Friday, March 02, 2007

Console Post of the Week: Ahem

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Sony Corp. is on track to ship 2 million PlayStation 3s to North American stores by the end of March, and expects shortages of the video game console to have completely eased by May, a top executive said on Tuesday.

"April or May is when we feel like we're going to catch up to demand and have product fully in stock across North America and stay there," said Jack Tretton, chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment America.

Asked about widespread reports on video game Web sites that stacks of unsold PlayStation 3s are a common sight in many electronics shops, Tretton told Reuters in an interview that the console was still out of stock in some areas three months after its November launch.

Ahem.

Really, do we have to put up with these jackasses any longer? All these Sony executives sound like drunken Willy Wonkas, living in a fantastic word entirely populated by their imagination.

Maybe Sony thought it would be impossible for us to get any real information about the retail availability of the PS3.

Think again.

Enter Itrackr, the site that tracks inventory at over 8,500 individual locations of U.S. retailers (Target, EBGames/Gamestop, Circuit City, and CompUSA, and I believe Best Buy is included in some areas as well).

I manually tabulated in-store availability for over 950 locations in 37 major metropolitan areas at about 7 p.m. Thursday night. Guess what? The 60GB PS3 was in stock at 80.7% of those locations.

The lowest availability? Brooklyn. Only 25 of 48 locations had it in stock.

Availability nationwide at all 8,500+ locations? 84%.

Oh, and the Xbox 360 Premium unit? 78% nationally. The PS3 is easier to find than the 360.

Why do these people feel compelled to lie and lie and lie to us? Their asses must be absolutely huge, because the amount of information they pull out of them is astounding.

I think what Sony executives have clearly failed to realize is that they're part of the problem. It's not just their suicidal pricing strategy. The problem is that in interviews, good marketing has at least some vague resemblance to truth. The Sony executives tell such outrageous fabrications that their interviews are more high farce than anything else.

There's more, obviously, because in any one week Sony commits several major gaffes now. Hardware compatibility with the PS2 has been removed in European units (and surely will be removed from North American units as well), and software emulation will be used instead. How many games will be compatible? Well, the list isn't available yet, but that didn't stop Phil Harrison from pulling "over one thousand" out of his ass during an interview.

Could that number be accurate? Yes, but the track record for accuracy has been so poor in the last twelve months that we expect Sony to be making things up as they go along.

With over 5,000 games available for the Playstation, even excluding the Japan-only titles, that's a huge drop from the 98% figure Sony was claiming previously.

The chip they're removing for hardware emulation costs (allegedly) $27. So Sony has an $840 bill of materials for the 60GB Playstation 3 and they're going to save $27 by significantly reducing backward compatibility. Does that seem like the best way to lower your costs by a fraction more than 3%?

Backwards compatibility being gimped is actually a bigger story than the imaginary shortages, but it's been well covered by other people at this point. Here's one quote from Phil Harrison, though, just to bring back the memories (from May 2006):
"Backwards compatibility, as you know from PlayStation One and PlayStation 2, is a core value of what we believe we should offer. And access to the library of content people have created, bought for themselves, and accumulated over the years is necessary to create a format. PlayStation is a format meaning that it transcends many devices -- PSOne, PS2, and now PS3."

"If the developer wrote the game according to our technical requirements checklist, we will have what we believe will be almost perfect backwards compatibility. There will be some exceptions, there always are, but we believe those will be very few and far between. Even less so than we saw from PSOne to PS2."

Oh, and in response to a question about Microsoft's "difficulties" with backward compatibility, here's Harrison again: "I don't believe that was backwards compatibility."

Oops.

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