Sony loses mind, sues the hands that feed them
by Jason Ward | June 3, 2005 in Industry Blog | Comments Off
According to an article at The Register, Sony has now decided to sue retailers in the UK who’ve been importing PSP handhelds to sell to eager customers.
Apparently Sony has decided that the best way to ensure a product’s success and build a loyal fanbase is to sue those who sell your products for you. As if they didn’t already piss off the European audience enough by pulling their PSP preorders and shipments in order to sell a million on day one of the US release (you know, that shipment that’s still trying to be sold out?), thereby pushing the European launch by 6 months due to their inability to supply an adequate quantity of the units.
The bright side of that news, of course, is that Europeans have been gobbling up the competition like crazy, with the Nintendo DS selling out 77% of its stock (over 500,000 units) within the first 2 weeks of its March launch. With clever decisions and ramifications like this, maybe Sony’s inevitable downhill slide in the Game Console market has finally begun. Personally, I hope it’s a spectacular fall.
Nevertheless, we’re interested: what do you think? So far I have to say it looks very impressive. The appearance of the console is, much more attractive than the Xbox 360, though I suspect that some of their performance estimates are a bit dubious given the specs of the machine itself (which is typical of Sony: they overstated performance on both previous Playstations purely in order to market against their competition, truth be damned), but on the whole it does look decent.