May 31, 2006 - Just over two weeks ago, Sony's American boss, Kaz Hirai, dropped jaws around the world by pricing the PlayStation 3 at $500 and $600 - depending on which model you want. Things have not gone smoothly for his company since then.
The PlayStation 3 didn't have quite the showing at E3 the company would have hoped for and there has been a series of potential blunders over the past fortnight that, while not damaging in the long term, has at least given people pause in their decision about which company to give their money to this year and in the years to come. Both of these snafus are related, directly or indirectly, to Sony's insistence on ramming Blu-ray technology into the PlayStation 3, and you have to question whether it's going to be an albatross around the company's neck.
Whether you're paying $500 or $600, there's no denying that the PlayStation 3 is going to be expensive. Message boards have burned for weeks now as would-be buyers vent their frustration. Probably the most amusing outcome of the inflated price has been the eagerness with which both Microsoft and Sony have tapped Nintendo's Wii as the second-console of choice.
Kaz Hirai delivers the good news
Sony's response to the caterwauling about the price has been to remind us that we should be aware of what we're getting for that money. Blu-ray players don't come cheap and the money you hand over for your PlayStation 3 in November will quickly bump you into the next generation of DVD - at a lower price than a stand-alone player. Apart from the confusion surrounding which of Blu-ray and HD-DVD will come out on top as the next standard disc format, there's also the chance that, much like laserdisc, people will simply ignore both of them.
With HD TV adoption in the US predicted by Sony to hit 25 percent by the end of 2006, there's some support for this idea. If three-quarters of households don't have the technology to see the advantages of Blu-ray over DVD, pushing the PlayStation 3 as a cheap Blu-ray player isn't going to work. The situation is even worse in Europe, where HD broadcasts, a better driver of HD TV adoption, are only now getting started. In the UK, Rupert Murdock's Sky has recently started limited HD broadcasting, and even then early adopters have to pay £300 ($565) for the appropriate decoder box - if they can find one.
Sony has had one fortunate turn of events. A technology consortium recently reached an agreement to push back enforcement of the ICT, or Image Constraint Token, until as late as 2012. The ICT is Hollywood's latest attempt to thwart the evil pirates who are robbing the companies of billions of dollars in profits - if you believe the studios' questionable numbers. The technology requires that any high-definition 720p/1080i/1080p digital signal to an HD TV needs to pass through an HDMI connector or otherwise it will be downsampled to an analog signal barely above current DVD resolution. You can see, then, why people were calling foul at Sony's decision to drop the HDMI connector from the $500 model of the PlayStation 3.
But it's not over yet. Since the agreement is currently just that and not an addition to Blu-ray's technical specifications, there's a chance that the firms could pull out at some point, making your decision to save $100 cost you dearly by the end of the decade. The timing of the agreement is interesting too. Apparently, we won't have to worry about the ICT until 2012, which is around the time that the next round of consoles would be due.
The second brouhaha to hit the PlayStation 3 this month had less to do with movies and more to do with games - specifically second-hand games. This has long been a source of great frustration to publishers. Essentially, they're not happy that people pass over new, full-priced games for used ones that can save you anywhere from 10 to 50 percent. At issue is that none of the money that stores make off these secondary sales goes to the publishers. The rhetoric has changed to vitriol over the past year or so, and it's no surprise that publishers are eager to find a way to stop second-hand sales. For a while at least it looked like Sony was on to something.
A recent report from out of the UK said that Sony would implement new technology that would stop all second-hand sales by tying games to the machines they were first played on. Essentially, when you walk into a store and hand over your $60 (or whatever no-doubt high price we're going to be faced with for PlayStation 3 games), you would not be buying a game but rather just the right to use the game. (Whether this means Sony would replace damaged discs for free so that you could continue to use your license wasn't touched on). Cue the frenzy.
Which one will you buy?
Within hours, sites big and small had rounded up the most professional people they could find to talk about the technological reasons why this probably wouldn't happen. The biggest obstacle is that to enforce a scheme like this, all PlayStation 3s would probably need to be online, which isn't likely. But, catastrophe was averted a day later when, after repeating requests for comments to clear up the mess, Sony at last shot down the "speculation". Another potential disaster averted.
But here again, we're not in the clear yet. Some people have pointed out that Sony holds patents that would allow them enforce a one-system-per-game scheme for PlayStation 3 games. Holding a patent and using it are two very different things. It's doubtful whether the rewards of keeping used-game sales at bay would be worth the backlash from gamers. The second-hand market may be a big problem to publishers, but draconian laws aren't going to help anyone. Instead, publishers should either make the games bought new worth hanging on to or deal with the fact that, like the DVD market, if people are done with their purchases, they will sell it.
A big question is whether Blu-ray will be worth it to Sony in the long run. If Blu-ray comes out on top and people start trading up, the answer will be yes. But what happens if HD-DVD surges and overtakes Blu-ray among early adopters? What would be the fallout should both formats fail? With the Xbox 360's external drive, Microsoft has positioned itself well here. Blu-ray and HD-DVD are late in arriving and uptake is probably not going to be anything like that when DVD was introduced. People have only now come to the point where they've re-bought their movie collection on DVD. Asking them to do it again is going to be a hard sell. Will the PlayStation 3 do as well if you take movies out of the equation and Blu-ray becomes a format only for games and other data? Kaz Hirai is hoping that's a question he'll never have to face.
Quelle: http://www.ign.com
