Sony PlayStation 3 Press Misery Continues

Well where to start… I am a bit of an Xbox 360 fanatic admittedly, but still just weeks before the launch of the Sony PlayStation 3, there are certainly signs of weakness cropping up for the system:

In this morning’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun (a leading Japanese economic newspaper, also known as the Nikkei), it was reported that the number of PS3s for Japan had been dramatically slashed by one-fifth. This figure falls some 20,000 units shy of the originally promised 100,000, due to “component shortages. – Source: Gamespot

Just as well they did push back the European launch of the PS3, but with so few units being shipped it could cause problems for publishers.

In other news, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell has a pop at Sony as well but speaks favourably about the Xbox 360:

I think Sony shot themselves in the foot. there is a high probability [they] will fail. The price point is probably unsustainable. For years and years Sony has been a very difficult company to deal with from a developer standpoint. They could get away with their arrogance and capriciousness because they had an installed base. They have also historically had horrible software tools. You compare that to the Xbox 360 with really great authoring tools [and] additional revenue streams from Xbox live. a first party developer would be an idiot to develop for Sony first and not the 360. People don’t buy hardware, they buy software. – Source: Red Herring

Also over at GameSpot there is a review of Tony Hawk’s Project 8 on the PlayStation 3 that doesn’t fair well against the Xbox 360 version of the same game:

The PlayStation 3 version also installs a 264MB cache file onto the system’s hard drive when you first put the game in your system. Presumably, this is done to help speed up loading, but the load times don’t seem much better than the Xbox 360 version of the game. If you’re in a position where you have to choose between the two versions of the game, the Xbox 360 version offers a more complete package

Is this because Blu-ray isn’t fast enough to read data off the disk? Are the seek times too slow?

Continuing…

The game runs at a good speed, but unfortunately the frame rate just can’t keep up. The PlayStation 3 version of the game is more unstable and sinks to lower depths than its Xbox 360 counterpart.

Hopefully for Sony, things will improve very soon otherwise it could be a very difficult launch for them indeed! However much I dislike some of the comments made by various Sony representatives, there is still a strong need for competition to help push gaming innovation forward.

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