PlayStation 3: Not About Quantity, About Profitability

The Xbox 360 price drop rumors flow like water and it’s all but officially been announced at this point. What about PlayStation 3 and their price? No.

Nobuyuki Oneda, the Sony’s chief financial officer said, “our plan is not to reduce the price. Our strategy is not to sell more quantity for PS3 but to concentrate on profitability.” (gamespot) This makes complete sense coming from their chief financial officer, as their motivation is to make money, not lose it.

The question remains, how will they actually make money if they’re no longer in the race for competitive market prices? Considering game licensing must Net them some amount of profit Sony’s idea seems to be the exact opposite of their original PlayStation method: saturate the market and sell them all games.

So far we’ve seen very few “need to have” games for the PlayStation 3 console while Xbox 360 continues to build a substantial library and Wii continues to break sales records for apparently no reason. When a game publisher has to decide on a platform to launch a new game, why would they choose the one that doesn’t care to be competitively priced in the market? The one that doesn’t care about quantity of sales?

Sony intends to reverse the entire razor blade philosophy where one sells a cheap razor and charges users for the blades over and over again. Their take on this concept is to sell really expensive razors and put out small half-quality blades. Is that a good market strategy at this point?

0 thoughts on “PlayStation 3: Not About Quantity, About Profitability”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Post

DSi Will Be Region-Locked, Sad Face…DSi Will Be Region-Locked, Sad Face…

One of the greatest things Nintendo has done was allowing the DS to be unlocked for regions. This allowed gamers around the world to share their favorite games from all cultures and countries with just a click of the “buy” button at an online store.

The DSi loses this great freedom by locking it down to a region. “Nintendo DS software is region free so you can play any DS software on DSi from any region. You can also browse the internet on your DSi wherever you are in the world and exchange your photos with friends from around the world,” says Nintendo (CVG).

Much like the US Entertainment Industries need to lock down everything and contribute to global piracy, Nintendo follows suit with their hand-helds, tis a sad day indeed. Of course Nintendo reasons it all away by yelling parental controls and making it easier for regions to access their own content.

“DSi is region locked because DSi embeds net communication functionality within itself and we are intending to provide net services specifically tailored for each region. Also because we are including parental control functionality for Nintendo DSi and each region has its unique age limit.”

Specifically tailored for each region is a nice way of saying that each region has to pay the penalty of not being “first” (second, or third) to get some cool new features. Although Nintendo could put emphasis on the region the gamer lives in with complete access out of those bounds if they wanted, they’ve chosen to use this as a crutch to lock users out of content.

Users will get their content, of course. It just means more home brews, software hacks, hardware hacks and workarounds for the system. If that’s what Nintendo is trying to inspire, then they’ve done their job right.

However, wouldn’t it be great if they could just come out and say “we don’t want certain people accessing specific content until we say you can.”

Wolfenstein for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3Wolfenstein for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3

When you hear the word Wolfenstein what game do you think of? Constantly, I recall Wolfenstein 3D and all the memorable times I had building my first person shooter fingers. From a new-generation FPS perspective, Return to Castle Wolfenstein for the PC back in 2001 was my last touch on a Wolfenstein game series. I enjoyed it a great deal and would love to see more out of the game series.

It seems Activision and Raven Software are working on a PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game, currently titled Wolfenstein set to be released “when it is done.” The game follows the same concepts as most of the Wolfenstein titles of the past, a bit of dark science fiction and undead matched with World War II settings with Nazi’s and the main character BJ Blazkowicz.

This series seems to be full of re-hash and repeat with plots, characters and overall feel. Developers seem to favor re-makes over sequels to the famous franchise, eventually putting out one or two sequels of their re-make hits well with customers.

Is this the correct direction for the Wolfenstein franchise? In my humble opinion, it doesn’t really matter to me because I’m such a fan of the series. Perhaps they will continue to re-make the game until the larger demographic screams “Not again!”

(Thanks, Eurogamer)