Can the PS3 Save Sony?

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/sony.html?pg=1&topic=sony&topic_set' target='_blank'>http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/sony.html?pg=1&topic=sony&topic_set</a><br /><br /></div><i>"... Early this year, Sony dropped a bombshell: The PS3 release would be pushed back until November. So when E3 came around again this spring, everyone trooped out to the retro Hollywood lotusland of the Sony Pictures lot – only to view the same console they'd been promised the year before. Not great. Delays are nothing new in tech, but Sony seemed intent on making the worst of it. The crowd was kept waiting nearly an hour. Then Kaz Hirai, who heads PlayStation in North America, took the stage to declare, "The next generation doesn't start until we say it does!" He meant it as a dig at Microsoft, but to gamers who'd been salivating for a year, his words were like a bitch slap. The demos that followed were no more impressive than those the year before. Finally, PlayStation chief Ken Kutaragi came forward to make the one announcement everyone wanted to hear: the price. $600 for the high-end model? The room gasped, then fell silent. Almost immediately, the blogosphere lit up with denunciations: Sony has turned its back on gamers. The PS3 will be a failure. Kutaragi and Hirai are idiots."</i><br /><br />So completely true. I have been waiting for the PS3 for months, nay years, now, mainly because of the promise of the 1080p. But that announcement regarding it costing a whopping $600 is absolutely nutty. There is no question that the PS3 is extremely advanced and has a number of features that will be unparalleled. However, I am not convinced that Sony will be rescued by the PS3. I remember this kind of hype for the PSP as well and we have all seen what happened there. Well, time will tell, I guess.

[Jason Dunn]

This is the beginning of the end for Sony (though it will certainly take them quite a few more years for them to really drop off...)

[Jeremy Charette]

I think this is where Sony made their crucial mistake: pushing the envelope too far. In terms of CPU, graphics, and memory horsepower, the PS3 is in a dead heat with the Xbox 360. Microsoft looked at the display marketplace, and decided to get their product out the door with "current" HD resolution support (720p, 1080i), and a standard DVD drive. Sony opted to wait for 1080p support, and include a Blu-Ray drive. Microsoft has a one year head start (an eternity in this marketplace), will bring an HD-DVD add-on drive to market even before the PS3 launches.

In theory, 1080p sounds great, but here's the practical problem: to push that many pixels, something has to suffer. Texture memory, texture resolution, frame rate...the resulting picture will look better at 720p, upscaled to fit a 1080p screen. So 1080p ends up being a non-issue. Not to mention the fact that there are few (if any) developers developing games to support 1080p. Everyone is working on 720p titles for launch.

So again, we're back to a dead heat with the 360. Which costs half as much. And has a huge library of titles out already, with 2nd and 3rd generation titles being released in the next few months. Microsoft may not win this round of the console wars, but they're going to give Sony a heart attack trying. The next generation may be Microsoft's to lose.

[Felix Torres]

Sony's problems do not begin or end with MS, though *they* seem to think so. (Not a good thing in itself--ask Scott McNealy about the effects of MS-phobia.) Interesting comment in the article that Sony was looking over their shoulder at MS going all the way back to the PS2 launch, when MS wasn't even talking about the first XBOX. Wonder if that's a self-fulfilling prophesy kinda situation, where Sony in effect drew MS into the console arena by threatening the home PC business with their overblown promises (which they never did keep, even with the PSX).

Anyway, as the article points out, Sony has gotten way out of touch with what consumers use electronics for and are now in a position of trying to "force" technologies and standards onto consumers instead of trying to guess what they need and offer that. (Insert standard Sony attempts to lock customers into their proprietary tech.) Over the years I've mumbled about Microsoft's apparent unwillingness to fully exploit the XBOXes media potential (would it have killed them to give the original a true Media Player to managed locally ripped music?--why can the 360 only play video off the network while it plays music off the USB?) but, maybe...just maybe...the console market is different and the focus *has* to remain solidly on games without diluting the message. Sony's PSP problems might be an indication that if a device is seen as not a "pure" console, it'll lose support as a gaming device. Sad if true.

The PSP situation by itself seems odd--Memory stick and UMD aside, the gadget has good features and good support on the media and networking sides, both things Sony has traditionally not done well. Yet Nintendo has just been eating them up alive; you hardly hear of any PSP games outside the Sony fanbase, while Nintendo seems to be movig the DS upstream from the toy market into the casual gamer arena and getting favorable press for it. Granted that the Gameboys have backwards compatibility with ten year old games and a lot of those casual games grew up with game boys to start with and granted that the price differential seems to have *really* worked in Nintendo's favor (a bad omen for PS3?), still, Sony's PSP value proposition *appears* solid on paper. Of course, Sony hasn't been promoting the PSP on TV.

Maybe Sony products *need* the hype just to match up with the competition's natural buzz? Dunno. Certainly Sony has earned a lot of negative buzz around their brand, of late...

I don't *really* think Sony is going to implode soon but things are truly going to get rough for the next six months or so. If they don't get all their ducks in a row by then, *then* an implosion starts to become possible. For starters, Sony has about 16 billion in cash reserves; that's about three years worth of bleeding. Spider-man three is due next summer. And by XMAS 07 they *should* be able to produce BD50 movie disks in volume at halfway decent yields (or swallow their pride and adopt VC1) and get enough PS3s into the japanese market to prop up their installed base. Their LCOS TV business is strong, their Samsung-sourced LCDs sell at good profit margins, and the new boss is cutting back overhead so financially they should do well enough. But to thrive as something more than an old, tired CES company (think: Matsu****a), Sony desperately needs a hit; they really, really, need for the PS3 to save the BD-ROM business. And that is a lot to ask of a game console.

Maybe MS underplaying the media capabilities of the XBOX is really safer and something else Sony needs to copy from them. ;-)

[Felix Torres]

In theory, 1080p sounds great, but here's the practical problem: to push that many pixels, something has to suffer.

Technically true, but...
The 360 already renders at 1080.
720 rendering is the *minimum* MS requires, not the maximum the box can do. 1080i vs 1080p is just a data transfer protocol issue.

What 1080i buys you is that you can render the game at 1080p30 instead of rendering at 1080p60 and let the interlace/deinterlace process take care of any frame-rate issues. The price of 1080p on the PS3 is being *forced* to render at double the frame rate. Since the PS3 hardware is not really that much faster than the 360(certainly not twice as fast), games that can't be rendered at 1080 on the 360 probably can't be rendered at 1080 on the PS3 either.

The whole 1080p thing is a red herring, as far as consoles go.
(TVs is a different story we've already discussed.) ;-)

The real differential between the two platforms is going to be the quality of the games. And since the 360 is moving on to its second wave of games, developers have had more time to figure out ways to use all the power of the hardware, so for the next year or so, 360 games are likely to be more sophisticated and look better than their PS3 counterparts, on average.

Sound reasonable?