News Sony wants profit, not market share

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2009/03/20/sony-wants-profit-not-market-share/1

Sony is apparently unconcerned with the lack of PS3 sales and is more concerned with profitability than sheer market share.

 

you want profits? so.... launching a console that makes a loss of $150 per unit?

no biggie right, just subsidise sales with games! you have shed-loads of must-have titles!
.... oh, right.

i see that sony's business model is as concrete as ever.

 

But bigger market share = higher profits surely

 

£220 for a PS3 only £40 more than a wii. I dont think its expensive at all for what you are getting.

The PS3 is less than half price since its launch price 2 years ago int he UK. Get over it. If you want one you would have it, and those that never have any intention of buying one will always moan saying its expensive.

With the 360 at the bottom, Wii int he middle and Sony at the top of the pricing band, there is always going to be the argument that the PS3 is too expensive even if the 360 was £50 Wii £100 and PS3 £150 it will always be labbled too expensive and can never, ever loose this tag.

Its like im never going to buy an Aero because its way too expensive compared to a Mars Bar. When prices go up, the Aero is always the most expensive.

 

the problem i have with sony is that they came into the market as cocksure, saying 'people will pay $600 for this console because we're sony and it's gonna be totally awesome', with about 2 half decent games at launch. they then proceeded to cover their eyes and ears while the console tanked and people consistently cried for a price cut, claiming that the console offered a value proposition.

marketing lesson 101: It's not how much you think your console is worth. It's how much your customers think the console is worth. it's why the wii still sells for, let's face it, a stupidly high price for what the technology actually is.

you can trump the multimedia awesomeness of the ps3 all day, the problem is it just doesn't work on the vast majority of consumers. it's a games machine first and foremost to them; everything else is just gravy.

honestly speaking, the ps3 is a modern day 3DO. people just don't get why they should pay more.

BTW i own a ps3 - i bought it purely for littlebigplanet, it's amazing. the blu ray functionality is awesome too, but hey, i am a nerd! i GET this stuff.

not necessarily. nintendo was making profit from day one on the gamecube. that was a massive financial success for them, even though the console itself tanked.

 

Reverse your "[" if you want to put that second quote paragraph in italics...

 

i think it's a perfectly viable strategy, and i really dont see why people should get upset about it. Sony did their asessment, and decided that they dont want to engage in a price-war against Microsoft, a company that has profit margins well over 70% on their core business.

If i were sony, i'd do the same thing, though maybe be a bit more outspoken about it. "They compete on value, we compete on quality". That kinda stuff. Now that i think about it, i'm actually more inclined to get a PS3. Not that i'll actually go as far as buying one, but still...

 

I was eagerly waiting for the PS3 to come to market but have been underwhelmed but it, it's not the console or the price that is an issue. Really it's an awesome and very powerful machine however there aren't any amazing games for it, the games you get for it look and play almost exactly the same as the X360. Until something is released that makes full use of the awesome power of the PS3 then I'm gonna stick to PC gaming.

Oh and the online play on the PS3 is woefully bad! I know it's free compared to XBox live but I'd rather pay for something that works well that have something for free that is shoddy

 

when the ps3 was out here in the US, i though 600$ was too much to pay for any console, i just didn't see the value. when it went down to 400$, i though the price was starting to be acceptable (yet not desirable) but the games weren't convincing enough for me to buy the console. now, i'm waiting for sony to drop the ps3 to 300 $. the system's worth that amount, and there's a bunch of great games to play. meanwhile, i'll just wait & play on my pc... i'm sure there's lots of people in my same position.

 

lol but my PS3 is the only thing i need hooked up to my TV, no other device.

 

I want one [almost] purely for a Blue Ray player, which will play the odd game that's not on the 360 or PC.
However, I don't know when I'll actually get one.
A price drop would make it more tempting, but it doesn't look like it'll happen just yet (Christmas time, maybe, possibly)

 

I wouldn't say it tanked, yeah it wasn't the most popular of the 3 consoles, but it was no Dreamcast. Plus didn't Nintendo actually make profit on each GC, unlike what Sony are doing now? They also had pretty much only first party game sell well, it's quite a different situation to the PS3.

 

They're £220 atm from Argos for a 40GB

 

What I feel is that the PS3 is a very powerful console indeed but it tried too hard. It's like it wants to be a gaming PC which it can never be. If I am to spend a shitload of money I can build myself a very affordable gaming PC instead and have almost NO limits to what I can do instead of sinking close to the same amount of money into a locked down console. For me buying technology monsters of consoles today is just not a very good idea.

And yeah, if Sony want to tout it's profitability argument I want real numbers backing that up. Now they are just lying in our faces.

 

Bulls**t. Give some explanation as to why you believe this. I have never had an issue with PSN unless it came to an individual's shoddy connection. XBL uses a P2P system which lacks dedicated servers versus PSN which does. XBL has also been down plenty more times than PSN for the record. So I'm not understanding your concrete position on the matter. Both services are great and service to different crowds.[/quote]

Tried too hard? Yeah, they did try hard to bring a powerful, reliable system to consumers and because they took risks they ended up paying for it in the long-run. Also, at $400 (US) for a PS3 and possibly $300 by next week the PS3 is a great buy. Please show me a $400 PC that can run games the same way PS3 runs Killzone 2 (1080i natively) or Uncharted (1080i natively) and I will be impressed. A PS3 will last you a very long time. A PC will not, period. You will end up spending money on a entirely new rig in the next 3 years once that new socket, new memory, new FSB, etc. comes available. Don't get me wrong, PC's are great (as I want a new rig myself), but to compare PC vs. console isn't completely fair IMO.

 

Given Nintendo are putting the price of the Wii up in the UK, buying the Wii now is hardly a genius move, unless you love Nintendo. I brought one over 1 year ago, at that time the PS3 was almost double the price, however a PS3 for £220, even just for the updateable Blu-Ray is good value. The PS3's problem has been a lack of enough must have, Sony exclusive games; maybe the PS3 development tools are just to complicated for many developers to get the best out of the hardware?

P.S. Buying a new Wii might be crazy, but an excellent value, pre-owned model with Mario Kart Wii, could provide hours of great value fun for all the family, PM me for details.

 

side by side with my xbox in a single evening, PSN has been consistently awful, tbh. every other game of LBP i tried to play online suffered terribly from dropped connections and incomprehensible error messages, whereas XBL has been smooth as butter.

this jives with my other friends who own ps3s and xboxes; they just have a better time on live.

 

I'll stick with the Dreamcast, thank you. Now that was online play.

 

You can get better BR players for cheaper than the PS3 - from Sony no less!