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PS3 launch in five days
By admin | November 6, 2006
It doesn’t really feel like the PS3 is coming out this Saturday. There hasn’t been a bombardment of TV ads until today; there wasn’t a demo unit in Akihabara when I went on Saturday (it turns out they all got installed on Sunday instead); and there’s still no price info about the games that we can download from the PlayStation store. But it’s still happening, apparently.
1111 - that’s what the TV ads are all about. I didn’t get it at first, but after wondering what the heck I just saw, it started to sink in. It’s typical slick Sony advertising, but it doesn’t really show a lot of the product on sale.
It’s such a paper launch, if ever there was one. It’s way worse than the PSP launch, especially in terms of games that will be available. To tell the truth, I’m starting to have major second thoughts about buying my own. At launch, the only game I’m interested in is Ridge Racer 7. There have been recent videos of this showing courses pulled straight out of Ridge Racer 6. I know there’s some new courses, and there’s a lot of good new music. The new customization aspect looks cool, and I’m sure team racing will be a blast, but it still feels cheap when they recycle such recent content. And that’s it — aside from Ridge Racer, no launch titles interest me. I would have got Motorstorm, perhaps, if they were putting online in the Japanese release, but it seems they are rushing it out to pad out the scant release schedule. So it’s effectively going to be a Ridge Racer machine for a couple of months at least. Not cool. If I can get decent money for selling it, I’m seriously considering that route.
But another thing that’s been bothering me — what does the general public think about the PS3? I’ve read retailer blogs where they say that customers are actually asking “What’s the difference between PS2 and PS3?”. Apart from Blu-ray, which typical consumers really don’t care much about, and HDTV, there isn’t a great deal. HD is one of those things that’s especially hard to notice unless you’re standing right in front of the display TVs too. No stores are going to have 50″ screens showing off true 1080p. Most just have 720p 21″ displays, which don’t do the graphics justice, of course. And that’s a big hurdle that Sony will have ahead of them. In fact, I’m not even sure if consumers actually want HDTVs. Certainly, there is a lot of force to buy new digital sets, thanks to the phasing out of analogue broadcasts, and nearly every digital set you see in stores is, you guessed it, HD. A very useful coincidence for making an argument about HD’s penetration. But does it mean anything about consumer desire for HD content?
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