Wow, Sony delays PS3 in Europe

That is 500K for launch day only. They are planning to get 2MM units by end of the year.

Woody Allen: "80% of success is showing up." ;)

Eh? This really isn't my fight. Rock and Roller Cola Wars. I was just firehosing out ice-cold reality-water during your Microsoft and Major Nelson fanboy apologist-firefly spaziod era. All that Launch Era 'Second Coming of Jesus Christ' hype.

But the PS2 is already outselling the 360, a legacy system is ALREADY eating 360's lunch, not comparable on price and such, but in terms of raw numbers. And the 360 has really only sliced it's current footprint, of which the North American market is only the strong point. And Nintendo is the dark horse, zeroing in on game playability. And even if 360 is "doing well" it's still in the sink billions upon billions.

Now if Sony repeats the rush-out faulty overheating, logistical supply-chain management nightmare that Microsoft craved into Biz Schools textbooks as the 'don't ever ever do this' test-case, then you can talk. And given the way Sony has been going lately, almost a given.

So a Vista delay is good, taking the time to get it right, but a PS3 delay means hellfire and brimstone? That's what I call irony. :)

@Christopher Coulter

The PS2 only outsells the 360 because the former is $120 (or whatever; you can get it at retail for less) and the latter is $400. They are appealing to different markets, very late adopters vs early adopters. The only irony here is you calling someone else a "fanboy".

People have been waiting a year since xbox 360's release to get their hands on a better product, real next generation hardware. In fact, not only have they been waiting for the PS3 and Wii, but actually BUYING those company's legacy products instead of the 360. Why do you think informed customers would settle for purchasing an inferior product from Microsoft instead of waiting another six months?

Anon, since you guys have been touting this kind of "analysis" I've been hanging out in the Sony store in San francisco and doing some customer research. Most people buy what their friends have. They aren't waiting at all.

The early adopters, on the other hand, always want the latest and best stuff. My brother used to be one of those. Bought every video game system the minute it was out and then bought tons of games.

Those kinds of people are buying Xbox's in droves. No matter how much you protest and say they aren't.

So, what'll happen in a year? Xbox will be the thing all your friends have. So, will you buy a Sony that's more expensive or an Xbox that's cheaper and that you can share games with your friends on (and you can see when they are on with Xbox Live?)

I'm betting on Xbox. Yeah, I'll probably buy a Sony too just to get BlueRay so I don't have to worry about movie formats. But, then, I'm in the early adopter camp and there aren't many people like me.

Ask yourself, do you have a $4,000 TV? If you do you're probably one of the freaks who cares about the fight.

All I know is everyone who comes over and plays Xbox says it's stunning on my screen. Sony is going to have a hard time overcoming that momentum.

Kermit: you're right. They aren't even going after the same markets.

In four years these same "late adopters" will be buying Xbox 360s cause all their friends will have them and they will be cheap by then. And the "early adopters" like me will have moved onto something else.

Christopher, I know you understand how markets are built yet your view here doesn't reach up to your usual high bar of rational thought that you usually reach.

The early adopters, on the other hand, always want the latest and best stuff. Those kinds of people are buying Xbox’s in droves. No matter how much you protest and say they aren’t.

Scoble: techies hate Microsoft for how it has set back the technology industry. They might be stuck with Windows "standardization" at work but they won't pay for the stuff out of their own pocket and subsidize a company that violates the law in order to retain its mediocre products' dominance. No matter how much you protest, it's the truth.

In four years these same “late adopters” will be buying Xbox 360s cause all their friends will have them and they will be cheap by then.

Why aren't the "late adopters" buying the original xbox instead?

Anon: keep arguing. I don't really care. The sales data will back me up. The early adopters waited in line for 24 hours in freezing weather. I have the pictures to prove that. You? You are so cowardly you won't even tell us who you work for. I wouldn't be surprised to find out you work for Sony.

>Why aren’t the “late adopters” buying the original xbox instead?

OK, do I need to do a remedial class of video game console marketing for you? I guess I do.

A console gets games by being most popular. Sony had a one year lead. It used that lead to get all the early adopters to buy PS2's. That drew in even more game developers. And more users. And so on and so forth.

Actually, it was worse than that. Sony had a huge momentum coming off of Playstation where it had the best technology. But, that was a long time ago.

Anyway, Xbox 1.0 was late to the market with "me too" technology. It was always playing catch up with Sony.

Truth is the economics of consoles require your console to survive in the marketplace four years. Why? Two reasons:

1) You need four Christmas's to get enough games sold to pay off the losses you take on the consoles. Both Sony and Microsoft are losing money on each console sold for the first few years. They only will make money in the fourth year, which Sony's PS2 is now in.

2) You need four years to bring costs down on consoles due to quantity. Parts get cheaper over time (you aren't paying the same for a hard drive today as you did a year ago, are you?) That trend lets game manufacturers make more (er, lose less) each year.

3) If there's a paradigm shift, as there is right now with HDTV, all bets are off and each month you're out there with product and your competitor isn't is another unit sold. When I bought my $4,000 screen there wasn't a Sony available for it. Only Xbox. Even now that's the case. Later this year you'll have to wait in line for a Sony (if you can get it at all, remember last Christmas? I couldn't find an Xbox anywhere and I wasn't willing to wait in line for 24 hours to get one) and even then you'll have to pay out $600 for it (my Xbox cost a lot less than that) and now I hear it won't come with an HDMI cable, which can run you $90 in most retail stores, so that's $690 and you haven't even bought any games yet. That's VERY pricy for most people.

Like I said, late adopters buy what their friends have. If all their friends have Playstations (which is true for most of the market cause the first Xbox didn't get huge numbers) then the late adopters all will go that way too.

But, one other reason? Microsoft isn't selling Xbox 1's anymore. So, late adopters don't really have much choice, do they? Go with the newer, cooler Xbox 360, which costs $300 or more, or go with the Playstation for $150 or so, which all your friends have.

That's why I don't really care about what the late adopters are doing. They aren't going to tell me a THING about what next year's market will look like.

your usual high bar of rational thought

News to me, I am more shrilly rants, I mean, what else is a blog for? ;) But early adopters in freezing weather as your data point? And you are calling me unrational?

But real simple, some sales data:

PS2 installed base: 25 million. Xbox + Xbox360: 10 million. (Forbes)

Gartner: PS2, 51% -- Xbox 34% -- Nintendo, 15%.
IDG: PS2, 56% -- Xbox, 25% -- Nintendo, 19%.

Yankee Group Future Forecasts: PS3 - 30 million, Xbox 360 - 27 million, Nintendo - 11 million. (predicts a serious next-gen decline).

It's a numbers game, and the numbers look good for SOny, but then pricing, games available, publisher backing, stock ready, next gen DVD format wars and a whole host of misc. complex factors will determine the outcome.

Kermit: I said it wasn't comparable per price, but in terms of RAW NUMBERS, which still means the upgrade footprint is way larger. And I am hardly a PS3 fanboy...I am actually more the DS/Wii type. But like I said, rock and roll Cola Wars. I eventually get them all, no wars. Mac vs. Windows, 360 vs PS3 is so early 90s Usenet flamewarish, gawd.

Why so emotional "you must work for Sony" on this? Easy there. Frankly both companies are screwing up the Next Gen, and Sony is blowing BluRay.

I know you understand how markets are built

Well in the case of Xbox, no market was, or ever will be, BUILT. Rather, BOUGHT. :)

Easy tho, this is not something I care more than an iota about.

What the industry needs most are new ideas for games.

One thing not mentioned so far is Microsoft's new XNA Framework and Game Studio which are going to transform the games development scene for Windows and XBox.

There will be a lot of "me too" software written with this and probably even more rubbish, but there absolutely will be gems of ideas that will go on to be commercial dynamite.

Sony had a development version of the PS1 called Net Yaroze. They need to do it again for PS3.

"So a Vista delay is good, taking the time to get it right, but a PS3 delay means hellfire and brimstone? That’s what I call irony."

No irony here.

Vista's delay was to continue development on the product, making it more solid and usable when the release occurs. Also, Vista's not being given to the US and Japan in Beta form and then Europe in RTM form a few months later. Before anybody gets bent out of shape, I'm not saying the PS3s that the US and Japanese markets will get are going to be "beta" hardware, I'm just keeping with his comparison.

My point is, you cannot compare the two delays. Vista's delay will lead to a more solid product by the time it is released. The PS3 delay for Europe will not result in a better product, just a late product. Now, you could say it'll have more games, hardware bugs may be worked out, etc; however, that's true for the other territories during that same time period - they just got a little bit less selection a lot sooner.


"Sony had a development version of the PS1 called Net Yaroze. They need to do it again for PS3."

I thought they announced a new Net Yaroze-esque setup at GDC. Since the PS3 runs Linux, you'll be able to create games for it through that avenue. However, that won't bring you development support, the SDK or anything like it, or a free IDE - Microsoft provides all of those with XNA.

Microsoft got it right with XNA. I was at GameFest and had the chance to talk with some of the developers on the project and it really does sound wonderful. How they're going about security, the types of systems they're looking into for distribution, and the communities they're looking at setting up and supporting - just wow. Very nicely played; I can't wait to see how everything unfolds.

Nick

It's also happened with Australia and other non-European PAL regions.

Vista’s delay will lead to a more solid product by the time it is released.

Says who? And that's after tossing out half of the promised features. And it wasn't so much as a direct comparison, as it was in reference to the REACTION (from Scoble) per said delay. And why is a 'delay' the 'root cause' per a fix? Apple sure manages to deliver better, faster. Maybe it's the PROCESS, over the delay? Maybe, just maybe, if you don't fix the PROCESS, no amount of time will help. You think?

The PS3 delay for Europe will not result in a better product, just a late product.

Says who again? Maybe the delay WILL bring out a better product, fix a last minute glitch, Heaven knows X360 could have used some fix-up's per the overheating issues.

You are taking two data points and assuming they are self-evident, such is not the case, they could go either way. A delay doesn't automatically make Vista better, maybe it will, maybe it won't, likewise with PS3.

Either way, PS3 v 360, who cares. They're both going after the same market the PS2 and the Xbox went after. That's a limited known market, and one that will have the same sales. The only reason I bought a PS 2 was for Baldur's Gate and Jaws.

I'm still betting the Wii will end up having fantastic sales due to some real innovative thought, a game catalog that blows the others away, and as Christopher said, concentrating on *PLAYING* rather than BS Techie Wank like GPU and CPU featuresets.

@jbwebb: If you want originality in games, you should be following Nintendo for the game content and the new console - you'll get games that are fun, new and playable instead of yet another game that is all too similar to a dozen others in the same genre. Everybody in my social circle has said to me independently "I want to get a Wii on launch day - don't tell the others".

Don't underestimate Nintendo...

The problem with Sony isn't *all* about the delay it's the price and the fact that it has cost them another Christmas.

"now I hear it won’t come with an HDMI cable, which can run you $90 in most retail stores"

Oh come on, that's just dumb. Yeah, if you like being ripped off you can pay $90 for an HDMI cable - hell, you can pay $250. Me? I shopped around and got a 3 metre HDMI cable for 9ukp, and MCE looks great on it (actually, it's so good it shows up artifacts in MCE's interface).

I agree with most of the rest of your points, but this endless hyperbole about "OMG!!!111 HDMI cables are teh expensive!!!111" is just dumb. It's like people who buy Monster cables for 2-3x the price, and believe they actually make a difference.

Robert, your post 11 is not remedial video game class, it's a class in Xbox's strategy. And that's a strategy that has a lot of shareholders upset. After five years on the market with a single profitable quarter, Microsoft is still in the whole billions of dollars in their gaming division. Also, your "course" ignores the fact that Nintendo makes a profit on all their hardware (supposedly with Wii they might take a small loss but nobody really knows). They do that because the NES was the only system they ever released that was with top of the line hardware. And they made a profit on those through very aggresive business tactics with the manufacturers.

But I have a small remedial video game course for you, specializing in next gen. In response to your original post, Sony timed this move so that it actually won't have any effect on games being developed. You see, the average development time for a console game last generation was 18 months, meaning if you were developing for PS3 for launch or most of 2007, you are well into your project. Plus, some say next gen dev time will go up to 20-24 months thanks to how difficult it can be to make a quality HD game.

Just thought that was worth mentioning. It's nice to think developers could just cancel their PS3 projects because of the low unit numbers, but at this point it wouldn't be a financially sound decision. Instead, you see things like Assassin's Creed where they've announced it will also be coming to the 360.

I feel like I’m joining the game a little late but what they hey, I’ll throw in my two cents as well…

Ok, before I even say what I’m going to say, I’ll clear the air and remove all doubt, I’m in Microsoft’s and Nintendo’s camp. Call me a fanboy if you will but name calling will only get you so far.

I would be what you call an early adopter when it comes to a lot of things, and as the console wars go, I’ve pretty much had every system (as money and my parents would allow – as I was just a lad during the super Nintendo era, etc…) I have owned a Playstation, a PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, and now the 360. In all cases all three companies are doing something’s right, something’s wrong, and then something’s creative. Will I be getting a PS3? Yes, but not right away, I figure I would wait a year or two to when Sony has a good library of games, the Xbox is starting to get that library of games (Dead Rising is awesome) and I’m now really starting to be happy about my investment, during the past year I have pretty much lived on Xbox live arcade. Ok, I digress… Anyway, even though I know there will be great games for the PS3 my argument why the Xbox will take the lead is simple and it all comes down to development costs.

With the rising cost of developing games for the 360 and the PS3, we should start to see less and less games becoming exclusive to a console. While the argument could be said both ways and argued that this could benefit Sony, I won’t disagree, but with Microsoft’s head start we should start to see more and more games come out at the same time as they would on the PS3. The reason that the game developers will port their games more quickly then they have in the past is to make more money on the game with the market winner undivided until the third or forth year in the life of the console. So with third party support, and the same games on each system it will come down to one thing, exclusives. The more exclusives that a console has (and when I say exclusive, I mean that they won’t be ported in 6 months, a year… etc) the better the chances it has of success. Sony has their heavy hitters, and so does Microsoft, so the more exclusives they can pick up from third party companies the better their chances of being the ring leader this go round.

Microsoft bought its way into the market, Sony is taking a big risk and banking on its Playstation brand, but where does Nintendo fit in all of this? Well, if anything they are going a whole different direction. Why will I be buying a “Wii” well because I want something different, even if it has a goofy name, I don’t care. I just want to see what it’s all about and I don’t mind spending $200 to find out. And if it sucks, I’ll be spending all my time and money on downloading old classics, sure I could do this on my computer, but I don’t like playing games sitting in a chair and looking at a computer screen, give me the wireless controller and my couch and I’m set to relive some of my greatest game moments from my adolescence. I just hope Nintendo stops being so Nintendo and starts being cool and let us play those old classics online with or against each other…

Who will win the next Generation? I think its between Microsoft and Nintendo, if Nintendo can get the same kind of buzz that they did with the DS then they could take it. The PS3 will be effected by the delay and most people might hold off getting one for a while giving Microsoft an added advantage in their head start. I hope that my thoughts were complete, I’m currently at work and the phone keeps ringing breaking my chain of thought. :-S

Sony has major problems, which y'all know about (exploding batteries, CDs with root kits, Blu-Ray, now these delays) that are affecting the brand and the famous Sony reliability that made us want to buy their products. This is not just a PR spin problem. They need to fundamentally reconsider how they handle projects and get back to making solid products.

@Nick: I agree, XNA looks like it's going have a big influence in the long run. Without Sony's full support and quality tools then developing for PS3 is going to be extremely challenging.

@R: Absolutely, Nintendo have made some of my all-time favourite games and I'm looking forward to Wii as well. It would be fantastic if they supported the homebrew developers too. That's how Rare got started after all.

And that’s a strategy that has a lot of shareholders upset.

Geee, imagine that. Spend billions, justify with growing the market, toss in all sorts of give us four years, four Christmas's, four July 4ths, and lather up with 'hey it's a disruptive paradigm shift, doncha know blah blah blah', sprinkle in some utopian blather 'failures are never failures, every failure is a success, the way to success is to fail and fail, as eventually you get it right, everything gets recycled, blah blah blah'...

And bingo Microsoft styled-capitalism ahoy...That's not a market, that's a subsidized welfare state.

Microsoft hints at delay of Vista in Europe.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ar...

Mr. K@23: Yes, but Microsoft has major problems too. They are losing mindshare faster than any company in history. More and more people are admitting that they use Windows “because I HAVE to” for work reasons or for that one application that only runs there. The development process at MS is by their own admission broken, as is staffing, compensation and leadership transition. Sony is used to competing in crowded spaces and their products are still prominently displayed in Circuit City (etc.) stores. I seriously doubt that MOST people will pin their next TV or stereo purchase on Sony's DRM screw-up (even though I might).

More importantly, in case you analysts haven't noticed, PC/HW/SW and media companies have a problem on their hands, or some might call it an opportunity and that is the fact that these game consoles are becoming more powerful than the PCs they were meant to supplement while at the same time PCs are becoming cheaper. There is a role reversal underway that isn't quite fully realized. One of the CH9 videos that Robert pointed to talks about how heavy computing can be done as much as 10 times faster by relying on the fancy video card in most PCs rather than using the processor that is supposed to be in charge of everything. Our old Intel friend is becoming little more than a glorified device controller, or more accurately a coordinator of device controllers, while what used to be a device controller is learning to do all the interesting chores. Those game consoles are built on technology that looks a lot like the multi-processor technology that video cards have had for a while now at a time when we are just getting used to the idea that we can have a dual core Intel or AMD box.

We may in fact have finally arrived at a place where the old Intel 8080 instruction set and all its cluged-together descendants can be relegated back to the dishwashers and microwave ovens they were designed for. The challenge Microsoft faces is the potential need to re-write Windows from scratch (and who can say that would be a bad thing?) and as Linux has already demonstrated (and to a lesser extent OS X) the details of the underlying hardware become almost insignificant.

When we look back on this time ten years from now nobody will remember the console wars, but they will remember this as about the time when the Intel/Microsoft duopoly unraveled for good. Whether Sony remains a significant player in the milieu that will follow I think is relatively unimportant.

>>techies hate Microsoft for how it has set back the technology industry.

Can someone explain to me how did they do it?
What was there before Microsoft for the masses?

Techies probably hate MS because they took away their privileges. Today average Joe's are able to work on computers because of the crappy MS software.

28: “>>techies hate Microsoft for how it has set back the technology industry.
Can someone explain to me how did they do it?
What was there before Microsoft for the masses?”
I answer this question so often I should save a template of some sort.

It wasn't exclusively Microsoft, but the PC in general. Whether things would have evolved so badly had Microsoft not been in the picture is open for speculation, but as Microsoft plays such an important role in the average user's PC experience, they have to take the bulk of the blame as it stands.

The PC allowed many people who would never have been allowed inside the air-conditioned/raised floor computer room the chance to hit the on/off switch of a computer for the first time. I've met many people who consider this an important milestone in their life, and maybe that has something to do with the fact that “booting” is such a popular pastime for PC users. (On the old mainframe systems I had to schedule special time to re-boot the computer to show new employees what was involved, because it was something that almost never happened otherwise.)

Over the years I've watched these folks, newly empowered with their own private on/off switch demonstrate repeatedly why they were never allowed near the computer room. They still blame everything that goes wrong (including such things as forgetting to do backups) on “the computer”, and they marvel at such “new” concepts as RAID drives, uninterruptable power supplies, vector processing, virtual machines and “managed code” that were invented in the 60s or 70s.

As the computer industry recovers from that set-back (which is quite real) the resultant systems are going to look a whole lot like where mainframes were headed anyway. Most people will not be aware of this, nor will they be aware that we could have probably gotten here a lot faster by standing on the shoulders of giants rather than re-inventing the wheel (sometimes mixed metaphors make sense).

How do more and more people connect to the Internet? Through a specialized box that keeps out all the bad stuff. In my case that box also connects to a hard drive that manages shared storage, it communicates with my streaming devices on several radios throughout the house, it does it's own scheduled back-up, and non of this involves any technology from Intel or Microsoft. Imagine that! Most of what I do with computers these days involves data stored somewhere in “the cloud” of the Internet and I only need to worry about making local copies when I travel where there will be no Internet access (an increasingly rare situation).

As I mentioned in a post above, much of what was wrought when IBM allowed other companies to control the destiny of the PC has now been rendered itself obsolete by yet “newer” technologies that look, once again like carefully controlled centralized systems. Even compare with strong points of new Xbox and PS3 systems being server based and you see that the PC/Game console are looking more and more like the vision of smart terminals that (again) isn't really a new idea at all.

Christopher,

Do you know what the most important part of the XBox 360 is? The Media Centre Extender. Why? Because it connects the traditional hub in the home (the PC) to the XBox, which is the hub of the Digital Home.

What you are not getting here is the XBox is not about the console market, its not about games. That isn't the market its after. The market it is after is much, much bigger - the "Digital Home". Microsoft only entered the market once they realised what Sony had was a competitor for the 'digital hub' in a home.

This is the same reason Microsoft made sure they won the original Browser Wars - they didn't give two stuffs about Netscape until Marc Andreessen got all giddy about it and started saying it was going to be the Operating System of tomorrow. And its why they are ploughing the billions into Windows Live, to head off Google and the Zanemeisters of Web 2.0.

Microsoft know that when or if they manage to get the Digital Home market, the rewards will be huge.

Good God. 'The problem was normal proles were allowed access to computers' and 'the mainframe was the way to go'.

Are there people still stupid enough to think this?

Interesting. Seems Christopher did a pretty good job of shutting Scoble down with some actual numbers. I didn't see a response from him. Maybe he went to the Sony store to do more "customer research"?

This is the same reason Microsoft made sure they won the original Browser Wars.

Let me think - MS owns system, MS owns API, MS creates a free web browser - wait a moment - and you want to win this war against them with a $30 browser?

The Internet playground is a different story - they don't own it and everything is (almost) for free. That's the reason why MS is quite irrelevant there. Even after pouring millions into the MSN division.

Maybe he went to the Sony store to do more “customer research”?

He is supposedly camping in front of Apple store with his son waiting for September 12 show time ;-)

No Cider, he's just pointing out that all this crap you think is so new on Windows/Mac OS X/Linux/Unix isn't.

Christopher shut me down? Heh! I wasn't arguing with the numbers -- they demonstrate what I'm talking about. How much market share did Xbox have five years ago? Zero!

How much did Sony have? A lot more than it has now.

Hint: next year MS will have even more.

And I, for one, hope Microsoft wins this one. Sony is a screwed company, even more than Microsoft. I like my Xbox 360, pity they made it so closed... If it was compatible with the macs those early adopters have... It would be an even better story for Microsoft....

Microsoft know(s) that when or if they manage to get the Digital Home market, the rewards will be huge.

You know as well as I do that this will never happen, Microsoft will spend billions drilling for oil only to find sand. Most End Users aren't going to hook up a computer to a game system to TV do Media Centerish stuff. The 360 is a gaming machine, first and foremost, even the marketing is aimed at that.

Don't ask me, goto the horses mouth...

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/xbox_p...

I ask Allard whether his book-sized memo outlines a broader strategy featuring Xbox 360 as a Trojan horse that sneaks Windows into the living room entertainment stack. It seems like a reasonable question. At $150 each, PS2 and Xbox are already cheap ways to kill two home-entertainment must-haves with one stone. But Allard recoils at the very suggestion. He looks like he's about to curse, but then composes himself enough to answer my query. "If there's a serious gamer out there who doesn't get an Xbox console because a mom who wants to watch DVDs grabbed the last one, then we've failed," he says.

Well Sony is going to need the lower launch numbers to try and make it look like everyone and their dog is trying to get one at $600 a pop.

The '07 holidays will be the true test and by then the PS3s will be collecting dust. ;)