A weekly summary of what is being talked about quite a bit in the gaming community.
PLAYSTATION 3 worldwide launch is a no-go: Only 400,000 units in North America and 100,000 units in Japan at launch; rest of the world sees delay until March 2007
Far and away the most discussed and debated topic this week comes from Sony’s announcement late Wednesday night (for me, on PDT) that their worldwide launch plans have altered significantly. If you don’t know what the details are you must have been living under a rock! I guess the Sony Computer Entertainment Europe press release can bring you up to speed:
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) today announced that it would revise the launch date of its PLAYSTATION® 3 computer entertainment system in the PAL territories of Europe, Russia, Middle East, Africa and Australasia from 17th November 2006, as previously announced to March 2007.
When other news outlets such as the International Herald Tribune, who attended the press conference in Tokyo, posted their stories, everyone was treated with another shocker with the number of consoles that are projected to be available at the U.S. (400,000) and Japan (100,000) launches this November.
This news resulted in bannings, thousand post threads, message board server crashes, intense debate and trolling and at least two feature articles and twice that many news stories on Gamesindustry.biz. Joystiq even compiled a list of less than complimentary quotes from all manner of online media sites from Europe about the delay. Seriously, who in Europe and Australia (among other places) would actually be happy about this news, so it’s not surprising.
On message boards, the thread on NeoGAF exploded to over 1,000 posts in less than less than tweleve hours while Sony’s English language community forums in Europe crashed. Supporters of all three console came out in full force although nobody could refute this was bad news. It seems most people think that the low number of units at launch in Japan pretty much handed Nintendo the market over there. Europe, well, nobody was still happy there, some felt resigned to waiting yet again and others will import — no surprise. On the U.S. PlayStation forums, some posters still did not believe the launch allocations for some time and it seems like they still might not based on their interpretation of the reporting from various sites. Despite still looking forward to launch, there’s still a seed of doubt in some poster’s minds on how well launch will still turn out.
Joystiq lets their most prolific and most junior contributor go
There’s no denying that Robert Summa has driven a lot of discussion this week. He drove several threads on NeoGAF, TeamXbox and no doubt several other places stemming from a posting on Joystiq that he had some key next-generation console news coming late on Thursday night. Everybody, including other journalists, who likely thought that did not receive the embargoed news, were whipped into a frenzy as Joystiq is no small site. Nobody had any clue what big news could be released on a Friday and by whom in the next-gen console space. When 12:01 a.m. hit, the news that IBM has been shipping the CPU to Nintendo for the Wii for some time now was less than well received. Blog readers and message board posters fell for the hype they had built for themselves in the hours between the tease and the announcement. When the dust settled, Codicer at posted on the Evil Avatar forum that the comments on the post made it seem like the readers were “almost personally wronged, like Joystiq owed them something.“
An hour later, Joystiq posted an apology which perhaps even referenced NeoGAF, at least the board regulars thought so. By next afternoon, Robert was no longer at Joystiq and found a new job at Destructoid, where he posted some biting remarks while he detailed his feelings for what happened. Both the move by Joystiq and Robert’s first post on Destructoid left no small impression on the community. Notably, Evil Avatar and CMP Media’s GameSetWatch blog all provided their impressions on what happened. There is no shortage of opinions on what happened as best demonstrated by the debate-filled NeoGAF thread on it — there were people on both sides of fence and some even on the fence. However, the disappointment for falling for the hype was clear, no matter who was really responsibile for letting it get out of control.
Take a look at what Sony’s “Entitlements” could really be in the future
On the topic of NeoGAF, a new feature article got posted on their forum portal page which I encourage you to read. Written by board member Panajev, “It’s All About the Entitlements” is an in-depth look at a patent Sony has applied for titled “Incentivizing software sharing through incentive points” (US Patent and Trademark Office). I’ll let the article speak for itself, but it does paint a somewhat interesting or scary image (depending on where you stand) on where a large console maker could go with word of mouth incentives and in tracking unique instances of game discs.
