More PS3 Woes

Hardcore gamers can't catch a break.  Things are looking grim for the hardcore holy grail, the PS3.  Resident Evil 5, a series born on the Playstation, a series that has Playstation written all over it, can't keep up with its 360 brother.  Ouch!

To kick a dead horse, someone wrote an article about the 10 reasons PS3 is failing. Those are all valid issues of course, a $500 PS3 can't run a game better than a $200 360 - that disrupts Sony's entire marketing strategy of being the superior system.  But so what?  If Sony addressed every single issue in that article, they'd still be in 3rd, or 2nd at best.

The real reason PS3 is failing is the same reason 360 is failing, they're "hardcore" and therefore doomed from the start.  They're designed from the ground up to appeal to teen boys, a strategy that might be good for a game, but not good for an entire system.  The market is larger than that, and has been larger than that for quite some time.  Only Nintendo listened.

Mourning the PS3

(source: NPD shows that PS3 sales are down year over year since October '08)

PS3 sold relatively well in the summer of '08. Not good enough to justify releasing the thing, far from a profit, but the bulky old box was doing better than any other time in its life. It had just received its first highly rated exclusive, blu-ray returned from the format war victorious, and the triple was even gaining about 50k sales a month on its old nemesis, the 360!

Then something happened. Was it 360's price drop? The economy? Multiplatform gaming woes? We're not sure. But we do know that the newest member of the Playstation family has been dropping deeper into last place ever since that summer. The sunny days with the #4's, GTA, DMC, CoD and MGS, came to an end.

Sony wants us to look at the year as a whole and ignore that frightening trend line, which points downwards into their worst holiday season in memory. Perhaps if we don't look, if we pretend this didn't happen, we won't recognize the sad truth that in the summer of '08, before it turned 2 years old, PS3 peaked. It barely got to stretch its little wings.

Sony Playstation the III
2006 - 2008

Rest in Peace