in defense of the PS3
(This article originally appeared here.)
I admit, in the last two years I’ve cracked more than my share of Playstation 3 jokes. For the first year of its life, it seemed to me to be a more expensive system that played mostly games that appeared on the 360; more of a status symbol than an actual game console. Which was probably a result of the fact that it seemed targeted at a very specific entertainment demographic—people with expensive home theaters and HD televisions—a group that I decidedly did not belong to.
So, I played Bioshock on the 360. I played Call of Duty 4 on the 360. I played Grand Theft Auto IV on the 360. I could have played Fallout 3 on the 360. So, why did I choose to get a PS3? Well, there are a couple of reasons. First is that my girlfriend and I are avid gamers, and there is something to be said about having all available major platforms. That said, many of the great games on the PS3 can be found on the 360. There are a few games—like LittleBigPlanet and Resistance: Fall of Man—that I really wanted to play, but with the economy the way it is right now, a handful of great exclusives isn’t really enough to make me want a new system.
So, why the Playstation 3?
Without getting into a fanboy pissing contest over whose system is the next-geniest, the PS3 seems to me to be a better piece of hardware. It’s pretty clear to me that Blu-ray won the HD format war in large part because every person who purchased a Playstation 3 also got a Blu-ray player. It’s my understanding that this was not an accident. And in a time when HD televisions are becoming more and more common, I think many of those console owners turn to the new media format simply because they now had the ability to play it. Now, I love pretty tech. Always have. But I do not see myself purchasing a stand alone Blu-ray player, even at the lower price points we’re seeing. But my Playstation 3 came with one. And given the choice between the getting some of my favorite movies of the year—The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Wall-E—on standard DVD or the new High-Def format that I found myself with, it wasn’t a hard decision. Now, I haven’t had a chance to play with the DVD-upscaling feature of the PS3 (still waiting for my HDMI cable in the mail at the time of this writing) but Blu-ray is noticeably sharper than DVD. Even on my 720p television, I can see a drastic difference. It’s pretty.
Is there a price difference between the 360 and the PS3? Yes, of course there is, though I think that gap will begin to close. It’s interesting to me that, at the previous price point of $399, the Xbox 360 was still flying off the shelves. Now that the PS3 has come down to that same price—a drastic improvement over its ludicrous launch price—some say it’s still too expensive. And don’t get me wrong, $399 is a ton of money, and a week before I got the system I was already feeling a sense of pre-emptive buyer’s remorse. After a week of tinkering with it, playing a lot of Fallout 3 and LittleBigPlanet, messing around with Skate, and watching a few Blu-rays, that feeling is mostly gone. I feel like, for what I got, the price is justified.
If that’s the case, why isn’t the PS3 doing all that great?
I think the problem with the PS3 might be that it’s catering to a market that doesn’t have a very large slice of the overall market share. Blu-ray is doing alright, but is still fairly niche. I think recent blockbuster releases on the format have done much to at least narrow that gap, but DVD is still the juggernaut. I think in the next 2-3 years we’ll see that gap begin to close. But in a technological landscape in which the government has to send out vouchers for special boxes to consumers to make sure their TV able to accept digital signal—in 2009!— it’s apparent that this transition from standard def to high def is likely going to take much longer than the switch from VHS to DVD. In that sense, the PS3 seems future-proof. The trade off is that it’s not at all present-proof. Even though the system launched over two years ago, it still seems ahead of it’s time, and I have to wonder, as sweet at the Blu-ray technology is, if Sony jumped the gun. Just because something is state-of-the-art does not mean that it’s state-of-the-market.
However, I don’t think that including Blu-ray in the PS3 was a mistake. In fact, I think the opposite. There are games on the PS3—like Metal Gear Solid 4—that were designed from the ground up to take advantage of the extra storage place, and it shows (whether you appreciate hour-long rendered cut scenes is another argument). The problem, is that by using such a format, Sony alienated a number of customers. Of course I don’t have statistics, but I wonder about the number of people who purchased the 360 over the PS3 because they didn’t have a high-def set and thus saw Blu-ray as an unnecessary expense? Why pay $400 for a PS3 when you can spend $300 on a 360? Or what about the Wii? The Wii has shown that gaming systems can be marketed very successfully to people who would not normally own such an expensive piece of consumer electronics, and it this unexpectedly growing group of gamers that the PS3 is simply not built for.
So, what are we left with here? Is the Playstation 3 good? I would say definitely yes, but not for everyone. For people who don’t care about Blu-ray, who don’t care about managing media, or who don’t care about LittleBigPlanet (read: people who hate fun) then, no, I would not recommend the system. The 360 has everything you want at a lower price point with better exclusive games. Right now, the best pure gaming platform is the Xbox 360, and this console generation I don’t think that is likely to change.
But, for what you get for the money, the Playstation 3 really is a steal.
