Console Post of the Week: P.R. Like Its 1999
Let's get Nintendo out of the way first this week. Steven Davis sent me this:I was stuck trying to get a Wii for my niece (after taking care of my nephew a couple of weeks ago) and so got to Toys R Us at 9:30 expecting a reasonable line and to be out by 11.
No such luck. They apparently had so many people in line early that they gave out 66 vouchers at 9AM... (alas, didn't tell us late arriving folk, so I waited in line for no reason for 25 minutes).
The line was about 70-80 families long by the time the store opened.
This was a longer line than when I got the last Wii - 2 weeks ago - and on that day they had 91 Wii's for sale.
(Foster City, CA, Toy's R US)
Here's what happened with this new generation of consoles: Nintendo focused on how you play instead of what you see.
They've sold every Wii they've made, Paper Mario will sell milllions of copies and get great reviews, and no Nintendo executives said anything stupid last week.
That was easy.
Microsoft, though, not so much.
First up we have Aaron Greenberg, the product manager for Xbox 360 and Xbox Live, commenting on the crack-fueled decision to charge $170 for a 120GB hard drive:
“What we have done is release a smaller laptop size drive. If you compare what we are offering with a real plug-and-play drive the closest thing would be to take a 120 gig self-powered external PC drive and in that case we are seeing those retail at anywhere from $160 to $200 for comparable laptop sized external hard drives."
Dude, where do you shop--the Apple Store? Here's a big tip for you: try Pricewatch. You'll save a ton of money, because I've looked all over that site and can't seem to find anything remotely close to the prices you're quoting.
Oh, and hey--did you notice that Sony lets you replace the PS3 hard drive with a larger capacity drive with a minimum of fuss? If you're wondering how, I found a link to a guide for you.
Listen, Aaron, how hard is it to understand that you're offering that drive so people can load it up with crap that they buy from you? So when you jam us up on the price, all you're doing is reducing the viability of the downloadable content you're trying to sell us.
Smooth move, McFly.
In all seriousness, trying to tell us that a 120GB hard drive costs almost half as much as a 360 with a 20GB hard drive is just embarassing.
The second bit of dickery I was going to write about involved Microsoft people whining about leaks before the "Elite" unit was announced, but it's boring and I'm going to skip it. Stop crying about people giving you free publicity.
On to Sony. After crowing about their "brilliant" UK launch, it was announced that sales had dropped 82% in the second week.
Oops.
The second week's sales were 30,000 units. In other words, the UK (and the rest of Europe, I'm guessing) doesn't have some kind of crazy-special demand for the PS3. Europe isn't substantially different than the rest of the world in terms of PS3 demand, and worldwide demand is soft.
Japan last week? 16,889 units. That is nothing short of brutal.
Here's the story that no one is talking about, but it's going to be big as soon as people start paying attention. I've gotten a ton of e-mails in the last week saying that the UK is drowning in PS3 inventory. So is the U.S. So is Japan.
Do you know why Sony could not only make all the consoles needed for the European launch, but also was able to restock immediately?
Three words: excess manufacturing capacity.
It's very simple: Sony is building far more PS3's than we want. "What we want" is so much below what they expected that they've flooded every inventory channel they have in only three months. Unless sales improve dramatically, and soon, they're going to be forced to both shutter some of the existing capacity and greatly scale back their plans to bring additional capacity on line.
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