“Between the conceptionAnd the creationBetween the emotion And the response Falls the shadow”
Mr. Thomas Stearns Eliot demonstrated that he was often full of six different kinds of shit, but he nailed one particular axiom in “The Hollow Men,” which is oddly relevant to the financial ball-gag that Sony finds stuffed, Ving Rhames-style, in its yawning skull-cave; there’s a gulf of difference between the idea and its execution, or between that which we envision and that which we achieve.
If a writer cannot say what he intends, or a painter can’t put to canvas his vision of a sunset, it’s often because he holds undefined premises which thwart the transition of his ideas from the conceptual to the perceptual; namely, he attempts to write or paint with either a misplaced standard of creation (aiming for A and hitting Schenectady), or one so poorly defined that it produces only stream-of-consciousness drivel and/or 20th Century poetry.
Similarly, if a formerly successful corporation such as Sony begins to hemorrhage cash from every orifice, it’s important to identify the defective premises which serve as the catalyst for their pending, though yet avoidable, demise. Since arrogance and calamity seem to be SOP at SCE these days, and since competition is essential even to a trompe-l’oeil market economy such as ours, I figured I might as well help them out.
Prayers, Too Broke, and Stoned
If your business strategy includes forcing potential customers to embrace an unproven (and therefore unvalued) technology such as Blu-Ray, and you’re charging slightly less than the GDP of Luxembourg for the privilege, expect consumers to be, shall we say, slightly fucking hesitant. Asking would-be early adopters to fork over a month’s rent just to get their mitts on your glossy black box and its requisite accessories attains an altitude of marketing hypoxia unmatched since Dean Kamen set out the change the very nature of transportation in malls cities around the world, at $5000 a pop. Thanks, Dean. Yes we can.
If your tech strategy includes intentionally making your hardware difficult to develop for, requiring a higher investment and a lower return for developers, don’t be surprised when guys like Gabe Newell, who’s made a game or two in his day, admit that they’re a couple of little blue pills short of a full-on quarterstaff for your coyly inaccessible machina. Longer, more difficult development cycles mean fewer games per studio, which means less profit in an industry with a mosquito-dick margin; as a result, expect to see your third-party royalties dry up like Richard Simmons on hormone replacement therapy.
If your distribution strategy includes issuing a new hardware SKU every sixteen days, ensuring that even the most concupiscent Sony fanboys can’t keep up with your lasciviously schizophrenic appetites, expect to see on-the-fence adopters retreat in confusion and resentment at the constant state of feature entropy. Between the elimination of the card reader slots, the loss of PS2 backwards compatibility, and fewer USB inputs, you’ve taken more meat away from the table than Jenna Jameson. Decidedly not good eats.
Chuan-Li lamented the shortsightedness of his getaway plan after barricading himself in the men's room of the only donut shop in Beijing.
This Is the Whey They Whirled. NNNN.
If your software strategy includes letting anything as remotely hideous as Haze appear on your system as an exclusive release, please hasten to solicit the services of an exorcist, because clearly you’re possessed by a 5th-level Demon of Perplexing Judgment, and it’s only a matter of time until the green puke and the crucifix make an appearance. Similarly, if the very best exclusive third-party title that you can offer contains the not-so-latently-homosexual vision of a man named Solid Snake grinding his junk into the sand in six different trouble spots around the world while exchanging erotically charged radio banter with a repressed anime fan and searching for Big Boss (also known as Naked Snake), I’ll pass, thanks. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
If your downloadable content strategy includes full Playstation 3, PSP, and PSOne games (+1), yet many of these games are priced the same on your network as they are at brick and mortar retail outlets (-1), without appreciable acknowledgment of the lack of manufacturing and distribution overhead, there’s no incentive for anyone to buy from you. Price and convenience are both crucial components of any business, but price, specifically the perception of value, trumps convenience every single time. Also guilty of this is Microsoft, which is under the impression that $15 is reasonable for the shitty Xbox Originals that they offer on Xbox Live; anyone who would today pay that much for Grabbed by the Ghoulies or Raze’s Hell indeed ought to have his ghoulies grabbed and perhaps pummeled and twisted into odd balloon-animal shapes.
Lest this seem like a fanboy rant, realize that there is no room in the games industry for misdirected standards; it is crucial that SCE survives this hardware generation, if for no other reason than their demise leaves my primary form of entertainment solely in the hands of the people who created Windows Vista. At this point their biggest faux pas seems to be the forced adoption of Blu-Ray, which at launch drove the cost of each Playstation 3 into the technological stratosphere; though their reasons for including it were sound (betting on Blu-Ray becoming the hi-def format, along with a drastic price drop on TVs capable of displaying images in the Blu-Ray-native 1080p resolution), this betrays an engineering standard completely divorced from gaming, as Blu-Ray’s benefit only fully emerges in the arena of home theater. Its value to gaming is purely peripheral.
If SCE is to survive, at least some of the aforementioned issues need to be addressed and remedied in the current console round. If they are to thrive into the next generation, they need to become the company they were ten years ago, which operated with a penetrating, singleminded focus on games and only games, and which made theirs the best-selling consoles for over a decade.
“Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar”
In This Valley of Dying Stars
June 25, 2009 by GravityFailsGet your fat space ass back here!
“Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the shadow”Mr. Thomas Stearns Eliot demonstrated that he was often full of six different kinds of shit, but he nailed one particular axiom in “The Hollow Men,” which is oddly relevant to the financial ball-gag that Sony finds stuffed, Ving Rhames-style, in its yawning skull-cave; there’s a gulf of difference between the idea and its execution, or between that which we envision and that which we achieve.
If a writer cannot say what he intends, or a painter can’t put to canvas his vision of a sunset, it’s often because he holds undefined premises which thwart the transition of his ideas from the conceptual to the perceptual; namely, he attempts to write or paint with either a misplaced standard of creation (aiming for A and hitting Schenectady), or one so poorly defined that it produces only stream-of-consciousness drivel and/or 20th Century poetry.
Similarly, if a formerly successful corporation such as Sony begins to hemorrhage cash from every orifice, it’s important to identify the defective premises which serve as the catalyst for their pending, though yet avoidable, demise. Since arrogance and calamity seem to be SOP at SCE these days, and since competition is essential even to a trompe-l’oeil market economy such as ours, I figured I might as well help them out.
Prayers, Too Broke, and Stoned
If your business strategy includes forcing potential customers to embrace an unproven (and therefore unvalued) technology such as Blu-Ray, and you’re charging slightly less than the GDP of Luxembourg for the privilege, expect consumers to be, shall we say, slightly fucking hesitant. Asking would-be early adopters to fork over a month’s rent just to get their mitts on your glossy black box and its requisite accessories attains an altitude of marketing hypoxia unmatched since Dean Kamen set out the change the very nature of transportation in malls cities around the world, at $5000 a pop. Thanks, Dean. Yes we can.
If your tech strategy includes intentionally making your hardware difficult to develop for, requiring a higher investment and a lower return for developers, don’t be surprised when guys like Gabe Newell, who’s made a game or two in his day, admit that they’re a couple of little blue pills short of a full-on quarterstaff for your coyly inaccessible machina. Longer, more difficult development cycles mean fewer games per studio, which means less profit in an industry with a mosquito-dick margin; as a result, expect to see your third-party royalties dry up like Richard Simmons on hormone replacement therapy.
If your distribution strategy includes issuing a new hardware SKU every sixteen days, ensuring that even the most concupiscent Sony fanboys can’t keep up with your lasciviously schizophrenic appetites, expect to see on-the-fence adopters retreat in confusion and resentment at the constant state of feature entropy. Between the elimination of the card reader slots, the loss of PS2 backwards compatibility, and fewer USB inputs, you’ve taken more meat away from the table than Jenna Jameson. Decidedly not good eats.
Chuan-Li lamented the shortsightedness of his getaway plan after barricading himself in the men's room of the only donut shop in Beijing.
This Is the Whey They Whirled. NNNN.
If your software strategy includes letting anything as remotely hideous as Haze appear on your system as an exclusive release, please hasten to solicit the services of an exorcist, because clearly you’re possessed by a 5th-level Demon of Perplexing Judgment, and it’s only a matter of time until the green puke and the crucifix make an appearance. Similarly, if the very best exclusive third-party title that you can offer contains the not-so-latently-homosexual vision of a man named Solid Snake grinding his junk into the sand in six different trouble spots around the world while exchanging erotically charged radio banter with a repressed anime fan and searching for Big Boss (also known as Naked Snake), I’ll pass, thanks. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
If your downloadable content strategy includes full Playstation 3, PSP, and PSOne games (+1), yet many of these games are priced the same on your network as they are at brick and mortar retail outlets (-1), without appreciable acknowledgment of the lack of manufacturing and distribution overhead, there’s no incentive for anyone to buy from you. Price and convenience are both crucial components of any business, but price, specifically the perception of value, trumps convenience every single time. Also guilty of this is Microsoft, which is under the impression that $15 is reasonable for the shitty Xbox Originals that they offer on Xbox Live; anyone who would today pay that much for Grabbed by the Ghoulies or Raze’s Hell indeed ought to have his ghoulies grabbed and perhaps pummeled and twisted into odd balloon-animal shapes.
Lest this seem like a fanboy rant, realize that there is no room in the games industry for misdirected standards; it is crucial that SCE survives this hardware generation, if for no other reason than their demise leaves my primary form of entertainment solely in the hands of the people who created Windows Vista. At this point their biggest faux pas seems to be the forced adoption of Blu-Ray, which at launch drove the cost of each Playstation 3 into the technological stratosphere; though their reasons for including it were sound (betting on Blu-Ray becoming the hi-def format, along with a drastic price drop on TVs capable of displaying images in the Blu-Ray-native 1080p resolution), this betrays an engineering standard completely divorced from gaming, as Blu-Ray’s benefit only fully emerges in the arena of home theater. Its value to gaming is purely peripheral.
If SCE is to survive, at least some of the aforementioned issues need to be addressed and remedied in the current console round. If they are to thrive into the next generation, they need to become the company they were ten years ago, which operated with a penetrating, singleminded focus on games and only games, and which made theirs the best-selling consoles for over a decade.
“Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar”
Tags: 360, Flaccid, Homoerotic, Playstation 3, Soiled Snake, Sony, T.S. Eliot
Posted in Commentary, Hardware | Leave a Comment »