Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Computer Entertainment’s worldwide studios, has expressed his concern in the latest issue of Edge Magazine that the PlayStation 3 was “late” in offering “platform-level” online support for the console.
“I think we were late to offer the platform-level support, to make the online functionality work at that level.
“We made the prior decision that you do not introduce the common centralised network names into every experience, so publishers made their own. That was fine at the start, but as more and more games have online functionality you need a unified approach.
“So Microsoft took that approach in the last generation, and maybe that’s where people see the difference when they compare Xbox Live and PSN.”
Yoshida said that Sony’s continuing to make improvements such as with 3.0 (which was really a disappointment) that SCE “should really continue to look at adding and improving” the PlayStation Network. He also mentioned the possibility of social networking integration such as with Facebook: “Something like 300 million people already have accounts on Facebook. Why should we ignore that?”
The biggest roadblock in Sony’s success is Sony. I hate to sound stereotypical of the Japanese culture but they don’t seem to understand that if they REALLY want to be successful in the States they’re going to have to either start thinking like an American company or give SCEA more authority and make more moves that are closer to what MS is doing with Live.
Sony probably can’t wrap their brain around the fact that MS has a highly inferior product and continues to beat them on nearly every facet of this generation.
Community is what’s driving the 360 and the more Sony continues to ignore they’ll continue to stay behind. Another, more powerful system won’t do the trick. They’ll really need to match XBL feature for feature. Convince Blockbuster, Hulu or YouTube to offer a streaming service on their system; enable cross-game voice chat, maybe give away the Bluetooth headset (or sell it dirt cheap, like $15 or less); whatever they do they need to be able to do an apples-to-apples comparison to XBL.
And then, THEN, maybe Sony will have a leg to stand on.
I still love my PS3 and look forward to all the exclusive titles in the pipeline but there’s no denying that XBL is in the driver’s seat.