NPD November 2010

Re: PS3 slim v2, I don't think I'm the first person to mention this but the way Sony still refer to the machine as "PS3" rather than "PSThree" perhaps indicates their plans going forward ...

 

'Hardcore' console gamers aren't going to go to PC. Not without the PC market changing dramatically. They're going to stick to where games are, and big publishers aren't going to go back to making PC exclusives (Blizzard and Valve and MMOs excluded, of course).

 

The once-per-decade Windows price (remember how long it took them to get us off XP?) is in no way comparable with the $10-per-title, $60-per-year-for-Live, 30%-off-horse-armor they get from Xbox games.

 

This is a pretty big long-shot, though, as there isn't a huge indication that this is happening. The consumer focus shifted, sure, but that happened 4 years ago. Both parties are playing catch-up in their own ways, and they're having decent (and not unexpected) success. 'Hardcore' gamers aren't going away, though. We're too dumb for that; we'll continue to buy games at launch, pay for preorders, pay $20 extra for $5 of collector's edition crap. We're reliable cashcows, unlike the extended audience. And pubs know that; it's why we're courted so aggressively. We may see an Activisionesque shift away from new IP to tried-and-true rehashes for everybody, which might be disastrous, but that's still them catering to us (catering with a trough is still catering).

 

Holy cow! It's like we've gone into a time warp with all of the "Sony is doomed"-type posts. Easy on the hyperbole guys!

In terms of the US market, it certainly appears like Sony's strategy going into the holiday was pretty poor. Add the fact that the execution of that poor strategy was itself poor, and you see results like we saw this past month. It's kind of amazing that Sony still seems to be so tone deaf when it comes to what will play in the 'States. From their marketing, to their product designs to which games to emphasize they don't seem to learn from either their successes or their failures. That having been said, this same strategy seems to be more effective in other markets and the poor execution doesn't seem to be hurting them as much elsewhere either.

On a personal note, I was looking hard for a deal on the PS3 that would get me one for <$299 and if I could have found a good enough of one (thinking like $249 here) I might have bought one. I'm not interested in Move as I'll get my motion fix from Kinect. The fact is from a value standpoint the PS3's price is not only stopping me from buying a PS3, but also a BluRay player as I'd prefer to buy the PS3 for that. Right now, I'm getting by with the drive in my HTPC. I suspect the fact that Sony chose to go the bundling route instead of the discount route lost them more than just my sale, too. To be fair, though, discounting may not have been an option. Either way, if price was a factor for me, you can bet it was a factor for others.

 

True (and by now, we should know the drill), but doesn't excuse Sony from some of the silly mistakes they made. ^_^

 

It's not just about how Sony's doing right now with sales - they're in a very deep hole financially from the starting losses of the PS3 and haven't got the brightest outlook to recover from it.

 

There's that...plus looking at the landscape ahead. I know there are many arguments as to why major players like Google, Valve, Apple, etc will never touch the console space, but I find it extremely hard to believe that they have all looked at the situation and decide nah, we don't want any part of the family tv and all that impulse buy money, not interested. I don't buy it, hence why (bold statement alert) I'd expect one of them to put their hat in the console ring in in the next three years in some way shape or form. If one did then Sony risks being squeezed out because their currently modus operandi has been a failure. They need to look ahead to future threats to which currently they are totally unprepared to fight. It's not like it would be the first time that an "invincible" console player got squeezed out. I still don't believe they have the ability to go at it themselves, hence why I expect a major alliance announcement from them in the next two to three years.

 

Today, that is a tactical picture, clouded by boardroom soap opera.

Moving forward, it is more important for Sony to streamline their operations across divisions, using PS3 as a lead example. It is the closest thing they have where they own everything from exclusive software to hardware; has a huge install base, and also partnering with assorted providers (Internet and content).

There will be new and old competition, but for the most part, most projects mess up because of internal issues; not competition. They still have the ingredients for leading the industry. They are pretty unique too.

 

No, the past Core and Arcade models were never awful. They were designed, created, and existed just for the very point we're at now. They were there to get the price as low as possible, to remove the requirement for a hard drive, and to maintain price superiority.

The core/arcade strategy was a huge win for Microsoft. It was never meant to be an earlier seller.

 

Perhaps it would be better to state the choice offered them flexibility. Not just in pricing. Technically speaking the original Xbox hdd was something of a failure simply because no one seemed to use it.

 

whoa. that is huge.

Kinect is talked about by our casual friends with families in circles from which I have NEVER even heard video game talk.

they say they WANT it. It's the same way many people seemed to speak of Wii 4-5 years ago, now this (to them) seems like a normal evolution of that technology and something really worth owning and experiencing.

Another brilliant move by MS among the many brilliant moves over the past 7 years from development of this "system" (including Live) to the execution.

 

Totally agree. The non-hard drive SKU was a very smart move by Microsoft in terms of "long term" strategy for the platform. They might not have been very appealing to the early adopters, but later in the console life cycle price matters to joe six-pack. The outlook is very bright for the base sku over the next several years. Even for the future Xbox 720 they would be insane to include a standard hard drive. With so many developing countries around the world, price will continue to be a major factor later in a consoles life cycle and download infastructure is very much a work in progress. Just stick in a fast optical drive that will be hard to pirate (holographic disc).

 

Perhaps. But it was a well-thought out choice, guided in part by their past experience with the HDD on the Xbox and their inability to be price competitive because of their fixed costs. (the HDD and nVidia licensing the most notable). It was the same reason they didn't include the HD-DVD drive in the 360.

The decisions that MS made, to focus on the GPU, the CPU, and the memory and not add in all the bells and whistles are what lead to the Core/Arcade and are a huge part of why the 360 is a success today. They were not bad decisions, or 'awful'. It was a wonderful, beautiful strategy.

As opposed to Sony, who wanted to be able to 'check every box' (remember all the ports that got cut from the PS3?). So now they've got a fixed cost on a harddisk, they've got a fixed cost on blu ray, and nobody particularly cares because MS was able to easily add flash memory to the arcade at no cost to the consumer and blu-ray players are now available so cheaply that there is no bonus to the consumer to have one in the PS3.

 

I'm honestly shocked and impressed at how well they were able to sell the casual non-gaming crowd on the xbox360.

I was impressed with the tech when they introduced 18 months ago, but I thought for sure that they would need to package it as a separate box entirely (essentially a Wii version of xbox) with a different name and look.

They came through with the new look but it's still surprising to me that these people that had nothing to do with xbox are now showing up in droves.

Truly a masterful job by their marketing team.


For those that have set up a kinect for a non-gamer, you know MS still has a long way to go to get the operation of the box more friendly for non-gamers with a gamepad phobia.

The Kinect interface needs to be fully usable without a xb controller from install to bootup to turnoff and everywhere in between (dashboard).

Even with it's limited implementation it is still selling very well to these non-gamers as evidence by bundle shipping nums (roughly half the shipped boxes this month).

Congrats guys.

 

Indeed.

The box still isn't even down into the $150 range yet.

I'm thinking their BOM has to be near that mark at this point in the gen.

 

Sure they'd love to have everyone sit on one box, but that came at a rather large cost this gen.

If next gen, MS had the top end market to themselves, they can cut much of that cost down initially and sell the box either for profit at launch or break even. Either way would be worth it for them even if they lose "some" of those hardcore gamers to PC.

Of which, I doubt many would see significantly better experiences on PC with PC developers targeting the consoles as a baseline even this late into the cycle.

I'd expect that to continue next gen given the low sales of pc games.

 

The first (?) incorporation of HDD into console was a failure because there was no content strategy to go with it.

Similarly, Blu-ray will plateau (eventually) if BDA doesn't continue to grow the BD-Live part to generate more exclusive need for the stack.

 

There was an article a while back, I haven't the time to hunt it up right now, about how they had actually done a great deal to price reduce the hdd. It was not the albatross everyone thought it was. Certainly still a cost of questionable value, but not the major article that sunk the console. Or so the article seemed to imply.

Just to be clear, I'm not disagreeing with you. I just would have thought that after getting stung with developers not making enough use of the standard hdd in the past (at least according the MS at the time), it seems to be a multi-front issue. One where BOM cost wasn't the only issue arguing against a hdd inclusion in the base model.My only point was that it seems to imply more foresight than I would have credited MS with 5 years ago. (Not just MS really, but anyone to a certain extent. If that were anticipated I would have expected better support for SSD's for regular PC's than what I have seen. -> A "proud" owner of Vista and an SSD

 

I'm not disagreeing with a lower cost BOM too. ^_^

The people who bought a HDD 360 are likely to outspend the people who bought a HDD-less 360 from the get go.