Media Wonk

Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Sony changing course? - November 19, 2007

Sony seems finally to be taking steps to disentangle Blu-ray and PS3, if not physically than at least strategically.

The recent PS3 price cut seems to have goosed sales of the third-place games console just in time for the holiday selling season. Perhaps more importantly for the long-run, however, it represents at least a tacit acknowledgment by Sony that PS3 has to succeed as a game console, on game-console terms, if it's to succeed at all.

The notion that gamers would pay a premium for a console just to be able to watch high-def movies was always flawed, as PS3's third-place showing so far makes clear. Gamers want to play games. The fact that the console could also play high-def movies is nice, but not reason enough to pay one-third more than for a perfectly acceptable alternative.

Media Wonk has long argued that Sony should introduce a low-end PS3 model without the expense-adding Blu-ray drive, but at least Sony has done the next-best thing: give away the Blu-ray player and price the PS3 like a game console.

A similar belated reorientation can also be seen in today's announcement that Sony is slashing the price of PS3 developer kits in half to make the platform more attractive for third-party game publishers. Compelling games sell game consoles. By making it difficult and expensive to write games for PS3, Sony was driving third-party publishers into the arms of Microsoft and Nintendo, where the lower development costs for Xbox 360 and Wii games are easier to recoup. That left the PS3 critically short of compelling games.

Is it too late to save PS3? Media Wonk's crystal ball is cloudy. But at least Sony is finally treating PS3 as a games platform, which, ironically, could end up doing more to boost Blu-ray's prospects that trying to ram it down gamers' throats.

[Consumer Trends]  [Discs]  [Platforms & Formats]   LEAVE A COMMENT