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@rainstormYou complain about leaner and trimmer and then bash sony for laying people off? This restructuring plan was put forth by Stringer and he is trying to have Sony work more like a single unit with a general goal. We are still in the midst's of this reconstruction and these layoffs are nothing knew to sony. An interesting fact about sony.... even though they have been laying people off for the past few years, their amount of total employees has grown. Seems like some sort of direction is being formulated.

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I guess this is what happens when you release a game system without any games for it. All I see for the PS3 are just ports from other systems. People are not buying PS3's for blue-ray, they are buying PS3's for the "GAMES." If you don't have the good games for a system, people are not going to buy it. People are buying Wii's because they have the games people wants. The Xbox 360 is selling because it has the games people wants. What good games the PS3 have that people want? All the games I wanted to play on PS3 I can get for the Wii or 360, so for that I don't see a need to get a PS3. My brother has a PS3 and it just sits there gathering dust. Same thing with the Handheld, the DS has games people want, the PSP has stripped down PS2 games, but to be fare about the PSP (I do own both a DS Lite and PSP) I am seeing new games made just for PSP, Crush looks cool.

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"f course, the Japanese management mentality being what it is, it's not surprising to see massive layoffs after even a minor project disappointment"Buried because you _clearly_ dont know what you are talking about.

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That kind of thing is pretty Standard Operating Procedure in large companies. They also dont want you doing any silent sabotage on the way out, if you're left unattended you could steal company Intellectual Property (think customer lists, sales info, financials, product-designes, code etc).

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"hopefully this brings things back to reality where smaller talented teams and normal budgets become the target so that innovation and fun can come back again. "This is what Xbox LIVE Arcade is about, and the coming XNA Studio Express games.. The PSN is the same deal. Nintendo is unlikely to start releasing new games on the VC because of the backcatalogue strategy they have.This is where MS will excel, they will bring all the small developer teams -- those used to making games for the PC & Java/Flash and bring them into the console world via XNA & XBLA. This is where you'll see this kind of "smaller dev teams" and wild-new-ideas. Console VideoGame startups need a market to growup-in slowly and naturally (like any other business, you dont just start with $100M revenue), and MS has already created this ecosystem.

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"PS3 will eventually catch on" thats not guaranteed. The rub is the Install-base as a target market for the Studios. As time goes on, the Studios are going to see so few PS3s in the world and either A) focus on the larger base (Xbox / Wii are both far bigger) or B) Go cross platform (more likely go Xbox 360 & PS3 due to Wii's GC1.5 hardware and Wii-mote-ness)So, as time goes on, the Game Catalog becomes affected. The buyers in this new market look at the catalog and it affects their decision... and thus the viscous circle turns.The 3DO and the CDi were decent machines too, but the high price kept them out of the homes at first -- and then the software didnt come, and _that_ also helped keep people away.Its toying with this viscous circle that Sony has by coming in the market as such a high price compared to Xbox 360 and Wii. The PS3 just doesnt really offer any intrinsic hardware advantages over either, and the catalog may start to suffer.If Sony trys to drop the price, it doesnt matter, MS is already lower. MS may drop the price just a little to keep the price-point "high." and keep the pressure on. If Sony _doesnt_ lower the price, the situation remains in this same state.Sony is in a really tight spot.

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If only they would make the PSP 802.11g, then their sales would go through the roof. I can not count the number of times that I have read "If the PSP were 802.11g then I would buy one today!". errr... wait. it is 802.11g, Except Sony never bother releasing the news that they updated the firmware. And for some flippin reason no one in the entire world (except me) noticed... I would expect that from 90% of the people in the world, but not from digg users. Because I appreciate the hardware Sony has made, I have been single handedly trying to get the word out that it is in fact 802.11g. What do I have to show for it? nothing! wikipedia administrators insist on keeping it 802.11b because "that is what the box says" and because it is not written anywhere that it is 802.11g. Who do I blame? Sony. Seriously Sony, when you release an update like 802.11g how about you just announce it instead of letting the nerds find it? Obviously people didn't catch it and with a firmware update like that your sales really might go up with it.... stupid... really stupid sony.

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<a class="user" href="http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/feature/?id=16446&quot;&gt;http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/feature/?id=16446&lt;/a&gt;

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