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Opinion: On Sony's PS3 Past, Present, Future - The Possibilities
by Adam Martin [PC, Console/PC]
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July 10, 2009
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[In part two of a Gamasutra opinion piece (see part one here), developer Adam Martin takes a close look at the state of Sony's PlayStation business and his personal, heated opinions on what it should -- and shouldn't do to achieve its goals.]
In the first part of this opinion piece, I looked at the success of the PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2, and tried to pinpoint the business issues around the PlayStation 3's current issues.
So what can Sony do to turn around the outlook for the PlayStation 3? Firstly, let's look at some things Sony has traditionally done, or has maintained at current levels, that appear to have failed or need to be reduced.
What Sony Has Done
Throughout PS3's development, and after launch, Sony made it clear that they wouldn't have the cash to create a PS4 for many years yet, even if the PS3 were successful, so that appears to be out of the question.
First failure? High revenue per hardware unit. One of the big reasons for Nintendo's Wii being so successful was simply price (even if you ignore the different market-targeting, the price differential was so large that it was a major attraction across markets).
Yes, I'm well aware that the average content/price ratio for Wii games is much lower than for PS3 games, but mainstream consumer purchasing decisions tend to be made much more on "what I can see/touch/taste now" rather than "long term value proposition".
On high revenue per first party title at retail, there are two schools of thought. The first school says that "everyone's doing it, so it's OK - the consumer has no choice" - the cost for a new title to the consumer is very high on *all* "traditional" console platforms, and on "traditional" PC games.
The second school of thought is that the consumers have already voted with their wallets and shown the retail prices are too high, as shown simply by the huge second-hand games market.
The reason consumers spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on second-hand games is that the retail "new" price of games is far too high for the average consumer. Maybe the hardcore consumers who used to be the bulk of the market were less price-sensitive than the new, more mainstream, consumers introduced by PS1 et al - but retail is driven by the many, rather than the few.
Personally, I think you can "get away with" the high prices for a bit longer, but to ignore that the market has already shown it's non-acceptance of this is a strategy with very little future.
Now, let's look at high tax per title sold at retail. This is a holdover from the "old days" of consoles. The world doesn't work like that any more - nowadays, publishers need to have much greater control over pricing.
Just look at the MMO market, and how both revenues and profits have soared as they've moved from fixed-price subscriptions to dynamic F2P (free to play) models where each user pays a different price. Fixed-price taxing of unit sales actively prevents any innovation in consumer pricing - which, ultimately, reduces everyone's revenues.
What Sony Can Do
Increase the revenue-per-title of PSN titles. Given that PSN unit sales, in my opinion, appear to be relatively slow, increasing cost-per-title would seem a poor choice. Until the unit sales get up to where they "ought" to be based on comparative markets and the superior consumer benefits of digital-distribution, you mustn't do anything to scare the consumer off. Price hikes are probably a very bad idea right now.
Incidentally... anything that the user notices in terms of a high price here is a bad idea. That means two things: initial purchase price, and total-cost-of-ownership.
What If? Some Recommendations
There are three broad recommendations I'd make, based on all the above. I'm going for a compromise between Effectiveness, Practicality, Risk, and Reward. You could try a lot more things, but if you're running a multi-billion-dollar company, you probably need to keep your strategies simple enough that you can communicate them to thousands of staff and have any hope of ensuring they get enacted properly. Here's my top three:
• Hardware: increase the installed base, and get out of “2nd place”
• Portfolio: make the PS3 the world's richest games console (in terms of games)
• Retail: capture the second-hand games market on Sony's platforms
Hardware: increase the installed base, and get out of “2nd place”
Going back to my list of ways Sony could increase profit, this section mostly covers:
• Increase PS3 installed base
• Reduce hardware production costs (increases profit per unit PS3 sold)
The number one problem here is PS3's small install base.
Small installed base makes it very unattractive to developers -- witness the fact that Rockstar was very happy to break out of their GTA exclusivity. The more the PS3 falls behind, the fewer third-party exclusives Sony can hang on to.
Developers and publishers focus their energy (and their best titles) on the biggest-selling consoles, and each extra console they sell on provides diminishing additional returns but linearly increasing technology costs.
Sony hasn't won the marketing war against the Xbox 360; Sony hasn't won the zeitgeist war against the Wii. They have a good product, that sells OK, but they need to go for something much, much simpler if they're going to pull ahead. I'd go for the simplest one of all: price.
The PS3 needs to come down in price at retail, by at least 30%, preferably 50% (in my personal, entirely biased, opinion). As of this writing, it's retailing for $350. The Xbox 360 is $250, and the Wii is £160. That price cut would make the PS3 directly competitive on price with the other consoles, and would bring into sharper focus the differential in product quality and portfolios.
If Sony is already making a 10 percent loss per unit, as reported recently, then this could bring the per-unit loss up to $100-$120. Sony is 10 million units away from second place, and 30 million units away from first place.
At the current rate-of-sales of the market-leader (Wii), and assuming Sony's annual sales rate would triple with the price reduction, getting into first place could easily require 45 million more unit sales. Assuming no reduction in production costs, this would cost Sony corporation around $4.5 billion.
Sounds like a lot; then again, let's bear in mind that they're planning to lose a third of that this year already. It may sound insane - and after the vast losses incurred to date, they may not be able to raise enough cash and goodwill to fund it.
Corporations of Sony's size have done bigger strategic losses in the past and come out the other side smelling of roses.
My favorite example is IBM, which in the early 1990's incurred an annual loss measured in the tens of billions of dollars, entirely as a deliberate act to improve profitability 5 years later. It worked, and the loss was handsomely paid off a decade later.
Personally, I'm not sure Sony really has a choice here: do they still want to be in business in 5 years time, or not? The PlayStation family has been essential to the survival and profitability of Sony over the past decade and a half as legions of their competitors (other consumer electronics companies) have given up the ghost. Sony needs PS3 to succeed; quite possibly “at any cost”.
Why Does It Have To Cost So Much?
But let's take a step back here: does it really need to cost Sony so much cash? Why is the PS3 so expensive to produce anyway? Why hasn't the production cost plummeted already?
In simple terms, the different components of a console scale down in price at different rates. Some items come down in manufacturing cost and power requirements at a ferocious rate. It's been a very long time since I worked in an electronics giant, but off the top of my head, and simplifying a lot, the big wins are (biggest first):
• Any off-the-shelf electronics that other companies in other industries are already paying to miniaturise/improve
• Proprietary stuff that is technically simple and easy to integrate into new microchips
• common, standalone, consumer electronics systems
• Proprietary stuff that's already in microchips and just needs improved chip fabrication plants to improve it
In practice, that means (biggest savings first):
• RAM
• Flash / SSD
• 3rd party major electronic subsystems (graphics cards)
• 3rd party minor subsystems (bits of BIOS, bits of standard tech like USB)
• 3rd party physical subsystems (hard-drives, CD/DVD/etc)
With the PS1, the CD-ROM drive plummeted in cost very quickly, and kept on falling. Funnily enough, that flies in the face of my list above.
And that, many suspect, is what tricked Sony into putting the vastly expensive BluRay drive into the PS3: their internal version of the above list had the bottom item at the top.
Why? Because CD's swept the world in a way that nothing else has before or since. The timing almost couldn't have been better. The PS2 achieved a similar trick with the DVD - although less pronounced.
The Blu-Ray drive? And Microsoft's HD-DVD? Much less so than DVD, and a pale shadow of the CD. They just haven't taken off as consumer electronics devices (and, possibly, the very lack of Sony's old competitors has contributed to the slower reduction in manufacturing costs - maybe consumer electronics has relatively less investment these days).
There's a couple of problem-devices hiding in there too. The worst one is probably the hard-drive. Hard drive capacity increases at a ferocious rate each year, but - in the wider consumer market - the older drives simply stop being manufactured, they don't get cheaper. Compare this to CD/DVD/etc, where the “new” drives provide exactly the same functionality as the “old” ones, just cheaper to produce; with hard-drives, the cost savings are ploughed 100% into increased capacity and speed, keeping retail price effectively constant.
Here's something interesting, though: the world demand for SSD (which is like RAM, only it saves the state permanently) is so huge, and so varied, that *all* capacities are constantly coming down in price *as well as* the cost/megabyte decreasing constantly.
When the 1Gb SSD that was enough for your high-end camera is replaced by 10Gb SSD because the cameras have gone higher-megapixel and need more capacity, the 1Gb SSD becomes viable for the compact cameras. When it's too small even for them, it's useful in the mid-range cell phones. And so on, down the line.
To put this into perspective, the latest iPhone is on sale with almost as much SSD storage as the PS3 has hard-disk space.
Hardware: Actions / Summary
1. Remove the Blu-Ray drive; go “online only”
2. Remove the hard-drive; go “online only”
3. Where necessary, replace the hard-drive with SSD
The most important thing to recognize here is that - in the PC / MMO world - we already *regularly* get all our home users to download 10Gb game clients, and to re-download them every few months in the form of patches. Darkfall Online, one of this year's MMO releases, came as a 9Gb download. That's almost half the size of a BluRay / HD-DVD disk.
In other words, 100 percent of console game purchases *could* be delivered via the internet.
I don't want to remove local storage entirely; the idea of waiting overnight each time I want to play a game - wait for it to re-download - *every* time I play is far from appealing.
But as a budget offering, there's an awful lot of wiggle-room for Sony to put in the largest SSD they can afford cheaply, and expect/force home-users to regularly re-download titles. It's not pretty. But we already knew there'd be no “easy” ways forwards for the PS3.
And that SSD? We *know* it'll come down in manufacturing / purchase / integration cost. As a bonus, it's more reliable, and a lot smaller and lighter than a hard drive. That all adds up to additional savings in physical costs (transportation, warehousing, etc). Funnily enough, the raw hardware performance is also a lot better than that of hard-drives, and massively better than that of BluRay drives et al.
What About The PlayStation Network?
Microsoft was very innovative and clever with XBLA; they tried things no one had ever done before (e.g. they invented the whole system of badges/awards that is now endemic in games on all platforms). In my opinion, Sony has done relatively little to promote PSN, and if anything has tried to kill it off through a combination of “damning with faint praise” (providing tacky, half-cocked clones of XBLA's awards system) and “self-obsolescence” (creating - and marketing - the self-competing Home).
Further, being purely download-based, the PSN could easily take a whole chapter out of Kongregate's book, and be turned into an interface between professional game-developers and the people who play their games.
This is a novel (and scary) concept for console developers: actually having direct interaction with your own consumers - but it's how the online game studios have lived and died for the last decade.
And having lived through it, I believe that it's a good thing, and that studios quickly come to embrace it (and benefit from it). Kongregate started with the opinion that players wanted to talk to the people who made the products they loved, and that developers wanted to learn at the start of the process what their players liked and disliked (rather than only after release). Console developers generally don't get any of that feedback until the game launches, and the games are harder to make well without it.
So… the PSN could be turned over into a gallery of in-progress game development. It's terrifying to take this approach to your platform “let a thousand flowers bloom”, and it's totally buzzword-compliant, sadly - but it would revitalize the PSN platform.
What If PSN Was A Java Environment?
I'd settle for a scripting language, actually. But java is available, and looks like a more powerful option right now. The key point here is to make it very cheap to develop new games, both by increasing the pool of available “qualified” staff, and by reducing the development complexity - and by opening up PSN as a place where studios can throw up their experimental side projects.
The secondary boost is that PSN could be turned from a boring, dull, holding-ground for tacky, cheap rip-off games that even the developers themselves clearly didn't love - and the publishers certainly weren't taking seriously - into a vibrant, exciting, community.
That's a scathing, extremist view of the PSN - but it's one that I believe is becoming more endemic in the PS3-owning community, as the platform continues each year to fall short of their hopes and expectations.
The Second Hand Market
PS2 is a lucrative market for Sony today - the hardware is profitable, sells like hotcakes, and the software market is still selling new games. Simulating the PS2 on the PS3 was always hard - Sony's not great at software, and the PS2 was a complex beast; in practice, it required including extra hardware on the PS3 that contained some of the components from the PS2. No wonder they removed the backwards compatibility from the PS3.
Only … the second-hand market on PS2 is massive, and Sony makes nothing from sales of 2nd hand games. And the PS2 sales are now paling in comparison behind the next-gen consoles - even falling behind PS3 sometimes. The honeymoon is over; it's time to accept it and move on.
I would bring back 99% PS2 backwards compatibility, preferably through pure software emulation (the PS3 is a powerful beast, and with enough cash injected into a good software team it's likely that a software-only solution could be provided).
But I'd add a caveat: it only works for digitally-downloaded PS2 games.
As of today, that means precisely “none of them”, because the PS2 wasn't networked (bar a very small number of near-experimental units of networking hardware that briefly shipped and were soon aborted).
A little bit of DRM magic (much as I hate DRM in general), and the PS3 could be downloading PS2 games on-demand.
Here's the exciting part, though, both as a consumer and for Sony:
• if the downloads are digitally retailed (DRM'd), then Sony knows who “owns” what
• if Sony knows who owns it, Sony can mediate consumer-to-consumer sales
If you could buy PS2 games direct from Sony, and then re-sell them to other consumers once bored - with Sony skimming a percent each time - then Sony could sell them at a much lower price than retail, and yet still make a higher profit per-unit (as would the publishers / IP owners).
I'm sure there are plenty of startup companies that even now are grateful Sony hasn't (yet) pulled this stunt. Microsoft could try it - but with backwards compatibility already guaranteed on the Xbox 360, and a much much smaller portfolio of titles, it would be much harder for them to pull off. Although if Sony did it, I'm pretty sure it would put a sizeable dent in their strategies.
Threats
I've only made glancing mention of the fact that Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii are all "traditional" consoles. If you've been playing games long enough to remember them, you'll no doubt look back at Nintendo's NES and Sega's Master System and see that - in most ways - the three "current gen consoles" aren't really any different at all. Even down to the widespread use of funky plastic peripherals (Duck Hunt, anyone?).
But what of the non-traditional consoles?
The iPhone has sold well over 45 million units to date. It's selling faster than the Wii and the DS, and considerably faster than the PS2 - yet, since it is (pretends to be) a mobile phone, it has a target market measured in the hundreds of millions rather than the tens of millions. This horse has some serious legs...
The king of consoles is still the PS2, with its current 150 million odd installed base. All in all, it would be a sad day for any of Microsoft, Sony, and even Nintendo, if they finally managed to dethrone the PS2 only to look round and see that the iPhone had just hit 500 million.
And that 60 percent of those iPhones were being used as gaming consoles, with one-click-billing, subscriptions, micro-payments, "always-online", motion-detection, GPS, facial-recognition, and live video capture all "built-in" to *every* game...
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Secondly, you indicate the Harddrive as a price factor. Wrong. Harddrives are a dime a dozen. And, prices do, go down. So, you're wrong there. The real factor in the cost of the hardware makeup, is that Sony utilizes 2 bits of hardware, that are produced by 1 company, and then Blu Ray.
XDR Ram from Rambus
Cell Broadband Engine
Both of these items, are made by 1 company, not commercially available, and mainly used in Sony's PS3. Some companies have started adapting the Cell and XDR into other electronics, as with Toshiba and their high high end TV's. Or the new HD Encoders. Again, not enough mainstream use to drive down the prices. As well as, no manfucturing competition, to also drive down prices.
Blu Ray, is still an expensive technology as well, and given Sony's inability to remove the drive from the PS3, it will continue to remain one of the leading cost drivers for the PS3. Of course, as Blu Ray sales take off, and penetration becomes more saturated, these costs should drop. However, there's still XDR and Cell to take into account.
Back on the harddrives though, Sony uses SATA 1 drives, for the PS3. However, it can accept SSD, and Sata2 drives also. My launch 60g, currently has a 320g SATA2 in it. That cost less than $200. Meaning, 60g devices are much much lower.
In the end, Sony's machine will drop in price, but I think they'll keep it at $400 for a time, to allow the company to remain in the black, financially. They've taken enough losses, in order to make it appeal to a more broader segment of the population, however, what seems to be lost in the mix is the PS3 is a luxury item. It costs that much, for a reason. The hardware you need in addition, in order to enjoy the full experience of what the PS3 can do, makes the $400 price tag, paltry in comparison. A thousand+ for a true 1080p TV that's 50" plus. At least $400 if not more, for a sound system that can output Lossless Audio @ DTSHD-MA levels.
If you balk at a $400 price tag, you probably shouldn't be even considering a PS3. It's currently outside your price range, and $60/games won't help either.
For the rest of you, saving, and prioritizing the things you desire is really a lesson in life. Eventually, you learn that you won't always be able to afford sick gadgetry, just with one paycheck, and that setting aside money, here and there, will get you there over time. Many people hate having to wait, and feel entitled to a certain experience. This, is not the case. Sony's bent over backwards to try to accomodate, now it's your turn to try and act like an adult. Set aside $25 a month for 16 months, and you've got yourself a PS3.
Brian
Brian
Who's going to develop for an occult, 8-core asymmetrical CPU? Who's going to like being limited to a paltry 256 mb of RAM? Sony thought they could make a more powerful machine than the 360, but they didn't consider that developers are going to target for the lowest common denominator, making all their hardware bonuses obsolete. For example, Blu-ray seems like it would benefit developers in giving extra storage space, BUT a game needs to run on the 360 as well, so devs are still limited to DVDs, making Blu-ray useless for games. Sony failed to appreciate the realities of rising development costs and the pressures that would fall out from it. Graphics are limited by cost now, not processing power.
Given the history of expensive consoles in the past -- specifically Panasonic's 3DO -- the PS3's fate was easily foreseen. The only thing Sony's done right with the PS3 is win the format war, but was it worth killing the Playstation legacy to do it?
For the PS3 to be appetizing to developers at this point, it needs a larger install base proportionate with the extra costs of developing for it. And to make that happen its price-point needs to be below that of the 360.
Honestly, Sony doesn't need 3rd party support. 3rd parties, need Sony's, simply because of the costs of games developement. If it costs millions and millions, developers are going to want to hit the largest base possible, and excluding Sony, is really removing a possible target audience of 24 million.
Additionally, one thing I think you don't quite understand is that the PS3's/Cell architecture, doesn't demand large volumes of GPU RAM. The GPU itself, merely draws lines (look up how the Cell/GPU interact with each other). Almost all processing, that we'd normally associate with the GPU, is done via the Cell's SPE's, and the GPU merely draws the lines. Hence the reason why Bioware, completed their engine, and still have V-RAM left over.
Brian
"The most important thing to recognize here is that - in the PC / MMO world - we already *regularly* get all our home users to download 10Gb game clients, and to re-download them every few months in the form of patches. Darkfall Online, one of this year's MMO releases, came as a 9Gb download. That's almost half the size of a BluRay / HD-DVD disk."
It is EXTREMELY rare for me to download anything beyond 1GB. I actually cringe when I go to try some demo and it clocks in at 1.5 - 3GBs. I have high speed internet (well, as high speed as a cable connection gets in an apartment complex) and I just hate waiting 3 - 5+ hours to play a game. I actually refuse to re-install WoW because I know it will take me at least half a day just to get all patched up.
I love the idea of digital distribution (and do buy many PSN titles), but I refuse to use it as my primary purchasing option for large/HD titles until the internet connections available to consumers in the US are faster/cheaper to afford.
People dont want to, and these days dont have to, and if Sony adopts that kind of thinking, PS3 wont be around very much longer. They have to drop the price if they want to survive. this is business, not teaching customers restraint and the value of saving, heheh.
For those able to either A) Buy a PS3 outright, or B) Save up for a PS3. They do so. Otherwise, they're perfectly able to buy a 360 or a Wii, however, they still won't gain access to any of Sony's 1st party developers. It is a business, and Sony's in the business of making money, not making commercially available a high end piece of electronics, to those who can't show some restraint and save up for it themselves. As I said, if $400 is somehow...too much for you. Then, why are you even looking at the Ps3 in the first place.
It's called economics. Not everyone is rich, and not everyone is capable of dropping $400 plus on a game system/media center. If you want it, you save for it. Or you choose a cheaper alternative. For me however, I wanted a PS3, and I saved for it. I also wanted a high-end gaming PC. I saved for that too. The PC, cost roughly $2300, I worked overtime, I saved, and I purchased pieces and parts, when I could, where I could. This is how you work towards the things you desire. Therefore, I'm left with all the games that Sony's 1st parties have to offer. And 99% of everything MS says is exclusive to their console. The difference being, I actually play the games at the resolutions, framerates and depth of detail that the developers originally intended. Not the dumbed down, half-assed version the 360 manages.
Brian
What do you want? To PS3 become a clone of ZEEBO?
What? There are multiple SKUs for the PS3 and XBox 360, aren't there? Why not list that information, or at least state which SKUs you chose to list and why. And why is the Wii's price listed in pounds while the other two are in (presumably American) dollars? Are Wiis not available in America?
i dont know about Ferraris, but i do know that most high end sports cars barely eek out a profit, if at all. and sports cars from larger, more diverse companies are usually the first on the chopping block when its time to make cuts.
you're right, it is called economics. If people have a sense of entitlement, its because other gadget makers have given them the expectation that they can have it. Sony is looking like a relic.
Most advantages of the PS3, are not worth it to you. But, 24 million people have disagreed with you, myself included. Again, it falls unto the exclusive market, Sony plainly has more, and, arguably of higher quality than the other two major console manufacturers (this is obviously subject to opinion).
Sony looks like it always has, delivering high quality products, to the consumer. The consumer, looks like they always have. Barely in the know, filled with the false impression that because they like to play games, they're entitled to own a PS3. This is not accurate, nor will it ever be.
And there you have it. Ferrari's barely ekk out a profit. Guess what, Sony has lost money, continuously, since the inception of the PS3, as they've sold it at a loss for 3 years. While the margin of loss continues to shrink, they are still losing money. And current SKU's being sold at $350, are mark-downs from the distributor (Ala, Best-Buy, Amazon etc..), Sony still sells them for $400. Period. The most recent independant analysis from isupply, still indicates they're losing $48/console. Given the SKU makeup has not changed SINCE that analysis, they're still losing $48/console, until new SKU's are introduced, either the slim-line, or the smaller processed chips/gpu etc... They have YET, to make a profit, on any console sold. They may (and probably do), make money off of their VoD, Music, and PSN game downloads, but, they do not make money off of the PS3. Even Jack Tretton publicly stated this to be the case (in response to Mr. Kottick's blubbering).
My original statement holds true, you are not entitled to this system, just because you like to play games. If you want it, save up for it and buy it. Plain and simple. Or, wait a year for the price to drop.
The problem, and I've stated this before, is that Sony has built a great box - but they have not explained to the average joe why they need to pay more for it. Couple this poor hardware marketing the fact that Sony has been beat by MSFT in areas like bringing Netflix to the box, and it's hard for a layman to understand why Sony's box is more of a full-fledged entertainment system than the 360.
Lots and lots of bad decisions early in this round for Sony, and I'm not even sure that Stringer actually gets it either.
this isnt a fanboy site, this is about business. (I dont even play consoles, so i dont really care who survives or not). all game companies are in it to make money and stay in business, not make the best console. Sony didnt create the PS division to lose money entertaining hardcore gamers (though it will now have to lose even more money on a price cut to become profitable).
just saying "well if you want us, save for us and stop acting so entitled" is a pretty weak sales pitch. Consumers have clearly spoken that they arent interested. No business on Earth would be stupid enough to expect consumers to change their spending habits, especially in a downturn, for the company. its the opposite. the company, assuming it wants to increase revenue, has to change for the consumer. The onus is on Sony here.
Hardware: So if Sony is looking to lose a third of 4.5 billion for the 2009 fiscal year, why would they want to increase that loss? If you were to review the financials for fiscal 08 you will see that the game division of Sony is improving and shoving even further unnecessary losses isn't the answer. Thus enter refining the manufacturing process.
Sony and IBM have stated that CELL 45nm chips are looking to hit production, or store shelves, in fall 09. Shrinking internal parts certainly allow for cost reductions. If you are one to believe all the rumors regarding a PS3 slim, this certainly allows Sony to reduce the cost of the hardware and hopefully match their fiscal 09 30% increase for PS3 sales. Drying up the warehouses of old costly units and replacing them with cheaper units would be the likely scenario. this is why I believe you will mostly not see a price drop of the current model because they will incur more losses and will have to eat the costs of those that are still sitting in warehouses.
As stated before, removing the BR drive is simply not an option. If you thought people complained about not having PS2 compatibility how do you think they will feel if they can't simply pick up a few BR games when they get the console? Instead they must go home and begin to download, at minimum, 6gb retail games? Removing the HDD will also not be an option. How will players download those titles they can't get on BR? Unless your hope is for Sony to provide an "On-Live" type service? The market won't go for that and it would not be a good business decision to do on a home console at this time.
PSN
Rewards system: I am puzzled how the implementation of a different rewards system, ala trophies, is tacky and half cocked? Personally I find both systems to not be rewarding at all. In the end, each system provides players with a "I am better than you" mantra.
The remainder of your analysis basically declares PSN as a failed experiment with nothing left to do on the network but open it up to be a test bed for developers to try things out on. I am really taken back by this concept. For the games available on PSN, I love Sony's execution in finding new and original content instead of relying on old arcade titles to provide a portfolio that says you have "x" games available. Titles such as "The Last Guy", PixelJunk series, "Echochrome", "Everyday Shooter", and "Flower" are certainly unique titles that you won't find on any other system. I, as many others, welcome their drive to seek out such games for us to play. So I certainly find it hard to believe that PSN is a "boring, dull, holding-ground for tacky, cheap rip-off games that even the developers themselves clearly didn't love."
Who wouldn't love to see PS2 titles on PSN? We have just been promised an increase in PS1 titles. From a strategic perspective, it could be Sony has held out on offering such to get people to buy PS3 software. Once the PS2 is no longer selling, which I expect to have another significant drop this year, Sony will begin to make PS2 emulation via software available. That of course depends on their progress in emulating the GS.
I would like to see Sony continue what it has done with EA & Criterion's Burnout Paradise. Offer up more 3rd party titles for downloads, continue price promotions of store content and continue to improve the service. Looking back at it's launch in 2006 and what is available now, you can't really believe that it is falling short in hopes and expectations.
I'm not a fanboy, I merely have the ability to look at the games situation, objectively. PC > Consoles. Which makes the 360 irrelevant to me. My PC, is hands down, a better performer than either console. However, as stated previously, I have a PS3, for Sony's 1st party games. My PC, takes care of 3rd party developement.
And you're wrong, the games division STARTED with the hardcore (Didn't they all, really?). Therefore, the Sony games division, was in fact, created to cater to the hardcore gamer. Whether that market has grown to include more than just hardcore, is irrelevant. The hardcore still exists, and is still quite lively.
I'm not a salesmen, I'm a realist. I'm also of the mind that Sony has done quite enough to attempt to alleviate the price issue to the common consumer. It's the common consumer, who refuses to act like a sentient being, and understand that what comprises the PS3, costs allot more, than what comprises other consoles. Plain and simple. As such, you cannot expect Sony to just give these consoles away, at the same price, or lower, than the competition. Is it hurting them in the sales department? I'm sure it is, however, I would note, you don't work for Sony, nor do you understand their business/marketing strategy as it currently stands. I don't either, but then again, I have a PS3, and I don't have to worry about it.
Bottom line, the common consumer, doesn't know the costs associated with the PS3, or, for that matter, the costs associated with other consoles. They nickel and dime you to the point, where you'd actually have been around the same cost, simply buying the PS3. I mean, a Wifi adapter that costs $100? Seriously, c'mon now. Wifi adapters haven't cost a hundred bucks in years and years. And yet, MS is happy to gouge their customers that way. Serves them right really. If you're not going to research your purchasing decisions, you deserve to be nickel and dimed to death. But, don't sit there and complain that the competition's price is so high, when comparatively, they're equal.
Bottom line though, most of Sony's customers, past, present and future, are in it for Sony franchises. As these franchises continue to come out, you'll see sales increase. I would venture a guess that PS3 sales will go through the proverbial roof, when God of War 3 come out. Which doesn't even remotely come close to the tidal wave that represents the Gran Turismo base. Sony's biggest issue, was that their 1st parties worked on new IP, for the PS3, not bringing back old IP's that made Sony's game division what it is today.
High performance SSD's cost much more per gigabyte than normal hard drives. Using digital camera's and Ipod's as an example is a fallacy as they in no way represent anything close to the read/write speeds of a SATA hard drive.
Going online only is in my opinion a terrible idea and would limit even further the target market. Not everyone has broadband and even those who are paying for broadband get sub-broadband speeds from their ISP (*cough* clearwire *cough*).
Overall I think most of this article was just a bunch of hot air and the proposed solutions don't have much merit.
The PS3 should bring back full PS2 backwards compatibility, but at the same time remove the disk drive? That defeats the purpose of backwards compatibility, which is that old software works with new hardware without additional resources. You are talking about a new PS3 sku that is not even backwards compatible with itself. That is out of the question.
Sony has commented regarding sharing and they have stated it was fine. They can, and do, lock full release games from being shared. Honestly, it is just an exploitation of allowing the user to retrieve their games anytime. It is certainly better than Microsoft's or Nintendo's drm structure for their games, IMO. I have seen people get bitten when they use up their allowance, console craps out, then can't get the game back because those they shared with don't want to give it up. It will certainly come in handy as I house sit this weekend and want to purchase trash panic.
For my own reference, could you give an example of a full game that's been locked and can't be shared? Thanks.
But it is exactly what Sony is doing with the PSP Go. So, smart or not, it isn't out of the question for Sony to do something exactly like this.
The point about $60 games was also brought up, and the reason they're so high is because the consumer has responded by buying those games. If people plain and simply refused to spend $60 on a game then they wouldn't be $60, but apparently the whole "but games cost more to make this generation" argument that all the companies came up with at the beginning of this generation was enough to convince the consumer that it was okay to raise the price. Also games are pretty much just 1 entity regardless of company. They've all basically agreed that $60 is what a new game is going to cost, so there is no competition to make the $60 price tag look bad. But with consoles we have the Xbox360 that costs lower than the PS3 so it makes the PS3's price point look bad.
People are putting too much stock into the console war when its relevance is so little in the big scheme of things. Sony has a much smaller piggy bank than Microsoft so they couldn't go into this generation using the PS2 strategy, no matter how many people complain about them not doing it. Get over it! It was for many good reasons; the most important being that it also isn't sustainable in this environment anymore. When it all comes down to it, short of making a PS2.5 with motion controls there was no way for SONY or Microsoft to win. The Wii disrupted the market at the right time with the right product.
This whole HD fight is not about the current generation of consoles (which lost to waggle a long time ago), but about the future of entertainment software and controlling the pipeline by which it will enter our homes. Microsoft is not even close to being the leading console this generation and they are nowhere near as successful as the PS2 was. To make it seem like they are doing everything right and that SONY now needs to change their company's founding principles to beat the XBOX is ridiculous. That's like saying Dwight Howard is a better NBA Center than Shaq. Win a ring first, kid! Microsoft needed to make noise and throw themselves into every spotlight even in a failed attempt, because they need the XBOX brand to ring out like Nintendo or Playstation. Sony needed a generation to figure out networking and focus on software - a futureproof machine w/ scalable CPU and the winning HD media format allow them to do that.
In conclusion:
What does Sony need to do? Follow the course. Invest in customers that have money to spend on their other products. Don't invest in people that are going to be buying the cheapest TVs, used games, and can't see the value in free online gaming over a paid subscription. Wait until the high markup sister products are within the price range of the average consumer before reducing the price to a level that the mass market can afford. Continue to create/refine wholly-owned products that will last for decades and will increase their portfolio advantage. Continue to sure up a value market via digital distribution to offer customers alternatives and a wider variety of entertainment than traditional retail can offer. Continue to meet high quality standards in order to raise the floor for competitors.
What does Microsoft need to do? Follow the course. Continue to spread the XBOX brand as far and as wide as possible. Maintain the head start gained from entering the arena a year early. Maintain their status as the easiest and most publisher friendly platform to develop for. Retool XBOX Live for the next round of consoles and the Natal roll out. Focus internal resources on new franchises for the Natal and XBOX Live. Phase silver memberships out and make everybody eligible for Gold Membership access to Xbox Live.
What does Nintendo need to do? Give me some money.
The original Xbox was merely a DRM'd PC, The 360 was merely a DRM'd PC with a different non-intel CPU. But the number of PC parts in consoles has been increasing exponentially over time, and the number of NATIVE chips has decreased.
All consoles now use PC 3D accelerator chip technology developed primarily for the PC game market irony of ironies.
The real problem with development costs is that most companies outside the PC industry are very clueless. I'm glad sony finally clue'd in to amazing work going on in the PC industry by going with NVIDIA 3D chips for the PS3, the whole reason the PS3 is so expensive is because it is the best system (overall, minus the cell) the only thing it is lacking is games and better retail price.
Sony did hurt themselves this generation by trying to be the best system, if they had went with DVD's most of the market would not have noticed, nor cared. Since Blu-ray/DVD technology still can't hold a candle to hard disks and solid state storage.
The real problem is that console manufacturers never plan for intelligent expandability within their cost structure, since consoles to most users are blackbox's (the have no f'n idea whats inside). So ideally you could make an interferface to use any permanent storage storage technology so that you could use the cheapest and thereby abstract the hardware (flash vs traditional hard disks) so the end user won't even notice.
It gives one lots of leeway as prices of components change relative to one another. Blu-ray really was not needed for this generation of consoles, that is definitely for certain and Sony could have sold a lot more consoles and kept costs down had they gone with traditional DVD drives. Most consumers by and large don't care and are clueless about hardware.
This is where we start to see the failings of competition: We have 4 different machines (if you include the PC) and tremendous amounts of redundancy and wasted effort (making games multiplatform) because every console manufacturer wants "game / library" lock-in, games that sell their consoles.
Here's something I didn't notice anyone point out however: the PS3's market share is criticized as being measly despite the fact that it has sold marginally more units per a year (or just about even after the 360's price cut;haven't checked very recently) than the 360. I understand that increasing market share is important for maintaining 3rd party interest (although I highly doubt the situation is making many think twice, and don't say Kottick!), but as a console that is supposedly dreadfully overpriced, that's extremely impressive -- end of story.
Sony really should consider selling an SKU without the built in wifi. Considering that MS gets away with selling their add on for $99, I'd imagine it would make a worthwhile difference without crippling the PS3's capabilities by any means -- my people prefer to use the ethernet ports anyway, although my connection is perfectly fine with the wireless.
Should I use a BD disc? Well then I restrict sales from those that bought your proposed "PS3 Lite" w/o the BD drive. Shall I make use of the HDD as a cache to speed up access to data? Oh I can't, because only part of the market has a BD drive and a HDD thanks to the proposed PS3 w/o a HDD.
What Sony should do is continue their current hardware strategy: make it smaller, cheaper to make as quickly as possible. However at the same time, INVEST more into marketing the PS3's games. I see so many more TV ad's that showcase a 3rd party game being released on both consoles but at the end of the segment is that green X then 360 logo. I'm willing to bet that the average joe consumer who is mostly uninformed of what console what game is being released on will purchase the 360 version first or if they don't own a console will look at the 360 first.
Also they need to market their own games better! Killzone 2 was fun but the TV ads?... BORING! Don't get me wrong, neat little "matrix'ish bullet time" commercial but hardly a commercial that makes you remember it. Mainly because the Matrix bullet time effect is OLD news now.
Also I like to think their investment in the PS3 can pay off with the PS4. BD drive speeds will be faster by then. They could update the cell, just build off the current architecture and make it faster with more cores perhaps? One would think by doing that, all the tools that will have matured during the PS3 timeline would be compatible with the PS4 and the cost to develop that chip should be much less since you're not building from scratch. Then again I'm just typing this without knowing what's technically possible, effectively talking out of my "@ss". :)
In a way, though, I actually agree with Brian's belief that consumers need to plan more for the things they want, but this has nothing to do with that, as Dave Smith has pointed out. This has everything to do with the question of "how can Sony sell enough PS3s to become profitable?" The problem as I see it is, that when Joe Consumer goes down to Best Buy to pick up a console because he really wants Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, GTA, Oblivion, or some other third-party blockbuster, he sees the obvious difference in price between the PS3 and 360 and go with what's cheaper. You may be right that the 360 is just as much when you pay for all the additional features the PS3 has built-in, but if those features are enough to discourage consumers who don't know they have to buy them separately with the 360, or even worse for Sony, don't care about the features in the first place, then I say Sony should adopt Microsoft's approach and lower the price of their box.
Obviously, Sony needs to cut the price to get a larger install base so as to start making more money off their games and services. The trickiness here is that, by cutting the price too much, they risk losing more money than they stand to recoup. I don't know the specifics of their finances, of course, but I believe that the price is going to have to go down in order for them to turn this thing around, if the situation is indeed as dire as this article would have us believe. If not, and SCE is already profitable, then I don't see what all the fuss is about, and Sony should just keep doing what it's doing. But since everyone here is treating the situation as dangerous, then Sony has got to change.
1: I'm seriously starting to question why Sony did not pitch the DVD functionality of the drive a bit more. And by that, I mean lead developers to focus on software development on the DVD side for a little while longer, and then *eventually* bring them into focusing on BluRay development. I think that, if they had done so, publishers wouldn't have had to procure such a manufacturing loss and development for focus of the "lowest common denominator" (Microsoft's 360 in this case) would not have been such an issue, since many of the initial PS3 games would've still been coming out on DVD, sort of similar to what Sony did w/ the PS2 in that a lot of early PS2 games still came out on CD format before the major shift occured to the DVD format, even though the DVD features were there from the start. Such also reminds me of how a more 'subtle' route was taken w/ Sony in terms of getting consumers into the DVD last gen, versus the more brute and aggresive route they've taken for BluRay this gen. Then again, DVD had the benefit of already having built up steam on it's own accord before the PS2 released, steam that the BluRay simply did not have; Sony had to create that steam more or less on their own so I can see why the aggresiveness was needed. Still, by not focusing *too* much on the BluRay until after a while (or atleast until after the 1st gen of software), I think Sony would've made a lot of publisher (and developer) heads less cramped and stressed.
2: Referring to the article itself, I did like some of the ideas you proposed for the PSN, specifically the idea of making it akin to a Kongregate service and the Java-like idea. I think those two features could really bring up some great opportunities for indie developers, and really grow the indie scene on the PS3 (leading to more unique software). I'm also sure there are many big-name developers that would like seeing those sorts of ideas implemented by Sony, both as a way to bolster a unique identity and spin their wheels in a few different fields. And a lot of the smaller developers-whose chances of making another game honestly depend on if their current project is successful-might enjoy getting community feedback from fans while the game's still in development (and a possibility (though very slim one) of that community actually being able to work alongside those developers. I know I know, NDAs' and such will likely prevent that happening on the console scene).
3: As far as a price drop is concerned, it really needs to be determined on the grounds of if Sony can afford the potential losses. They need to make sure they're offsetting those losses w/ other gains, otherwise I just don't think it'd be viable to go w/ a price drop right now. However, unlike a few others, I'm not saying that b/c I feel only the "entitled" should be able to buy the console, and those not willing to sacrifice don't deserve it; there may be other alternatives out there, but I would think a company would rather as many consumers as possible to go for their own product vs. the competition, and would try to accomadate for that consumer, wouldn't they? Indeed, my reasons for the PS3 not likely having a price drop for a while (until perhaps the Slim, but even that's a maybe) is because-as a piece of equipment-I think it's proven itself worthy atm to stand at the price it's at. Like a few others said, the 360 initially looks cheap (as does the Wii to an extent), but once you factor in add-ons for devices that already exist natively in some form in the PS3, the price adds up. Another thing is that the PS3 has not had the dreadfully shameful RROD issues the 360 has had, and any consumer that is doing research on the consoles before purchasing will likely look at those facts and determine that one is more sturdy in construction than the other, and they'd be right. The library-minus a few exceptions-is pretty much there, and Sony's also keeping a lookout for future strategies of their competitors. Specifically, I think they'll be looking very closely at what Microsoft does w/ Natal; that doesn't look like it'll be hitting anywhere below $100, and could be as much as $150 or $200. The Natal's already been mentioned as having a possibility of splitting apart the 360 base, and if the situation gets *really* bad for MS there, Sony could just opt to keep the PS3 at it's current price and sell it to consumers just on the grounds of "Hey, it's not a part of the mess over in Microsoft's camp!", much like how Nintendo started handling the SNES when Sega was flubbing around w/ the SegaCD, 32X, Neptune, etc. "Current price", though, is assuming the PS3 isn't dropped in price between now and Natal releases, and if that isn't happening until, say, mid '10, I doubt that'll be the case. Even so, it's probably best to only expect negligible price cuts; nothing drastic.
4: I don't think backwards compatability is *that* major an issue for the PS3, mainly b/c there are still SO many PS2's out there that are fully functional, and-to a lesser extent-PS1s' as well. The whole fanfare over BC started w/ the PS2, mainly as a way for Sony to try and do something that hadn't been done on consoles for a LONG time (not since the Atari 5200, if I remember correctly), and was also done in a way to give fans a way to supplement any droughts of new software they might've experienced shortly after the launch, by letting them play their older games on the new tech. There was also (and still *somewhat* true) perception that most gamers stuffed their older consoles when the newer ones came out; Sony still wanted to keep the PS1's library relevant, and so took the BC route. But ever since Sony took the initative to support their consoles past the normal 5-year lifecycle and not drop them like a dead body from a crime scene you accidentally picked up on the way home, this habit-atleast for their own consoles-hasn't been practiced as much. So, other than possible resolution increases, there isn't really that much a reason most gamers would want to play their PS1 or PS2 games on a PS3 when they still have perfectly working PS2s and PS1s sitting around; just a few chords to hook up here and there and there 'ya go, and I don't think people these days are so lazy as to not want to hook up a few simple chords ;)
All in all, it was a pretty interesting two-part article to read; I'm in no ways a business man, so a lot of my suggestions just come more from the book of common sense and (probable) logic, and taking in a good deal of foresight and hindsight. It also got me thinking of a few possibilities Sony could do on it's end, most of which I've mentioned in this post and the last one. In the end, my conclusion to things is that Sony get the right people (or keep the ones already on board that know what they're doing) and take the time to seriously evaluate their business strategies over the short and long-term, taking into account possible losses, and possible ways to make gains in other areas to subset or mitigate those losses. Whoever they get, they need to have a firm understanding that 1: Sony *is* an electronics manufacturer, not just a game/console developer, 2: The PlayStation brand is highly important to Sony's endgame, 3: There's a history in the console industry as far as pricepoints for consoles and how different consoles have fared w/ their pricepoints, 4: Even having said (3), it's internal company politics that eventually make or break the console's financial viability (I know it's not exactly fair, but the fuss between Sega of Japan, America and Europe during the Saturn is one of the most tragic and clear examples of this), 5: A console only remains as viable as long as it's manufacturer supports it, regardless of it's current state, as it's the manufacturer's support level that either gives confidence or warning flags to others looking to support that platform, 6: Don't over or under-read the market *too* often (nobody's perfect, but doing either too often and for too long often spells trouble), and 7: understands what the name "PlayStation" really means; the PlayStation as a brand began as a way of catering go gamers. The PSX's main focus was games, the PS2's main focus was games, and over these 10+ years both gamers and consumers have looked at it as a brand for gaming. Sony has to make sure that, no matter what, the PS3 is still focused on the games, first and foremost. They can still go for all the other stuff they've been trying to do, but they can't let it overshadow the expectations people expect out of a PlayStation product, the gaming factor. If they do, the meaning of that name is lost, and it's brand recognition out the door. They will (and have) piss off gamers, and confuse consumers as well. Hopefully someone at Sony is reading this comment, all the comments above it, and the article; it could help mightily in the long run.
Peace out.
Sony's value to cost ratio is clearly lower then the X360's. Boasting about technological advantages is not enough to do this. Sony needs to come up with way of either reducing its cost, or building its value in the eyes of its target market, not in the eyes of its engineers.
Because you read somewhere that Java speeds development?... Ok.
But, what does Java really do to speed development?..
The advantages of Java's design allow programmers to translate their ideas into code faster and with fewer errors. That's true... But, there is a trade off.
Java's strong typing forces developers to trust the virtual machine to handle things behind the scenes. That's safe; but it's not particularly fast.
Is Java even mature enough to be used as a viable development tool for games? I haven't seen any real evidence to support that. For their part, Sun and the Java community have made a geniune effort. But, I'm still not buying it.
Is this Sony Java going to be a bastard child of Java (see Google's Android)? Supporting standards is important. If a new dialect falls too far from the tree, it's really not Java anymore. That defeats the purpose; we're trying to avoid hours of scouring the Javadocs... How many proprietary classes will need to be added to get things going?
Are we encouraging porting mobile and web games to a home console?... I hope not.
Will it run on a virtual machine? How effecient will it be? Can I really trust the machine to manage itself--because Java locks me out?... How much potential performance will it cost to implement the VM?... I suppose you could abandon the idea of a VM and try to compile directly. You could even relax the rules and let developers have some real access to the hardware. But, it really isn't Java anymore at that point... is it?
And, who is going to develop all of this?... Sony?... They aren't offering developers the tools to take full advantage of their hardware right now. Now, you expect them to deliver a polished high performance Java VM that strikes the perfect balance between Sun standards and useful additions for game development?... Don't hold your breath waiting for that.
All of this leads me back to my original thoughts:
Java?... Seriously?... How?... And why?
"you cannot remove the BluRay from the PS3"
Well, obviously, you can.
I gave examples of games already being published online today at almost half the size of a BR disk.
None of the PSN games are available on BR, so Sony is *already* publishing non-BR games.
Of *course* BR prices will drop ... eventually. But if that "eventually" is 10 years from now, then that's useless; if it's "tomorrow", then Sony is going to be extremely rich. As I pointed out in the article, compare BR price drops for "the past 3 years since launch" with CD and DVD price drops since the PS1 and PS2 launches respectively.
"hard disks are very cheap"
If you think hard drives are cheap, I strongly suggest you go look at the prices for buying them in bulk, then come back here and quote them.
"3rd party devs are turned off by the PS3's architecture"
Please give some evidence for this. As a developer, I cry "bull****" on this claim. It is often quoted on gamer websites by people who don't work in the industry, but I've yet to meet anyone who actually develops console games whose studio is avoiding PS3 for this reason.
"I actually refuse to re-install WoW because I know it will take me at least half a day just to get all patched up."
Cool. Good for you. 10 million WoW subscribers disagree with you, and it would appear that not many agree with you. Sorry, that puts you in a small minority (although I personally feel your pain!); no console company really cares about 1 person compared to 10 million.
"blu-ray players the PS3 always was rated the highest"
I just saw a TV advert today for a consumer BR drive which records to BR. How long is the PS3 going to remain a preferred option against competition like that? As a console, they cannot arbitrarily change the BR functionality, but all their electronics competitors can.
"This is probably one of the most ridiculous articles I have read on the subject."
Excellent! In my opinion, as a developer, the vast majority of the articles I've seen so far were written by journalists who had *never developed anything in their lives*, and had almost no idea what they were talking about. I'm glad to at least come across as substantially different ;).
"The PS3 ... has sold marginally more units per a year"
No. Simply: you are wrong. Go check out VGChartz.com (or ... buy beers for a friendly developer who works on PS3 and 360, and once they're a bit drunk, ask them for the official figures). PS3 had a surge at launch, but since then has been steadily dropping behind the 360.
"question why Sony did not pitch the DVD functionality of the drive a bit more"
Good point. Interesting "what if" story there...
"It also got me thinking of a few possibilities Sony could do on it's end"
Excellent! Prodding people to think a bit more widely and imaginatively about the possibilities here was one of my aims in writing the articles.
"what does Java really do to speed development?"
What does C++ really do to speed development, compared to C? The answers are pretty similar, abstractly...
"Can I really trust the machine to manage itself--because Java locks me out?"
If you are a professional programmer, you put a lot more trust in a lot less visible systems every day you come to work. so ... yes.
"Flower, Everyday Shooter, the PixelJunk series, even quirky fun like GTI Club? "
Of the 30 or so people I know who've played more than one PixelJunk game, only 3 have liked anything other than PJMonsters - so I think we'll have to count that as a single game (even though I love PJRacers). Unfortunately, I've not played GTI Club. I'd add Super Stardust, and the Ducks game, but also note that SSD and Shooter are both extremely hardcore, and a lot of people give up on them very early.
But ... in 3 years of existence, we can name fewer than half a dozen good games. Isn't that a bit pathetic, given you get at least 6 brand-new games of equivalent popularity/quality every quarter on Kongregate? (you get that many in a month, if it's a good month).
A "minor flash portal for non-professional developers" far outdoing the "own-brand portal with a captive audience of 10million users, run by the manufacturer of the world's best-selling console" ? What's up with that?
FWIW, in the stinkers pile I'd put things like:
- FOR LACK OF GAMEPLAY: the 1942 remake (great game for one level, then it goes very far downhill very fast; as a professional developer, it looks to me like a game that got 3/4 through production, then ran out of budget: the level and gameplay design is great for one level, but quickly gets boring and has near-zero replayability).
- FOR BAD PRICING: Pain and all the ways it tries to sting you for large amounts of money for overly simplistic additions
- FOR BAD GAME DESIGN: the Desktop Tower Defence clone, with it's myriad misunderstandings of how DTD clones work, and how they don't work - and the terible UI
- FOR LACK OF CONTENT: the Pirates game, which looks and feels like a Playstation 1 game. Great ... but when I went to Casual Games Conferences 4 years ago I'd see 5-10 new games pitched every day that were as good as this, each from no-name studios looking to get signed for PC / web downloadable.