Hey so does anyone on cohost have stories about Sony shooting themselves in the foot with their own bumfuckery in regards to their products?
Finding it funny and I kinda want to write something on my website talking about how often their own hubris stopped them lmao
Only ones I know absolutely are that of what happened with the PS3 but I've been seeing stuff about how their own dumbasses killed off Betamax, SACD, and Vita so
Yaknow
Sony has been sending out their products to die since the start. That's their style. They have always been a tech company, before they were messing with games. And as a tech company, their goal is to "try" to get a mainstream audience to latch on to a new product branch they can sell. That's why they just throw stuff at the wall and when 9 out of 10 don't work out, they'll just move on to the next. You could argue that the instant drop in support for PSP or Vita even fall in that description. Or anyone who bought a PSVR, looking at a follow-up that is barely even talked about anymore. Xperia? I barely knew ya. My heart goes out to anyone who is looking to buy one of those Playstation Portal tablets. I hope you know exactly what you're getting.
So, I figured I'd highlight my favorite flunkies from my time with Sony's little experiments:
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Sony Playstation 3D TV: There was a one year period where Sony was shilling this TV with glasses hard at trade shows and, funny enough, it was the only booth that never had a queue. One of the only times I had to decline an offer, since I'm stereoblind. It was evident from the start that no one cares enough about 3D tech for games (and some blu-ray, I think?) to build a setup around it. It vanished like a year after that. I've literally never seen it mentioned again. What a time.
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PS Vita TV: What a hilarious thing. Instantly rebranded as Playstation TV for Western audiences, for a good reason, this thing landed like a wet fart. What should've been a Super Game Boy equivalent of playing portable games on a TV had to come with a compatibility list. And tons of Vita games were not compatible! That's the entire reason it exists! I still don't know what they were thinking, but it quickly dropped to €25 fire sale prices and died.
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PSP Go: I don't hate this tiny portable as much as everyone. In theory, having a more sleek digital version was neat. It's just that anyone who knows Sony knew that this would get discontinued, since it was the end of the PSP life cycle. Then you just have a really fancy brick. Not to mention that digital pricing of games is run by Sony, not retailers. I have no idea how you'd still be able to put games on it today, considering the PSP store no longer exists.
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Net Yaroze: My favorite, by far. It's not that Net Yaroze sucks. In fact, it's one of the coolest pieces of tech that the game industry produced, ever! It's just that launching the equivalent of garage dev hardware for Playstation 1 to a mainstream audience, for over twice the price, was an insane thing to do in 1997! I wanted one so bad, but you had to be rich rich and even then you'd still have to learn game dev! It only sold like 1000-ish units here. You can find a list of games created with this titan online somewhere. Way ahead of the curve.
I'm sure someone else has mentioned this already, but the Vita has to be the biggest case of Sony shooting themselves in the foot in recent memory. Without a doubt, probably the best handheld system ever made.
- compact size like the vita
- added analog sticks without taking from the compact design.
- front and back side touchscreens.
- bluetooth and remote play capability.
*backwards compatibility with PSP games also
Sony could've printed money for the rest of their days with the Vita, and the fumbled the bag horrendously. biggest issue for me was that a big seeling point was the wide library of digitial titles you could buy. The Vita had like maybe a gig or two of storage without a card. and buying one was WAY more expensive than it shoulda been. I got my Vita near the middle/end of its supported run, and getting a 32 gig card cost more than buying a game itself.
sony was insistent on using proprietary memory cards instead of making it compatible with basic SD cards like most other games with storage media of the time. fucking ridiculous. They got greedy and wanted to gouge people on memory cards and tanked a really good system for that.
There's probably other ways they mishandled it, but that one always sticks out for me
