Sony’s Home has weathered its fair share of insults since launch. But putting arguments over the service’s usefulness aside for a moment, lets today look at some numbers.
You may have heard, the PlayStation 3 is expensive. Not “private jet” expensive, sure, but compared to the Wii and 360, it’s expensive. So people want it cheaper. Sony, however, are having none of it.
Welcome to the Family is a series of three letters that will run this week from the heads of Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo.
Say what you will about his outbursts, Sony’s Peter Dille is a man who wears his heart on his sleeve. Dude bleeds Sony. And as is often the case with passionate, outspoken types, as often as they’re wrong about something, they’re right about something else. Yesterday, Dille was so wrong about Final Fantasy XIII, but today (well, last week, it’s from the same E3 interview), speaking about the PS3′s global appeal, he’s bang on the money:
Sony’s Peter Dille has never been a man short on words. So when asked by MTV what he thought of Microsoft’s Final Fantasy XIII coup, he offered words:
Consumers responded to “GTA” on the PS3 just as they did on the 360. And it becomes a bit of a jump ball. But it didn’t rise the tide for them. And I think if you fast forward to when “Final Fantasy XIII” comes out I think you’re going to have millions of people who grew up playing “Final Fantasy” on the PlayStation playing it on a PlayStation 3. They spent a lot of money, I’m sure, to get “Final Fantasy” onto the 360 but at the end of the day it’s on our platform as well. Which is why we focus on, “Let’s look at what happens when you have “Metal Gear Solid” on your platform … when the NPD numbers come out … I think you’ll see the value of what a real exclusive title does and how it raised the bar for PS3 versus 360.
So…exclusives don’t really matter, yet exclusives like MGS4 bring “value” and “raise the bar” for the PS3? You seem confused, Peter.
Sony: ‘Final Fantasy XIII’ Going To XBox 360 Creates ‘Jump Ball’ [MTV]
First week sales figures provided by Microsoft, courtesy of unnamed retailers, put sales of Grand Theft Auto IV at 60% for the Xbox 360 version, 40% for the PlayStation 3 version. A win, undoubtedly, for Microsoft. N’Gai Croal of Level Up got his hands on some GameStop-only sales data, which puts the percentage more accurately at 64% on the Microsoft side, 36% on the Sony side.
Argh! Not accurate enough, for our tastes! Fortunately, we’ll be able to more obsessively split hairs on the matter later this week, when NPD data is revealed, but for now we have some expertly sculpted spin to enjoy!
Sony’s long-rumoured, rarely officially talked about video download service is coming to PlayStation 3s this summer, according to a report from the LA Times. Hints that Sony would be capitalising on the Sony Pictures and Sony Home Entertainment library have been tossed about by the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal with Peter Dille—SVP of marketing for SCEA—dropping semi-official word on the unnamed service on the official PlayStation.blog last week.
Sony’s Peter Dille has this morning hedged his bets and spoken not only briefly, but around the bush, on the inevitable movies & TV download service for the PS3. While not formally announcing such a program, or hinting at anything like a release timeframe, he does say more info is coming “very soon”. More interestingly, he also says:
