Washington Timeswriter Sonny Burch isnot a happy bunnyright now. See, he loves his PlayStation 3, but what he doesn’t love is the “sabotage” he sees going on with Sony and the system following recent NPD figures.
“The Nintendo Wii remains the most popular system in the land, and, at $250, isn’t necessarily a budget buster. XBox 360 has made serious inroads by dropping the price of its core system to $199,” Burch explains. “So how did Sony respond?
“By releasing a new version of the PS3 … that’s $100 more expensive. Yes, it comes with a game, and yes, it has more hard-drive space, to which I respond: Who cares? Was the marketplace clamoring for more memory from the PS3? Is that why its market penetration is so low compared to its predecessors and competition? What were the Sony execs thinking?”
TheTimesarticle also lays into Sony’s denial of its own movies on the Xbox 360’s Netflix service: “The XBox 360 has just added the same capability. How does Sony respond? By allowing PS3 owners to stream Netflix movies? No, that would make too much sense. Instead, Sony said Netflix couldn’t stream any title from Sony’s library to the XBox. That’ll show ’em!”
This has always been the root of my own so-called “Sony hate.” The company has in its hands a beautiful machine, probably the best hardcore gaming console out therepotentially, but Sony has continued to piss it away with incompetent marketing and ludicrous pet projects likeHome. Pretty much everything Burch says is 100% right. The PlayStation 3 appears to be in the completely wrong hands right now.
