Initially I saw this posted on the front page of another site:
Expensive PS3 titles!
Posted by Quema34 on 27 September 2006 - 04:44 - Source: The Inquirer
GristyMcFisty submitted this news regarding a report at The Inquirer, mentioning the prohibitive cost of new PS3 releases. With each title costing as much as ~ $ 100 each, it is hard to imagine what Sony is thinking with pricing the titles so high. However, the article itself points out why:
At the heart of the price rice [sic] was the fact that Sony has been unable turn the PS3 into an open platform in time. It has not produced a development environment, manuals, security management and community features.
This further supports Sony's philosophy of selling higher-cost merchandise than the competition (which would be the Xbox), but adds the further dimension here of Sony passing on its development failure to the consumer through cost. But how sad! How is the consumer responsible for Sony's lack of proper and timely project development? This kind of attitude (regardless of how wonderful and graphic-rich PS3 titles might be) is so arrogant and presumptuous that any consumers recognizing it as such will be further turned off from future Sony offerings--saying nothing of balking at the console and title prices! At least in this one case, it is clear Sony desperately needs better project management and certainly given its wanton carelessness on the recent 5.9 million + Lithium-ion notebook battery recall, suggests it needs a serious makeover in management, manufacturing and the workers it uses. These exorbitant prices will not make people new Sony fans, and could cause even hardcore PS fans to reconsider and/or switch to a lower-cost option. It makes one wonder how much money Sony will lose to the Xbox pricing by such stupidity!
I tried realy hard to bold the statements where the poster's commentary borders on libel, and crosses the line of being a professional opinion into just inflamatory commentary meant to make all the readers switch to have the same opinion. Unfortunately, there was so much I probably should have just bolded the whole thing.
So aside from the fact that it was completely unprofessional and inflammatory, the poster made a one really big mistake. You'll notice that at the top of the post, it says the information was taken from the The Inquirer. Here's a link to that source:
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=34617
The inquirer however links to their source also! Which is here:
http://ps3.ign.com/articles/734/734950p1.html
Now looking at the IGN article you see that the news came from a Japanese site originally:
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/ ... /rt013.htm
In actual fact, it is QUITE likely that the costs per PS3 game mentioned in the article is ONLY true for the Japanese market (if that... we still don't have confirmation that this is going to happen). What we *DO* know is that many sites have PS3 pre-orders already up for much lower prices then quoted in any of the news postings listed above.
The point I'm making is that if you're going to run a news site, you *NEED* to track the information back to the original source. As a news site, you have a responsability to act and write professionally, and make an effort to report genuine news, or at least tag rumours as rumours.
It really makes me sick when people and companies try to use news postings to make their opinion look like the only truth possible.
