by user Rbrtchng

Here we go. The creator of the most successful last generation console, the PS2, that continues to push its gaming envelope with outstanding games such as God of War II and Final Fantasy XII. In the early days of the PS2, Sony has been accused of creating the biggest let-down, the PS2, as the launch window games were anything but spectacular. Here are some memorable scandals that haunts the Sony brand.

Immersion / Forced Feedback:

For those of you who don't know what Force Feedback is, it is the rumble feature in your PS2 and PS controllers that gives you that little shock treatment when you crash into a wall in GT4 or getting your a** kicked in Tekken. This "scandal"/ lawsuit was kept rather quiet until E3 2005, when the PS3 was announced with a BANG. Apparently, Sony lost in a lawsuit with Immersion as they claim that the forced feedback technology in the DualShock2 controllers belong to Immersion and Sony has used it without paying for it. "But Xbox and Gamecube had the rumble feature too? What happened to them," you might ask. Microsoft paid Immersion under the table to avoid litigation even after Microsoft "stole" the technology. MS paid the royalties, so they are in the clear. Nintendo uses a different technology for their rumble feature. Gamecube used a Nintendo-created technology, therefore, Immersion couldn't sue.

Now back to Sony, the allegation of the existence of this Immersion crisis was pretty much only a rumor, which erupted in more rumors as to the rumble feature for the PS3. And lo and behold, the PS3 doesn't have rumble feature with Ken Kuteragi and Phil Harrison explaining that Immersion had nothing to do with the lack of rumble. The Sixaxis was "designed" without rumble to allow the motion sensing technology. The Wii did an "in your face Sony" with the Wiimote having both the rumble and the motion control. Currently, Sony and Immersion "made up," and Phil Harrison explained that we "might" see another PS3 controller (Sixaxis2?) with forced feedback feature. I choose to remain optimistic and hope for the best.

PS2

This had been touted and still being bashed for being the most overhyped system ever. The PS2's first viewing promised the "emotion engion" with realistic facial expression and physics calculations. The reason for this misconception of being the most overhyped machine is due to it's lackluster games in the first few years. Gamers felt cheated out of their own investment as PS2 games failed to look better than Dreamcast games. The gaming community immediately believed that the PS2 was a rushed system with DRE (Disk Read Error) problems that Sony pushed just to drive Sega out of the console race. In a way, the PS2 was such a system. It had successfully created enough hype to drive attention away from the Dreamcast to a point when Dreamcast was obsolete. With Dreamcast out, developers had no choice but to develop for the PS2 because Nintendo Gamecube was not 3rd party friendly. With its newly hyped machine, Sony took control of last generation with guarantee to be crowned king. As third party developers learned the PS2 architecture, PS2 games started to look like what was promised at its first showing. Final Fantasy XII and GT4 has way surpassed Sony's vision with the PS2, yet the PS2 was one of the biggest scandal Sony put out to force their competition to oblivion to win by default.

PS3:

Aside from the Immersion fear, Sony tried to pull another PS2 by overhyping the PS3 with CG footage and conceal them by naming them "real-time." This was especially true of the Killzone E3 trailer. To this day, many will debate that the trailer was indeed real-time, not CG. My opinion of the matter is that it probably is real-time, but probably not gameplay. The PS3 launched with weak lineup of games with only one excellent game: Resistance. The games certainly don't look as well as they do at E3 2005, but many are coming close.

Anyways, the biggest scandal of the PS3 revolves around the Bluray Disk. This is both a great feature and a bad feature. On the up side, now developers will have more than enough storage to make any game of their imagination. 50 gigs of space with BD means that the sky's the limit (or rather 512 mb Ram is the limit). On the negative note (the one that most media are talking about), the BD drive drove the price of the PS3 to it's behemoth $500-600. That is hurting the PS3 horribly and is extremely bad for the consumers. It is forcing the gamers to adopt BluRay as the next generation format if they want to be able to play PS3 exclusive games. Calling it a "cheap BD player," is Sony's way of taking the other perspective. From a pure gamer standpoint, BD is definitely hurting the PS3. Sony has used the PS3 to force BD as the next generation format over HDDVD. In a way, the BD inclusion is more for Sony's movie department than it is for their game department. Still debated to be one of the scandals of Sony, the BluRay drive seems to become more accepted as BD starts to take off with almost every major Hollywood studios (except 1) as its supporter. PS3 became BD advertisement under the facade of "home entertainment" instead of being just a game machine as most gamers want it to be.

I was going to make a frustration section for Ken Kutaragi simply because the PS3 is in last place largely because of him. His words have become so hurtful to the image of Sony and PS3 that he has been removed from his office and replaced by Kaz Hirai. Krazy Ken had said that the PS3 promises "4D gaming" similar to the Matrix. He had also said that the PS3's price would make you want to work harder for it. Ken has also wasted E3 2006 as he talked about sales figure at a gaming conference, losing the PS3 edge that it had in E3 2005.

Sony had taken too much focus on the hardware that they had neglected the software. Cell and BD drive are nice, but gamers want killer apps more than a multicore physics calculator. With Phil Harrison's introduction of "Game 2.0" during GDC 2007, PS3's focus has returned to the gamers. I still remain skeptical at PS3's success. Unless we get good games, great new developers, innovation, the Playstation brand will not take crown this time.