Sony’s Poor Playstation 3 Sales and Marketing Isn’t Sabotage – It’s Just Sony

Dec 13, 2008 (Click to Rate!) Loading ...

The Washington Times’s Sonny Bunch wrote an article recently that raked Sony over the coals for:

No price cut this holiday season — instead they actually released a more expensive bundle
Not properly promoting DVD-upscaling capabilities of the PS3
No Netflix (or other 3rd party) streaming movie support

This is all in the wake of Sony’s falling PS3 sales over October and continued lag behind the other consoles moving into the holiday shopping season.

Sonny states upfront that his take on the situation is clearly from the perspective of a PS3-owner that wants more out of his device, not a gamer on the fence about which console he should get. I’d make the assertion that Sonny is not Sony’s target audience… he’s already got a PS3, he’s already going to be buying Blu-ray movies and PS3 games along with the occasional PS3 peripheral… unfortunately for him (and all of us with PS3s), these extra things we want our PS3s to do aren’t important to Sony’s bigger platform strategy… they already have us.

It’s also interesting to point out that each of the points Sonny mentions as more or less stupid moves by Sony are all strategic moves that benefit Sony in another way that Sonny doesn’t address; more specifically:

Price Cut: Sony has already divulged that they are still loosing billions per year on manufacturing the PS3 hardware. While Nintendo has been profitable from the very first day with the Wii, Microsoft finally caught up to breaking even with their hardware recently (not including the cost of the RRoD fiasco) and Sony still lags behind in producing a PS3 that doesn’t cost them a small fortune.
Secret DVD Upscaling Feature: Sony has to make Blu-ray a success. If consumers knew that their PS3 (and other Blu-ray players) upscaled their DVDs to better-looking 1080p resolutions (still no where near true Blu-ray quality though) they would be less inclined to drop another $20-25 on their favorite movies that they already own.
No Netflix or Other Streaming: Sony has Playstation Store, they want you renting movies from them. They don’t want you streaming shit for free from other services. In true Sony form, they don’t even want a piece of the Netflix-streaming-pie, they would just rather block that access until it became a market-loosing strategy for them and then change it too little too late in and attempt to force their online store and Blu-ray format forward with all the force they can.

Another thing that Sonny doesn’t acknowledge is Sony’s historic stuborness. They are an insanely hard-headed company… once they get it in their heads that Strategy A is the way to go, well by-god that’s all we are going to get. Wether that means keeping prices of Blu-ray players and disks high while getting beaten in the market by alternative formats or competing hardware, they will wait it out… just burn money and wait it out.

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Blu-ray, competition, Netflix, NPD, PS3, Sony, strategy, streaming, Wii, Xbox 360

This post was written by:

Riyad Kalla - who has written 1725 posts on The “Break it Down” Blog.

"Ultimately I just want to provide a resource that folks find useful."

2 Comments For This Post

Patrick Says:
December 14th, 2008 at 1:04 pm

Sony’s biggest problem across the board this generation is straight up hubris. When Microsoft launched first, Sony took the line that the next generation didn’t start until they say it did. Clearly they were mistaken. It is a really sad state of affairs that a console who’s whole launch day production line has a fatal error is still beating the crap out of the PS3. They seem to be suffering from the same sort of delusions that Microsoft had back when the original X-Box launched. Ed Fries would basically just go out and attack the Game Cube as being ridiculous because it had a handle and when anyone mentioned that the X-Box controller was like a loaf of bread with joysticks stuck in it, they would say ‘well focus groups liked it.’ So then they had to throw a bunch of money at a redesign because they made the thing too big for a whole race of people.

Sony did the same thing. ‘Rumble is last generation. Our motion technology is just as good as Nintendo.’ I suppose that was true if you were talking about the motion detection in the nunchuck as opposed to the remote itself. And the bit about rumble not working with the motion sensor was an obvious lie since we have them now. They should have just paid Imersion for the rights to use the rumble like Microsoft did. For something that was last generation we sure did demand it and use it a lot.

Sony has it in their head that they are the arbitors of what is cool in video games and they are really, really wrong. How they can still feel that way after all of the problems with the PS3, which I own and want to see succeed, is completely beyond me. You are dead on about how stubborn they are and I hope that eventually the financials shake them out of it.

PednticCunt Says:
December 30th, 2008 at 12:26 am

its losing not loosing you tard.

Patrick Says:
December 14th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Sony’s biggest problem across the board this generation is straight up hubris. When Microsoft launched first, Sony took the line that the next generation didn’t start until they say it did. Clearly they were mistaken. It is a really sad state of affairs that a console who’s whole launch day production line has a fatal error is still beating the crap out of the PS3. They seem to be suffering from the same sort of delusions that Microsoft had back when the original X-Box launched. Ed Fries would basically just go out and attack the Game Cube as being ridiculous because it had a handle and when anyone mentioned that the X-Box controller was like a loaf of bread with joysticks stuck in it, they would say ‘well focus groups liked it.’ So then they had to throw a bunch of money at a redesign because they made the thing too big for a whole race of people.

Sony did the same thing. ‘Rumble is last generation. Our motion technology is just as good as Nintendo.’ I suppose that was true if you were talking about the motion detection in the nunchuck as opposed to the remote itself. And the bit about rumble not working with the motion sensor was an obvious lie since we have them now. They should have just paid Imersion for the rights to use the rumble like Microsoft did. For something that was last generation we sure did demand it and use it a lot.

Sony has it in their head that they are the arbitors of what is cool in video games and they are really, really wrong. How they can still feel that way after all of the problems with the PS3, which I own and want to see succeed, is completely beyond me. You are dead on about how stubborn they are and I hope that eventually the financials shake them out of it.
PednticCunt Says:
December 30th, 2008 at 12:26 am
its losing not loosing you tard.

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