Sony planning a re-run of the Playstation Slim Domination – Part 3
While entering the current (7th) generation of consoles, Sony was the crowd favourite following its dominance during the last two generations. No one would’ve ever believed that Sony would end up in third place behind Nintendo and Microsoft.
Sony perhaps got too overconfident and wasn’t taking the competition seriously. Microsoft was the first to bring the Xbox 360 to the market in the end of 2005. Microsoft decided to call the console the Xbox 360 instead of Xbox 2 because they felt that the
title would seem inferior when compared with the upcoming Playstation 3.
Except for Japan, were the console still has poor sales, the Xbox 360 quickly gained a lot of popularity in the West. The new Xbox featured a fully functional easy to use online service Xbox Live which ushered a new era of online multiplayer console gaming.
Microsoft had learned from its mistakes from the original Xbox and the first thing they did was to convince third party developers to develop for the console. This meant that many intellectual properties (IPs) which were exclusive to Sony’s console last generation
were now also available on Xbox putting the company in a comfortable place in the market.
Nintendo hit the gaming scene with the Wii a year later and started to completely dominate the market. The main appeal of the Wii for the gamers was that it boasted full backwards compatibility with the Nintendo 64 and the GameCube thus providing early adapter
with a large variety of backlog at launch. The Wii also brought in motion controls which became very popular and started to pull in new demographics.
Sony, even though they had the most powerful machine was late to the party and made many mistakes along the way. The first one being the announcement of the Playstation 3 (PS3) in 2005 when the company revealed that the upcoming console would retail at a
whopping $599.99, which disappointed many gamers.
The second mistake was the graphics card and the decision to use the newly developed ‘Cell’ processor. The Cell processor, even though it was really powerful, was really hard to develop for and that meant that not many developers were capable of developing
games for the PS3. The console also had a weak graphics card which basically bottlenecked the console’s power and made it somewhat similar to the Xbox 360.
The earlier models of the PS3 after the launch in 2007 had full backwards compatibility with the Playstation 1 and 2 but being so far in the current generation meant that gamers would rather play better looking games on the Xbox 360 rather than spend $600
on a Playstation 3 just to play old PS2 games. Another reason why backwards compatibility wasn’t as attractive for the PS3 was that almost everyone already owned a PS2 so there was no point in buying the new console if there were not enough good games to play
on it.
The Playstation 3 also featured an online service but gamers considered it second to Xbox Live which had matured over the years and boasted a greater number of features and ease of use.
DISCLAIMER: The views and the opinions expressed in this article are the writer’s own and do not reflect the editorial policy of bettor.com.
Continued in Part 4
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