PS3 Fails To Impress

A friend of mine sent me this.
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There are a lot of reports lately about PS3s sitting in piles on the shelves in the U.S.. Many were returned in the initial month after purchase when speculators failed to realise any profit. Ebay shows a number of PS3 sales at shop prices or just below, as people try to make their money back. Silly money for PS3s on Ebay lasted only for a couple of days.

Wii prices, however, are between 125 and 150% of RRP on Ebay, and most major shops still report selling out of any Wii console stock within an hour or two of delivery.

The PS3 has not been the major success that Sony were hoping for. So far the PS3 is only selling to early-adopter die-hard Sony fans with sufficient disposable income – not as big a slice of the market as Sony thought. Many reports (on Slashdot, Digg etc.) seem to suggest that almost all video-gamers already have a good gaming PC, or a recent console. Few people seem desperate to upgrade, except the early adopters, who’ve already done so. The PS3 is very expensive, and there’s one good game for it (Resistance). Motorstorm was a big buzz title pre-launch, but it’s now been revealed that the impressive scenes shown at game shows were pre-rendered cinematics. Software sells hardware, and there’s nothing so amazing that people will buy the hardware just to play the game (as happened with GTA3 on PS2).

By all accounts (from reading comments on several developer blogs) the PS3 is a complete pig to program well. The 360 is quite straightforward, being a multi-cored PC-in-a-box, and the Wii is a Gamecube v1.5 (which could well mean that a number of games for the Cube, which were shelved in development as the machine didn’t sell too well, could be polished up and released for the Wii, which is selling very nicely indeed).

True, Sony have deep pockets, and could support an unprofitable system for some time, but so did Sega, and their failure to market the Dreamcast pushed them out of the hardware business altogether. The cycle is fast, and vicious – console doesn’t sell well, so fewer developers release games for it – with less software available, the console is even less appealing to consumers, so doesn’t sell well…

Given that you already have a next-gen console, the question you’ll need to ask yourself is this: Is the small handful of platform-unique titles on the PS3 worth laying out £500 for?