Sony PS3 misses shipment targers, loses exclusive games

After the much hyped launch of the Sony PS3 and the following coming out from Sony Management

Sony Computer Entertainment America couldn’t be more pleased with the response we have seen from consumers since the launch of PlayStation 3 on Friday,” said corporate communications boss David Karraker. “This truly demonstrates the power of the PlayStation brand and further validates our belief that consumers see real value in an entertainment system that will define the next decade of digital entertainment.”

Translation: We love it when people are shooting each other for an overpriced piece of hype. It truly demonstrates the power of PR and short supplies.

Sony’s having a rough week. After shootings on launch day and a harsh review from the New York Times, Bloomberg is now calling Sony out as having completely missed its shipping targets. The analyst company says there may have been as few as 50% of aimed-for units available, and that the company may only get about 200,000 units to stores by the end of the year (something Sony flatly denies).

PS3 fans now also have to deal with the fact that Koei is cross-platforming two previously exclusive titles. Fatal Inertia and Bladestorm are now in development for the 360 as well, marking the latest in a string of titles that have slipped away from Sony. There is some consolation for the company to take away from this week, though. They did better than Microsoft last week in Japan, with around 81,000 PS3s, 19,000 PSPs, and 16,000 PS2s sold to a mere 4,000 Xbox 360s and … 4 Xboxes.

To be fair, it’s not a really question of “will” MGS and Final Fantasy sell – they’ll sell huge, in that if there were 2 million PS3s owned by gamers, each of those games could still sell a million units. It’s more a question of how huge the sales will be. Think of it this way: If Take 2/Rockstar had skipped the Xbox entirely in terms of GTA games, they still would have sold millions of units and made a ton of money. By releasing on the Xbox, they probably got at least a million more sales (virtually every used Xbox I see on Craig’s List comes with at least a copy of San Andreas) for the relatively small cost of porting the game.

The problem for Sony is that there seems to be a perception that they need their exclusives due to the Microsoft head start and the high price of their hardware. Because they didn’t lock up franchises like GTA or the “hot” new property, Assassin’s Creed (for example), Microsoft can make what is probably a cheaper deal to make them multiplatform and gamers won’t have those extra incentives to buy the PS3 (don’t get me wrong, there are other incentives – I’m only a “hater” in terms of price).

The bottom line is that PS2 ended up with many (many, many) exclusives over time thanks to their ridiculous market share advantage. For at least the next year, if not a couple years, they’re not going to have that advantage (certainly not in the US, probably not in Europe, maybe not in Japan depending on the Wii’s penetration), so PS3 exclusives will have to come either from the preference of a particular developer (MGS’s boss seems to be enamored of Sony, for example) or specific deals (like cheaper licensing fees) between the developer and Sony. Otherwise, it makes more sense to at least go multiplatform based purely on the hardware numbers.

As a gamer, I hate exclusives because they unnecessarily (given the relatively low cost to port games as opposed to starting from scratch) limit my options. They are necessary, though, for companies trying to differentiate themselves from the competition and sell more hardware.

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