Wednesday, February 28, 2007

My PS3 Makes Me Cry...

Yep, Sidious and I have long been lamenting the state of the PS3 and it would appear that Sony lacks the simplest understanding of the market, or understands it at such a level that their strategy seems completely insane. My guess is the former, but I've been wrong before.

The PS2 gave Sony pole position in this market, but it would seem that they are trying to do everything possible to lose this race. Does that mean that the PS3 is circling the drain or even close to it? Of course not, but there are a few key things that need to happen to turn this ship around:
  1. Developers need to crack the code on the cell processor. Right now programming for the PS3 takes longer and tends to produce worse results than on your "conventional" machines. Once developers figure out how to unlock the latent power theoretically contained within the cell processor, games produced for the PS3 should easily surpass their cross platform brethren (this was the spot the Xbox had in the last generation).
  2. The PS2 needs to be officially abandoned. Sorry for all you PS2 fans out there, but part of the reason that the 360 and Wii are proving so successful is, once the next generation hit, that's where they focused. With some of the best games of the last several months and into the future coming out for the PS2 (Okami, Valkyrie Profile 2, FFXII, God of War II) it's clear that Sony hasn't thrown it's full weight onto their new horse. There's no excuse for producing first-party software on the old system (I'm looking at you God of War II), and generous incentives could easily "convince" developers to make the move more quickly. The fact is games move systems not the other way around.
  3. The PS3 needs exclusives. With several former PS3 exclusives jumping ship and going multi-platform, most of the games for the PS3 are ports of old Xbox 360 games that are virtually indistinguishable from their original versions. That's clearly not a winning strategy. Again I say, games move systems, if Sony manages to release a Halo or a Twilight Princess, they can easily get back in the running, but looking out right now, there's no such system-seller in sight.
I have faith the Sony knows these things and that they are moving in the right direction, just very, very slowly. As of right now, however, my PS3 is a glorified Resistance arcade machine and The Last Samurai HD movie projector.

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