Every company in the console business - publisher, developer, platform holder - is on a steep learning curve right now, but none more so than Sony. Since the departure of PlayStation founding father Ken Kutaragi, whose shadow had loomed large over the organisation for many years, Sony's performance has been far from impeccable - indeed, financially, it's often verged on the disastrous - but nobody can deny that the company is learning and adapting.
"PS3 hasn't done badly; it hasn't crashed and burned, as some feared at the outset; but by god, it's had to endure a rough few years"
Of course, Kutaragi left the company in a position that required a hell of a lot of learning. PlayStation 3's launch was the culmination of a development cycle that was suffused with extraordinary hubris. The console was birthed from an almost wilful ignorance of the realities of the games market, with Kutaragi and those around him choosing to believe that Sony's market-dominating form with the PlayStation 2 ensured that no matter what they did with the PS3 - its extravagant price point, its alien architecture - the company would continue to rule supreme.
Well, it didn't. In the end, the new management who took over after Kutaragi's departure have managed to turn the generation around to a degree - which is no mean feat, especially given the awful business conditions for Japanese export companies - but even at that, Sony has had a miserable generation in the home console market. It's watched Nintendo run away with the kind of sales the PS2 enjoyed once upon a time, while it carves up the rest of the market with Microsoft - an also-ran last time around, yet now easily a match for Sony. PS3 hasn't done badly; it hasn't crashed and burned, as some feared at the outset; but by god, it's had to endure a rough few years in order to ensure a "joint-second" market position, and that's no fun for the former all-conquering champion.
In that time, though, the company really has been learning. It's learned that off-the-shelf components and technologies may limit your engineers' imaginations, but they keep your price tags low and your developers happy, since they don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you launch a console. It's learned that if it's going to outpace Microsoft, online services will be a big part of things - and it's notable that while Sony's core online gaming experience may not rival Microsoft just yet (not shipping with a headset still feels like a crucial mis-step to me in this regard), it's streets ahead of its competitor in terms of its digital content offerings. PlayStation Plus has matured into an excellent and high-value service, in content terms, while the company's investments into developers like thatgamecompany have also paid rich dividends.
The problem is, there's still more to learn. There's more to learn every day, because the industry is changing faster than ever - and even if Sony today is clearly a chastened and vastly wiser company than the Sony of six years ago, I'm not sure if the company is learning fast enough.
PlayStation Vita, of course, is the canary in the coalmine. It's the first Sony console to be created and launched in the post-Kutaragi era, by the team that had supposedly learned from his mistakes. It does a lot of things right. It's packed with technologies that are pretty developer-friendly, it's got a host of flexible, interesting control systems, and it's even relatively cheap for a new piece of hardware. It supports the idea of launching cheaper software that has been forced on the industry by the uptick in mobile games. It takes all the great hardware design that runs deep in Sony's DNA and combines it with a degree of understanding of the market that was painfully lacking from the PS3's launch.
"Third parties are agnostic, and in some ways, they recognise that Apple and Google are better platform holders for them"
It's also doing genuinely miserably in the market. I wish that wasn't true, because the console is a joy to hold and plays host to a handful of genuinely great games, but it's unavoidable - the sales figures are extremely weak, even in Japan, which was the bright point on the global map of PSP sales.
This week, Shuhei Yoshida told Gamasutra that he was disappointed and surprised at the poor support for the system from third parties. "In retrospect," he said, "there are so many options for publishers now that we cannot take it for granted that our new platform would be supported by third parties, like [it would have been] many years ago."
Learning. Learning fast, even, and let's not underestimate what a difficult recognition this is for a company like Sony - which formerly had every major third-party publisher and studio hanging from its every word. It must be even tougher for a man in Yoshida's position; as Worldwide Studios president, he would have regular contact with many of the third parties who now seem to have hung the Vita out to dry. All the same, he understands. He knows that the question for publishers is no longer "how
...
Catherine: Full Body’s English translation for the Vita