Sony has gotten a lot of crap from gamers recently. Most of it is entirely deserved. They are forcing consumers to buy a Blu Ray player if they want a PS3, charging $600 for their new console and games are anticipated to sell for $60 or $70 a piece. PR statements from Kutaragi and Hirai have made Sony seem more arrogant than ever. More recently, there have been reports of delays in production and now Sony has announced that the PS3 will launch next year in Europe and the launches in North America and Japan will be limited. To top it all off, the new Sony slogan for European territories sucks total ass – Now this is living.
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All of these factors combined with how promising the 360 and the Wii are looking have led many to attack Sony, some going so far as to “break up” with them (funniest article in the world – he acts like Sony is a girl, not a company, get it?). First, I want to clarify that I am as pissed off by Sony, if not more, than the rest of the peanut gallery. I just don’t think these issues will matter at all once the PS3 ships.
Time and again reality has played us for fools. Seemingly great things like the Dreamcast flop, and shitty launch titles for the PS2 manage to propel the system into the stratosphere. Plenty of companies make frequent small mistakes. Microsoft has done plenty of stupid things, and they are debatably evil to boot. Yet these errors have done very little to hinder the company’s success. The more we all pretend Sony’s follies will actually matter, the harder it will be to cope with the eventual fact of the PS3’s amazing success.
I believe the more Sony does wrong now, and the more articles written by gamers about how fucked Sony is, the more casual gamers and rich people with too much free time will flock to the PS3. Do not fool yourself – if Howard Stringer has a massive heart attack and falls off 30 foot high scaffolding while touring a PS3 manufacturing plant, crushing Kutaragi under his flabby, pasty body, the two mangled corpses becoming lodged in the Blu Ray laser installer, preventing it from performing it’s assigned task indefinitely yet somehow rearranging the parts so that it outputs terrible new slogans for the company, such as “Now this is living in our reality that you’re playing in that you aren’t ready for,” all it means is that Sony will sell 50 million consoles by next April.
Yeah, I’ve basically come to this point as well. No matter how much people bitch out this company or that company, it never matters in the full scope of things. It’s mindless bickering at this point. I don’t like what Sony has become, and many people say the samething, but the readers of video game sites are not the ones selling 100 million PS2’s in its lifetime. The people that play Madden are the ones that create a products success, and the majority of them do not read IGN, Kotalu, or videolamer. So what the fuck is the point? Remember how the 8 layers of texturing and the I-TSram was going to be the secret succes of the GameCube? Or how the limited power of the PS2 was going to be its downfall? Yeah, none of this ever happened. Mere facts can go so far, and in the video game industry, they go even shorter.