Sony PR Goes From Bad to Worse
I've already outlined why Sony's PS3 is, in all likelihood, going to fail in the long term. The repost over at GearLive is getting hammered with fanboy blustering on both sides of the fence. If there was ever a company that could use a dose of positive PR, Sony is it. Instead, two more stories caught fire over the holiday weekend.
The first was the discovery that the BluRay drive in the PS3 is slower at reading data than the DVD drive in the Xbox 360. Chalk it up to DVD being a more mature technology, but I could see developers being concerned about this. Storage space is a great thing, don't get me wrong, but you need to get the data out of your slowest medium (disc) and into a faster medium (hard drive, active memory) so that you can work with it, and you need to do this as fast as possible. The DVD drive in the Xbox 360 is almost twice as fast at loading data, and that's not an insignificant spec. That's something every gamer will be able to feel.
That's not to say that there couldn't be a reason behind not going with a faster drive. Cost is certainly a concern, and I'm sure that the noise complaints people have made in regards to the Xbox 360 are a component as well. Never the less, it's hard to hear the drive over all the fun you're having, and when you're paying $599 for a console, what's another $50-100 for a faster drive?
Next up is pretty much par for the course ... Sony is shipping that $599 console without an HDMI cable. Not all that big of a deal, considering that high-end cables are usually not included, but when you consider that high price point as well as Sony using HDMI as a differentiating feature, suddenly, it feels like you're getting screwed with your pants on. Microsoft set the bar very high when they launched the $399 Xbox 360, and included a Component video cable, headset, and other accessories.
Putting on my business guy hat for a moment, why is Sony allowing this to continue. I know that their PR department isn't this clueless or incompetent, but there has been no real counter-response that they can use to deflect attention from all the bad press. One of the most impressive new IP's (intellectual property, basically new game franchises) is Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed, and yet the announcement that the game is also coming to Xbox 360 is met with silence from Sony. In fact, Sony has not tried to take attention away from any of the high-profile defections.
It's one thing to keep yor mouth shut and allow the breeze to blow your way when the news is positive, but sitting back and ignoring the onslaught of negative stories is doing nothing to help the perception of Sony as an arrogant company, nor is it pacifying the gamers still on the fence about their next-gen gaming purchase.
Sony really needs to pull out the big guns. Waiting isn't going to do much good with announcements coming in advance of the Tokyo Game Show. Every game company is sitting on secrets ... well, Sony's at a point now where secrets aren't doing it a bit of good. It's time for them to turn the press to their favor and get people talking positively about Sony and the PS3 again.
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