Sigh. I said this nine months ago.
Sony’s beginning to figger out that the PS3 isn’t changing the world as fast as they thought it would. In fact, what is it doing? Well, it’s driving up the sales of the PS2. Of course it is:
While the PS3, the Xbox 360 from Microsoft (Charts) and Nintendo’s Wii got the most media attention during the 2006 holiday season, the PS2 proved to be the best selling home console, perhaps because of its lower price, perhaps because of widespread availability.
Or perhaps because it’s good enough.
What made the PS2 so popular wasn’t that it was an improvement over the PS1, but that it was a QUANTUM LEAP beyond the PS1 - the games were just amazingly better, and you didn’t have to pay 3DO prices to get them. CD displaced cassettes and vinyl for the same reason; ditto DVD and VHS tapes. The big technology successes don’t just give you an incremental ooh-ahh advance: they also succeed because their predecessors sucked.
The PS2, even for a seven year old console, doesn’t suck. In fact, some of its games - GTA: San Andreas, Resident Evil 4, hell, even Destroy All Humans - are looking and playing very, very sharp. So while Sony spent all last year trying to convince everyone to shell out $600 for a frakkin’ GAME SYSTEM, obsessed with the 360 and Wii, their biggest problem was always the PS2. At a hundred bucks for the slimline, the older console simply doesn’t suck anywhere near enough to justify selling your soul to the PS3. Never underestimate the awesome power of simply being good enough.
So I’m going to be curious to see how Sony deals with this. Don’t get me wrong; I wanted the PS3 to succeed. I’d still like it to succeed - unlike the recent wave of tech geek sentiment, I actually still like Sony and their products. But as long as PS2 sales remain strong and the PS3 remains expensive (and technologically almost negligible unless you have an HDTV to play it on), Sony’s most dangerous competitor for the game market will remain Sony.
Personally, I don’t mind that. Gives me hope that maybe I’ll see the next GTA game on the PS2, rather than a PS3 exclusive.. or (*shudder*) XBox.
