What will happen to PlayStation?

So unless you’re such a SONY fanboy that it has made you blind, you’ve probably noticed the numerous face-palm-inducing decisions the electronics giant has made over the past few years. Everything from last year’s infamous hacking PR nightmare, to the fact that it has to take a loss on every TV unit it ships, to nearly everything about the PlayStation move. This is made even worse by the fact that the company hasn’t made any profit in the last four years, and expects to lose $6.4 Billion this year. Anyone concerned or even vaguely interested in the company’s future should read an article from the New York Times, written by one Hiroko Tabuchi. It is an extremely good way to gain clarity on the company’s current situation and where it plans to head.

Now after reading that paragraph you’d be forgiven for thinking that I don’t particularly favour SONY or PlayStation, thinking that I was enjoying warning you all of your beloved companies demise. However you’d be wrong. I love my PS3, hell I even bought a PS Vita.

Seeing a company responsible for some of my best childhood memories tailspin into the ground is terrifying. I want to play the PlayStation 7. I want to show my inexistent children how amazing Crash Team Racing was. I want to be playing the current iteration of PlayStation All-stars Battle Royal or LittleBigPlanet or Grand Turismo in 2022. If the PlayStation name is nothing but a memory in ten years I am going to be more than upset.

What would happen to all of my trophies? They would more than likely disappear. All of the digital games and DLC I have downloaded will also be gone, apart from on the system I’ve already downloaded them on.  And sure I could still plug that PlayStation in and play my games on it, but what happens when the PlayStation network goes down for good? Will all of my wasted time be, well, wasted? What happens when developers no longer support the dead system? What happens when the PlayStation name, the thing that we all rally to and love (sometimes a bit too much) is nothing but a whisper on the wind? What happens when people place PlayStation and Sega in the same light? What will we do? Where will the alternative be? XBOX? That system we love to hate? What will SONY do?

Kaz Hirai was extremely important in the development of the PlatStation 3

I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does except for SONY (hopefully). Do we keep buying PlayStation products? We kinda have to, after all the only way for SONY to continue as a company is for it to actually turn a profit. But we can take heart in that apparently PlayStation is one of the few parts of SONY that is actually making money. It is also one of the three areas that the company will be focussing on in the future, including mobile devices and cameras, under the new leadership of Kazuo Hirai.

But even the PlayStation brand has its problems, just look at the newest “Handheld Revolution”. The PlayStation Vita was supposed to be amazing, and as someone who owns one I can tell you it is. But due to typical SONY bone-headedness in the form of overly expensive proprietary memory cards, a HORRIBLE advertising campaign and a small number of compelling games on the system, it has become somewhat of a let-down. Nintendo (a company commonly looked at as a Dinosaur, kicking and screaming its way to irrelevance) is trouncing the Vita with its 3DS, selling nearly six times as many units last week than SONYs newest handheld. Even the older device, the PSP, is selling more than the VITA, nearly twice as much (21,000 to the Vitas 12,000) due to SONYs lack of initiative in telling third party developers to stop making games for it.

$99 for this!?

 Now assume the worst comes to worst, let’s say SONY dies horribly. I don’t pretend to be an expert on how huge multi-national corporations dissolve their assets. But I would hope that somehow PlayStation could be salvaged, spinning it out into its own standalone company. I’m not saying this is going to happen, it’s only a hope really. But PlayStation is large enough to hold its own against the competition, it’s arguably the largest video game publisher/developer/hardware and software manufacturer. For example just look at the amount of first party software developers the company owns or holds deals with, that kind of support would be a hugely important to PlayStation if it had to stand by itself. That could be what kept it afloat in an industry where all of the major players don’t make just games consoles, just look at Apple and Microsoft.

Again though, the loss of the father company would be felt, more than likely in the loss of engineers. Just look at the Vita, a technical “masterpiece”. Do you think that it was a fruit of just PlayStations effort? That would be naïve to assume. A multi-touch OLED screen? There would have almost definitely been engineers from SONY wireless (then SONY- ERRICSON) helping put the thing together, just like there would almost definitely have been engineers from SONY VAIO helping with the PS3 and this new project, codenamed “Orbis”. My point is that while SONY is a company famous for its infighting and engineers to proud to share information with their colleagues, there is no way that PlayStation is the only part of the company developing its hardware. Losing the support of the parent company would have huge ramifications for PlayStation in the loss of expertise and resources it would have available.

So this all begs the question: what will be of PlayStation in the near future? Obviously it’s not going away overnight and will be around for at least a few more years, but then what? What will we do when worst comes to worst? Who will fill the gaming void as the main competitor to Microsoft’s XBOX? Who will be the big players in the game? Nintendo? Unlikely. Apple? Probably. Or even OnLive? Possibly.

The point here is that SONY is in trouble. It’s bleeding money and hasn’t had a smash product since the PlayStation 2(the best-selling games console of all time). There clearly needs to be a huge change to the way SONY operates and due to the sheer size of the company that is going to take time, time that SONY doesn’t really have. So is there anything you can do as a consumer? Well sure go buy SONY products, keep them afloat. So off you go, you say you love SONY? Put your money where your mouth is; go buy a PlayStation Move, buy a 3D personal viewer and buy an Xperia Play. Or not?