What amazes me is that you'd launch a console with so many crippling production issues in the first place. Coupled with the high price, it may as well be an invitation to developers to jump ship.

The 360's going to sell at a much slower pace than last year simply due to their competition among other things.

Either way, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a very early price drop (my guess is $50-$100) for the PS3. That'd basically be all we'd need to confirm that it's doing badly.

I think part of what its going to come down to is whether or not Sony manage to hold onto some of their bigger exclusive titles. Its certainly arguable that most of the gamers who owned a PS2 owned it for the games, rather than the fact that it was published by Sony. The PS2 had a lot of the big name titles, so if you wanted to play the newest Ico, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, Dragon Quest etc you needed a PS2.

But lately they have been losing a lot of exclusives. Virtua Fighter, Dragon Quest, Assasin's Creed and the 360 is starting to hit its stride. Its becoming a race for Sony to try and stabilise their user base before publishers look at them decide that they are going to be better off making 360 titles and porting them, exactly like the last generation.

Konami says that MGS4 is Sony exclusive, but the same thing was said about 2. Then Substance came out and was ported.

If Sony can hold onto its major franchises and gain some more 3rd party support, than it should be fine. If the costs of development deter 3rd party devs and say MGS4: Whatever is ported? Its going to hurt them hard. The indie titles that the PS2 had like Okami, Ico and Shadows of the Colossus will most likely go to the Wii due to the very cheap development costs.

Right now MGS and Final Fantasy are the major titles that are keeping people interested in the PS3. If it lost either of those or the go multiplatform we're going to see a huge drop in PS3 buyers.

Thing is, they had no choice. They already "delayed" the launch and any further would just hurt them even more. As bad as their launch might've been and the problems they're facing now, they can at least say it's launched, it's out there, and people are buying it. They painted themselves in a corner basically.

Which means next to nothing. Until we DON'T see a port ever it's still technically up in the air. Just look at RE4, and more recently, though everyone saw it coming, Assassin's Creed. We all knew it was going to be a multi-platform title, but that's not what Ubi said for quite awhile.

Bullshit. They could've at the very least prioritized the machine over all else in terms of production and started far earlier than they did. This is a combination of their artificial demand building strategy backfiring and terrible planning on their part. I still don't see why they'd do this to one of the few divisions that's actually still profitable.

Launching means nothing when you had something like 200k units on launch date with just a few units coming every week. Looking back on the PS2's launch, they handled the shipment and launch date much better than this.

I'm tempted to call this the most botched launch of any console (there are some close runner-ups though).

Why are people using Assassin's Creed as an example of the machine losing exclusives? It was announced as a Xbox 360 game (though not exclusively) before the PS3 announcement came. Even then, at E3 insiders mentioned that it was running on a hidden 360.

I expect SE to spread their titles across consoles to rake in the big bucks. Multi-platform is the way to make money these days, so we'll see everyone losing exclusives across the board. Heck, maybe we'll even seen "compilation" type deals where certain titles in a series are on one console, and one is on the other.

This gen is definitely looking like pure trash, though. Hopefully by late '08 these guys shape up, because either the console doesn't have the games there to justify their purchase or there are massive droughts where nothing worthwhile is available.

Actually, in this one case, I wouldn't doubt that a large part of the shortages weren't artificial. They've been experiencing production issues for ages, including low yields (and various other problems with the Cell chip), Blu-Ray lasers, and just the difficulty of producing a high-end piece of hardware and getting it out the door. But you're right, launching doesn't mean a whole lot when there's only 200,000 consoles to ship. But they got them out in time for the holidays and gathered enough hype for it to matter. Believe it or not, a lot of news stations seem to reporting the PS3 as one of the top must-have items, placing ahead of the Wii. They would have suffered beyond belief if they further delayed the console, at least no they can build themselves back up and try to keep pace with Microsoft.

They should have done more to ensure a better launch, I agree, but they constantly fucked up along the way. To the point where they really didn't seem to have much of a choice. They chose the lesser of the two evils That's my point.



AC is viable because it was reported as a Sony exclusive. As I said, everyone knew it was going to be on the 360, but that's not Ubi was saying. Plus, the 360 project wasn't exactly titled "Assassin's Creed." The name was announced for the PS3 and for all we knew they dropped the project and took it over to Sony. Anyways it's just a recent example of a publisher saying something's exclusive when it's not. RE4 is a better one though, which is why I included it. That actually came as a surprise.

As for the second paragraph: yeah, no kidding.

Third: I disagree. I'm already enjoy this generation and have found a ton of good titles to enjoy. The 360 got off to a shaky start, but I have no regrets purchasing it. Same with the Wii, especially knowing great games are just around the corner. And though I won't be getting a PS3 for awhile, I'm sure it'll turn around like the 360 did. Good games will eventually come, whether exclusive or multi-platform.

Why?
They're selling out, although not as fast as the Wii is, and mainly because people try to sell them on eBay, but they're still selling out.
Sony is losing something like $106 on the $600 model and some $200+ on the $500 model as well. So yeah, I doubt they'd be that hard pressed for sales to bring about a price drop so early in the hardware's life cycle.

The Xbox360 might drop in price before Halo 3 is shipped though. It'd be a very bold move on Microsoft's part, but you just KNOW that there are hundreds of thousands of people out there waiting on Halo 3 to get a 360.

Either way, I wasn't surprised when I first read about MGS4 possibly going to the 360 when Joystiq reported it. In fact, I'd be more surprised if the new MGS game didn't get some kind of gaiden treatment with some new missions like the Subsistence and Substance of its predecessors.

The reported production problem wasn't even the CELL, as they were reporting excellent yields well before launch. The main problem was the blue laser diode for the Blu-Ray drives. Which gets me to another point: If that hadn't been placed in the machine, we likely would've saw it at a much lower price point and at far greater quantities at launch and beyond.

They're simply seeing what's happens when you try to force feed the public a format, even if it's got more the computer/motion picture industry behind it.

Agreed, there really isn't much more to it. The amazing thing is that for such a large company, they never saw these shortages and planned accordingly or anything. It's like a bunch of decapitated chickens are running SCEI at the moment.

Again, not viable. Ubisoft's long been suspected of having a very close relationship to Microsoft, so when they announced it was "exclusive" there was widespread skepticism already. Early reports about the game, while lacking the game, were still reporting on AC.

Either way you look at it, the sudden exclusivity seemed like a joke as the machines are nowhere near close enough to simply jump ship like that (nor are they close to Sony).

This is just my opinion of course, but it comes down to whether there are enough good games to justify the cost of the console and said games. IMO, none of them are there yet.

Wii - Nintendo's got it easiest here. Lowest price point and they've got blockbuster titles coming down the pipe. They're already known for pumping out concentrated awesome, so you can rest assured that you're getting your money's worth. The rumored drought of titles is a little worrying though, and it has many screaming "Gamecube Redux".

X360 - This is where we start getting a little fuzzy. It still lacks a diverse enough library to appeal to anyone except the same group of people the original Xbox did, so it loses gamers looking for niche titles and other titles coming out of Japan. Online is fantastic, but that doesn't make up for a variety of titles to choose from.

It may simply be me, but it's not worth it yet. If we see more good stuff from Capcom and Namco like Lost Planet it'll be more appealing to gamers that were more drawn to the PS2/Gamecube than the Xbox.

PS3 - One word: Bloated. Priced too high, more bugs than a barn, and slim pickings in terms of games. The online is slowly coming together, but there's already a long wait for worthwhile titles and then another vast expanse of time to traverse before getting to the heavy hitters. Sony's expecting this thing to be a PS2, but sales are likely going to crawl outside of the holidays. Hence, developers are going to get a clue and start heading to the cheaper-to-develop-for Wii and equally-capable 360.

Far slower sales than predicted, bleeding exclusives left and right (don't think this is going to stop with MGS4) and the competition dropping their prices, as you said with Halo 3 will force their hand.

It's either do that to keep their console viable as a gaming platform, or start moving it toward entertainment and bail out of the industry. Post-holiday sales will probably be awful due to a combination of the issues stated before and collapsing demand.

You say this like I'm defending Sony. You're right, of course. But they're trying to push a new format, much like they did with the DVD.

Like I said, everyone knew it wasn't an exclusive. It was just an example of a company saying something was an exclusive when it's not. Simple as that.

No launch is really worth it right away. But chances are, if you're buying a console at launch, you know what's coming down the road. And that's enough for some people.

I lost complete faith in this concept with the Dreamcast. I still bought ne years later, and I still love it, but I certainly didn't see that road coming for it.

I seems like the 360 is becoming the PS2 of the next generation. It has a head start above the rest, but there's also some fairly high ranked titles coming out for the PS3 and Wii which would knock it off it's feet and ultimately make it another Dreamcast.

Since Virtua Fighter 5 is coming to the 360, they're still a solid contender. You know how people started making multi platform games for the GC, PS2 and xbox, and in the later years all we'd see from the GC was movie titles and/or titles which are specifically pushed to all three consoles? Yeah. The same will most likely happen for this as well.

MGS4 would certainly boost the 360. I mean, people will buy a PS3 just to play MGS4. But if you can pick up a console a couple of hundred dollars cheaper, with more of a variety of games, and get your favorite title (even if it is (possibly) dumbed down/not as high quality) I'd say most people would swing for that option.

Oh, no. I'm not saying you're trying to defend the company at all. Heck, I don't think anyone is here nor do they need any defending (they've got people whose job is to do just that).

I agree that they're trying to promote their format, but they've gimped one of the their most successful products with it. I'm glad you brought up DVD, as they were also behind the push for that as well (along with many of the same companies behind Blu-Ray).

Aye, which makes me think there was some "moneybags" being passed around in order to make it seem it was exclusive. Either way, something odd was going on with that whole deal.

Of course, but those are early adopters. Over 90% of a console's sales are those who wait after the launch, so they have to make sure that the machine is priced to appeal to these folks and that the games are there as well. This is easy enough to demonstrate when the expected 360 price drop comes around along with Halo 3.

I was just running through some other articles and came across this:

Now, while this doesn't prove anything either way, its not something you want one of your critical 3rd Party devs to say if you were Sony.

What it comes down to is profit. At the moment dev costs for the PS3 are very high, though they go down eventually. But a game has to sell a lot of copies to make it worthwhile and if the games have lackluster sales, then the option of moving/porting to a system with a higher attach rate becomes more tempting.

No kidding.
In fact, I'm planning on getting a PS3 because of Metal Gear 4. Seriously. If it goes on the 360 then I'll probably just settle for that system when I do buy another console.

I've actually gotta wonder how much sway MGS still holds in the US. Every new iteration has sold less and less in the States with MGS3 only selling, what, 700,000 copies? Who knows how MGS4 will sell, but if the past is any indication it will see a further decline in sales. I doubt it, since more hype seems to be placed around MGS4, but is that because it's one of the few reasons to buy a PS3? And if so, does bringing it over to the 360 lower the anticipation, even just a bit? It's going to move systems, but I'm not sure if it will really have the pull people expect it to. I mean, the PS2 was a pretty good price when MGS3 came out, and I doubt the PS3 will see any kind of price drop before MGS4 hits the shelves...