Sony, Nintendo Aim to Wow Gamers with New Handhelds
TOKYO/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Sony Corp (NYSE:SNE - news) (news - web sites) plans to unveil its first new major game hardware in four years next week with a handheld machine that aims to unlock Nintendo (news - web sites)'s stranglehold on the mobile game market
Nintendo plans to answer back also at E3, the game industry's annual trade show held in Los Angeles, by taking the wraps off a new handheld of its own that the Kyoto-based company says is unlike any gaming device ever made.
Lofty expectations -- Sony has dubbed the PlayStation Portable (PSP) as "the Walkman for the 21st Century" that can play games, movies and music -- have inflated the hype for the PSP and Nintendo's new machine, codenamed "DS."
The pre-E3 buzz has gamers excited about DS, a mobile machine with two screens one above the other. Industry insiders have said one of the screens will be a touch panel.
"This will not be a machine where you push the 'A' button or 'B' button and move the direction pad, but a completely different way to interact with the device," said Hirokazu Hamamura, president of "Famitsu" game magazine publisher EnterBrain.
In fact, the gaming community has been so perplexed by the idea of the DS and how it might be designed that one Web site, Gizmodo.com, has offered a bounty to the first person to send it a photograph of the unit before its public unveiling.
Nintendo President Satoru Iwata has said he wanted to come up with a new type of machine to cater to gamers alienated by the trend toward more complex titles, while inspiring software developers to get creative again.
At E3, the creators of "Super Mario Brothers" are expected to display up to 30 titles, a number that Sony will be hard-pressed to match for the PSP since some of its software specifications have yet to finalized.
"I still don't have a great sense of how much PSP there's going to be (at the show)," said American Technology Research analyst P.J. McNealy.
Sony suffered a setback with the PSP in February when it postponed the U.S. and European release until early 2005, missing out on this year's holiday demand. The PSP is slated to go on sale in Japan before the year-end.
Tokyo-based Sony has said it targets shipments of three million PSP units in the business year ending March 31.
BREAKING UP MARIO'S PARTY
Sony will try to succeed where others have failed in breaking up Nintendo's virtual monopoly over the handheld game market with its GameBoy line.
Last year, Nokia (news - web sites) tried to muscle in with the N-Gage, a hybrid phone and game device, but has not managed to dent Nintendo's 90 percent market share. It plans to offer a revamped model from May in Europe and Asia.
"The challenge is more on Sony's side than Nintendo's," said Hiroshi Kamide, analyst at KBC Securities. Working in Sony's favor is its game guru Ken Kutaragi's track record of beating Nintendo in its backyard. In the console battles of the 1990s, the PlayStation toppled Nintendo64 by catering to developers with cheaper and more advanced CD-ROMs.
Kutaragi is again trying to appeal to software makers by making the development process for the PSP similar to that of the PS2.
"There were a lot of complaints from game developers when PlayStation shifted to PS2, so Kutaragi has been saying he wants to make it as easy as possible to create games for the PSP," said EnterBrain's Hamamura.
Sony's efforts to woo buyers with a line-up of attractive software titles got a boost when Electronic Arts Inc, the world's biggest game developer, said last month it would have four to six games for the PSP by March 31, 2005.
HOW MUCH??
For years, Nintendo's strategy has been to offer hardware at low prices, while making most of its money from software sales.
Analysts speculate that its DS pricing strategy will be no different. As a game machine targeting children, the DS is not expected to top $250, despite having two liquid crystal display (LCD) screens and two microprocessors.
Sony's PSP could come with a price tag significantly higher, because it will be marketed as an all-in-one entertainment system. The PSP promises a wide-screen LCD monitor and the capability to play two hours of DVD-quality video.
It is also expected to offer wireless Internet connectivity and a proprietary storage device, Universal Media Disc (UMD), with three times the capacity of a CD-ROM.
"Whatever happens, I don't think Sony can beat what Nintendo is offering at the moment (with the GameBoy Advance), which is $99," said KBC's Kamide.
"It depends how much money Sony wants to lose every time it sells one of these things."
TOKYO/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Sony Corp (NYSE:SNE - news) (news - web sites) plans to unveil its first new major game hardware in four years next week with a handheld machine that aims to unlock Nintendo (news - web sites)'s stranglehold on the mobile game market
Nintendo plans to answer back also at E3, the game industry's annual trade show held in Los Angeles, by taking the wraps off a new handheld of its own that the Kyoto-based company says is unlike any gaming device ever made.
Lofty expectations -- Sony has dubbed the PlayStation Portable (PSP) as "the Walkman for the 21st Century" that can play games, movies and music -- have inflated the hype for the PSP and Nintendo's new machine, codenamed "DS."
The pre-E3 buzz has gamers excited about DS, a mobile machine with two screens one above the other. Industry insiders have said one of the screens will be a touch panel.
"This will not be a machine where you push the 'A' button or 'B' button and move the direction pad, but a completely different way to interact with the device," said Hirokazu Hamamura, president of "Famitsu" game magazine publisher EnterBrain.
In fact, the gaming community has been so perplexed by the idea of the DS and how it might be designed that one Web site, Gizmodo.com, has offered a bounty to the first person to send it a photograph of the unit before its public unveiling.
Nintendo President Satoru Iwata has said he wanted to come up with a new type of machine to cater to gamers alienated by the trend toward more complex titles, while inspiring software developers to get creative again.
At E3, the creators of "Super Mario Brothers" are expected to display up to 30 titles, a number that Sony will be hard-pressed to match for the PSP since some of its software specifications have yet to finalized.
"I still don't have a great sense of how much PSP there's going to be (at the show)," said American Technology Research analyst P.J. McNealy.
Sony suffered a setback with the PSP in February when it postponed the U.S. and European release until early 2005, missing out on this year's holiday demand. The PSP is slated to go on sale in Japan before the year-end.
Tokyo-based Sony has said it targets shipments of three million PSP units in the business year ending March 31.
BREAKING UP MARIO'S PARTY
Sony will try to succeed where others have failed in breaking up Nintendo's virtual monopoly over the handheld game market with its GameBoy line.
Last year, Nokia (news - web sites) tried to muscle in with the N-Gage, a hybrid phone and game device, but has not managed to dent Nintendo's 90 percent market share. It plans to offer a revamped model from May in Europe and Asia.
"The challenge is more on Sony's side than Nintendo's," said Hiroshi Kamide, analyst at KBC Securities. Working in Sony's favor is its game guru Ken Kutaragi's track record of beating Nintendo in its backyard. In the console battles of the 1990s, the PlayStation toppled Nintendo64 by catering to developers with cheaper and more advanced CD-ROMs.
Kutaragi is again trying to appeal to software makers by making the development process for the PSP similar to that of the PS2.
"There were a lot of complaints from game developers when PlayStation shifted to PS2, so Kutaragi has been saying he wants to make it as easy as possible to create games for the PSP," said EnterBrain's Hamamura.
Sony's efforts to woo buyers with a line-up of attractive software titles got a boost when Electronic Arts Inc, the world's biggest game developer, said last month it would have four to six games for the PSP by March 31, 2005.
HOW MUCH??
For years, Nintendo's strategy has been to offer hardware at low prices, while making most of its money from software sales.
Analysts speculate that its DS pricing strategy will be no different. As a game machine targeting children, the DS is not expected to top $250, despite having two liquid crystal display (LCD) screens and two microprocessors.
Sony's PSP could come with a price tag significantly higher, because it will be marketed as an all-in-one entertainment system. The PSP promises a wide-screen LCD monitor and the capability to play two hours of DVD-quality video.
It is also expected to offer wireless Internet connectivity and a proprietary storage device, Universal Media Disc (UMD), with three times the capacity of a CD-ROM.
"Whatever happens, I don't think Sony can beat what Nintendo is offering at the moment (with the GameBoy Advance), which is $99," said KBC's Kamide.
"It depends how much money Sony wants to lose every time it sells one of these things."
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