Topic: Worried About Sony?

Baseless "Hate" for systems occurs everywhere for each system. There are probably as many Nintendo Fans who hate the Vita as there are Sony fans who hate the 3DS.

It makes no sense and they're stupid.

@TysonofTime I don't think "amounts" really matter - the ones who bark the loudest are usually the ones who's company is struggling in the market.

Back on subject - I think Sony is in a precarious position at the moment though. I fully expect the PS4 to cost $399 - 449, but even at that cost (which will likely match Microsoft's 720) I think they are going to have a tough time getting the ball rolling. The reason that Apple continues to move high volumes of iPads, is because an iPad not only plays games, but it's numerous other functions ensure that it's worth its asking price: basic CPU functions (especially when paired with a keyboard), streaming service, Apple TV, lightning fast social media apps, etc. - PS4 might have these features, but it won't be something that can fit in your hand.

I'm afraid that the next generation is going to be tough for the Big Three - they'll all need our support.

What software?

@Neoproteus I've been seeing a lot of this "[insert game,brand or console] should just cease to exist," here at Nintendo Life. Firstly, if you actually care about the gaming industry - you would never utter/type these words at all. Competition is what drives not only the gaming industry, but every single industry around the globe.

I never said I wished Sony would cease to exist. I would love to see them succeed.

Secondly, do you realise that the Wii U isn't doing to hot right now? Do you realise that it's one of the most 'confusing' dedicated home consoles to land on the market? Do you realise that one of Nintendo's very own Wii U commercials was banned in the UK because it was ruled to be falsely advertising that it could play games independent from a television (not all Wii U titles utilise this feature)? Do you realise that consumers still think that the Wii U is an add-on for the Wii? Should Nintendo just throw in the towel and give up? Heck no!

Except that Nintendo fans know good games are coming. Nintendo consoles always have a notoriously slow start, and then as they start putting out more first party games more people start buying the system. There's no issue with how promising the Wii U is. Everyone I talk to says the same thing about it: 'It's a bit too expensive and I'd rather wait until more games come out, but eventually I WILL get one.' -which is exactly my own sentiment as well, explaining why I don't yet own a WiiU.

Lastly and I say this as a person piece of advice - grow up.

Funny how I would give the same advice to Sony.

Really now? Where's your proof?

and overall I think the PS3 was a bit of a disappointment compared to the PS2.

It was to you. In reality, it was just as successful as Microsoft's Xbox 360. If not more.

I was comparing it to the PS2, not the 360.

I still think the Vita is dead and should just stop production though...

The 3DS should have within its first year, too.

No, the 3DS had at least a couple of compelling titles at launch, like Ocarina of Time 3D. It also had a lot of good games coming. There's no real evidence of this with the Vita. It's just doing the same thing the PSP did. Releasing watered down versions of PS3 franchises.

The PSP would be a better comparison to the Vita. You got me on reputation though. I have to say if they started releasing PS2 ports on the Vita even I'd get one. My original opinion of this was that Sony does not have the resources to support this with quality first party content, and third parties don't have a reason to be interested. I still stand by that.

Also, you're discounting multiplatforms. Never do that. If the PS3 can put out reliably capable, even at times superior versions of games, that definitely counts in its favor.

They are more often inferior. Look at Skyrim, Bayonetta, DMC. All had stuttering issues on the PS3 where there were none on the 360. Skyrim even had worse problems with freezing and crashing that only occurred on the PS3 version. If we're measuring a consoles worth against competitors, exclusives are really the only way to discuss it because otherwise the competition has the same thing.

You all seem to have the idea that I hate Sony and want to see them die. That's not the case. I love Sony. I just miss the good ole days of the PS2, when third parties more often made exclusives and they still had the support of Square Enix in their prime. I can see that the first party development is growing within Sony, which means that the PS4 will have the games it needs to succeed. This is nothing but good news, as f they put out an awesome new system with awesome games, there's no downside for me at all. The PS3, PSP, and PSVita are still disappointments for lack of the kind of games that I like, and I am a little bitter after buying them anyway and feeling like I wasted my money somehow.

Let me clarify why the PS3, PSP, and PSVita are disappointments for me, because it's not sales numbers or anything abstract like that. I'm a fan of Jak and Daxter, Legend of Dragoon, Final Fantasy, Sly Cooper, Kingdom Hearts, and Ratchet and Clank. Only two of these franchises were represented on any modern Sony console, and Sly Cooper isn't even out yet. Instead we got Heroes on the Move, Final Fantasy went multiplatform, and Jak and Daxter got watered down for the PSP.

On the plus side Heavy Rain was a pleasant surprise, as was 3D Dot Game Heroes and Final Fantasy Dissidia and Birth by Sleep. There just wasn't a whole lot of things I personally like on these consoles.

Because people have this preconceived notion that only Nintendo is allowed to be in the handheld market. They have been ruling over it for so long that gamers can't conceive an actual competitor that's a threat to Nintendo in the handheld market.

Sony is that threat. Now granted the DS and 3DS are selling a lot more than the PSP and Vita, but the fact remains that they are selling well enough to keep Nintendo on their toes. For the first time in a long while, you have a gaming handheld that didn't have the name of Nintendo on it. The PSP had a slow start, but it finally built enough steam to give the DS a good battle. I bet the same thing will happen to the Vita.

The Vita is going to stick around and eventually will pick up the third party support that the PSP did in it's latter years. There is so much potential in the Vita that it's almost scary. The days where Nintendo was the only company in the handheld market are permanently over and don't even get me started on iOS.

The ''hate'' for the Vita is more than likely biased hate from Nintendo fanboys. They think that a handheld is automatically bad because Nintendo didn't produced it, and I despise that way of thinking. It's sad, immature, and pointless. There are good games on every console and handheld, but unfortunately many people believe otherwise.

Both the 3DS and Vita have amazing games, and you have to accept that unless you want to make the same mistake many kids made during the 16 bit wars.

@knux same mistake as 16-bit wars? You mean how Nintendo lost for having low tech and Sega winning for having better tech?

...And you completely missed the point, but that doesn't surprise me.

I'll put it in a lot simpler terms. Back in the early 1990s, both the SNES and Genesis were churning out an amazing library of games. But fanboys believed that one console was holy and the other was some kind of abomination that needed to perish. They used a million excuses from which console's graphics were better to which exclusive games were better. The point of the matter is that saying which one's the better console is next to impossible. The reason being is because the SNES and Genesis are too vastly different to be compared, just like the DS and PSP, and just like the 3DS and Vita.

The bottom line is that it's pointless to say whether the 3DS or Vita are better because comparing them is impossible. Both are very different handhelds that will eventually have vastly different libraries of games. I know this because I own a SNES and Genesis when i was a kid, and I own a DS and PSP. The right thing a gamer can do is to own both the 3DS and Vita while enjoying the games instead of debating on which handheld is better. That, or play the handheld you do have and stop bashing the other handheld when you have likely never owned a 3DS or Vita. Fanboyism is a waste of time to be honest, but gamers still do it today.

I don't necessarily disagree with the rest of what you said in regards to my post, but I just want to clarify this bit:

I knew those very examples would come up. Skyrim? It's a Bethesda game. Their engines are notoriously unoptimized, and even the PC versions of their games tend to come out with game-breaking glitches, and last I checked, Skyrim was no different. That's more up to them rushing their games out the door than anything else.

Bayonetta was the first Next-gen game made by a new studio, so of course they'd have some issues. Personally, I feel the problems there are overrated. It's still a perfectly playable game, and I don't see how it's that big of an issue. Their next game, Vanquished, ran fine on the PS3. Obviously it was just their lack of experience that was the problem, since Vanquished was no less fast and frenetic than Bayonetta.

DmC, if that's the one you're talking about, is using the Unreal engine, which for some reason takes more work to fully optimize on the PS3. DmC was a much better effort than Enslaved, and again, I don't think the slowdown issues are that big of a problem. The 360 demo I played actually ran into slowdown at one point, so it's not like the 360 version is perfect either.

I know there are other examples, but they all come down to optimization issues that most developers have gotten past for the past couple of years. And there are games that have superior PS3 versions, such as Bioshock, Red Alert 3 (compared to the 360 version at least), and most Multiplatform JRPGs.

I do wish Birth By Sleep was on PSN, I'd totally buy it on my Vita D:

I want it on the PS3. This was one of three games I really enjoyed on the PSP, but since I no longer have a PSP, I can't really go back and play it through the rest of the way. Since they announced Kingdom Hearts 1.5, I'm hopeful that they'll make a 2.5 with KH2, Birth By Sleep, Dream Drop Distance, and the cutscenes from 358/2 Days and Re:Coded.

I'd also like to see a Final Fantasy Dissidia game made for the PS3, and I'm eagerly awaiting Final Fantasy X HD.

@Neoproteus Hmm... let's see: Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack, Dokuro, Velocity, Persona 4 Golden Edition, Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Wipeout 2048 (with DLC installed), Dynasty Warriors NEXT, Jet Set Radio, Little Big Planet Vita (the best in the series in my opinion), Mortal Kombat, MotorStorm RC, Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath HD, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, Rayman Origins and Sound Shapes. That's not to mention the PSP games that run/play better than ever on the PS Vita as well, or the PlayStation Mobile titles (e.g. Super Crate Box, Lemmings, Aqua Kitty, etc.) that offer up a good time on the cheap either.

But, what do I know? Who am I to actually know anything about what makes games good or not?

(I honestly don't even know why I cared to even type all of that out... must be getting sick or something.)

So really your only criticism with the PlayStation consoles is that they don't make games for Neoproteus?

Next time I speak to Sony I'll be sure to let them know that they're going to fail and go bankrupt unless they get on the phone with you

Really now? Where's your proof?

Metacritic.

I was comparing it to the PS2, not the 360.

Of course, but no home console will probably ever touch the PlayStaion 2's behemoth success. But like the PlayStaion 2, the PlayStation 3 is a success.

No, the 3DS had at least a couple of compelling titles at launch, like Ocarina of Time 3D. It also had a lot of good games coming. There's no real evidence of this with the Vita.

One game that was released three months after the system's launch, isn't necessarily a great thing. Let alone the fact it was a remake of an N64 game.

The Vita has many great titles in its library already. It'll pick up in time, trust me.

I think the Vita will sell better, but I'll be surprised if it does better than the PSP. Not nearly enough support, when the 3DS has way more. Not to mention phones are really popular, meaning the casual market isn't going to buy the Vita (though this is affecting the 3DS more). I think it will do better than now though. It doesn't need a price drop: they just need to bundle more with it, and lower the stupid memory card prices.

The casual market never bought the PSP either.

If the Vita takes off there's no reason to expect it won't perform as well as the PSP as, unlike the DS family, Sony's handhelds occupy a very different market to phones.

Actually, many casual gamers did buy PSPs. For hardcore games. I call them "casual hardcore gamers". What I mean by that is people who bought the system for a select few games like GTA, God of War or Burnout, and then call it a day. These people were what led to many sales numbers for the system in the west during its early years (which it did have) (and, quite frankly, its poor software attatch rate. Not many PSP owners bought lots of games, it's sad to say). Then, the PSP became pretty much irrelevant in the west, the market that carried it, as iOS and the like started to really take a foothold in delivering excellent gaming experiences around 2009-2011 (which is kind of interesting because this was around the time when the system really started to pick up in Japan. Go figure). Now, those people who bought PSPs before to play certain hardcore games can now just play them on their phones. Are the controls perfect? No, but they're servicable, and most people aren't really going to care that much when you can buy GTA III or Max Payne for $5 and have them available in a format that is easily accessible.

The dedicated portable-gaming market is much smaller than it used to be.

Can I use that same term for Nintendo fans who buy Mario and Zelda/Pokemon games and nothing else?

I honestly don't know if one can call him or herself a fan of any publisher if they only played a small number of their properties. It's like saying a person is a Capcom fan if they only play Resident Evil and Street Fighter games. Yeah, those are their two most popular franchises (in the west), but when Capcom has a bunch of franchises like Okami, Mega Man, Dragon's Dogma and Monster Hunter, it'd be hard for me to say that person is a fan.

Still, I suppose it fits. They only play a few games, but they want their games to be engrossing. There's plenty of people like that out there. It's hard for me to call someone a through-and-through hardcore gamer if he or she plays so few games.

Actually, what crippled software sales (and thus attach rate) for the PSP was hacking and piracy, which was about as breathtakingly bad as it is for Android - and that in turn is why developers stopped bothering with it.

Because of Monster Hunter, the console took off in Japan, and later versions of the hardware were far more hack-proof (in fact I think to this day the PSPGo has beaten the hackers). The fact that the PSN was all but required on later versions of PSP hardware helped.

As such the attach rate steadily improved with the PSP. Too late to attract western developers back (plus, Monster Hunter doesn't sell consoles in the west), but the Japanese dev support of the PSP remains spectacular to this day.

He was just stating why he doesn't like those consoles, no need to be a jerk about it..