Here's some shocking news - if my partner-in-blog hadn't recently left this Earth (R.I.P., homecheese) I'm sure he would have had something to say about it.
Sony announced on Monday that they'd be releasing a new PS3 in August. It's not the fabled U.S. release of the ceramic white console, and it's not the rumored 120 GB model...it's a Blu-Ray free model that they'll be selling for $150.
$150.
That's friggin' brilliant - seriously. That's just over half the price of the current low-cost leader, the Wii and will undoubtedly open up a new market for Sony: poor people with great internet access. I kid! I'm poor too. No PS3 under my tree...
Understand that this means the new console has no optical drive to speak of...yeah, it took me a minute too. PS3 games come on Blu-Ray discs. How do you get software? The miracle of the interwebs, brother: you download...everything. Sony sells you games with the bulky video clips excised, and you have the option to either download the video components later, or simply stream them if you've got a fast enough internet connection. In Sony's press release, they cite "Gran Turismo 5: Prologue" as an example: 6 GB on Blu-Ray disc...2 GB download. That's a hefty download, but Sony is claiming 1 MB/sec. (DSL-ish - more likely) to 30 MB/sec. (FIOS-ish - less likely) download speeds; even at the low end of that range, you'd be able to pull down "Gran Turismo 5: Prologue" in around 35 minutes. Not insignificant, but that's less time than it would take you to go to the store and buy it - and you do it all from the comfort of your own home.
Perhaps best of all, the console is allegedly (per Sony) the same in every other way: 80 GB hard drive, the usual compliment of card readers and ports.
Granted, to a degree this will be a niche product; not everyone in the country even has DSL as an option yet, let alone anything faster...but for folks in metropolitan areas who do have reliable, high-speed internet access, this is a no-brainer.
The funny prologue to this story will write itself over the next few months as the August 12 release date edges closer: how will Microsoft fumble their response? Sony claims they'll be keeping records of everything you buy so that if something happens to your console, your content can be easily restored. As we've mentioned, an informal poll of Xbox 360 users over at cheapassgamer.com showed that over 1/3 of users have seen their console fail - and Microsoft as of yet has absolutely no idea how to restore your purchased, downloaded content if your console is replaced. A proper riposte on their part means not only the hardware but also doing some serious retooling of Xbox LIVE (and their notoriously ineffective customer service team) so that they can A) log your purchases and B) restore said purchases when your 360 (inevitably?) fails. Not only that - they're using a standard dual-layer DVD -drive...they backed HD-DVD, but that was only available via an add-on peripheral. What can they possibly eliminate, hardware-wise, to be competitive with Sony, and how can they do it without alienating their installed user base? You can't eliminate a DVD-drive that probably costs them on the order of $30 and then drop the price of your "low-end" console (Xbox 360 Arcade: $279.99) by $130 to make it competitive with the new PS3...everyone who shelled out for the $279.99 version will say, "How in the hell can you justify charging me so much more for so very little?" - then they will slash your tires.
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Damn Kids!
All you do is play that winky-wonky and raise my electric bill!
3 comments:
Excellent post, my friend. I just finished a couple of jobs and have been sucked into WoW again this past week.
And thanks for reviving "Homecheese." You know Sasso is out there playing Sex Games 2 on a c64 emu. Wait. Something just occurred to me. Sasso was the first LOLcat. Seriously.
Back on topic: This seems to me like Sony's coup de grace against xbox. Microsoft has been saying, about the death of HD-DVD, "We don't care. We're more interested in downloadable distribution. Optical media is dead."
Sony says: Bam. Redesigned PS Store. Bam. $150 drive-free console. Bam. Downloadable GT5: Prologue as a demonstration of how the whole thing will work. And soon: Bam. PS Home.
Seems clear to me that Microsoft knows not what it is doing, strategically, while Sony, um, has a plan.
Why am I not surprised?
Here's what I cringe at, though. I just bought my PSP-2000. Will Sony's drive-free mentality spread to a new PSP-3000? I should hope so, but on the other hand... I just bought my "new" slim model. Waah. Technology. Hate you. Love you.
UMD is stupid, though. Die, UMD, die.
Oh, and Sony's claim of keeping track of what you buy and download so you can download it again in future if necessary isn't a claim at all. It is a current, active feature of the Playstation Store. I've already used it several times to download my purchases to my brother's PS3.
Love it.
Just wanted to follow up on that point.
The whole computer world is lurching back to the original "dumb terminal" model. And I welcome that. Why should I have to purchase applications? But that's fodder for another place, another time.
I can haz 6th grade pants?
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