Kutaragi Admits Sony Hardware In Decline

An anonymous reader writes "In a surprising admission, Sony Computer Entertainment President Ken Kutaragi acknowledged that Sony's strength in game hardware might be in decline. BetaNews has the article, which reports on Sony's PS3 struggle for the holiday season." From the article: "In an extraordinary public statement of regret and despair over having to postpone his company's PlayStation 3 debut in Europe and Australia until March, and to limit availability elsewhere to only 500,000 units come November, Sony Computer Entertainment President Ken Kutaragi is quoted by Reuters as having told reporters, 'If you asked me if Sony's strength in hardware was in decline, right now I guess I would have to say that might be true.'"

Just the Opposite really

[adam31]

The One positive PS3 has is its hardware. Its the software, sales, and marketing departments that are killing PS3. Did you watch E3? That was the longest continuous WTF I've ever seen. Powerpoint? Massive Crabs? Card monsters? The devkits they're giving developers are supposedly a total nightmare, with SDKs that take days to get working... And then sales goes and picks the magic number we all know.

But the hardware underneath it all is brilliant. Cell is a pretty sweet piece of chip for video games. RSX is good enough. Blu-Ray has 25 GB of storage, which should be enough for the next 5 years of games. A hard drive removes the artificial limitation of streaming bandwidth from building seamless worlds. Wireless controllers, Wifi internet, 1080p... tilt is tilt, even if a gimmick-- all these options are there for devs.

If only the rest of Sony could get their shit together, the box would sell itself.

Re:Just the Opposite really

[Rycross]

Interesting about the dev kits. Do you have some sources for the problems, because a friend of mine didn't seem to have any troubles at all devving for the PS3. He seemed a bit confused when I mentioned this rumor.

I'm not trying to troll or spread FUD or anything. I'm genuinly interested where there have been problems.

Obligitory: I'm leaning towards Wii myself. I'll have to see the whole package Nintendo delivers.

Re:Just the Opposite really

[masklinn]

Dunno, most of the feedback about the devkits indicate that it's extremely complex and the tools are akin to PS2's devkits tools: they suck, and you have to create your own.

From what I've read, for this generation, the Microsoft devkits are the absolute best (in simplicity, functionality and features, I guess MS' experience with Visual Studio helped a lot there), then comes Nintendo (the devkits are OK, and the fact that the Wii is fairly similar to the GC allows companies to reuse GC knowledge), and dead end is Sony with much more difficult to use and less featureful devkits. I guess companies which developped a lot for the PS2 are used to it though.

But it seems that what sucked the most about the PS3 devkits were the second-to-last iteration: seems like they were extremely noisy ("vacuum cleaner") while the final iteration is extremely silent.

Re:Just the Opposite really

[BeeBeard]

You raise some great points about how Sony at least knew enough to sandwich together some pretty interesting hardware for their upcoming console, but how in the world can you claim that the PS3 is being "killed" when it hasn't even been released yet? Rather than engage in endless debates about who will be king of the mountain after the PS3 arrives, the thing to do here is to just wait until the PS3 is out and the dust settles.

Trust me, there are plenty of ways to kill a console that don't involve unfounded PR moves and minor devkit problems. How about having *no* developers even making games for it? That was the case with the Sega Saturn, which I owned and loved. There was a time when it was the hottest thing on the block, too. But the Saturn soon turned into a kind of cautionary tale about how you really need to get some grassroots developer support before you even think about releasing a new machine. Sony has done that.

Will it be enough to topple Microsoft and Nintendo? Who can say?--I'm no fortune teller either. But what we shouldn't do is assume that because Sony has completely dropped the ball in other markets, that they will likewise fail in the console arena. Still skeptical? Look at Microsoft: Their operating systems range from mediocre to absolute garbage, their office suites are pretty nice, and their console systems are now wildly popular. If we had just considered Microsoft's past history with operating systems, could we have accurately predicted the success of the Xbox? It's doubtful. There was a time years back when ./ ran almost nothing but anti-Microsoft stories, and a lot of that general enmity translated into some early Xbox-hating. Now, Sony is the new punching bag. Will we all make the same mistake again?