Sony Defense Force: Assemble!

This month hasn’t been the best for Sony. First, the November NPD numbers came out and weren’t very encouraging for Sony’s big black box. Soon afterwards, Silicon Valley Insider issued a pretty scathing analysis of those NPD’s, calling the PS3 a sinking ship and pointing out that “sales of the PS3 are down about 19% from November 2007″. They continued:

 

So why is the PS3 flopping so badly?

1. It’s the most expensive console on the market, $150 - $200 more than its rivals. Even if you believe the video game industry is “recession-proof” (it isn’t), a tanking economy makes consumers more price-conscious.
2. The PS3’s big bonus is its ability to double as a Blu-Ray player. Too bad no one seems to care about hi-def DVDs. The differences between Blu-Ray and DVD are hard to see on a TV less than 50″.
3. The PS3 just doesn’t have any must-have titles exclusive to the console. “LittleBigPlanet” has generated decent buzz but isn’t a game-changer, and neither is Sony’s new virtual world “Home.”

There’s really only one option left for Sony to remain in the game: deep price cuts, and not just for people with good credit. Tell yourself the PS3 has superior graphics if it makes you feel better, but a $400 console with a mediocre game library simply cannot compete against an Xbox 360 priced at $200 in this economy.

 

Yikes.

But the hits keep coming for poor Sony, as more bad news arrived today.

You know that cute, creative, and exclusive game for the PS3, LittleBigPlanet? You remember how Sony was convinced (and had a lot of us convinced) that it was going to be a system seller this holiday season? Well, it turns out that optimism was slightly unwarranted. Kotaku reports:

 

The game sold an OK-ish 205,000 units in October, but wasn’t out for that long. It’d do a lot better in November, when it was on sale for all four weeks, right? No. It sold a disappointing 141,000 units for the month, which saw it slip out of NPD top 20 charts altogether.

Lord only knows how few copies it would have sold had it not been marketed to hell and high water. Then again, maybe that was the game’s problem. The game itself is fine, as its “failure” is a relative one. Selling 346,000 of a niche, debut IP with novel concepts would otherwise have been a huge success!

But selling 346,000 copies of your most high-profile holiday release? That is not a success.

To make matters worse, another Sony exclusive, Valkyria Chronciles, also underperformed. As kotaku reports:

 

Valkyria Chronciles is one of the best-looking games of this hardware generation, and although tactical RPGs of the Japanese variety aren’t big sellers, it still would have been nice to see it move more than 33,000 copies in North America for the month of November.

33,000 means the game wasn’t even in the top 100-selling titles for the month. Meaning it probably got beaten by some Imagine: and Nancy Drew games. So sad.

 

So sad indeed. As an owner of all 3 current-gen consoles, I take no joy in seeing news like this. While I do prefer to play my Xbox 360, I don’t want to see Sony disappear from the market. If they do, nobody will be pushing Microsoft in the next generation to deliver cutting-edge hardware, software, or online services. Because let’s face it: Nintendo doesn’t even play on the same field.

But don’t worry yet, friends! Sony Europe swears that Home will be a system seller. Yeah, right…

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Tags: LittleBigPlanet, NPD, PS3, Valkyria Chronciles