PS3 is dead meat.
For about a month now, I’ve noticed the vultures gathering around the Playstation 3, due out Spring-time 2006. Then I saw the biggest harbinger of all-Sony itself is floundering. Let’s examine each reason the Playstation 3 is the next Dreamcast, but bad.
#1. The Xbox 360 is coming out first. Most sources guess a November launch, but it’s certain that 360 will be out in time for Christmas. Further in the 360’s corner is the fact that Microsoft won’t be run out the way Sega was. Sony likes to draw the comparison, but it’s not there.
#2. For all intents and purposes, Blu-ray doesn’t exist yet. Right now there are maybe a few thousand blu-ray discs in existence. Anyone who knows anything about video games knows that that isn’t anywhere near enough for a console to launch on. At the moment, Blu-ray discs go for $60 dollars right now-for a single disc. Even if Sony does manage to produce enough millions of discs to launch with a system, it will be absurdly expensive. Not just for them, but for you. Rumors of the sixty or seventy dollar game this generation proved to be wrong, but it will be almost inevitable for Sony and even more so for third-party developers.
#3. Sony’s bread and butter-its television division-is going the way of the dodo. Its projected earnings from TV’s went from about a billion and a half to less than a half billion. There’s no way Sony can foot the bill for the ps3’s blu-ray discs and hardware if its TVs continue to drop this way. And I can’t even imagine the entrenched battle between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.
#4. The N-Factor? We don’t know as much about the Revolution or Nintendo as a whole as we do about Microsoft and Sony. The only thing we really know is that it will have access to the hundreds of millions of Nintendo games on its old systems. That’s one thing I think we can put in the ‘Pro’ category for right now. We don’t know much else about what Nintendo will pull out, making it, effectively, a wild card that could either help or hurt the Playstation. We all know how hard Nintendo has been kicking itself for creating and then compteing with the PSX in the 90’s-maybe Nintendo can finally win back some of Sony’s excess support. Only time will tell on this one, thus the question mark at the end of it.
