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Your email address will not be published.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

Episode 378: Hilary 2015Episode 378: Hilary 2015

This week has a very special guest, former IGN editor and current Dog and Thimble podcast host Hilary Goldstein, as he teams up with Paul to razz Jonah incessantly, as well as add a certain amount of NSFW spice to this week’s proceedings.

The news items include:

  • Rock Band DLC hints at a comeback
  • Sony appears to have ‘abandoned’ its trademark for The Last Guardian
  • Final Fantasy 15: Episode Duscae demo detailed
  • Nvidia’s big March 3rd event – is it a gaming phone?
  • After raising $114,000 on Kickstarter, dev goes silent
  • BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk has come back from retirement

All this and Listener Feedback.

Community Expands: Team Fortress 2 Has a BlogCommunity Expands: Team Fortress 2 Has a Blog

The Internet has given us a communication mechanism which allows developers to better understand their audience. You can use community sites to market your content and your brand but you can also use them to better understand your market and bring your strageties and progress to your fans.

Valve Software has taken their latest successful franchise title Team Fortress 2 and followed it up with a website or “blog” which can keep their fans “in the loop.” Teamfortress.com will, no doubt, be the launch pad for much hype, community offerings and up-to-date news about the TF2 game and any updates.

“Now that we’ve settled into regular releases of content, we’ve found ourselves wanting a better way to talk directly to the TF2 community about the state of the game and some of the reasoning behind the choices we’re making. Our hope is that this blog will accomplish that, and give everyone some better insight into our development process as well.” (teamfortress.com)

Now, there is a great chance Valve will use their new launch pad to talk about upcoming games and lead you to demo’s and downloads to the TF2 title; they already link to the valve store to purchase the game. But, blogs bring in users searching for fresh content about the game and give official word to kill any bad rumors.

Call it marketing, call it journalism or developers notes, there is nothing wrong with having one more resource which represents the voice of Valves TF2 development team. Congradulations guys!

Episode 252: DuckTalesEpisode 252: DuckTales

This week, Paul can’t make it, so we bring on a Paul substitute, Dan Quick of the PolyCast podcast – and the show doesn’t skip a beat thanks to Dan behaving like Paul without realizing it. This week’s Gaming Flashback explodes like a blood sausage with Wasteland.

This week’s news items include:

  • Dashboard update gives Indie Marketplace more visibility
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 outed by Amazon France
  • Skyrim DLC won’t follow same model as Fallout DLC
  • Electronic Arts terminates “free Battlefield 3 for preordering Mass Effect 3” deal early
  • Alan Wake on PC because Remedy “a nagging little kid” to Microsoft

In addition, we have Reader Feedback for Paul’s Pixie Diamonds contest – the winners will be determined next week. The contest’s Question of the Week remains the same: “Who is your favorite Disney Prince or Hero, and why?”