Kaz Hirai Dooms 360 To Short LifeKaz Hirai Dooms 360 To Short Life
Sony’s PlayStation 3 has a 10-year plan. We’ve heard about the plan, we’ve seen Sony’s current execution and we’re starting to see some of the titles making their way to the PS3 for 2009. The Xbox 360? Kaz, Sony Computer Entertainment’s head man, made his thoughts clear when speaking to Official PlayStation Magazine.
“Last time I checked, they’ve never had a console that’s been on the market for more than four or five years and we’ve committed to a ten year life cycle, so you do the math…,” he says. He goes on to state that the Xbox 360 won’t have a larger install base by the end of their 10-year plan has been completed, “unless things go really bad.”
Of course, nobody says Microsoft’s 10-year plan isn’t to push out yet another console. Is that wise? We don’t really know, but you can’t count them out on it. Maybe they’ll only have half the install base but two consoles in the market within the next ten years, nobody really knows.
The one major hole we can see in his comments revolve around their claims that the Microsoft doesn’t have any history of a console being on the market for very long. If I recall, Sony managed to squeek one by on Nintendo with the original PlayStation, which changed everything for the next ten years. Sony didn’t have a 5-year track record when they started taking Nintendo down, why does Microsoft need to have an extensive resume as well?
As for Wii?
“It’s difficult to talk about Nintendo because we don’t look at their console as being competitors. They’re a different world and we operate in our world — that’s kind of the way I look at things…” (kotaku)
Say what you want about Microsoft vs. Sony, but it sure sounds like Sony doesn’t want to acknowlege Nintendo’s success because it casts a dark shadow on their own product. Nintendo and Sony have been battling for years, that’s just the way it is and that’s how the industry sees it. When NPD releases numbers, when journalists write articles about consoles and when the war is finished one thing remains constant: all three consoles are included in the equation.
Before Sony fans unite to comment storm, remember, the PS2 had a lot of great games and continues to have games coming through for its console. People are still debating the life-span of the Wii product line, regardless to overall sales figures while the PS2 no doubt had a long live and still continues to have a long life, heck 30%+ of gamers still play the darn thing. Sony has been able to utilize the PS2 and its profitability to glide through the initial PS3 sales slump and get the momentum growing for their current generation console.
The question of the day, “Do HD graphics matter to gamers?” If you’re currently rolling with a PS3 or Xbox 360 and you’ve got HDMI and or sweet component cables you’re probably saying, “duh, of course they do.” What about everyone else, those Wii consoles for instance, there are so many of those. What about gamers that do not know what HDMI means?
No new 
Granted, there were other glossy magazines prized by young boys too, but we were old enough to purchase Electronic Gaming Monthly, now known as EGM by the hip and cool. Although EGM was founded in 1989, many adults between the age of 29 and 35 probably spent their youth flipping through the pages reading the reviews and editorials.
Only 13.4% of gamers are playing the Wii even though it’s the hottest selling console on the market, showing the fury of the casual gamer it seems. It’s trendy to own a Wii but it’s not trendy to play it; it would be interesting to see how much of the 13.4% is Wii Sports.
Microsoft’s fast to push out their press release, probably hoping to overshadow any reports Sony may be releasing for sales numbers. At this point, we’ll have to believe their press release as fact until someone proves it otherwise; Microsoft would hate to be caught in a lie. Unfortunately, NPD figures aren’t collected in Europe so we have to wait for all the other metric gathering companies to release final December 2007 figures.
The game sound was much like any other 8-bit action platformer. It reminded me of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the Nintendo Entertainment System, not the cool arcade one. Minus the turtles, Yo! Noid is a battle against Mr. Green, the Noids evil duplicate, a concept used in so many games; remember Shadow Link?