Sony gets it wrong again but PS3 still a winner

Stan Beer
Sunday, 25 March 2007 13:01

Opinion and Analysis

It's hard to imagine a product rollout that has been botched as badly as that of the PS3. However, in spite of Sony's worst efforts and the consequential embarrassment it so richly deserves the company will still end up with a winner.

The PS3 was terribly late to market, badly beaten in the PR stakes by Nintendo's Wii, hampered by production problems and was embarrassingly overpriced. In fact, for probably the first time in history a major product had its price slashed (in Japan) before it was even released.

To make matters worse, Sony insulted customers outside the US and Japan by not only delaying supply by months but making the PS3 even more expensive in Europe and Australia than it is in the US and Japan.

As a result, Sony itself has been forced to suffer the embarrassment of nearly empty queues at its most recent midnight launches. Here in Australia, at AUD$1000 plus extras for games and additional peripherals, should Sony have expected anything else? Frankly, no.

However, the nextgen consoles market is a long distance race and the PS3 is a console with staying power.

As my colleague Alex Zaharov-Reutt has pointed out, the PS3 is the most powerful consumer computing device you can buy. In addition, the next series of games to come out for the PS3 in 2007 and 2008, will start to take advantage of the power of the PS3 architecture, with the sort of stunning graphics that will set new benchmarks for gaming.

While critics are bemoaning the fact that there is a lack of exclusive PS3 games as yet, you can bet your bottom dollar that with nine cores of supercomputing power that there will eventually be games for PS3 that Xbox 360 just won't have the horsepower to run, let alone the Wii. In the meantime, there are between 1700 and 2000 PS2 and a handful of PS3 games to keep PS3 owners occupied.

While many hardcore gamers are not impressed by non-game entertainment features, there appears to be little doubt the Blu-ray is currently winning the high definition video war. Even Microsoft is starting to make noises to that effect.

The PS3 is an expensive games console but it is currently the equal cheapest Blu-ray player on the market. If gaming history is anything to go by, the first round of PS3 price cuts will be on their way in the not too distant future. When the PS3 cuts come, they will also represent Blu-ray player price cuts. While  wide screen HDTV units are not the standard in average households just yet, the market is just starting to bubble, making the timing perfect for families to seek a cost effective Blu-ray player to go with their new high definition plasma set.

Of course, all this is academic if Sony doesn't get its PS3 games producing pipeline into gear. More than anything else, what 100 million plus loyal Sony Playstation fans want to see first and foremost are some great new games.