Bluffmaster
Forerunner
Can the big guy keep his crown in the new generation?
June 30, 2006 - While Sony has easily dominated gaming for two console generations and is confidently preparing for a third, a surprising pricing strategy and vigorous moves from Microsoft and Nintendo have many questioning whether the champion will easily win another round.
Adding to the skepticism this week are several reports from industry analysts which point to possible weaknesses in Sony's approach.
During a luncheon at the recent game marketing conference MI6, analyst P.J. McNealy of the American Technology Researchers warned that Sony's PlayStation 3's complexity could prove troublesome.
"This is now the most complex box that's ever been built in this industry. It's going to have a Cell processor, it's going to have a Blu-ray drive. The number of pieces that are going into this box are even more astounding [than the over 1700 parts used in the Xbox 360]," commented McNealy. "While Sony has certain manufacturing advantages at the end of the day, this is a very complex process, and they're going to be limited to the yields that they can come up with."
Sony has set a goal to build six million PS3 units by the end of March 2007 and set a monthly shipping target of one million units per month from launch in November 2006. McNealy also speculated on the production schedule of the complicated next-gen system: "We don't think [Sony] is going to be in assembly for another four to six weeks -- end of July, early August."
Meanwhile, Next-gen.biz reports that the strategic market research and consulting firm DFC Intelligence sees the PS3 as possibly coming in third behind Microsoft and Nintendo in the next-gen console war.
The DFC clarifies that it is guessing and doesn't know "which way the market will shake out," but by looking at several factors to estimate how well a system will do they're concerned for PS3.
"The glaring weakness of the PlayStation 3 is price, especially when compared to the competition," said the report. "Sony has done very little to justify why the system is worth a premium price for consumers that don't care about raw hardware performance and are not hard-core audio/visual consumers. Unfortunately we believe that represents over 90% of the consumers in the marketplace."
While acknowledging that Sony has long been a market leader due to a huge, diverse software library, the report summarized the analysis by pointing out that "a $600 price point is okay for launch but it will not fly in holiday 2007. If Sony wants to drive unit volume 2007 needs to be not only the year of price cuts, but the year of drastic price cuts. There is going to be a shakeup in the video game industry and even if Sony executes perfectly there could be a new market leader in two years."
Source : IGN