Sony

I tried to hold my tongue on this one, but I just couldn’t.

I’m talking about Lair for the PS3.

Sony have gotten into the habit of not only pissing off their customers, but responding to the backlash by metaphorically kicking themselves in the balls over and over. It appears that Sony have wholeheartedly embraced the ‘politican’ style of management. No matter what happens, blame outside influences, claim black is white, and it all else fails, put their fingers in their ears and go “LALALALALALALA CAN’T HEAR YOU! LALALA.”

They fail to grasp the simple truth of the situation. Their customers have eyes and ears. Sony can say that the PS3 is whatever they like, but they’re not convincing anyone.

Sony has become a prime example of ‘Big Business Syndrome’. They believed that the PS3 was going to be an absolute smash-hit success whatever they did. They didn’t count on the fact that gamers are an extremely fickly bunch.

In fact, that might be a little unfair. It’s not that gamers are especially fickle, but brand loyalty only goes so far. You can be as big a Sony fan-boy as you like, but when their competition offers something better, sooner and for less money, that’s what we’re going for.

For example, as a PC gamer, I’ve always liked AMD processors. Every PC I’ve built or owned since 1996 has been powered by an AMD processor. However, if I come to buy a chip, and Intel releases one that is faster for less than the equivalent AMD…I’m switching over to Intel.

Long story short, brand loyalty is all well and good, but people aren’t going to burn money for no reason. Sony should have learned a lesson from Sega. At one point, Sega was at the top of the food chain…today they’re producing crappy games for other people’s consoles.

Anyway, back to Lair, and how mishandled it was by Sony.

The simple fact with Lair is that the controls suck. They’re totally unresponsive, sluggish and get in the way of gameplay. So how did Sony respond to this? Consider it a learning experience and fix it in Lair 2 or a major update?

Nope, they said to the gaming world at large:

“You’re doing it wrong.”

They went so far as to release a ‘Reviewers Guide’ in an attempt to stop bad scores.

Nice work Sony, you release a game with broken controls, and then release a ‘guide’ to professional gamers explaining that they don’t know how to do their jobs.

Here’s the deal. If people who review Lair say the controls suck, the controls suck. If the people who play Lair say the controls suck, the controls suck. You can’t turn around and tell the gaming community at large that they’re playing it wrong.

It’s like designing a car where to go left, you have to steer right. Everyone is going to have problems with it, and it’s not our responsibility to re-learn what we already know to suit you. It’s your responsibility to fix the damn steering!

The straw they’re holding onto is that the game is played with a sixaxis controller. They’re saying that people aren’t used to it and need to learn to use it.

I call bullshit. Innovation should be intuitive.

Look at the Wii. That uses an innovative ‘motion control’, and when was the last time you heard anyone complain about that? Nintendo created a control system that would allow people who’ve never even touched a controller before to play. You did almost exactly the same thing with the sixaxis controller…so how you can say with a straight face that everyone is wrong is beyond me.

Basically, when the controls are “Tilt the controller left to go left”, if people have problems with that, it’s the game and the controller that are at fault…not the gamer.

At my previous job, I came across exactly the same thing.

It was pay-raise time, and the pay raise offered was way below inflation. We also hadn’t received a pay raise in over three years. Of course, we weren’t happy.

What management chose to do was to distribute literature and emails explaining (with the use of pie-charts and graphs), that the pay raise was actually really good and really generous. As I said to my boss at the time, you can show us all the graphs, charts and rationales you like, the only figures I need to look at it my paycheck. An extra two dollars a week is certainly not generous.

Sony, admit you made a mistake. All you’re doing is alienating your customers and pissing everyone off. When you’re fucking us in the ass, we don’t care about your press releases about how good it is for our colon, or if we just relax it won’t be an unpleasant experience…we’d rather just not get fucked.