templeusox said:
No chance you see a new Sony console in 2012.
No, there's definitely a very good chance. The question is really only whether they launch in 2012 or push back a year.
OrigJake78 said:
Digital Distribution only.
As tempting as "Sony will make whatever decision will totally ruin their business" is after the 599-you-ess-dollars fiasco, I nonetheless maintain that there is no conceivable way this will happen.
Nfinit said:
I don't know if there would be a point to a PSP2 that was still using physical media. Any handheld going forward is going to find it's real competition in the iPod
No, the real competition of a future gaming handheld is other gaming handhelds (and, to a lesser degree, home consoles.) Nobody is really going to be sitting on the fence waffling between an iPod and a PSP2 when the former is unambiguously a far better media player and the latter unambiguously a far better gaming platform.
Manmademan said:
the only reason to sell games offline would be to appease retailers, which Sony may or may not have to do, depending on the pricepoint.
The reason to sell games offline is to provide an actually useful product that all potential customers can find use for, whether they prefer physical ownership or DD or a mix of both.
Nfinit said:
I don't get the "appeasing the retailers" argument. Apple does just fine selling iPods and accessories to retailers while virtually ignoring content sales outside of prepaid cards.
Did people just not pay attention to the whole debate over this with the Go? iPods are sold at big-box retailers who don't push product for you and at Apple-branded stores, and even then there's a retail cut so that the product is profitable for retailers. Game consoles are historically sold at zero margin and they require retail promotion from specialty retailers (GameStop and company) to really succeed; the Go is sold at a huge markup (to the detriment of consumers) to try to earn this and it still is getting marginalized at GS.
DD-only requires a completely different business model, which is a needle that Sony didn't successfully thread with the Go. A new platform would be a
better opportunity to do so, to be sure, but it'd still be in conflict with Sony's home console business (which unquestionably still requires strong retail support) and many factors (bandwidth penetration numbers, general DD success rates, etc.) point to it being far less potentially successful than a traditional-model system.
thuway said:
If at all possible, I wish they would make it a cell phone
This idea doesn't make any sense and I don't get why people are always suggesting it. People have
one cellphone. Making your library of software inaccessible to people because they already have a phone (or prefer the iPhone, or whatever) is a terrible business strategy.
Now, releasing a phone that is
compatible with a non-phone platform's games, that could possibly be viable, though I don't see the benefit to Sony in positioning the platform this way.