Look at any computer game site or technology review and you will see that Sony, the company everyone expected to walk away with E3 this year, in fact had the poorest showing in LA last week.
PS3 fansites are awash with anger and bile as Playstation fanatics vent their spleen at Sony's E3 announcements. The key source of gripe? Since the release of its tech specs at E3 last year the rumour mill has been constantly churning as to what price Sony will put on their next gen behemoth, the PS3.
We all know that console manufacturers take a loss on the pricing of their equipment for the first year or two of their releases (making the money back on software and peripherals), but everyone wanted to know how Sony was going to price a console with built-in Blu-Ray player when the stand-alone machines were slated to cost at least $1000 when they hit the market towards the end of the year.
Well, Sony have gone public and no-one's happy about it. In a blatant attempt to copy Microsoft's strategy with the Xbox 360 Sony announced that the PS3 would hit the market with two different models at the end of the year. One would only have a 20 GB hard drive and retail at $499, whilst the second would have a 60 GB drive and be priced at $599. What Sony didn't announce, and hoped none of the press would pick up on in the tech spec sheets, was that the lower priced model would also come without wi-fi, a slot for memory cards and, most importantly, an HDMI port.
HDMI is the industry standard for transmitting an HD image, and the lack of a port on the cheaper PS3 effectively cripples it as a futureproof next-gen machine. Now, add to this the fact that all of the games showcased looked exactly equivalent to those running on Microsoft's 360 (an only slightly technologically inferior machine) and the fact that the 360 even now weighs in at $100 less in its most expensive guise, and you can see why a lot of people are feeling more than a little miffy at the Japanese giant.
And here's a spot of insider information: we spoke to one of Sony's UK developers, and he knew nothing about Sony's plans with the two models until he heard it himself at the E3 press conference, and he was livid. How do we know him? We play Halo with him on Xbox Live.
The other thing that Sony completely missed in copying Microsoft's two-machine strategy was that if you bought the cheaper of the two 360s you could still just buy a plug-in hard drive and wireless controller at a later date – and then have the equivalent of the full-priced one. That's something you can't do with the PS3: sorry guys, if you buy the cheaper one and you're lumped without Wi-fi or an HDMI port for life.
Microsoft also cannily avoided incorporating a next gen HD drive as there are going to be two rival formats hitting the market this year and Microsoft wanted to avoid lumbering the consumer with the potential loser of the fight. It's already been announced that should Blu-Ray end up winning the format war, Microsoft will most likely bring out a plug in Blu-Ray drive for the Xbox 360.
Although Nintendo didn't set a price on its next-gen contender (the unfortunately named Wii) it is well known that the less technically powerful machine will sell at considerably less than Microsoft or Sony's. With this fact in mind Microsoft's Head of Interactive Entertainment Peter Moore perfectly summed up Sony's gaff when he stated that game lovers will almost certainly be able to buy a Nintendo Wii and an Xbox 360 for the price of one PS3 come this Christmas. While it's hard to believe that industry dominator Sony will flop without a trace in the next round of the console wars, it is almost certain that their pricing gaff, and possibly also the inclusion of a Blu-Ray drive, will cause them to lose significant ground in a market they have effortlessly owned for the past ten years.
Read more:
Moore: PS3 Price "Forced" On Gamers – CVG
[story by Timothy Hardt]