Sony has delivered its strongest blow to its competitors, particularly the XBOX 360, months before the launch of the Microsoft console. They have done it by once again implanting the seeds of doubt in the minds of people. A sneaky but effective strategy, that they had used before hand when they squashed the Sega Dreamcast.
What have they done? Comments from the SCE head, Ken Kutaragi from month’s back were like a virus slowly trying to kill and disillusion its host. Particularly, Kutaragi’s comments of the following were the strongest:
- Xbox 360’s true competition is the PS2
- Not Next-Gen
- PS3 will come with true superior Next-Gen hardware
To the unkeen eye and to people who really don’t know what gaming is all about, it’s so easy to believe Ken Kutaragi’s statements.
- The XBOX 360 is coming out 4-6 months earlier than the PS3. Let us remember that the hardware that will come out in
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If journalist all over the world are the same ones as it is here in my country, then you can bet that the these journalist don’t really bother with extensive research and they just go on to deliver the most sensationalist bit of news. But of course, objectivity has never really been something to sell print media and boost television ratings. Had the media been doing their research they will come up with the following.
They enlisted the help of IBM, the same guys that Sony went to for their Cell Processor. While in theory the cell processor is indeed a new approach to computing, the multi-core architecture of the XBOX 360 is just as new considering it is only reaching mainstream support from Intel and AMD with their new PC dual core PC processors. To top it all off, the Graphics Processing Unit of the XBOX 360 is one of the first that will add EDRAM, something that current PC video cards do not have.
b) People keep on forgetting that a totally new thing may not exactly be a good thing.
This whole debacle on Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is useless since neither one of them are even out yet. With talks of newer formats being developed by other companies that may even surpass the capacity of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, I don’t see how there is a clear winner on these formats as of the meantime. Also tech-heads might also be able to throw additional life to the cheaper DVD format by introducing more sophisticated data compression methods, something that Microsoft has been rumored to be delving into.
c) The whole Microsoft thing.
(Image courtesy of the wonderful folks at the 1UP gaming site)A couple of days ago, I read an interview with Bill Gates and why he is giving away his money to help in the world health situation. In my opinion, the interviewer is being rather snide will Bill Gates despite the content what he is actually saying. It is as if he can’t believe Bill Gates, one of the richest man in this planet, was capable of doing something good. Sadly, the XBOX 360 is marred by the reputation of Microsoft as a big-bad bully from the early nineties. It is an image that most people have stuck in their minds even if the XBOX console product is completely different from the software services. If these journalists actually bothered, they will realize that Sony has a couple of skeletons in its closets as well, like the whole fiasco with publishing ‘fake’ reviews to boost their movie ratings and the Digital Rights Management issues wherein Sony installs an unknown program in your computer to prevent you from making copies of the music. Sometimes, I feel that if the XBOX 360 was a product of a company like Apple, people would be a lot warmer to it. This whole perception thing is quite sad really…
d) The Playstation 2 argument.
The PS2 won in the last generation because it has the strongest third party support and it NEVER was because it was technically superior compared to its competitors namely, Nintendo Gamecube, Sega Dreamcast and Microsoft XBOX. In the current generation, no doubt the XBOX is the most technically superior console of its time but it took a mere 20% market share with Sony dominating everything else. In the console generation before the current one, the superior hardware can be awarded to the Sega Saturn, a console that met an untimely death due to the difficulty of developing for such new hardware. However people are touting the PS3 as the clear winner, while discrediting other consoles such as the XBOX 360 (a major improvement of its product and services) and the Nintendo Revolution (with its out-of-the-box wand controller) simply because the PS3 can churn out more muscle than the other two. But history dictates that it was never really the strongest hardware that won the console race but the most well rounded platform. Sony’s winnings came from the support of third party developers. People seem to forget that the XBOX 360 has signed on a lot more developer than they used to and they forget the strongest innovation in current day gaming that Sony will not bother with at all, online gaming!
Of course comparing it to current graphics of today…such as this…
While Sony might be stomping off its competitors with unfulfilled promises, they in effect setting a bar for themselves as well. And if they can’t meet that next-generation bar…let see if people will still be as forgiving as they had used to be. But hey…its’ a Sony!
Sony may have won the battle for perception. But the next-generation console war rages on!