Console Post Of The Week
In one big moment of WTF, Sony announced last week that they're dropping the price of the PS2 to $99 in the United States.Um, okay.
How far behind the 8-ball is Sony with the cost of the PS3? Well, this is the equivalent of throwing a party where you want to hire a magician, but he's so expensive that you call his 97-year-old great grandfather instead, because he's all you can afford.
Is a PS2 price cut going to do anything for anyone at this point? Not really. What's getting released on the PS2 now, with rare exception, are 100% half-assed efforts. The "D" team works on the PS2 titles. I'm impressed that anything's still getting released for the PS2 at all, but the titles are heavily concentrated from only a few publishers (Electronic Arts, most notably).
The exception is Atlus, and while Atlus is occasionally awesome (and always interesting), it's not nearly enough. But for people who want to buy a bunch of used games and play in lo-def, it's their lucky day.
So why in the world did Sony do this? Well, what else can they do? Clearly, they couldn't afford to cut the price of the PS3, or they would have. They've totally botched the generational transition--the strength of the PS2 is a testament to Sony mispricing the PS3 to such a degree that, incredibly, it can't engender a transition.
Being Sony, though, they can always make it worse. With the launch of Nintendo's DSi last week, here was Sony's response from John Koller, Director of Hardware Marketing:
If Nintendo is really committed to reaching a broader, more diverse audience of gamers beyond the "kids" market that they've always engaged, there isn't much new with the DSi to support that. Significant gamer demographic groups are being ignored, and there continues to be limited opportunities for games from external publishers to do well on the DSi.
Wow. Again, Sony violates the Prime Directive Of Interviews. I'm not going to break down why his statement is staggeringly idiotic, because Chris Kohler of Wired already did an excellent job of it here, but it's remarkable how often Sony executives just sound like dicks. Is no one at that company around to tell them to check trou and zip up after they leave the urinal?
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