14 DAY TRIAL // Quite a strange prediction coming from Nintendo of America's marketing chief, George Harrison, who believes that the PS3's slow start should ensure that more advanced consoles won't leave a good impression either, over the next 5 years, in an interview with Wired.
"There's a price point and there's the quality that's holding the PlayStation 3 back. They're selling so many PlayStation 2s because people are saying, "You know what? The graphics are pretty good, the price is good, and the library is good." So we have a great expectation that this lifecycle's actually going to last more than five years," said Harrison, as Nextgeneration reports.
He continued: "We also have a belief that we can be, of this lifecycle, 40-45% of the hardware that's being sold...we could get over 50%. And a lot of that depends on what our competitors do. If they only focus on the Grand Theft Autos and the Halos and things of that nature, they're focusing on a very tiny part of the market. The overall market is growing so dramatically that they're going to miss out on the opportunities that we're seeing in the expanded audience."
Yes, but what happens when the Wii becomes just about as obsolete as the SNES? It most likely won't have the same fate as the PS2, as it is a totally different console and if Harrison is trying to tell us that motion sensitivity is the next generation trend, then more classical gamers may be in for a rough five years, or more.
But Harrison thinks that Sony is copying Nintendo on a regular basis, starting with the SIXAXIS:
"So far, they haven't spent a lot of time focused on us. Now that we're having some success, they probably will. We can already see some of the things that they've tried. For last year's E3, at the last minute, Sony rushed out their Sixaxis controller as an effort to respond to the Wii remote. We saw Microsoft roll out Viva Pi?ata as their killer app for the Pok?mon set. And neither of those worked really well. Part of it is, I think it's not in their DNA. They're really good at reaching a certain customer, and have a real difficulty understanding how we succeed with the customers that we have."
I have to say, if there's one thing that the man doesn't lack, it's confidence. I don't mean to burst anyone's bubble here, but Sony's hardware (and not only consoles) sells good even 10 years after the respective machine has launched. But yes, this console war is over for Sony.