Dustin Salsberry

Why the PlayStation 3 Will Bankrupt Sony

I utterly concur with the article (and it certainly helps that it's so well constructed). That said, I also agree with Gerry B.'s final thought regarding the real selling point of a game console. That point is GAMES, and the reality that Sony is an electronics company, NOT a software company, is becoming painfully evident.

Sony's early success that continues in PS2 began with little more than a loosened licensing structure that made it a very attractive platform for developers who'd been disgruntled with Nintendo's grip on licensing. After all, the PSX was overpriced for its market, too, but the jaw-dropping library of third party games was enough to convince a lot of people to spend a few bucks replacing their Super Nintendos (c'mon, who really bought a Saturn back then?).

However, we now live in an era that hosts two major manufacturers that play ball with third parties, and the concept of an exclusive third party title is all but dead. Now the smart money is on the company that has the strongest first party intellectual properties, and Sony just doesn't cut it. As mentioned earlier, Sony is simply not a software company. Their God of War franchise may be popular, but it's no Halo, and Forza is a likely Gran Turismo killer.

There is, simply, nothing else worth playing on a Playstation X, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 10. Couple this woefull reality with the strikingly poor hardware decisions of the PS3 (a high density disc can't make their singly 3.2gHz processor suddenly as fast as three of them in the XBox 360), and you have a console with no worthy first party titles, a high price point, and a slightly worse capacity for handling the shared third party titles.

And yesterday Micsrosoft shows a pre-rendered trailer for Halo Wars, a brand new addition to the Halo universe, and announces an exclusive partnership with Peter Jackson's new Wingnut Interactive game studio that will bring a Halo MMORPG. It's starting to look like Sony hunting season.