The History
May 16th, 2005, Los Angeles California. Sony’s PlayStation 3 console was unveiled to the public, or rather a trailer for a game named Killzone 2 was shown. Within days, claims of pre-rendered footage were abound. After confirmation that the trailer was indeed only a target, Sony received quite a bit of negative press. And that was only the beginning.

Kaz Hirai @ E3 2006

The PS3 was originally announced with two HDMI ports, 3 Ethernet ports, 7 USB ports and numerous other abilities. The system was going to have a world wide release in the spring of 2006. This did not happen. In fact, Sony denied a delay up until a few months before the supposed release. So after officially delaying the PS3 till Fall of 06 (Spring of 07 in Europe), the system itself was unveiled at E3 2006. Unfortunately for gamers so was the price. $599. And that’s the only number gamers saw.

Yes Sony’s PlayStation 3 had a difficult beginning. Marred by bad press, massive damage jokes and 4 dimensions it seemed to be all doom and gloom for Sony. But on November 17th (11th in Japan) Sony released the console in North America. And it didn’t suck.
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Oh what a week. Sony let out a bombshell this week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. They showed off two upcoming projects for the PS3 that have amazing potential.

Home is this persistent online Second Life-ish game/chatroom for the PS3. What’s unique about it is the game itself is a portal into other PS3 games. Want to get together with some buddies to go play Resistance Fall of Man? Meet up at your virtual pad, chat it up or play minigames like Pool in the meantime and then launch the game. After you are done, everyone up for some Motorstorm? Just launch the game. The social opportunities for gaming are just amazing, and it’s something in a sense I suggested to Microsoft over a year ago. Basically the idea was to implement the Halo 2 party system at the dashboard level. I even heard that MS had a similar project in development that was canceled. They really dropped the ball here.

The second showing was a game called LittleBigEarth which is this sort of user driven co-op puzzle kind of game with some amazing visuals.

Both these things combined with a recent release of Motorstorm drove my SEBS (Sudden Electronic Buying Syndrome) off the radar to want a Playstation 3. Luckily a $600 purchase requires some thought, and after help from the Evil Avatar Community, and advice from some friends I decided to hold off.

There’s simply nothing coming down the pipe in the next 4 or 5 months that won’t be out on the 360. The next time, really the only game I want right now is Heavenly Sword which doesn’t even have an official date on it. Sure I could play a bunch of PS2 games like Final Fantasy XII and God of War 2, but with plenty of other games to keep me occupied I think I can wait.

My credit cards are thanking me.

Ouch. According to The Daily Tech, Sony is taking quite the loss on each Playstation 3 manufactured. In fact, according to them they are losing $241 per 60GB console sold and $307 per 20GB Sold. Doing some simple math, with over 2 Million consoles shipped worldwide, and assuming shipment breakdowns of 60 GB/20 GB are 70/30.

(70% Sold are 60GB x Cost) + (30% Sold are 20GB x Cost) = $337,400,000+$184,200,000 = $521,600,000.00.

That’s quite the loss.

On top of this news, is the fact that the CEO and President of SCEA, Jack Tretton, as stated that cost reduction on the console itself is going to be difficult. Sony could be in for some serious trouble.

DailyTech - SCEA CEO Says PS3 Will be “Difficult to Cost Reduce”

I know there’s been a lot of talk about the PS3 and it’s availability. It seems (or would seem) that everywhere you go you’ll find the store has a full stock of Playstation 3s, especially the 60GB models. I know personally I was at a handful of stores yesterday including Target, Circuit City and EB Games and every single one of them had at least 6 or 7 in stock.

So why is this happening? Why can some newly released system that was the hot item for the holiday season suddenly sitting on shelves collecting dust? I think it comes down to a lot of things honestly.

1) The Wii is what is getting the headlines. While the PS3 has its time in the mainstream press during it’s launch, especially for the EBay prices, since the Wii came out it has constantly gained attention in the mainstream media. Most likely this is due to the fact that the Wii’s target audience isn’t only the hardcore gamers and that the same target audience your nightly newscast is catering to is the same audience as the Wii.

2) The PS3’s marketing has severely died off. I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen a commercial. Maybe a lot of people assume there’s simply no PS3s out there, or maybe a lot of people have read the Internet and seen the reports with the lack of games.

3) Price. I really think the $600 (remember it’s mostly these models sitting on shelves) is just too much for someone to pay for a game console. Sony may have severely overestimated its fan base with this move and it looks like it’s going to really hurt them short term.

4) Games. There’s a severe lack of titles out for the PS3, and a severe lack of anything coming for at least 2-3 months. Remember this is a GAMES console after all, not just a blu-ray player.

There’s no doubt in my mind that this time next year the Playstation 3 and the XBox 360 are going to be neck and neck. By that time Sony should have a solid lineup of games that a lot of people want. I also think by that time a lot of the Wii hype will have died down, and hardcore gamers will be looking for something else to play. The Wii lineup for the next few months looks pretty barren itself, and this really gives Sony (and Microsoft) and opportunity to take away some of that momentum that Nintendo has.

All in all I don’t think Sony is in trouble, but they are off to a rocky start for the first time in their short lifetime in the console business. It’s going to be interesting one way or the other.

Last week I visited Rockstar Games to check out their upcoming game Bully.

When Bully was announced back at E3 2005 to a small closed door group of press it immediately garnered a ton of attention. Unfortunately it was the wrong kind of attention with numerous groups and a lawyer that should not be named claiming the game was a Columbine
Simulator. These people went as far as saying the game should be cancelled and that it was irresponsible of Rockstar to make such a game. These people are also idiots. They were irresponsible for not getting all the information on this game before making these outrageous
claims. Bully is a caricature of boarding school life. Bully is no more a Columbine simulator than robotic crabs are a part of Japanese history.

Read the full preview at Evil Avatar

Also check out my preview of Vice City Stories.

Evil Avatar - [PS2] - Bully Hands on Preview

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