Game Over: The Follow-up
Last Friday, our Michael Davis opined the inherent suckiness of the Playstation 3. Reuters provides us with an amusing follow-up. They inform us that Nintendo Co.’s Wii game console outsold Sony PlayStation 3 by more than five to one in Japan last month: 251,794 units of the Wii to 46,321 of the PS3. The ratio the previous month (April) was four to one.
Sony’s game division posted an operating loss of $1.91 billion in the year that ended March 31. And you thought the PS3 was expensive!
Sony’s going to be spending a half billion dollars upgrading its censor chips – so if you just bought a PS3, you lose. The consensus in the gaming community is that said half billion would be better spent developing cool new games.
There’s no reason to count Sony out, but I’ll bet its CEO and chairman, Sir Howard Stringer, had stayed at CBS.
Karma? Sony went behind Nintendo's back to make the PS1, which was originally designed as a CD-ROM add-on for the Super Nintendo.