Yeah, and the iPod Wasn’t a Threat to the Walkman, Either…
by John Paczkowski
Posted on March 5, 2009 at 3:42 PM PT
“I think the iPhone and iPod touch may emerge as really viable devices in the mobile games market.”
– Apple CEO Steve Jobs, November 2008
Sony doesn’t consider Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone a serious rival to its PlayStation Portable. This according to Sony Computer Entertainment’s Ray Maguire, who says a converged device like the iPhone will always be inferior to a dedicated gaming platform like the PSP. “The iPhone has the advantage of being a single device and is growing a reasonable installed base, but it doesn’t have the production power that a PSP has,” he told MCV. “As a specific games machine, the PSP is always going to win out.”
Not that Sony (SNE) is ignoring the fast-developing market for time-waster, or snacking, games that has arisen around the iPhone. Said Maguire, “We’re in a great position to take on the interest in these snacking games and produce them at better quality, lower prices, with lower cost of development–that’s a great business model.”
Comments
Ray Maguire has yet to grasp some significant aspects of the portable device market.
1. Fewer gizmos to carry are better. Especially for boys who refuse to carry gigantic purses/bags.
2. Moore’s Law. In 10 years the iPhone will have 1TByte of memory and its CPUs will be many and way faster than now.
3. Good enough. Sure, the dedicated device will be better, but if the iPhone is “good enough”, then many people will use it and not a PlayStation Portable. The best example of this is songs in MP4 format displacing much better quality CDs.
4. Apple’s game development costs are zero$. And, a few guys in a garage have a much lower overhead than Sony.
5. The online application store makes it way too easy to buy games. Can Sony create an online store? Sure, but they their device will be a mobile phone.
6. Nintendo.
I sure hope that Ray is planning to retire in a few years because he does not have a decade-long future with Sony.
Posted by Dave Barnes at March 5th, 2009 at 4:00 pmActually, future iPhones may be even BETTER devices than dedicated game machines. Why?
Because one can justify a higher price for better screens, processors, etc., when those costs can be divided across multiple applications.
Is someone likely to buy a dedicated $500 gameboy? No. But when that $500 also gives you a great internet browser, email/text device, phone, camera, mp3 player, video player, ebook reader…
Posted by Michael Long at March 5th, 2009 at 4:31 pmI’d love to see someone do a comparison of the development environments for Sony’s PSP games vs. the iPhone.
Let’s see:
1: Sony says they make the PS3’s development environment hard to use, intentionally. Do they do the same thing with the PSP?
2: Apple’s development environment is a familiar one to Mac developers. It’s essentially the same one for Macs. It goes way back to the late 1980s and has a reputation for the easiest, most powerful environment out there. And it’s not that hard to learn for anyone who has C experience. And it’s faster by an order of magnitude to produce software compared to the competition.
In light of that, it would be interesting to see a point-by-point comparison. Seems to me the iPhone is a major threat to Sony from a developer’s perspective.
Posted by Eric Welch at March 6th, 2009 at 7:21 am