http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?Dispatch=Display&cId=3156850
As 2007 moves into gear, the dust is starting to settle. The Christmas season is over, the post-holiday lull has returned and gamers, publishers and analysts are trying to predict the market's next move. The New York Times examined the issue this morning, coming to the same conclusion as everyone else so far: Xbox 360 holds the lead, Wii has the most momentum, PlayStation 3 selling solid but lagging behind.What's striking, however, is how Sony frames the currently hot sales for Nintendo's new console. "Wii could be considered an impulse buy more than anything else," said David Karraker, SCEA's senior director of corporate communication, suggesting PS3 and Wii shouldn't be considered in the same category.
Does that even make sense? Wouldn't Sony want PS3 to be an impulse buy, the kind of console people buy because they simply can't stop themselves from grabbing one? The price point is the stickler here, and considering Nintendo's already profiting from each Wii sold, they have far more room to maneuver in terms of price points in the future, too. The question is why Sony implies an "impulse buy" is an insulting description -- would Sony feel disappointed if PS3 was this holiday's "impulse buy," too?
You could argue impulse is a temporary state of affairs, as has been commonly argued by Wii's critics. Then again, Sony's President of Worldwide Studios Phil Harrison said the same thing about Nintendo DS roughly 18 months ago, and that didn't exactly pan out.
"With the DS, it's fair to say that Nintendo stepped out of the technical race and went for a feature differentiation with the touch screen," Harrison says. "But I fear that it won't have a lasting impact beyond that of a gimmick - so the long-lasting appeal of the platform is at peril as a direct result of that."
There's no doubt Wii's success could be temporary, but there's no saying it won't be, either.
I'm going to copy/paste my reply at 1up because it's just as valid:
It's comments like these that are the reason I've lost all respect for Sony. I was extremely excited for the PS3 until they actually revealed the thing at e3. The price tag wasn't even the issue, though it sucked hard (I can afford a $600 console, not that I *want* to afford a $600 console, but if the PS3 was really worth getting I would have).
It's all the comments that came out of their president's mouth afterwards that really made me change my mind about getting one. It's obvious they are so arrogant and egotistical and care nothing about the consumer. Talking smack about the competition is expected, though they tend to take it to rediculousness like the above. But when you trash on the consumer that's just bad business. All the "well people will work hard to afford our console", "I want robots to make me breakfast but that's not realistic", fake viral marketing campaign, and other condescending talk from them is really why I hope the PS3 flops. They need to learn some humility.
And to be objective, the same could have been said about Nintendo back in the 90s. Not on the egotistical, "customer is never right" front, but they had their own set-in-stone mindsets about things like blood in games, carts are better than CDs, online is not important, we don't care about Squaresoft, etc. that ended up screwing them over starting with the N64. They are only now starting to really recover from that. And to be fair, most of that is similar because it was mainly directives and stuff out of Yamauchi's mouth that started all this. As soon as Iwata took over things were turning around, though of course that was somewhere mid-GC so not quite for that console (but GC was definately an improvement over the N64 in terms of 3rd party support, etc).
I guess the reason Sony's crap bothers me more is that at least through all of that, Nintendo still cared about the customer. They made some stupid decisions, but at least they didn't fling mud all around and badmouth the people signing their checks.