Microsoft buyout of ailing Sony possible

[wraggster]

Source - BFR (http://www.bonafidereviews.com/article.php?id=148)

In a recent interview through a European media outlet, Mr. Fornay Vice president of SCEE (Sony computer entertainment of Europe) made some rather astounding remarks regarding the PS3 price-point and the views being placed upon it. He hastily hinted that a Blu-ray player in the neighborhood of $599.99 would be an absolute steal, but as a stand alone gaming machine would be quite overpriced, as proven in the past. Sony was quick to issue a rebuttal on his behalf stating these were his personal views and not official commenting on the price of the PS3. Damage control at its finest. But keep in mind the massive cover up after Sony’s own CEO Howard Stringer hinted at the PS3's launch delay to Vanity Fair. Sony PR was quick to label it as "pure speculation" coming from the company’s own CEO, which was later to be proven completely accurate when the delay was made official mid-march of 2006. Sony isn’t one for honesty as a company entity however their head honcho's loose lips seem to deliver the only truth passing Sony’s door these days.

If the PS3 is delivered at $599.99 what does this mean for Sony? Historically gaming machines would have never sold for anything north of $299.99 (that was until the Xbox360 moved the line to 399.99 in winter of 2005). Just look at the complete failure of the 1990's powerhouse, the 3DO, at the relatively respectable price of $399.99 (roughly $449.99 inflation adjusted). With the PS3 now touting the largest price tag for any console in the history of gaming and higher then most mid-low end PC's at this point, does this spell disaster for the ailing hardware giant? Sony hasn’t posted net gains in the past three years until 2005 when they posted a depressing $580 million dollar profit after posting loss's in the billions for the last three fiscal years.

The true death blow at this point would really point to the HDCP compliance required for Blu-ray movie playback (as well as HD-DVD), making the PS3 no more then a video game system with a capacity of 50 gig games for anyone who purchased a HDTV in the past 6 years. So were does the PS3's $600.00 price tag come into play for us non-HDCP HDTV owners? The answer is nowhere.

PS3 production pricing at this point has been laid out to be anywhere from $850 - $956 per unit, meaning there will be a loss on each machine of approx $250 - $350 per console sold. If one million consoles sell in the first day of availability Sony will have wiped their entire fiscal gain for all of 2005 in under 24 hours.

Read more at the link above and comment on this article in our forum.

[chickenclaws]

HAHAH AAHAHAHAHAHAH sony go bankrupted that would be the day!

[urherenow]

Wraggster... I used to think this was the end all, be all, PSP news site...

But now I'm thinking that you get absolutely no news on your own as everything I've seen here recently came from other PSP news sites, Including some that you used to personally attack. What's the deal?

[michael jackson]

First off microsoft may be a cheap monopolizing company who would rather noone sell a product than someone outsell them but they will NEVER ...... EVER buy sony

and as for bad marketting????.... umm microsoft spent MONTHS preaching to us how amazing the 360 was and that mountain dew thing gave away 800,000 units free? (HAH yeah and i'm abraham lincoln) and its now april and there are probably about 10,000 systems available to buy from retail here in america...

lastly.. whoever said ps3 would cost near %900 dollars to make neds to go get a cat scan

In my opinion this whole story is pure BULL most likely made up by some microsoft fanboy with too much time

..... wragg you can do better dude... cmon

[MrBiggs32]

Yo I Dont Even Wanna Think About It, This Sound Like Some Really Messed Up S**t. But Yo No Matter What, Playstation For Life!! If I Have To Sell A Liver And Put My House Up For Sale Id Do It For A Ps. (well Not Really) But At The End Of The Day No Matter How Much It Cost People And Myself Included Are Gonna Still Buy It. I Remember My Cuz Paying Somewhere Near 500 Bills For The Ps1 When It First Came Out, And It Didnt Even Come With A Game. So Like Mj Said, Its Just Another Fanboy For Mcst Blowing Off Steam. The Pressure Is On, And They Feeling It.

[neoalucard]

well we should all look at it as this... it would really cost us $1200 because we would have to buy 2 seeing as that in the last 2 sony consoles something has gone wrong...i.e. playstation 1 over heating, ps2 and it's beautiful disk read errors, so expect a combination of the 2 as we advance on to greater sony hardware... but wait there’s more !! 2 years after launch you can buy the third and "smaller" version they release of the same system, because it's "cool" and it doesn't have the obvious problems the original version of the system did ( that sony over looked because they don't care about you as a consumer ) but then again... we don't care do we... because it's "sony".. rant end. :)

[Kaiser]

Wraggster... I used to think this was the end all, be all, PSP news site...

But now I'm thinking that you get absolutely no news on your own as everything I've seen here recently came from other PSP news sites, Including some that you used to personally attack. What's the deal?

Most news is taken from some other news site somewhere. Think about it that way, PSPU didn't make the news themselves either and simply "stole it" from another site as you would say it.

[shadowprophet]

Wraggster... I used to think this was the end all, be all, PSP news site...

But now I'm thinking that you get absolutely no news on your own as everything I've seen here recently came from other PSP news sites, Including some that you used to personally attack. What's the deal?

Well. See the thing is,
Is that wraggsters job (http://fonefinder.net/?engineering-job) is a huge undertakeing.
Keeping this site updated constantly Is really only part of his job,

There has been speculation that the man never sleeps lol
Think about it.
You go to sleep you wake up. theres updates.
You get cough up in your work at home (http://bestway.com/?home-sale), or somthing else, and you come back later, theres updates here.
And its not just psp news hes got to keep track of.
Check out his title.

DCEMU WEBMASTER, Hes got a lot of responcibilities, Some of which most psp news regulars dont even know about, because most people that just regulate the psp news site have no real idea just how huge the dcemu network really is. And dont get me wring wraggster has help, But hes still the person all staff has to come to when they have a problem, His responcibilities are ongoing and rarely give him time for a break.

And he does all of this and never complains to anyone about him never being able to get some rest :( And to add (http://lincmad.com/?adult-add) to that, he does it for free:o,
And im not saying he should charge, But what I am saying, is if hes nice enough to do all of this for us.
Maybe we should be nice enough to cut him some slack every once and a while:o

And im not blameing you, Just like everyone else you just want to know whats up in the news. And thats all fine lol, I mean thats what your here for right lol,
But if I was wraggster, Id put thumb tacks in your seat, over that one lol :p

lol

[urherenow]

yea, I guess you're right. He also does news pages for the other consoles as well.. I'm just not interested :P

My apologies Wraggster, that post was uncalled for.

[Kloe]

well we should all look at it as this... it would really cost us $1200 because we would have to buy 2 seeing as that in the last 2 sony consoles something has gone wrong...i.e. playstation 1 over heating, ps2 and it's beautiful disk read errors, so expect a combination of the 2 as we advance on to greater sony hardware... but wait there’s more !! 2 years after launch you can buy the third and "smaller" version they release of the same system, because it's "cool" and it doesn't have the obvious problems the original version of the system did ( that sony over looked because they don't care about you as a consumer ) but then again... we don't care do we... because it's "sony".. rant end. :)

I have yet to experience any problems with my PS2 and I bought it about 6-8 months after it was released... my friend made a guide to fix that disk reading error so if you need it I can link you to it. :D

[Torgod13]

This is a bit off topic, but I can tell you first hand that they are an arrogant bunch of folks that only want to hear the positive spin on their products. I have had to replace my PS1 over 6 times and My PS2 4 times.. :mad: I am one of the lucky ones that just swapped them out and sent the defective ones back.. (no cost to me :D ). If this came out of my pocket I would never buy another Sony product ever. But they always have the cool shit  Why do you think they out sell all the other systems?!?!? BECAUSE WE ALL NEEDED TO REPLACE OUR CHEAPLY MADE SONY PRODUCTS OVER AND OVER!! How many Genesis, T16, Gameboy, SNES, Saturn, Dreamcast, N64, Game Cube, Jaguar, 2600, 5200 (controller the exception :rolleyes: ) NES... did we have to replace? Sega fell because of their arrogance and the Sony hype machine, Sony will follow history because they have never bothered to look to the past for answers. Our department told the uppers that the UMD’s would fail miserably.. and why… No one would listen.. Then there was the Dual Shock lawsuit.. Sony’s stance… WE WILL FIGHT THEM AND WIN!! Microsoft, paid them their settlement and continued on with business as usual. Now Sony must remove and re design all the Dual Shock controllers because their arrogance got the best of them AGAIN!!! Not to mention paying a nifty sum.. lol I do not wish for Sony to flounder and go away. They single handedly revitalized the Video Game market with the PS1, But a little egg on face and humility would due the company well. Plus we need three competitors in the market. It has been good for business and it always will be good for them and us as well. Sony needs to remember WE made them who thay are. (sigh... done with rant....) :D

[inlovewithi]

Perfectly put.

[inlovewithi]

well we should all look at it as this... it would really cost us $1200 because we would have to buy 2 seeing as that in the last 2 sony consoles something has gone wrong...i.e. playstation 1 over heating, ps2 and it's beautiful disk read errors, so expect a combination of the 2 as we advance on to greater sony hardware... but wait there’s more !! 2 years after launch you can buy the third and "smaller" version they release of the same system, because it's "cool" and it doesn't have the obvious problems the original version of the system did ( that sony over looked because they don't care about you as a consumer ) but then again... we don't care do we... because it's "sony".. rant end. :)

Perfectly put. It’s nice to know that there are people with common sense, who can see things clearly, for what they are.

[Psychondrius]

The thing I don't get... wasn't blueray Sony's creation? Does blueray really cost so much that they have to slap that $500 price tag on the PS3? Sony should loosen up a bit and get to grips with their consumers... they simply aren't giving in. More than likely, Sony will one day cave in on itself, like it should have many years ago when it created a blunder like the betamax. I think their current game systems, cd/mp3 players, dvd players and other simple UNDER $300 products are the only things keeping sony afloat. I hope that they puncture a hole in their life raft and drown if they don't pop their smarter pills soon.

- Psychondrius

[Ziro]

I have yet to experience any problems with my PS2 and I bought it about 6-8 months after it was released... my friend made a guide to fix that disk reading error so if you need it I can link you to it. :D

The guide is the stupidest thing anyone can followe do unless they're really good with things like this and would rather do it, void a warranty, and not have to pay to ship your PS2 to Sony.

Here's my guide:
Send your PS2 back to Sony.
They'll fix it for free. gamefaqs.com actually might have a guide for doing this (calling sony and telling them to fix it)


I tried doing the thing that fixes DRE's, and it worked somewhat at first. In the end, I had to send my console to Sony anyways. I opened up my PS2 for no reason.

[LC_killer]

Most news is taken from some other news site somewhere. Think about it that way, PSPU didn't make the news themselves either and simply "stole it" from another site as you would say it.

except here thwy say where it came from . like this story's source was gamespot. go look at the same story at pspupdates and it says it was posed by a user. this site does not claim to be the source of every story as others do. pspdupdates does not credit where they *stole* the artice from. dcemu verry blatently say where there story came from if it is from anotothe site.

[MaxSMoke]

Why Blu-Ray? What's the big deal about the PS3 needing this stupid Blue Ray drive? Does anybody really care about Blue Ray? The Xbox 360 didn't come with the Hi-Def DVD drive Microsoft promised, and guess what, NOBODY CARED! It still sold like hot-cakes!

#1. DVD's produce very good video as they are.
#2. Blu-Ray apparently have Super-Draconian copy protection, who wants that?
#3. Name 1 game that needed even just 2 DVD's to Run? 4GB's is alot of space for a game, especially a console game with less system resources then a PC.
#4. I can't think of anybody I know that remotely owns a Hi-Def TV, or will be buying one this year or the next.

There's just no need for Blu-Ray. If they can knock off $300 by skipping that stupid drive, then I'm personally *ALL* for ditching it! Dump the drive, use DVD's, but keep the useful stuff like built-in Wireless networking. Now that's a feature I need! My router is on the other side of the house!

Anybody else think Sony should ditch the Blu-Ray and keep the Wifi?

[shadowprophet]

Why Blu-Ray? What's the big deal about the PS3 needing this stupid Blue Ray drive? Does anybody really care about Blue Ray? The Xbox 360 didn't come with the Hi-Def DVD drive Microsoft promised, and guess what, NOBODY CARED! It still sold like hot-cakes!

#1. DVD's produce very good video (http://activejump.com/?video-cd) as they are.
#2. Blu-Ray apparently have Super-Draconian copy protection, who wants that?
#3. Name 1 game that needed even just 2 DVD's to Run? 4GB's is alot of space for a game, especially a console game with less system resources then a PC.
#4. I can't think of anybody I know that remotely owns a Hi-Def TV, or will be buying one this year or the next.

There's just no need for Blu-Ray. If they can knock off $300 by skipping that stupid drive, then I'm personally *ALL* for ditching it! Dump the drive, use DVD's, but keep the useful stuff like built-in Wireless networking. Now that's a feature I need! My router (http://digitalselect.net/?buy-router) is on the other side of the house!

Anybody else think Sony should ditch the Blu-Ray and keep the Wifi?

Personaly I think the market has gone crazy.
There starting to sell people stuff we dont want or need.

And people are starteing to wake up to this fact.
It wasnt so long ago in aincent history, when a certain company named atari started pushing stuff out on the market nobody wanted or needed, And the end result was the market collapsed.
Even after prices started to drop once again, people just wernt interested anymore.

I forsee this as a posibility. However A crash like what happened back in the 80s will never happen again.

But its going to take somthing monumental to open the the eyes of supply side of the video game market.

And what is there, (the markets) stance on this?

(you have proven to us your willing to pay that much so the price goes up)

But prices will only continue to up, and up, and up further still, As long as people pay what they ask, the prices will continue to rise.

And not just on consoles.
Even the price of games has went up.

But thats okay I predict with 75 dollar games and 600 dollar consoles. It wont take long for the market to realize (hey theres a lot less people playing consoles and a lot more people playing homebrew)

Its just not reasonible to charge 600 dollars for somthing thats got a built in life span:mad:

You can fool some of the people all of the time,and all of the people some of the time, But you cant convince people that upwords of a grand is a reasonible price for a console that is destined to have a four to six year lifespan tops, not to mention in that four to six years you will most likely have to buy another to replace your broken ones, cause come on this is sony, you know there gonna be designed to break.

[Flipao]

I'm siding up with Nintendo on this one... they know their gaming.

As for the source of this site's news, it's google news, just type PSP in and you'll get all the stuff that's posted here.

[r2works]

I'm siding up with Nintendo on this one... they know their gaming.

As for the source of this site's news, it's google news, just type PSP in and you'll get all the stuff that's posted here.

I agree. At $400-$600 dollars a system, its easy to see how Nintendo continues to out sell everyone else (except PS1). All they have to do is let everyone else make stupid decisions like selling a console for $400-$600, then release their system.

[iniquitous_beast]

Sony is just trying to show-off with Blu-ray. I'll admit that a blue lazer is a pretty cool thing, but it is not cheap enough to manufacture yet. Further, blu-ray drives have been in developement for many years. They weren't publically released because they had spectacularly high failure rates. I predict that if Sony uses blu-ray in its console, it will be unbelievably fragile. Such a narrow beam of light will be easy to knock out of alignment.

In response to MaxSMoke's question #3: Grandia 3, Shadow Hearts Covenant, Xenosaga II, and Star Ocean 3. Of course, all of these games would fit onto a single DVD9, which can hold 9gb of data. However, due to random incompatibilities in ps2 drives with DVD9 media, Sony doesn't make many games on that medium. It is pretty laughable, though, since the ps2 is supposed to support DVD9. (Moral of story = Sony + High-density media = Unforseen Problems)

To those of you who have been lucky enough to not have your ps2 die: Please type this into an ebay search box: "Broken ps2". It is hard to ignore the number of broken ps2's with the same common problem, the "disk read error". True, many of those units can be fixed by simply cleaning and re-adjusting the lens, but a common problem is still a common problem.

[SSaxdude]

A price in the $700 range is true. I got a newsletter from Game Informer that said some head of Sony said the PS3 will cost 500-600 euro, which is about 600+ dollars.

[Voltron]

I have yet to experience any problems with my PS2 and I bought it about 6-8 months after it was released... my friend made a guide to fix that disk reading error so if you need it I can link you to it. :D

My PS1 first version purchased Dec of 1995 stopped working after a couple years. (Something to do with the Optical Lens and/or motor)

My PS2 purchased the day it was released failed in less than 2 years. (Disc Read Error)

My XBOX purchased the 1st week of availability in 2001 eventually had disc read errors also. I had to get a 2nd of each of these systems. Never had a problem with the Nintendo GameCube yet.

[MadMonkee]

My Xbox's DVD drive got messed up. So I bought a SAMSUNG DVD drive for like 20$. Opened it up, re-soldered the motor 180 degrees turned. Put the elastic thing on it, opened my Xbox, took out the crappy DVD drive, and replaced it with the brand new samsung drive :)

Funny thing is, the SAMSUNG new one reads discs faster.

[idapimp]

well... i'm not exactly rolling in money so i'll probably do what i do with all the other systems when they come out (except handhelds). wait a year or 2. that will also give time to analyze all 3 next gen systems and see which one i should really invest in. no need rushing into bankruptcy.

[xypex982]

That's exactly what I did with the gamecube and xbox since I already had a ps2. What I plan on doing in not making a decision untill christmas of next year and whatever that desion is, it will be a used one. I am leaning for ps3 because of the sony titles that I have alwase loved such as, gt, gta, and metal gear, but as you all know gta and metal gear have already been put on other consols, and I would be glad to just get the xbox360 and wait an extra year to get those games because in the end I don't hjave to shove $600 when the only hdtv I have is a 64in widescreen that I will barley be alloud to play on and will have to resort to my non hdtv 25in tv in my room.


Also I know sony is notourois with they quality, but I am quite gental with my systems and I have had the ps1 since it came out and it still works, the ps2 sine it came oout and it still works fine, but those are just mine consols and I have seen my freinds ps2 get those disk read errors.


well... i'm not exactly rolling in money so i'll probably do what i do with all the other systems when they come out (except handhelds). wait a year or 2. that will also give time to analyze all 3 next gen systems and see which one i should really invest in. no need rushing into bankruptcy.