Sony bullshit generator still in working order
It’s good to know that Sony still has one market-leading piece of highly efficient and productive hardware on its books. The ailing megacorporation seems to expend most of its effort these days launching acres of cretinous lying drivel into the ever-compliant media, blaming anyone but itself for the catalogue of ineptitude that has beset the company over the last few years.
The space of that single hardware generation has seen Sony’s games division crash from being the overwhelming market leader by a factor of 6:1 over the nearest opposition (the PS2 has sold around 140 million units worldwide compared to the original Xbox’s pitiful 25 million and just 21 million for the Gamecube) to a dismal last place in every field of operation it competes in.
The company’s products populate the Blue Square Football Conference of the videogaming leagues – the PS3 is still making basically no inroads into the Xbox 360’s lead and gazing far off into the distance at the dust trail of the Wii in the mainstream market, and the PSP has been humiliated by the DS and now the iPhone and iPod in the handheld field. But who’s responsible for the latter catastrophe? You’ll never guess in a million years.
Okay, you probably will. It’s those pesky pirates again!
“I think we had a great lineup last year. The biggest problem that plagued PSP was piracy”, lied the latest idiot liar wheeled out by the company to insult everyone’s intelligence with some idiot lies last week. Surprisingly, no kind of evidence was offered to substantiate this claim – not even the usual back-of-a-cigarette-packet “calculations” about “lost” revenue, but since Mr Dyer works for Sony, we’re sure he knows what he’s talking about.
What we know for certain, though, is that the PSP’s biggest problem definitely wasn’t launching the PSP Go, a cut-down yet inexplicably far more expensive model of the platform that’s incapable of running boxed software bought from shops and caused consumers to worry that the normal PSP was about to be made obsolete.
The PSP’s problems are also definitely NOT the fact that game releases for the machine have dried up to a trickle, which is definitely NOT because publishers have realised the stupidity of developing far more complex and expensive games for a platform where software sells for the same price as DS games which have twice the userbase and cost a fraction as much to create. (The PSP had 394 game SKUs released in 2009, compared to 1,384 for the DS. But that’s definitely just a statistical anomaly.)
And we can further confirm that it’s definitely piracy that’s to blame, because of the fact that the DS famously doesn’t suffer from piracy at all, explaining its vastly higher sales of both hardware AND software. If it was somehow possible to pirate games on the DS far more cheaply and far more easily than it is on the PSP, we can all definitely agree that the DS would be a massive failure, and would NOT be making Nintendo the vast uncountable piles of money that it consistently has for the last half-decade.
Other factors which have definitely NOT caused the PSP’s failings include Sony’s control-freak restrictions on the machine’s most attractive features. While the platform is a fantastic way to play old PS1 games via its built-in emulator, Sony block users from transferring their legally-owned old games to a Memory Stick while simultaneously not bothering to make them available to buy in the pathetically barren European PS Store. (Which offers a feeble 55 PS1 games, scattered around without even their own category to make them easy to find. The Japanese store, meanwhile, has 375 PS1 games, with their own section and sorted into various helpful sub-categories.)
But this has DEFINITELY NOT caused PSP owners to hack their PSPs for this entirely legitimate purpose, only to then find themselves tempted by the sudden ease of playing pirated PSP games in a far more convenient format that through Sony’s abysmal proprietary UMD format, which stores games on slow, noisy, fragile discs and demands the further purchase of an overpriced proprietary-format memory-card for savegames.
Last among the factors which have DEFINITELY NOT contributed to the PSP being so comprehensively eclipsed by its competitors is the fact that despite being allegedly a machine aimed at the portable handheld market, the PSP is a huge and unwieldy device far too big to fit in the average pocket, with an exposed screen which necessitates still more bulk in the form of a case or pouch (at yet more additional expense).
The fact that it also tends to play host to games not designed with the needs of the portable-gaming market in mind is equally irrelevant, as is the fact that the machine’s battery loses all charge from mere days of disuse, while the DS (like the GBA before it) can be left unattended for months or years on end and then picked up and played with the majority of its last charge still intact.
None of these things, WoSblog would like to emphasise once more, have played any part in the PSP’s failure to achieve Sony’s expectations. It was piracy – entirely, definitely, piracy and nothing else.
It’s always someone else’s fault, isn’t it, Sony?
Well said, sir! Too bad the suit at Sony needs a brick in the face to understand, this being too subtle for him.
i agree with the article,
but didn't the ps3 made an inroad in Europe now?
http://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=1310
Individual territories don't count for squat. The piece refers to worldwide sales.
I agree about the types of titles on the PSP being an issue. Devs always seem to want to create cut-down versions of the sort of stuff you see on big consoles, and they often just don't work when crammed into the smaller console. The PSP controls aren't up to it for a start. I ditched mine last year after realising all I played on it was the Capcom and Sega collections.
I'd love to know how much Sony spunked on all those pointless UMD movies.
I'm sure you didn't consider the fact that maybe the reason why the psp sees so few titles is because the developers are reluctant to release something on a console where nearly 80% of its users will simply download their title for free. Even "successful" games see no sales and therefore a loss for developers because such a large percentage of the consumers would rather download it for free rather than support the developers. You seem to forget that the primary purpose for the developers to release games is to make them money. And sure, there are a few directors and people who just want to make a good game, but guaranteed their producers want them to make money above all else, and on a console where that generally isn't going to happen due to the large numbers of people pirating the games, suddenly producers seem reluctant to invest anything into the psp library.
I mean, think of it. Would you invest thousands of dollars making and marketing something that you know will just get stolen in the end? I'm sure if no one pirated games on the PSP, developers would be much more open and you'd see more games than the generic (And often shoddily done) port of major cross-platform titles that you get now.
The PSP is a very well-made piece of hardware that has a lot of potential. Regardless of how big it is or how long the standby battery life lasts (Like that'd ever be a dealbreaker for anyone looking into getting one) if they were able to have developers be confident that their products would sell on their console, they'd get a much larger library of games and would be marginally more successful. Maybe not as successful as the DS, sure, but you'd certainly have a lot more movement on the scene than we have now
Oh, switch your brain on and stop talking such total pish. By the time Gran Turismo 2 came out, the PS1 was the most pirated games format in existence. The game still sold TEN MILLION COPIES. The DS is now almost certainly the most pirated format of all time and DS games are far easier for casual users to pirate than the PSP (installing custom firmware on a PSP is a task far beyond the average owner's comfort zone, and storage is far more expensive), yet its biggest sellers still shift millions of copies – Pokemon Heart/Soul has shifted well over 8 MILLION in barely SIX MONTHS onsale – and it sells more games overall than any format except the Wii. And it's not just the big franchises – well over a HUNDRED different DS games have passed a million sales.
(Bear in mind too that figures for modern-era games are distorted downwards by the far greater availability nowadays of pre-owned copies which don't count towards sales charts, so those Pokemon numbers are even more incredible. Particularly as they're almost entirely Japanese sales – the Western versions had only been out for one month when those stats were compiled.)
History shows us beyond a shadow of a doubt that if publishers made PSP games that people wanted to buy, they would buy them, regardless of the availability of pirate copies. PSP games don't sell for a whole bunch of reasons – because most of its big-name titles are unsuited to the portable format, and because the hardware is absurdly big and unwieldy to carry around, to name but two. What absolutely ISN'T causing it to fail is piracy, because there isn't ONE SINGLE REASON why people would pirate PSP games but not DS ones.