More Signs of Sony Trouble

Sony has been getting a press beating in the last couple of weeks. After getting hammered over the PSP Go!’s pricepoint, and offering no hint of a price drop for either the PSP or PS3, Activision’s CEO, Robert Kotick fires another shot over Sony’s bow:

‘I’m getting concerned about Sony; the PlayStation 3 is losing a bit of momentum and they don’t make it easy for me to support the platform. It’s expensive to develop for the console, and the Wii and the Xbox are just selling better. Games generate a better return on invested capital on the Xbox than on the PlayStation.’

I have a hard time thinking Activision would really pull their support of Sony’s hardware. But just the threat by someone like Activision’s CEO is enough to carry some weight here. Activision isn’t some sort of no-name company. They are the single largest publisher of games in the world, a title they took over from Electronic Arts a while back. They took it by publishing titles like Call of Duty and Guitar Hero. Both are two of the biggest selling franchises for the current console cycle.

Sony’s response is that “Playstation has tremendous momentum coming out of E3.” Really? Because the two things I’ve heard most about since E3 are Project Natal and all its potential coolness, and how the PSP Go! is a rip-off.

Sony has good titles coming out. God of War 3 promises to be epic, and The Last Guardian looks to be a superbly emotional experience. Because narrative is important to me, Heavy Rain is going to be high on my wishlist for Christmas, too. Nobody debates that PS3 has good games. It’s whether or not Sony can sell systems. At $400 to $500 a pop, it doesn’t matter how good the games are. That’s one hell of a chunk of change to plunk down for a single system, whose other features and services Sony doesn’t really do a good job of branding or marketing. Right or wrong, for better or worse, Sony has managed to make itself look like it’s trying to screw its audience.

Sony has to drop its price on both the PSP and the PS3, and it needs to be more than a token gesture. At this point, Sony needs to re-market its image. It’s not the Playstation brand that is the issue; it’s Sony’s. They need to come out looking like a company that is willing to say “We were wrong and you were right.” Drop the PS3 price (at least $100) and introduce a deal with which gamers can rent titles through GameFly.  Even better: bundle the PSP Go! with PS3 units for the holidays. And if the PSP Go! is to run on a flash memory system, allow the Remote Play service to work with full-on PS3 games somehow. At the very least, develop PS3 titles with Go! apps with which gamers can contribute to their console-born games. I’d love to be able to play a side experience on the Go! that would allow me to alter what happens in a major triple-A title.