ORIGINAL: Terrak
I would hardly call giving only a handful of gamers such an expensive prize shows that sony cares considering they already delayed the ps3 launch for 4 months, charged European gamers more then the Japanese and US gamers (for the ps3) & cutting full backwards hardware compatibility.
It was a very good publicity stunt thats all, which almost got upstaged by microsofts gate crashing the ps3 launch in France.
Actually, they did that because they care.
It' s better to wait 6 months and get reliable hardware than get shoddily mass produced hardware with ZERO quality control like Xbox360 six months early.
Sony knew they could only produce so many quality built units, they also knew that just by snapping their fingers they could increase production and even lower costs at the risk of increasing their margin of defective units, like the responsible company that they are, they chose to just delay the hardware instead of giving you trash that you will have to repair within a month like X360.
Honestly, I would have rather got my X360 6 months later, than get the piece of crap I got which I exchanged 3 times until I just said fuck it and sold my last unit before it broke. If anything MS *lost* a consumer with me thanks to not taking their time to properly manufacture the machines, they were so desperate to grab a hold on the market they didn' t give 2 shits about selling defective hardware - that is a company that doesn' t give a fuck about it' s consumers and only wants money.
But that' s not the biggest slap in the face from MS, oh no. Despite the fact that they rushed their hardware they also failed to do ANYTHING with their one year lead, in one year the only " AAA" game they have is Gears Of War - and that is an Epic game, it could have just as easily ended up on any other console, MS deserves no credit for it. As far as influence on GoW go, it' s 98% Epic, 2% MS, yet people try to give MS credit for it - just NO.
In their one year lead all they did was produce millions of defective units, and barely mustered off enough money to pay Epic to make a semi-exclusive games and to slap the Microsoft logo on top of them so people think MS has any ability whatsoever to create a decent game - they do not. The LEAST I would have expected from microsoft is to atleast have bought out 10+ AAA titles in their first year, but they failed to even do that. X360 is trash, simple as that.
There has to be some kind of trade off for me to tolerate shoddy hardware or poor game performance - I tolerated PS2' s questionable built quality because as soon as PS2' s 2nd christmas came I was simply BOMBARDED with quality games, it' s that simple. Fine I got screwed by the hardware but atleast I got SOMETHING, good games. With X360 I got shitty hardware and no games - that' s just a slap in the face. I wouldn' t be complaing at all if MS had amazing games out there, but they don' t, I' d buy 20 fucking Xbox360' s if they only had the games to make me do so - they don' t.
But lack of games isn' t enough for me to just stop supporting a console company, I wasn' t a big fan of the Sega Saturn, had some good games, but not ever enough, but you know what my Sega Saturn was still alive and kicking 10 years after I bought it, that shit just worked. They slapped me in the face with bad game support, but at least the physical form of what I bought from them - the console itself - at least it worked, at least I got SOMETHING out of it. X360 I get nothing, no games, and the hardware doesn' t work, I get absolutely NOTHING from Microsoft, thus they lose me as a customer, it' s as simple as that. I can' t even use their machine as a fucking DVD player because it doesn' t even work, MS gives me NOTHING.
< Message edited by Evil Man -- 26 Mar 07 2:49:02 >