I am a very satisfied customer of Sony’s Playstation 3. I find it to be an enormously reliable and high-quality example of consumer electronics. The fit and finish, build quality and engineering are all top-notch. It does exactly what it claims to do and does it very well.
By comparison, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 has been plagued by a 30% failure rate (and even that number doesn’t seem right, everyone I know has had to have theirs replaced because of the dreaded Red Ring of Death). This has forced Microsoft to increase the warranty to 3 years.
Why then, is the PS3 languishing at the absolute bottom of the list in terms of console sales this holiday season?
As the Ars article shows, The Nintendo Wii is destroying everything as it rips up the holiday landscape with accessible games and the promise of fitness in front of a TV. However, I consider them to be cheating. They couldn’t compete in terms of pure horsepower so they just went and found a new market. They don’t address my needs, which is to say, the needs of a veteran gamer. What’s galling is the gap between the PS3 and the Xbox 360.
Everyone says the gap is because of the spectacular number of third-party titles on the Xbox 360. This is undoubtedly a big factor but I think the real reason is a little deeper than that. I think the big problem is that Sony is a hardware company and Microsoft is a software company. This handily explains why the Xbox 360 hardware sucks, but more importantly, it also explains why Microsoft is trouncing Sony when it comes to supporting third-party games. Microsoft understands the way software development works, they knows how to build the tools to support developers and, above all, they understand the software distribution business.
Nothing demonstrates this gap in software expertise more clearly than Playstation Home which is now in open beta on the PS3. When Microsoft needed to revamp the Xbox 360 Dashboard they unveiled the New Xbox Experience. The new Dash iterated on the interface, made things clearer, reorganized menus, tightly integrated with Xbox Live and added big features like Netflix support and install to hard drive. It is generally regarded as a major step up for the platform. Sony’s retort is Home.
At first, Home didn’t let me in claiming that “You are not old enough to play home”. Unless Home is being billed as the killer octogenarian app I didn’t see how this could be the case. Turns out my profile is probably screwed up because it is a sub-account, logging in on another let me in. After customizing your appearance and clothing from the extremely limited options, you are placed in a stark apartment with a great view. If you want to leave your apartment you have to download additional content of the central plaza. A 22 megabyte download. I have decent broadband but it still took a few minutes during which time you are essentially trapped in this apartment with nothing to do. Score 1 for a shitty experience. I found myself trying out the various dance emotes. Why they didn’t just download the central plaza with the initial content is beyond me. Why would you willfully force me to download content within the first 5 minutes of playing the bloody thing?
Anyway, the central plaza finally loaded up and I walked out into a sea of transparent people (the textures take a while to download, twenty minutes in I still saw transparent people). They all seemed to be bored stiff. Typing on the dualshock is not quite the ideal chatting experience so conversing with another person is a really tedious process. You can apparently use a headset and just say what you want (which some people took to mean screaming “Fuck you!” over and over again). Clearly, some kind of censorship will be necessary. So, what can you do within the game world?
- You can play an arcade mini game as long as nobody else is playing it. So if someone wants to hog the machine you’re fresh out of luck. Why they would introduce real-world annoyances in a virtual world is beyond me.
- You can go into a theatre and watch a trailer. Eventually this will be replaced by full-length movies, but I shudder to think how annoying it’s going to be to watch a movie with idiots dancing in front of the screen and yelling obscenities.
- You can buy, and by buy I mean spend your standard Earth currency, on virtual clothes for your avatar. Seriously. That’s why the initial clothing options are limited.
- That’s about it.
The end result is a 3D world wrapped around some very lackluster arcade games and a movie trailer screening service. I see nothing here that couldn’t have been handled with a couple of additional menu options. Judging by the aimless wandering and disco dancing of everyone playing, nobody has any idea what to do with this thing. I doubt Sony does either.
Tycho pretty much sums it up when he says:
“This is the terrible secret that roils beneath their false universe: it is nothing more than a cumbersome menu, a rampart over which you must hoist yourself to accomplish the most basic tasks.”
What really annoys me is resources that could have been spent on much needed improvements to the XMB have instead been diverted to this insane marketing ploy.
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