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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

So I actually don't think Betamax was as much of a fuck up from a consumer perspective as a lot of this stuff. Like they made Beta VCRs for over a decade, and you could buy new films on Beta through at least the first Mission Impossible, so it's clear they gave it a real shot. But there's a couple things that killed it:

1. When Betamax launched in 1976, it could hold an hour per tape. That's it. Sony sometimes has a thing where they're like "the way we did it is the way we do it, fuck you if you want something different." So when RCA was looking into licensing the technology and were told that no, Sony would neither increase cartridge size for more tape nor make a VCR that could use a lower tape speed to sacrifice quality for more content on a tape, they instead went to JVC, who reluctantly added a slower mode that was long enough to fit a whole football game on one tape to their new VHS format.

2. Sony made high quality, but expensive equipment, and they had expensive licensing fees that few were willing to pay, while VHS was much more open, so for pretty much the whole life of the format, it was cheaper to buy a VHS player than a Beta one.

And like if it were 1977, your main use was to record stuff off of TV, and you had the option of an expensive machine that could record one hour on expensive tapes and another that was significantly cheaper and could record 4 hours on similarly priced tapes, which would you pick? Would it even be a contest? Sony tried to compete by offering new lower speeds and thinner tape stock for longer play times, but they were unwilling to change to larger cartridges, as that would break backward compatibility, so they were never able to quite catch up to the recording times of VHS, which also saw new speeds and the same thinner tape stocks.

A couple other notes on Beta vs. VHS:

-That whole story about Sony not allowing porn on the format is complete BS. Early on, people didn't buy VCRs for pre-recorded content, they bought them to record stuff off of TV. Pre-recorded content was really expensive at the time, and it wasn't until the rise of video rental shops, which happened after VHS was already well in the lead, that that was a meaningful factor for VCR purchase for almost anyone. In addition, Sony had no control over what people recorded on a tape. They had a patent on the physical tapes, but even if they wanted to, there was no legal or even practical way to stop someone from buying a blank tape, putting whatever the fuck they wanted on it, and selling it to someone else.

-You might have heard that Betamax was higher quality than VHS. That only applies to that original Beta I speed, back when you could only have an hour on a tape, and it was barely a difference (250 TVL* vs 240). Within a few years, Betamax VCRs didn't even include that as a playback or recording option anymore. The vast, vast, vast majority of Betamax content was recorded on the slower speeds, and if you had a double blind test to tell the difference between a pre-recorded film on Betamax and the same film on contemporary VHS, I'd be shocked if people could identify which was which better than chance.

*It's awkward to talk about sharpness on analogue video, since there's no pixel count to compare, so they came up with the rather odd measure of "television lines." These are not scanlines but instead hypothetical vertical black and white lines. Basically, it's how many vertical black and while lines you could fit together before you got an indistinct grey blob. And because they wanted it to apply to different aspect ratios, you measure a horizontal area equal to the screen's height. Analogue is weird and complicated.