Sony Is Sony dying?

You have no idea what "niche" means, do you? "Casual" gamers is a far larger market than "hardcore" gamers. Nintendo's success with a mainstream market is proof enough of this.

Hell, historically, handhelds have had more mainstream appeal than consoles and, as should be blatantly obvious, Nintendo remains the only company to have consistent significant success in the handheld market, so I think it's a safe bet to say that Nintendo knows what they're doing with the mainstream.

Call of Duty targets "dedicated gamers?" That's news to me. I mean, it's not like it's the current big blockbuster shooter that non-gamers buy, then effectively glue to their consoles. Also, you CAN'T be serious implying that "dedicated gamers" only play shooters. That is completely absurd. Ignoring that particular idiocy, I could make this exact same argument with any console. Here, watch:

XBox 360:
Casual gamers: Kinect
Hardcore gamers: X-COM, Borderlands
Shooter fans: Gears of War, Halo, Call of Duty
RPG fans: Lost Odyssey, Mass Effect

Wii:
Casual gamers: Wii Sports
Hardcore gamers: No More Heroes, Mad World
Shooter fans: Red Steel 2, The Conduit
RPG fans: The Last Story, Xenoblade Chronicles

The PSN hacking fiasco would beg to differ. Not to mention that the free online play is, while by no means a bad service and I do applaud Sony's dedication to keeping the PSN free, actually less stable and generally inferior to other services (and isn't really anything special as PC gamers have had free online play since the 1980s), Playstation Plus is a pay service that does little outside of provide "free" games (though considering the number of games and the quality of games, I can't argue with the value of the service) and handheld and console interactivity isn't anything special and Nintendo has been doing it since the SNES days.

That IS actually a pretty nice deal, but it highlights one of the Vita's biggest issues: Almost all of what it can do can also be done by the PS3, which eliminates any real reason for an existing PS3 user to get a Vita. Getting both versions of a game is an awesome bonus if you already have both products (and remains the only reason I would ever use that feature as I would never buy two copies of the same game to play concurrently), but is not much of a selling point, as Sony is slowly realizing by the less than enthusiastic customer response to this feature.

Some examples, please. Sony has a habit of treating their customers quite poorly, likely due to their delusion that their the best company on any market. As I mentioned earlier, the PSN hacking fiasco is one of the best recent examples of Sony not giving two shits. They let their customers hanging long after **** broke loose and tried to cover up everything they did wrong. And don't tell me that the free games they gave out as a response justified their poor treatment of the situation as that was simply excellent damage control and they still let things get out of hand in the first place.

I don't think anyone is going to argue with this one.

 

A niche audience can be a larger market. I don't dispute casual gamers make up a great part of the customers of consoles these days, but what I say is that nintendo is, a large majority of the time, marketing to the casual audience, they focus on that niche audience are not meeting the demands of their already established customers over the recent console generations.

Of corse they're the monopoly of the handheld console industry. They've been the majority of the console market for well over a decade; they have a trusted brand their which is key but more importantly they are a monopoly in that market because they have no competition. If you have no competition you are going to be the only one in the lead. Sony never truly conquerd into the market and established themselves too well. Unless the PSV and future iterations of a Sony handheld sell well it'll be cheaper just to not make anymore.
However they are receiving new competition from mobile phone games, with the ease of use and purchase of said games the marke is shifting towards phones being the new mobile console. In the long run I am unsure how Nintendo will compete. Especially since the mobile market is made up of all types of gamers, they can't really compete against that.

I never said they only played shooters. I used a popular franchise that almost every console gamer has played at one point or another, has a massive following and three of its games are the highest selling games in the history of gaming, beating its previous editions in sales each time. I would include Assassin's Creed, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, Mass Effect and Borderlands in that, to name a few. High sales, high advertisement, established franchises, recognisable to most all gamers and some non-gamers. I don't know what else to call a gamer who plays games a lot of the time that most people know. Mainstream gamer, perhaps?

I listed what they were good at and had unique selling points compared to Nintendo. Nintendo basically offers no proper online play, Sony does better here. PSN+ offers discounts, eclusive content, early acces and a catalogue of great games to take advantage of, Nintendo offers little compared. Nintendo doesn't use it now though, and the Sony Handhelds offer a multimedia way to be used, not only has a place to play games but also to listen to music, wathc movies, view pictures and so on, something only Sony has done so far.

I can't really give specifics, i'm thinking of past E3s where they announced new services and other deals that they offered. The amout of services they have offered more to their customers over the years then any of the other gaming consoles this generation. I personally just don't see the way they've customers poorly, exactly.

 

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I don't think Sony would be dying. I mean--it created the Playstation and people still buy it to be able to play games such as Kingdom Hearts on it. Recently, I've bought Kingdom Hearts 2 and bought the Playstation 2 system along with it. It only depends if people want to dearly play a game on a system that belongs to Sony that they'll even buy the system when they get the game.

 

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Sony are struggling, and sometimes you do get the impression they don't learn from their own mistakes. The Vita is currently making the same mistakes that plagued the PSP. The biggest games just being ports/portable console games and not many killer games, despite having great hardware.

They also (at least in gaming) have a recent habit of releasing great hardware and stop supporting it after the release window. After they released Move they pretty much ignored it, I guess you can say Wonderbook is doing more stuff with it, but give it a few months and that will be ignored also. On the other end you have Microsoft whoring the flawed Kinect and guess what, it worked. They actually put effort into advertising it. Even if Move is technically a better piece of hardware, Sony did nothing with it and it shows because it failed.

Now look at the Vita, a fantastic machine with great potential and they've barely done anything with it since launch. Their E3 2012 conference pretty much ignored it, only mentioning a CoD Vita game (which ended up being one of the worst thing ever released) They finally mentioned games at Gamescom, but since they haven't really shown what it can do in 2013. What do we have to look forward to? Killzone, the new Media Molecule game, that's about it really. That is terrible. Yeah, the PS+ thing has helped (Gravity Rush for free, yes please!) but outside of PSP and PS1 games I have no other reason to touch my Vita. I want it to succeed, but I really don't think it will.

I really think Sony aren't good against actual competitors. In the PS1 and PS2 eras, you had a burnt out SEGA, a struggling Nintendo and newcomers Microsoft. Sony was able to grab the market and run with it. They tried to enter the Nintendo owned handheld market and did ok, but ultimately got their arses kicked by Nintendo.

They hoped the PS3 would do the same thing as the PS1 and PS2 and it didn't quite work, they got too cocky. That allowed Microsoft to gain more ground, after they learnt from the mistakes of the xbox and hit the ground running. Sony finally had actual competition in the console market and guess what they lost. Well not really, in actual fact no-one has lost this console war, but you get my point they are at the bottom in terms of console sales. The PS3 is better now, but in the early days the PS3 was a train wreak, and it was the kick in the teeth Sony needed. But I don't think Sony has learnt many lessons. Though we will have to see what the PS4 is like before I make that judgement.

 

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Niche: having specific appeal.

can be used in the context I used.

You're worrying over semantics and did not address the point I made up.

Basic economic theory not agreeing.
New brand versus an established brand, the established are more successful. They're not blameless but they're definitely not the sole problem, it was an uphill battle whether they were on the ball or not.

Who's going to buy a dedicated handheld console for hundreds when they most likely have a phone that can already play games on, games that are continuously improving in all fields that make some of them on par with console games. The market for handheld gaming has never been as good as a home console, its range of games has never been appealing to a wide audience (bar early games like Mario/Zelda/Pokemon/etc), yet the mobile bring sout well known and popular games now. Look at the success of Angry Birds, everyone knows about it and most gaming companies are moving to placing themselves in the mobile phone market, simply because that's where analysts are saying that's where the market is shifting.
And the 3DS only got back up in sales figure because of the huge price drop that occurred early in its life cycle, something that probably dented the profits Nintendo received and were hoping that the demand of sales would make up for it. It doesn't bode well for Nintendo, seeing as they didn't have to worry about the N-Gage, or the PSP, but phones? It doesn't look like much now, but in a decade, things could be very different for mobile gaming.

I said PSN was better then Nintendo.

 

Cloud, you do bring up lots of good points, but could you stop acting like kind of a ******? Seriously :\

Also, the PSN interface as it is now is fine. Not great, certainly not better than Steam (who's is, really...?), but far from unusable. I've had zero problems with it.

 

You don't pay much attention to most of my posts, do you?

YEEEEAAAH, any interface that reminds me of Windows 8's Metro interface is not what I'd call "fine."

You realize that you just made the exact same point I made, right? Mainstream is not specialized is what you seem to miss.

Except that Playstation IS an established brand. Sony has been known for making consoles since 1996 and they advertised the PSP as a portable Playstation. Hell, even if you want to argue just handhelds, the Vita is STILL on an established brand as a successor to the PSP. The Vita's problem is not that it isn't an established brand, it's that customers have no idea what Sony is doing with the thing.

You're missing my point. The idea that smart phones will eliminate the market for handhelds is absurd. The most popular games on smart phones are games like Angry Birds (which, ironically, is also on 3DS), which no one is going to say is a great gaming experience. It's just a game that people use to waste a few minutes at a time.

What you're arguing is that cheap casual games like Angry Birds is going to compete with and defeat a dedicated gaming platform, which is a completely absurd notion. Not to mention the fact that smart phones are not sold based on their gaming capabilities, but on the fact that they're phones with great multimedia features, which includes gaming.

After that said price drop, the 3DS sales picked up more than significantly and the system has sold millions of units and sales continue to be steady. Hell, even when it first came out, sales weren't half as bad as people make them out to be as they still sold 3 million of the 5 million units they expected. Nintendo's biggest mishandling on the 3DS is that they assumed it would take off as well as, if not better than, the DS.

And I said that Steam was better than PSN, what's your point?

 

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Guys, no call outs and no insulting please. Keep it civil.

Not in the handheld market. And having an established average brand isn't going to break you into the market in a big way.
And customers know where Nintendo is going? I find them to be the least predictable of the main three console companies.

You implied I said it was the best, you mentioned the Steam was best.
I just simply mentioned that PSN was a better service than what Nintendo offered.

 

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/LOCKED\ ON REQUEST

OP has been satisfied with answers given so this is pretty much done.