“The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” –Mark Twain
He lived in a world of fire and steel, a world forged by muscle and sweat, by blood and pain. During his seventy-four years, he witnessed the end of an inhuman institution, the advent of transcontinental rail travel, and the first powered flight. His life was punctuated by periods of both personal and professional success and failure, and he experienced highs and lows of financial plenitude and near-destitution. He was acquainted with happiness; nothing more than a polite, hat-tipping familiarity, to be sure, but he was on a first-name, backslapping basis with suffering, and tragedy was his lifelong companion.
He was born with the comet in 1835, and predicted that he’d die with its return in 1910. He did.
Mark Twain realized better than anyone that untapped potential enjoys the same practical application as no potential at all, that is, undelivered promises and neglected dreams are of no benefit to those lacking the ambition or wherewithal to see them to fruition. It’s easy to make plans, after all, to conspire to success, but plans and promises without attendant accomplishment have no virtue. Often the phrase “it’s got potential” is a euphemism for something more along the lines of “this sucks, but it doesn’t have to.”
When the Playstation 3 was released in North America in November of 2006, it had two distinct advantages working in its favor; first was the fact that sixty-thousand million PS2s had been sold since 2000, giving the brand some considerable installed loyalty. The second, which hasn’t yet panned out as well as the first, was its versatility. With built-in b/g wi-fi, media card readers of every ilk, Blu-Ray and DVD playback, backwards compatibility down through the original Playstation, Bluetooth connectivity for headsets and controllers, USB ports, HDMI outputs, the Playstation 3 seemed poised to conquer the entertainment world as the first jack — and master — of all trades.
Instead of bursting onto the scene, its nostrils frothing and flaring, its flanks doing whatever it is that flanks do, the PS3 limped out of the gate with a rather weighty satchel o’ sales inhibitors strapped around its formidable girth.
Though Sony’s monolith was, at the time, the least expensive Blu-Ray player on the market, it was the costliest game system since Trip Hawkins’ exorbitant performance-art nightmare opened to a worldwide audience of crickets and tumbleweeds back in 1993. With the top-of-the-line 60-gigabyte PS3 priced at $599, many of the Playstation faithful found themselves embroiled in a sudden, seedy affair with Microsoft’s $399 Xbox 360, which enjoyed a year-long head start over the PS3 and thus boasted a wider selection of games. (Rumors persisted about a $499 20-gig model of the PS3, but to this day I’m convinced they were, in fact, merely rumors, as Sasquatch has been more frequently sighted in the wild than the 20-gig PS3.) For many, it was a simple case of price-to-value ratio.
Asking consumers to purchase a big-ticket item on faith — that is, asking for patience regarding the game library — is one thing, a given for a console launch, but requiring them to purchase an unproven technology like Blu-Ray, driving the cost of the item into the technological stratosphere, that’s just cousin-humping stupidity, no matter how reasonably priced the PS3 might have been in comparison to stand-alone players.
People don’t approach buying a game system based on what it will do for them outside of gaming, and they certainly don’t make such purchases intellectually. They seek intellectual rationalizations for them — such as the mental acrobatics involved in buying a sailboat to help impress potential clients, which will in turn improve business — but the underlying motivation for purchasing big-ticket items is always, always emotional. Blu-Ray had no demonstrable emotional value to anyone at the time of the PS3’s release; it carried intellectual appeal, sure, but that’s as far as it went. After all, movie fans weren’t lining up to buy the Playstation 3 because of its Blu-Ray capabilities that November. Gamers were lining up to buy the Playstation 3 because of games, but they had to accept — and pay for — the unproven proprietary Blu-Ray format in order to even get their foot in the door.
Many of them, myself included, didn’t bother with the PS3 until a year later (I got mine used, with a steep discount); thus with the inclusion of Blu-Ray, Sony committed a little bit of marketing suicide, and priced the PS3 beyond a reasonable emotional purchase. It forced otherwise interested consumers to rationalize paying a significantly higher price for something that had little or no value to them, but which they could certainly talk themselves out of intellectually. As Sony no doubt has learned in the intervening eighteen months, once you let the brain into the limo, the party’s over.
Another thing which worked against the Playstation 3 upon its launch was a decent selection of games with no system-selling title among them. (Please note; “decent selection of games” doesn’t mean the same thing as “selection of decent games.”) While this might be the case for most, if not all, system launches, consider the combined effect of spending $750 on a system and two games, and then having nothing better to play than Call of Duty 3 and Resistance: Fall of Man (which is, by the way, a game whose appeal utterly mystifies me). But that’s a review for another time.
Sacks, Fifth Avenue
Did the early adopters, those financially intrepid folks who set the tone for word-of-mouth feedback for any product, walk away from their paycheck-sized foray into the next-gen Playstation experience feeling like they’d made a good decision? Did the gotta-have-it meme set the world on fire as it did with the concurrently released Wii, or was the Playstation 3 like a Ferrari on a dirt road — an overpriced block of underutilized fancy hardware with nothing to do but wait for some pavement to appear beneath its wheels? Perhaps both, but I’d wager it was more of the latter.
Of course no one expects a system to stun the world right off the starting block, but a year and a half later still so little can be said for the PS3’s exclusive library that it hardly bears mentioning. With the recent release and subsequent drool-fest over Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriotic Libertines, or whatever the hell it’s called, Sony has what many consider to be the first exclusive must-own Playstation 3 title, though personally, I’m still waiting. Nothing against shitty writing, or stilted dialog, or horrible characterization, or dated, special-case design, or any of its myriad other rectal-cranial concepts (which no doubt remain dear to those who purportedly “grew up” on MGS), but I hated the fucker.
So it falls to the likes of Heavenly Sword, Folklore, Eye of Judgment, Lair, Untold Legends, and Time Crisis 4 to extricate the lowing beast from the mire of exclusive crap, and frankly, these games just aren’t up to it. Apparently, any Playstation 3 game is doomed to a life of mediocrity and/or dog shit cookies unless it contains a colon in the title, as the system receives a considerable boost from games like Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, but even these respectable gents don’t have the legs to carry Sony’s hamstrung bovine into profitability.
Yet another potential inhibitor of sales, backwards compatibility, is really a component of a larger problem, namely that of ambiguous product identity. No fewer than four different versions of the Playstation 3 have been released in North America alone: the 20 and 60 gig launch models, each which offered hardware backward compatibility to older Playstation titles, and though the 60 gig also sported flash card readers and wi-fi b/g, the 20 gig did not. Later, in 2007, the 40 gig model was released, which offered no backward compatibility at all, and no flash slots, but it did have wi-fi connectivity. The 80 gig PS3 was released in August 2007, and it offered software emulation of older titles, plus flash readers. The upcoming (September 2008, if this particular Sony release schedule can be believed), 80 gig model will lose all backwards compatibility, the flash readers, and 2 of its previous 4 USB jacks, but it will retain the wi-fi capability.
While this isn’t an issue for most people — I don’t know anyone who bought a PS3 in order to play PS2 games — at best it’s confusing, and at worst it conveys an image of constant removal, of less value for the same money. The persistent shifting of SKUs and features and hard drive sizes speaks of poor leadership and a misguided corporate direction, as even Sony can’t decide what they want you to be able to do with their system. All of it can be traced to SCEA hemorrhaging cash due to its Blu-Ray fiasco; instead of producing a simple, reliable machine that played games well, Sony is forced to consistently triage arterial bleed-outs by removing, taking away, and trimming down the PS3’s features in order to cut costs.
Instead of putting an affordable console into as many hands as possible, they tried, yet again, to force a proprietary format onto an unwilling, unready public, not just in North America, but around the world. In the process they priced themselves out of the game, and they keep aggravating the injury by constantly fiddling with it.
Sony is big on theatrical grandstanding (those of you waiting for Gran Turismo on the PSP, or LittleBigPlanet, or Playstation Home feel free to argue); they’ll promise the world, then, a year late and absent advertised features, they’ll deliver a town. It’s difficult to root for such arrogance, not to feel a little bit of smug satisfaction when it falters because of its own pig-headed decisions, but I’ll say this for them;
The Playstation 3 might not be perfect, but it’s got a lot of potential.
Tags: Avenue, Crap, Potential, PS3, Sacks, Twain, Uncharted, Wii
