Arrogant Sony? No. Microsoft in the lead was insufferable.

Zzero

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I personally don't think they misread the market. They were fighting multiple battles at the time and used the PS3 as a Trojan horse to attempt to kill 2 birds with one stone.
And just to be clear here. The other one is HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray, right? Because Sony making the PS3 a BD player singlehandedly turned that from a fight BR was going to easily lose to one where they easily won. And yeah, it made Sony billions, though those billions were counted under a different division's header.

Anyways, for all of its flaws, Sony made a few key decisions during the PS3's life that made it a winner in the end. They are as follows:

1) PSN was launched with the system as a "good enough" version of XBL, and was free to boot. This was a small miracle since they put it together over the course of half a year when they realized exactly how much of a gamechanger the 360 version of Live was.

2) The hard drive. I made a little hay above about Microsoft removing it in the cheap60 but PS3 included it in all models and this ended up being key in letting the system compete against Xbox on performance later down the road.

3) They maintained traditional game development, either through internal studios or funding third parties, while MS went all in on Kinnect. Obviously they blew some cash on Move and Wonderbook but it paled in comparison to the years Xbox spent focused entirely on Kinnect.

4) They made some smart moves with IP during the generation. Uncharted, specifically, really saved their bacon in years 2 and 3 and became, to many people, the face of the console. While Sony might have entered the generation fairly weak in regards to the makeup of its core group of studios (lots of platformers, racing games and, though we did not know it yet, a star team at Japan Studio that was going to end up sitting out the generation entirely while trying to get their giant dog AI to work properly) they all pivoted neatly into the trends of the time and came out looking a lot better for it while the opposite happened in Redmond.

5) Not much of a "decision" so to say, but their global presence specifically in Asia couldn't be breached by Microsoft. At the time they Microsoft actually did "okay" enough in Europe, even outside of the UK, but got absolutely trounced in the smaller markets that had remained loyal to PS2 era Sony dominance and, of course, in Japan where Microsoft's efforts ended up being more for developer relations' sake rather than a successful market push. Remove Japan from the equation and I think Xbox actually edges Playstation in sales that gen, but in reality you can't just delete a market because one side did exceptionally badly in it.
 

historia

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29 Jun 2023
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I'm calling you out , your Japanese only us from Yorkshire & Scotland & Ireland say shite 🤣
Eh I typed it on purpose because I think that accent is funny. Mate, shite, cunt, bla bla.

Back in high school I live far from family so I doesn't have much entertainment except for a radio, one of the frequency was broadcasts humor's show with lisence from an English broadcast network. Basically my only way I could entertain. Also they broadcast Serie A through radio as well, and baseball lol.

I still don't know what was that broadcast network was but I would wish one day I discovered it, so much memory I enjoyed from it.
 

Danja

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You don't go on stage and tell people to get a 2nd job if you didn't misread the market. They could have made a $400 version with no back compat at launch and blamed the $600 on the bc being expensive.
That's not misreading the market though? That comment was just straight arrogance. But the PS3 itself definitely was not them misreading the market. The price was only so high because of Blu Ray drive at the time, which was mandated by the company as they needed to win the HD wars. The graphics chip fiasco also set them back. They definitely made some missteps I just don't think they misread the market in the context you implied.
 

Danja

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And just to be clear here. The other one is HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray, right? Because Sony making the PS3 a BD player singlehandedly turned that from a fight BR was going to easily lose to one where they easily won. And yeah, it made Sony billions, though those billions were counted under a different division's header.

Anyways, for all of its flaws, Sony made a few key decisions during the PS3's life that made it a winner in the end. They are as follows:

1) PSN was launched with the system as a "good enough" version of XBL, and was free to boot. This was a small miracle since they put it together over the course of half a year when they realized exactly how much of a gamechanger the 360 version of Live was.

2) The hard drive. I made a little hay above about Microsoft removing it in the cheap60 but PS3 included it in all models and this ended up being key in letting the system compete against Xbox on performance later down the road.

3) They maintained traditional game development, either through internal studios or funding third parties, while MS went all in on Kinnect. Obviously they blew some cash on Move and Wonderbook but it paled in comparison to the years Xbox spent focused entirely on Kinnect.

4) They made some smart moves with IP during the generation. Uncharted, specifically, really saved their bacon in years 2 and 3 and became, to many people, the face of the console. While Sony might have entered the generation fairly weak in regards to the makeup of its core group of studios (lots of platformers, racing games and, though we did not know it yet, a star team at Japan Studio that was going to end up sitting out the generation entirely while trying to get their giant dog AI to work properly) they all pivoted neatly into the trends of the time and came out looking a lot better for it while the opposite happened in Redmond.

5) Not much of a "decision" so to say, but their global presence specifically in Asia couldn't be breached by Microsoft. At the time they Microsoft actually did "okay" enough in Europe, even outside of the UK, but got absolutely trounced in the smaller markets that had remained loyal to PS2 era Sony dominance and, of course, in Japan where Microsoft's efforts ended up being more for developer relations' sake rather than a successful market push. Remove Japan from the equation and I think Xbox actually edges Playstation in sales that gen, but in reality you can't just delete a market because one side did exceptionally badly in it.

Yes HD DVD vs Blu Ray without that addition the console would have been able to launch at $200 cheaper but it was necessary at the time. Microsoft jumped in the fight yo try and help out HD DVD with the add-on but Disney swooped and and back Blu Ray at the end and vindicated Sony. It also allowed them many benefits down the road that gave them an edge over the 360.

The unique architecture of the PS3 also allowed them to get ahwad of the pack with Multi-Threading. Which is why they were so leagues ahead of the industry by 2009 onwards.

They definitely had some missteps but history has been kind to the PS3 and will always be kind it to it. For all it's flaws it's probably the most feature packed and robust pro consumer console we ever got from any hardware maker.
 

anonpuffs

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That's not misreading the market though? That comment was just straight arrogance. But the PS3 itself definitely was not them misreading the market. The price was only so high because of Blu Ray drive at the time, which was mandated by the company as they needed to win the HD wars. The graphics chip fiasco also set them back. They definitely made some missteps I just don't think they misread the market in the context you implied.
No, arrogance would have been charging $800 and not taking a loss due to the blu-ray drive.
 

Danja

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No, arrogance would have been charging $800 and not taking a loss due to the blu-ray drive.
Nah arrogance is exactly what Kutaragi said. Reading the market wrong would be exactly what you just said.
 

Yurinka

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Listen to Peter Moore use PlayStation as a punchline in his sales presentation.

Then the crowd erupts in laughter.

In comparison to this, the "How to share games on PS4" seemed good natured and never explicitly mentioned the competitors.

Launch aligned they were behind PS, both in hardware and software.

Even more if you also count the still active PS2s. Even more if later when PSP was released it we also count it.

How exactly do you think Xbox360 got so many big exclusives? It was precisely by making the "moneyhat" commonplace. They weren't the first to do so, however. Neither Sony.
There were moneyhats, but some were exclusive because PS3 was released almost 2 years than 360 in the main PS market, EU. And PS3 had that bizarre alien hardware, devs struggled to develop for it in the first years, so some of them skipped the PS3 version for launch.

Regarding former PS exclusive series that went multiplatform in the PS3 generation had more to do with budgets getting to fucking high in that new gen, to the point they weren't able to make it with a single console, so needed to release it in both. MS just got lucky for many of these cases.

The "moneyhat" practice only became rampant after MS joined the console market, and ironically, Nintendo actually was immediately hurt the most by this.
Moneyhats (or paid exclusives) existed since the 8 bits generation: Nintendo and Sega paid to lock exclusives back then and also did it in the 16 bits gen, in the next one Sony also did them, etc.
 
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Plextorage

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Listen to Peter Moore use PlayStation as a punchline in his sales presentation.

Then the crowd erupts in laughter.

In comparison to this, the "How to share games on PS4" seemed good natured and never explicitly mentioned the competitors.


For what it is worth "get a second job" to buy a PS3 was a bit shit from Sony, yes. But PS3 was cheap for what it had inside.
 
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Danja

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Putting a BD inside a PS3 wasn't reading the market wrong.
And I never said that? I said I disagreed with the person saying arrogance would have been them charging $800 and not taking a loss? To which I said that would equated to them reading the market wrong? All my posts in here praised the PS3 architecture... So I dunno how you arrived at this.
 

AshHunter216

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It goes without saying.

To all those young people who like to say "remember when the Xbox360 had all those great exclusives?", and then turn around and say "damn Sony and their moneyhats!".

How exactly do you think Xbox360 got so many big exclusives? It was precisely by making the "moneyhat" commonplace. They weren't the first to do so, however. Neither Sony.

The "moneyhat to lock an exclusive" business practice was introduced by Nintendo, in fact. Batman and Street Fighter II were famous third party timed exclusives locked out from the MegaDrive. I don't recall people calling Nintendo anti-consumer for it back then, though. Maybe it's because they were few and far between.

The "moneyhat" practice only became rampant after MS joined the console market, and ironically, Nintendo actually was immediately hurt the most by this.

The more one thinks back, the more one realises how much MS corrupted the gaming industry.
People this gen love to blame Sony for things that were common practice long before they entered the industry.
 
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Eh, that isn't too bad if I'm being honest. It's about on par with some of the stuff Kaz would say during PS2 E3s; in both cases they're just comparing raw numbers.

Although, I agree there was never really an "Arrogant Sony"; that only gained traction in the 7th gen and it took certain Ken Kutaragi quotes out of context, or the quotes themselves were paraphrased so much that botched versions were assumed to be what was originally said. The "two jobs" quote is a good example: Kutaragi never said people should get two jobs, or even said it in an arrogant tone. He said that (in his opinion), PS3 provided so much value that he believed people would be willing to work more to have the money to buy it Day 1.

Obviously, they were mostly wrong about that when the system was $599, but that's more a case of them being aloof than arrogant. And I don't think Peter Moore's being arrogant in that clip; yeah they throw some shade at Sony & Nintendo, but Sony & even Nintendo did the same during the '00s and '90s.

None of it is to the level of Genesis-era SEGA, though. Or the Atari Jaguar stuff, or the American Neo-Geo ads. That stuff just straight up dissed competitors loud and clear, and very boldly.

It goes without saying.

To all those young people who like to say "remember when the Xbox360 had all those great exclusives?", and then turn around and say "damn Sony and their moneyhats!".

How exactly do you think Xbox360 got so many big exclusives? It was precisely by making the "moneyhat" commonplace. They weren't the first to do so, however. Neither Sony.

The "moneyhat to lock an exclusive" business practice was introduced by Nintendo, in fact. Batman and Street Fighter II were famous third party timed exclusives locked out from the MegaDrive. I don't recall people calling Nintendo anti-consumer for it back then, though. Maybe it's because they were few and far between.

The "moneyhat" practice only became rampant after MS joined the console market, and ironically, Nintendo actually was immediately hurt the most by this.

The more one thinks back, the more one realises how much MS corrupted the gaming industry.

Nintendo was the worst with it IMO. No other platform holder was so draconian that they forced 3P to both make spin-off shell companies simply to publish on other platforms (Namco > Namcot, for example), but also license entire games out to other platform holders to reprogram and have published by the platform holder (Capcom with Strider on the Genesis/MegaDrive). Nintendo of America even got hit with an anti-trust lawsuit and settled out of court in '91, likely because they knew they'd of lost the suit.

While I respect Nintendo's efforts to get a grip on quality control after the crash, they definitely went a little too far and took advantage of it in anticompetitive ways. In that sense it's sometimes a miracle the MegaDrive and PC-Engine were able to get as much market-share as they did in Japan. Even though Nintendo laxed the strict licensing agreements by the time the SFC/SNES released, they had so much built-in cache with Japanese 3P that they got a lot of defacto exclusive 3P support anyway during the 16-bit gen.
 
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Nhomnhom

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25 Mar 2023
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I still remember a idiot Who laughed at Sony fans about the 600 buckaroos of the ps3, and the poor Motherfucker buyed a separate WiFi dongle and a hdvd, (the 360 was launched without wifi) paying more at the end and with no hdmi
Then all the 360s made in the first 3 years died.

In a country like Brazil where many people were importing them that meant you were screwed.
 

RE4-City

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The 2000s were way different when companies leaders talked about the competition.
I made a thread on this about 2 years ago: https://icon-era.com/threads/when-d...do-stop-taking-public-jabs-at-each-other.557/

Reggie would have no problem talking the PSP's productions issue's:

Nintendo's E3 2002 litterally started off with Nintendo calling out Sony about there Gamecube Europe shipments:

There is that famous photo from Sony delcaring the Console wars are over:

For some reason these companies don't take jabs like these anymore at each other, probably because gaming has become more mainstream since 20 years ago.

Arrogant Sony = expensive console

Arrogant MS = DRM, no ownership of games, no trade ins, mandatory always on Kinect watching you to sell your data and fundamentally altering how games at replayed for the worse, and also overpriced and weaker console
Your not wrong but it can't be stressed how bad Sony was with the PS3. They pretty much expected third party developers to learn how to make games for the PS3 when they 360 was so much easier to develop for and the Wii let a lot of lower budget releases thrive. They pivoted super hard with the PS4 and PS5 to make sure developers had as little resistance getting their games on their system. The situation was a bit worse than "expensive console" since you were technically getting a bargain for $600 with cutting edge technology, just as a game system it is a miracle the PS3 recovered like it did.