Kolgar said:
Agreed. Sony's jeopardized the PlayStation brand and the whole damn company because they've priced the thing out of range of the people who've supported them in the first place.
These folks won't labor over the decision. They'll look at 360 with its second-gen, hi-def games, say "Fuck it," and walk out of the store with a green box under their arm.
Agreed.
Sony's going to get spanked by the 360 based on the pricing that exists for awhile. It's simply too expensive to be adopted at traditional playstation rates, IMO. The 360 will look like a hell of a nice buy and it's got a nice library building.
However, this would have been true in 2006 and early 2007 anyway. The PS3 was always going to be supply constrained and the 360 was going to take advantage. That hasn't changed even with the unholy PS3 pricing. Unless the PS3 doesn't sell out in 2006, which is probably unlikely, but it is possible.
My initial point was that I think the PS3 core pack compares quite well to the 360 Premium. However, on paper the original Xbox compared favorably to the Playstation 2 and look how that turned out. It's not about the specs or point-by-point issues for 98% of gamers. It's about affordability and the games. In this area Sony loses BIG FUCKING TIME. I absolutely agree.
However, for the 2% of us that make up this message board in large part, it's not quite as bad. I buy a good 20+ games a year minimum, which is well over a grand and it's because I buy the games I like to play. That isnt' going to change for me, and probably not for most of the folks on this board.
We have Sony fans split on the issue and the XBox fans laughing that Sony fans have to deal with this issue at all and they see the mountain of opportunity that the 360 is absolutely going to take advantage of. It's a shitty situation to be in if you like Playstation franchises, but apparently Blu-Ray is a double edged sword. It's a competative advantage that many have been looking forward to, but the cost seems to have majorly gotten away from Sony.
I honestly believe that they're pricing this as low as they can without killing the company, which says something. They put all their eggs in the CELL/Blu-Ray basket and it's come back to bite them and us in the ass.
The next 12 months should be incredibly interesting as the dominance of the Playstation brand is going to be put to a SEVERE test and we'll see if it's as strong in Japan, Europe, and even the US as many here think. It will be a testament to that strength if they can somehow manage a complete sell out of 4M units in 2006 with this pricing and 6M by March 2007. I'm not quite sure they can do it.
I do know however, that, on paper, it's a damn good system, but we absolutely are paying for Blu-Ray and not getting the free ride many of us hoped for.
be wrong, but it feels that way.