AdventureRacing
Member
I'd rather not get into this too much, but this sort of black and white reasoning is nonsense. Sony has out sold their competitors at certain points with changing strategies. if Sony is keen on the small successes while facing their overall failures it can help keep them away from these issues in the future. having those points of changing tides can be crucial in the success of future playstations. you can count the small successes in spite of an overall failure for a console generation. consider business war, you can lose many battles and still overcome defeat. so many wars in history were won when little hope was left.
Sony has fucked up a ton this generation, but they have also given gamers a shit ton of great exclusive content. I would count many successes for Sony this hardware generation even with the overall losses they've incurred.
So what exactly are the successes for sony (giving exclusive shit to gamers is not a success for sony).
Heres some of the bad points of this gen:
-They lost a shit ton of money (and if it the PS4 lost as much i think they would pull out of the home console business).
-They lost a ton of marketshare. They went from outselling their competitors combined almost 4:1 to coming in last place this gen. The playstation brand is nowhere near as strong as it used to be because of what happened this gen (especially in the US and Japan).
-They lost their spot as the defacto home to 3rd parties and this is a pretty big deal. In the home console space if anything MS is now the go to for 3rd parties.
The only thing i can see possibly being touted as being good for their future success is their expanded 1st party but even that isn't much of a victory. Their Japanese 1st party library has become even more irrelevant than ever and has had pretty much no impact this gen and that will almost certainly be the same next gen.
Their biggest 1st party title and their only real big HW moving franchise was developed in the PS1 era and even it suffered this gen as well. God of war was also started last gen. The only real big franchise they started this gen was uncharted and it isn't much of a system seller.
Sony has a pretty stellar line up of 1st party developers but they need to turn this into producing some real system selling software.
I think there are very few positives to take out of this gen at all. A small resurgence at the end which probably won't even get them out of last place or anywhere near being profitable overall isn't much to shout about really.