Being in a college that has a gaming division, the news that the Play station 3 could miss its release date has some gaming and movie folks concerned, besides possible being late, it could be overpriced according to reports like this one:.
If it is late, could it make the new HD-DVD a defacto standard? Many producers depended on the PS3 to be there to justify releasing movies on both HD-DVD and Blue ray standards.
Do you think Microsoft with the X box will rule from now on?
Note how flawed the article is. The manufacturing cost and the price of a console can be very far apart. All the major makers put the initial price well under the cost and (hope to) make money on the game licenses. So comparing the PS3’s cost with the XBox’s price is comparing apples and oranges.
It is clear that the writer of the article has no interest in getting things right.
The original XBox was a failure in Japan. If you aren’t selling in major Asian markets, you are not even competing. MS is losing a lot of money here and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. Sony is making money.
Not in Japan anytime soon. PS2, PSP and Nitendo DS have ads plastered and broadcast everywhere, while the only place I see the Xbox 360 is sitting on the counter at the 7-11 next to the boiled octopus bin.
Hasn’t the 360 launch been pretty pathetic? It was released in the US around Thanksgiving 2005 and only a few people got their hands on one who stood in line on release day. Nobody has had them in stock since. Or if they got some it was a handful at most.
I see stores that have plenty of stock of games and accessories but they can’t be selling much if no one can get a system.
The original author has since acknowledged his arithmetic error, and that his figure was supposed to be $800. However, as noted, that is the cost to Sony, not the price to the consumer. Even if it’s an accurate figure for what Sony is going to be laying out for each unit (a dubious proposition given the hand-waving around his estimates, especially the $300 tag for the BD drive), every manufacturer loses money on the console, at least at first. Sony reportedly makes a handsome profit on each PS2, and will likely eventually manage the same for the PS3.
Sony has acknowledged only that it is possible they may miss the PS3 launch, but have never shared their plans for which markets will launch when. In all likelihood, Japan will not get the spring launch that everyone expected (mainly due, we think, to AACS’s foot dragging on getting the scheme specs out). There is nothing in the evidence to suggest that either Europe or North America will see any delays, despite the nearly universal assumption by analysts that the delays will be global. If Sony had pointed the finger at blue laser diodes or some other part as a potential problem, then it would make sense to be concerned about all of the launches.
Blu-Ray has an almost insurmountable advantage in following, technology and (with the PS3) market openers. The consortium will have to do something quite dire to drop the ball enough to let HD-DVD get its foot in the door. There’s an outside chance that Sony’s fight to keep Microsoft’s scripting technology out of the spec may yet come back to haunt them, as it is reportedly dramatically superior to the standard that BD has adopted. Nonetheless, given the public’s rabid anti-Microsoft sentiment, even that may well play into their hands (you can be sure no one is going to be pointing out that Microsoft’s video codec is one of the standards that both BD and HD-DVD support).
All-in-all, I think it’s a pretty safe assumption that the PS3 is in no danger of failure at this point. The Xbox 360 has not made deep enough in-roads to the market to be any threat, and people are willing to give Sony the benefit of the doubt over any delays because of their past track record.