd say f**k you Sony, i'll better play something like SNES. Where it was truly plug and play.
I go to village every summer for a month or two, it's quite far from large cities, so only way to get online is EDGE which tries to become 3G without much of success because of distance to the nearest BTS.
Of course i don't play video games there much but when weather is bad it's what i do usually. And i don't want to start a PC, connect to net just to play an offline game on console. That ruins the very purpose of game consoles - to be easy to use. Networking damaged it a lot already - now it's possible to release bugged unfinished game in store and then patch it like it happens with PC, no need for extensive testing.