Sony have decided to capitalize on the lead they have in the console market and they mean business. It begun with various leaked comments on plans for the PS3 which seemed to be carefully arranged to coincide with the upcoming "Sony Dream World 2002" exhibition which opens this weekend in the port city of Yokohama. Sony's hype invasion will continue with the event itself which, based on the company's vast range of interests, is bound to attract the media spotlight.
It is possibly the comments made by Sony President Kunitake Ando, which best reflect what the future holds, not only for Sony, but for the whole electronics industry.
The broadband revolution is now happening, Ando said at a preview showing Thursday for retailers and reporters. Through Sony Music Entertainment and Sony Pictures Entertainment, we can drive demand for network content as well, and we are starting to make that happen now. This content driven approach is also a good way of tying hardware to services and therefore limiting the impact a small, independent electronics company, can have on the market by creating a semi-monopoly.
Whatever you may think of them though, Sony are riding high on the success of their recent ventures. The box-office hit Spider-Man, along with news that for the quarter which ended June 30, Sony reported a profit of 57 billion yen (USD 473 million), have got everyone over-excited. These figures show a distinct reversal from the 30.1 billion yen loss for the same period a year ago. Sales also jumped more than 5 percent to 1.7 trillion yen (USD 14 billion).
Hyped up and ready, Sony execs begun releasing various, vague but significant, bits of information regarding the future of console gaming. Force feedback is destined to become bio-feedback and the role of an engineer might soon be assigned to an MD. According to the rampant imagination of Sony, PlayStation 9, to be released in 2075, will feature a surgically implanted controller, tipped to hook up to the transparent glassy globe which is the console through the retina.
Returning to the present, Andrew Carter of Infogrames Melbourne said, Over the next couple of years we are going to see an even bigger jump in the quality of the graphics than we saw in the last generation of consoles. Games graphics are not necessarily going to become more realistic, but they will certainly become more fantastic.
As far as the future versions of the PS are concerned The limitation there is more medical understanding at this stage, Carter said. A lot of games could work fantastically well with that kind of interface.
Putting ethical and practical issues aside, the ideas presented by Sony seem to be the way technology wants to go. It will eventually become a fight between companies to buy a small plot of skin on your body in order to install their hardware.