Nathan Waters

I’m sure you’ve heard about the next-gen gaming consoles and the current battle between the three big guys. If not, basically there is Microsoft with their XBOX 360 console which has been out on the market for a while now and dominating against the older consoles. Then you have the not-yet-released Wii console from Nintendo and the Playstation 3 (PS3) from Sony.

Now console gaming is a massive multi-billion dollar industry and competitive too. The companies manufacturing the consoles generally don’t make much profit from the hardware (and in fact Sony will be losing about US$200 per console), but make-up for it with software licences and other services. So most of the marketing battles are focused on the gaming experience (gameplay, game graphics etc).

But people not only want a great console to run these high-end games, but they also want the price to be cheap:

Wii - US$170 (expected price)
360 - US$299 (current price)
PS3 - US$499 (expected price)

Looking at those prices, what would you buy?

I’ve always been a playstation man having gone from an NES to a Super Nintendo to a PSX and currently have a PS2. But I can tell you now I will probably be buying a 360 and Wii combo which will still workout cheaper than buying a PS3.

Now there’s a bit of a story behind why the PS3 is so expensive and if you follow the tech news you will know that Sony is also trying to launch their “Blu-Ray” portable media (it’s pretty much just a dvd disc that can hold 50GB+ of data). However they have some big competition in this sector too with another large storage portable disc called “HD-DVD”. So what Sony is doing is including a Blu-Ray read/burn drive in every PS3 in the hopes that they can establish Blu-Ray as the standard. Problem is that it’s very new technology and the drives and discs cost a truckload to produce.

Rumours have it that at US$499, Sony is set to lose about $200 per console produced… so they’re putting a lot on the line and its a big risk.

Being such a large risk and all, you’d think Sony would setup a skilled marketing team and carefully map out their pre-launch marketing as most consoles do. *pffft lol*

Sony have had soo many hiccups and bad PR, I would bet that the PS3 will be the worst console launch in gaming history.

They’ve had numerous delays, massive public outrage over the price and all-in-all just constant (almost weekly) bad publicity. Some recent announcements have been that they haven’t started production yet and so the PS3 won’t be released before Christmas, another was that their initial production output will be cut in half, and they just released their first commercial! (too bad it really sux)

Sony’s major flaw is simply that they have OVER-PROMISED and UNDER-DELIVERED. When they should be UNDER-PROMISING and OVER-DELIVERING.

From the start they should have set a later release date, announced a high price, and perhaps even scrapped the Blu-Ray component. That way they could have released “early”, “reduced” the price and when the Blu-Ray technology reduced in cost and matured a little more they could have released an advanced PS3 version with the technology included.

The Wii on the other hand has been doing everything absolutely perfect, and are set to launch before this Christmas. They are actually doing so well that they have Microsoft saying “Buy a 360 and then buy a Wii” and they have Sony saying “Buy a PS3 and then buy a Wii”.

So it will all be very interesting to see how things pan out

If you own Sony stock: SELL SELL SELL like there’s no tomorrow!

Nathan Waters
“Wii60″ - Wii/360 combo?