Occasionally (by which I mean virtually every time anyone working for the company talks to anyone whose writing something down), I feel as though Sony believes the dietary needs of their constituency (which would be you and I, dear reader) to be on par with that of a mushroom. I don’t know that I’m touching on any new ground when I say this, but Sony’s PR message is the stuff 1984 is made of. It’s as if some divine being was playing a joke on existence when the very day that an interview with Phil Harrison includes the statement that Sony needs to be more open, one of the more popular gaming news/gossip sites is briefly excommunicated for deigning to reveal information outside the scope of corporate PR’s iron-fisted media plan.
In many ways, I feel sorry for the people at Sony that have to be the talking heads for the corporate message; as the comic implies, it often seems like they’re selling something less than desirous as though it were the cure for cancer. It’s unfortunate, because with the proper marketing message, the PS3 would be in a completely different boat than it is right now. 600 dollars is a lot of scrilla, to be sure, but it would be swallowed with far more ease if you didn’t feel as though the slime Sony thinks it needs to coat the console with to sell it would get all over your hands and clothes when you sidled up to take a drink off that mother. Perhaps I’m being desperately naive, but I don’t think that it’s too late for Sony to make a game of this console war, though they’ve made misstep after misstep. Regardless of your console allegiances, should you have any, it would be difficult to really put forth that fierce competition isn’t a benefit to most gamers. I would just prefer that competition be on the merits of gameplay experiences (under which I do include graphics), rather than the skill of their marketing departments.
I would write more, but I’m fucking exhausted. And I’m barreling toward finals at an alarming rate.
-Aegies