Sony has reorganized their online game division. SOE will now report directly to Kazuo Hirai, the President and Group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI). Sony Online Entertainment's (SOE) John Smedley, who will continue to serve as President of SOE, now reports directly to Hirai.
The move, according to Hirai, to closely integrate the online developers with the Playstation 3 "entertainment experience".
Read the press release after the jump.
At CES, we had the chance to sit down and see The Agency and find out what SOE Seattle has been at work on all these months. We came back with fresh screenshots and an in-depth preview of some new nuggets of information.
"Spies don't click to craft," Wilson said with a grin, but quite seriously. At a basic level, it is operatives that do that for the player, and the results are in real-time. So for example, if a player wants a new car, they can build it for a monetary and time cost. Say that car takes a week to create. Well, in this form of offline advancement, a player can login on a Saturday and tell his operative to build him that fancy new car. Next Saturday, that same person has a car.
Read more after the click.
Sony announced that thanks to a price cut they sold 1.2 million Playstation 3 consoles in North America over the holiday season. This brings their global all-time total to 5.6 million units, which lags well behind Microsoft's Xbox 360 (17.7 million and 4.3 million over the holidays) and the Nintendo Wii (13.2 million before the holidays, the numbers for which are not yet available).
What's more, Nintendo outsold the Playstation 3 by a margin of 3 to 1 in Japan over the last year, a market where Microsoft is essentially removed from the equation.
Read all about the Playstation 3 sales figures here.
Microsoft sold 4.3 million Xbox 360 consoles from the end of September through the end of the year, which brings the console's total sales to 17.7 million units. While rivals Nintendo and Sony has not yet released figures, this raises the very real possibility that Microsoft will retake the console war lead from the popular Wii. Nintendo had sales of 13.2 million at the end of September.
All was not rosy for Microsoft though. As a result of the increased sales, their Xbox Live online service somewhat buckled under the pressure. Today, they promised free games to members to make up for it.
A total of 17.7 million Xbox 360s had been sold worldwide since it first went on sale in late 2005, Microsoft said. Earlier sales data from the software giant showed 13.4 million consoles sold by the end of September.
"Holiday 2007 was a blockbuster season for the gaming industry," Microsoft said, adding that the Xbox 360 has kept its lead over rivals in terms of total dollars spent on hardware and software.
Read more here.
Sony's Playstation 3 outsold Nintendo's Wii in Japan over a four week period that ended earlier this week, according to a Reuters article. The lead was a slim one - 183,217 to 159,193 - but is nonetheless a major milestone for the former console war kings.
Sony, which launched the consoles a year ago, sold 183,217 PS3 in Japan in the four weeks to November 25, topping sales of 159,193 Wii consoles, according to game magazine publisher Enterbrain, a key watcher of trends in the sector.
Sony dominated the game industry for about a decade with previous generations of its PlayStations but lost its crown to the low-cost Wii with its new idea of a motion sensor in the control unit.
The full article is available here.
After a one month hiccup while Microsoft and the newly launched Halo 3 lorded over the console hardware sales market, Nintendo has regained its perch. In September, 519,000 Wiis were sold in North America compared to 366,000 Xbox 360s. Despite the increased sales that followed their price cut, Sony continued to trail in their first full month of lower prices and moved only 121,000 units.
The PS3's price dropped by $100 to $499 in mid-October, and a $399 model was launched in early November. Microsoft dropped its lowest-end Xbox 360 by $20 to $280, but the Xbox still remains pricier than the Wii at $249.
Retailers have reported that Wii units sell out within a few days, even though Nintendo has said it increased production for the holiday season. Some observers have said that Nintendo appears to be increasing supply slowly, so as not to cause a glut.
Read it all here.
Sony has opened the door to cheaper development of Playstation 3 games. They cut the price of Playstation 3 development kits across the world in half, now to buy one in North America, it costs $10,250. While the price cut is a large one - over $10,000 - it remains only a fraction of the cost on the price of a AAA Playstation 3 game.
Prices for the PS3 development package have been cut in half. The new price in North America is $10,250, while the price is $11,250 in Europe and $8,600 in Japan. The price reduction for the development side of Sony's gaming equation comes at the heels of the company's PS3 console price cuts last month.
Read more here.
Sony is finally getting some good press just in time for Christmas. Apparently a price cut and a new low end model have boosted the sales of the Playstation 3 considerably, the AP reports. The article doesn't delve into comparitive numbers for the Wii or Xbox 360 over the same period, instead just restating the lifetime numbers. It could be a nice fight to the finish for the Christmas bounty.
Read all about it over on CNN.
Thanks to Halo 3, Wedbush Morgan analyst, the appropriately named Michael Patcher, predicts that the Xbox 360 will narrowly outsell the Nintendo Wii in September. The Wii has been a sensation since its launch last year, while the 360 has held on thanks to its early launch. Obviously, Halo inflates the numbers for Microsoft, but that cannot be anything other than good news for the Seattle software giants.
On the home console hardware front, Pachter predicts that Microsoft shifted 450,000 Xbox 360 units during September, in comparison to 425,000 Wii consoles and 150,000 PS3s, and forecasts growth throughout the holiday period.
Read more here.
In an effort to find greater success in their home market, Sony has slashed the price of the Playstation 3 in Japan and introduced a new 60GB unit. The efforts come as Sony tries to stay close with their main Japanese rival, Nintendo.
Japan's Sony Corp. announced plans Tuesday to slash the price of the PlayStation 3 game console in its home market and launch a new slimmed down version as it tries to catch up with Nintendo's hit Wii.
Sony will cut the price of the standard 20-gigabyte hard disk drive PS3 by 10 percent to 44,980 yen (384 dollars) from October 17, ratcheting up the competition with its rivals ahead of the crucial year-end sales period.
Read more here.
