Thursday, March 16, 2006

IdaRose Sylvester: Sony delays PS3 launch to November

IDC analyst IdaRose Sylvester writes at her personal blog, Consumer Semiconductor Girl's Place on the Web, about Sony's not so "surprising" delay for the PS3. Sylvester correctly points out that:

Sony's absolutely inability to execute in the consumer space over the last five years is tragic. Their only great product and great launch success is the PSP, the gaming portable. It is a fantastic device, and I adore mine, although there's precious little gaming content for the 35 year old female analyst crowd. What I want is puzzle games, like Boggle.
As I commented on her blog, I agree the PSP is a fantastic device, and it is hopefully getting better given the upcoming upgrades recently announced. However, I also believe the precious little gaming content extends far beyond just the 35 year old female analyst target audience.

As I noted many times in the past, my 10 year old son rarely plays his PSP due to lack of content. He has four games (Wipeout Pure, Twisted Metal, SOCOM and Virtua Tennis), and only plays the last two on long car rides, and even then he'd rather play his sister's Nintendo DS. And the only reason he has the tennis game is because I picked it up for a CD-like price at Fry's. IMHO, Sony has been very slow in getting developers to offer compelling content for beyond the Grand Theft Auto crowd. With that said, the new Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror game for the PSP has so far gotten some very good reviews so I'll definitely have to check that out :-)

On the otherhand, my 8 year old daughter still wants to play her Nintendo DS everyday after 2+ months, and she has only 2 games - Nintendogs and Animal Crossing: Wild World. I think this is due to a combination of factors - compelling content from Nintendo and the fact that girls have been neglected for way too long by the video game industry. Most of the stuff out there for girls, whether for consoles, portables or PCs, is frankly crap, so it's probably no surprise that she finally has gotten the gaming bug...