Is Sony Right (or did they just lose their natural mids)?
[QUOTE=""]Xbox 360 and Wii owners, I'm talking to you and only you now. Apparently, your consoles are "dead, dumb terminals" that are going to start looking dated over the next few years. So stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
The console wars are an inevitable and constant part of the games industry, with each generation seeing fanboys springing up eager to defend their console of choice until they grow up. But, the companies themselves don't usually get involved in the mud-slinging, leaving their customers to do the dirty work for them.
Of course, you get the odd incident where boardroom bravado spills out in to the public domain, but these are few and far between, with company executive usually keeping things professional. But one man seems intent on changing that, and his name is Scott Steinberg, SCEA's vice president of product marketing.
Now, obviously this guy is going to be a big supporter of the Playstation 3, it is his job after all. But I do wonder if laying in to the competition is really the way to go about things. Steinberg writes a blog for Edge Online, and in his latest post, he has not only talked up the PS3's future, but dismissed the other consoles at the same time.
In a long, rambling post about the advantages he believes the PS3 has over its competitors, Steinberg rips in to the Wii and Xbox 360. Videogamer reports that his words of wisdom include the following nuggets.
[QUOTE="Scott Steinberg"]
The brilliance of PS3 is that it's not a dead, dumb terminal like other machines. We can throw layers of firmware into that box and always be contemporary with technology. We can reflect and respond to how people are using entertainment.
In the next few years, you're going to start to see us separate from the herd. Some of the other platforms are going to look very dated because their life spans are so much shorter than ours.
And we're also offering more first-party exclusives. It's a major flaw in some of our competitors that they don't have the development resources to showcase on a global basis the diversity and the creativity of a development team that's a thousand strong.
If you're a competitor I've got bad news for you because we've got some absolute blockbusters that are in the works, some of them new IP, some of them existing IP, that we're building specifically for the PS3.
From a competitive standpoint our competitors are going to have a tougher road now then even in 2008. But for PlayStation 3 consumers, it means more quality and more choice.
Dreams-Visions
So let's deal with those statements one at a time.
The PS3 may well be more future-proofed than either the Xbox 360 or Wii, but that hardly means that those consoles are either dead or dumb. In fact, in terms of sales, it could be argued that it's the PS3 that is currently dead, and the lack of any price cut on the horizon is a dumb decision for sure.
The Xbox 360 has potentially as long a lifespan as the PS3 has in front of it, so Steinberg must have been referring to the Wii. But, is Nintendo really going to be bothered? The Wii will sell in huge quantities for the next couple of years before being replaced by new hardware that is also likely to be bought by all and sundry. Meanwhile, Sony will still be trying to sell the PS3 to people.
I concede the point on the first-party exclusives, as the PS3 does look to have a stronger line-up than either the Xbox 360 or Wii. However, those platforms also have some great games on the horizon and both have a larger installed user-base at present to actually buy the software.
My advice to Scott Steinberg: leave the console wars to those of us in the trenches, it's not becoming of you to start ******* at your rivals. And to be honest, you're not actually that good at it.
LinkScott Steinberg is Swift_Boss_A? It kinda sounds like it.
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