Anybody else remember E3 2004?
Anybody else? You know, that was the E3 where Sony was going to show off its revolutionary new handheld game system that would totally crush that stupid two-screen nonsense Nintendo was rolling. In all seriousness, though, around about that time, it really did look for all the world like Sony was just about to crush all the competition out of the console market, and once they entered the handheld market, it was only natural to assume that they’d conquer that, too.
How the mighty have fallen. Sony has announced that it will post a loss of nearly three billion dollars this year. Now, it would be unfair of me to allege that the poor performance of the PSP and PS3 are wholly to blame for this — they are not. They are, however, largely to blame, which I never get tired of pointing out, since I was the one who predicted that maybe Sony wouldn’t get much love for a handheld much larger, more power-hungry, and more expensive than the DS. Maybe that’s just because I remember the Game Gear and nobody else does.
Nintendo, incidentally, showed a 5.5 billion dollar operating profit for 2008. So I was right, and the rest of the world was wrong.
