It’s E3!  That magical time of year where we get crushed under a deluge of new ads for new products.  You know, now that I write that, it underscores a flaw in the whole process.  If you release an ad for a new product now, it’ll get drowned out among all of the other new announcements.  I guess people want to be king of the mountain for the extra hype, but jeez, it might be a bit easier to be king of the plains…

Anywhoo, around this time, there’s also talk of “best of show”, “worst of show”, and retrospectives on epic fails of conventions past.  Fails can be fun, but usually they’re just poorly executed, or embarrassing, so there’s not much to talk about other than to point at them and laugh.  There are two examples, though, not just because of what happened, but why it happened.  They are fascinating because they are almost complete opposites of each other, and arguably massive failures in their own ways.  These are the presentations of the PS3, and the Xbox One.

Sony – PS3 – E3 2006

The PS3 E3 presentation was legendarily bad.  For those who haven’t seen it, back in 2006, Kaz Hirai went out to discuss the new upcoming console.

There are so many little details here.  My favorite is the one guy in the crowd who’s excited for a Ridge Racer game.

“It’s Ridge Racer!” (Lonely reply from the distance: “Woo.”)

Funny quirks of the presentation aside, why do I list this as such a classic botch?  The price.  Not necessarily the number on its own, but why the number was so high.

You may remember that originally, the PS3 was backwards compatible, it could play PS2 games, and PS1 games.  The reason it could do that wasn’t some compatible architecture, or anything like that.  Turns out the PS3, for all intents and purposes, contained a PS2.  I mean that surprisingly literally, too.  It contained the “emotion” chip, which was the PS2 CPU.  This was both why it was backwards compatible, and so expensive.

Why would they want to do this?  There are a couple possibilities that present themselves right away.

First, this was at a time when backwards compatibility was still thought to be a very desirable thing, before digital distribution was so prominent, and the renaissance of the glorious PC gaming master race through said digital distribution channels like Steam.  Instead, gamers had stacks of physical media games that they spent years collecting and working on.  They didn’t want to feel that they had to abandon them entirely.  There was also a hope to simplify the entertainment setup rather than having to have every console collected for all time.  It had worked with the PS2, so let’s try it with the PS3!

A second reason is a very pragmatic one.  How do you have a strong launch lineup?  Carry over every title from the previous generation with you.  This makes a lot of sense if you look at the PS3 launch lineup.

Calling that anemic would be a bit generous.

It was a tricky balancing act, and in the end the PS3 was pretty successful, but there was pain every step of the way.  A high price point to retain a welcomed feature of the previous generation, paper over a weak launch catalog, or both.  Eventually they lowered the price point by removing Emotion chip, and with it, the backward compatibility.  That also angered people, as I would expect any time they perceive something as being taken away from them.

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