You are right to worry, but not about the entertainment industry. People tend to spend a lot on entertainment in hard times; Hollywood had its best years during the Great Depression. The Atari 2600 bloomed during the disastrous Carter administration.
That's true (and I agree), but people can go to cheaper entertainment or Internet.
Don't look at the installed base of the PS3 in the US, look at how many games they buy. Skate from EA, an original IP, lauded as a new fresh look at skateboarding, bearing a decent GameRankings score of 87% (the sixth best game on the PS3), has sold the pathetic 30k in its debut month of September. The Xbox 360 version netted 175k for the same period.
You have to look at both (as % of installed base and % of uptake for subsequent weeks. PS3 game selection is still smaller than 360's, so the game may still be visible). I didn't even know the game exists on PS3 to be honest
The other problem that may have dampened the peak is PS3 games are crammed into the last quarter of this year.
Games like Naruto and Ace Combat 6 are going to sell a lot of units. A popular license with boys and a well known flight game
Yes, Naruto would also match well with PS3, Wii in Japan and manga fans oversea, especially if they recreate the Ninja villages in Playstation Home and have Naruto costumes as unlockables (Akatsuki's uniform should be nice).
*sigh* Since I started ranting... I might as well finish it. This is related to how Sony market or rather unmarket PS3.
In general, the numbers are interesting, but they are usually not so interesting compared to the ideas/perception/driving factors behind those numbers. That's where marketing breathes and lives.
The issue with Sony's approach is they are building their business bottom up (whereas westerners tend to do it top-down, from market towards engineering). So a lot of Sony's investments went into the infrastructure and long term survivability, but these are generally behind the scene, defensive/passive, wasteful, seemingly unfocused, and won't be relevant/visible until later in the cycle (e.g., It took about a full year for Xbox 360's overheating problems to surface big time).
There are a lot of relevant technology already in place for PS3, their marketing is lagging seriously behind in defining and packaging the experiences. For something as ground breaking as EyeToy/PS Eye, all it got was a peripheral status (like a printer, heh). Sony will probably wait until Microsoft or Apple has done something wonderful and integrated before they cried "We did it first" or "We don't want to define our experiences around EyeToy" (Kind of like Creative Nomad vs iPod in the MP3 Player scene)
PS Eye has its own pockets of fanbase... find some partner(s) to grow it if Sony can't afford to. The experience should be more fundamental than just a few standalone/unrelated games and mini-games.
Granted, there has been some marked improvement since Stringer took over although the efforts are started by Kutaragi. At least they bet on the "Matrix" vision (Playstation Home) and it seems to have grown within Sony as a fundamental platform for all its devices. However, even if the technology is not totally ready yet (or only ready for 1 device like PS3; marketing can usually move first in a smaller scale -- if coordinated well).
In my experiences, the other negative side effect of doing things bottom-up is people tend to forget or grow tired of the vision after a long development time. Then by the time it's ready for the market, organization structure/goals may have changed, marketing finds that the finer details are lacking (because the last 20% polish usually takes up 80% of the time and they have used those time up for the long term infrastructure), and worst of all, everyone -- including the consumers -- lost sight of the original vision. People don't feel like saying the same "old" thing again. Doing things top-down typically require short, tight,
organic interaction (and frequent frustration) between marketing and technical teams. In real life, you'd need both approaches anyway, but I can't see the top down part in Sony yet. This is because when the marketing vs technical team conflicts are not discovered and resolved early/internally, these rough edges will show up in the market.
For what it's worth, Sony seems to have settled on a key theme for its first year projects ("Augmented Reality" -- blurring the boundary between fiction and reality). Demonstrate/prove it (don't just talk about it) ! It's as simple as giving more details/resolution and realistic sound to movie playback (Blu-ray's exceptionally high specs), Resistance's ultra-realistic glass modelling and smooth/fast gameplay that makes the control feels like an extension of my arm (Things react/interact immediately the moment I twist my fingers even in a busy 40-player scene, controlwise and visually. This was credited to dedicated servers, and Insomniac leaving enough computing resources for worst case scenarios so that they can be called on anytime), MotorStorm's mud and assorted car physics, Warhawk's volumetric cloud and SIXAXIS flight control, GT's surreal photorealism and car simulation, Uncharted's expression, muscle emulation and layered movements, HS's in-game acting and emulated SSS, Folklore's SIXAXIS tug-of-war (It really feels like it
), LBP's behavioural physics, Eye of Judgment's "magic" in realizing imagination in front of your eyes, all integrated into Playstation Home's virtual world. Most importantly, they are still fun.
All these can be articulated or even experienced by the gamers themselves today. The notion can further be reinforced by real Cell researches (e.g., Does the autonomous car work at all ?
Seriously, I want to see for myself; and do a Cell-powered "Aliens" sentry gun using PS Eye pretty please ?
)
For next year, I guess someone in Sony also has the vision to extend these augmented reality to social gaming/networking via PS Home. Blu-ray's interactivity and network specs (BD+) should be finalized around end October 2007. So they can be ready for major rollout and feature integration in 2008 too. So on and so forth...
So Sony, if what I say is off (which is likely since I only have partial information from external sources), then I will gladly apologize. But if there is some elements of relevance to what I mentioned, then change it. I have made the same mistakes myself in large/huge organizations. The worst thing a management can do is to stay status quo, or to pass the instructions down into a black hole. I can see from outside that there has been some actions taken, but I don't they trickle down to the consumers yet. Please follow through personally and relentlessly for the familiar nth freaking time (I know, I know) for a bright^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H our selfish fun.
We should come first. ^o^
