Brief History
Sony, like any business has grown from humble beginnings, experiencing both successes and failures along the way but nevertheless being shaped by these to become the Sony Corporation that is known today.
Sony’s origin was as a small business formed by Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita that would fix and upgrade radios from the telephone switchboard room of a war damaged department store, in the heart of Tokyo’s Business district. This company was known as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo and was officially formed in 1946. The road from Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo to the entertainment giant Sony was long and not without any roadblocks. In fact, the first product of the company was an automatic rice cooker that, after having ordered a truck load of wooden tub components, it was discovered that it was not reliable enough to make a viable commercial product:
“I remember sitting there on the third floor in Shirokiya day after day being fed rice that wasn’t fit to eat. We simply couldn’t make a product out of this and finally we gave up and now we are stuck with all these tubs” - Masaru Ibuka (Nathan, 1999. 13-14)
Nevertheless eventually with a solid basis of transistors, hand-rolled cassette recorders and radios generating a profit, the company branched out internationally. In the American market, Morita decided that Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo was not a suitable name and eventually the company adopted the name Sony – a play on words that mixed the word Sonus (the Latin for sound) and Sonny boy, a term associated with a bright or creative child.
The growth of newly reborn ‘Sony’ did not halt at simply venturing into America – with Ibuka choosing to pursue the development of television sets in 1964 with the ill-fated Chromatron. These televisions almost sent the company into ruin. It took 4 years before the Trinitron; a hugely successful television had finally been developed – meaning that they could pay of the development loan of 650 million yen (roughly two million dollars) in three years.
Growth of Sony Computer Entertainment
Given the risks that Sony took to move into the home entertainment market from its solid foundation as an audio hardware provider, it shouldn’t have been surprising when Sony Computer Entertainment was formed and Sony officially moved into the video game industry. However it was -even within the company:
“For some people within Sony, PlayStation represented the future and was very exciting, but for other people it was a threat – something they didn’t fully understand” - Phil Harrison, Former Executive Vice President Sony Computer Entertainment (PlayStation Museum, 2011)
Sony had not been entirely un-invested in the Video game console market prior to this, having developed the Audio Stereo chip for the NES console but the company was content remaining out of the market that had largely been monopolised by Sega and Nintendo up to that point. However, when Nintendo dropped a collaborative development between the two companies on a CD drive for the SNES, this drove Sony’s CEO Norio Ohga to allow engineer Ken Kutaragi to develop the PlayStation console. The initial investment into the machine was 50 million dollars after an Executive committee heard Kutaragi and Teruo Tokunaka’s presentation. This led to the purchase of 1.3 million processor chips and the formation of Sony Computer Entertainment as a joint venture between Sony Corp and Sony Music Japan as a sign of commitment to this new expansion in November 1993.
The PlayStation console itself was superior to the Nintendo and Sega systems currently on the market at that time but it wasn’t until Sony established a solid third party developer base and a reasonable retail price ($299 – a full $100 less than the Sega Saturn) that the product became a more attractive proposition for the gamer to rival the more established Nintendo and Sega brands. Sony also spent a rumoured 4 million dollars on a stall at E3 to promote the console. The resulting interest, both in Japan and internationally, exceeded Sony’s expectations dramatically. In Japan the PlayStation sold 300,000 units in the first month – 3 times the number Sony had prepared for. In three months this figure had increased to being over one million units.
Because of the success of the PlayStation (today having sold over 90 million units worldwide), the development and subsequent release of the PlayStation 2 in 1999/ 2000 was not surprising. At the heart of the console was the Emotion Engine (developed by Sony and Toshiba), which added backwards compatibility to a list of unique selling points that included increased processing power/ graphics in addition to the ability to double up as a DVD player – at a point where DVD was beginning to draw the consumer away from VHS. The PlayStation 2 has since become one of the best-selling consoles of all time (selling over 120 million units worldwide) but has not been without problems, as the Class Action Lawsuit that was filed against Sony in July 2002 demonstrates. This was largely down to a ‘disk read error’ fault that would often plague the earlier models due to a misaligning laser disk lens.
Sony Computer Entertainment has since released a third home console, the PlayStation 3 in 2006, in addition to two handheld variations (PSP and VITA), no doubt to counterbalance Nintendo’s prior creation and subsequent domination of a handheld market with the Gameboy and DS brands. However one such emerging market, again largely uncovered by the Nintendo Wii’s success, is in using motion capturing technology to enhance the gaming experience.
The PlayStation Move and its Competitor’s
With the Nintendo first commercially releasing the Wii in 2006, both Sony and Microsoft realised the potential that motion technology had and began working on their own products. Sony released the PlayStation Move first out of the pair in 2010, working in conjunction with the PlayStation Eye (released in 2009). The Move controller looks similar to the Nintendo’s WiiMote in shape and functionality in that the player can wield one or two of these ‘remote like’ controllers, one in each hand. They are ergonomically designed with rounded and smooth surfaces, rather than flat/square and neither controller features any thumbstick. The largest difference between the Move controller and the WiiMote is the large LED orb that is positioned at the tip of the Move controller. The reason for this orb is that the PlayStation Eye peripherally tracks the movement of this orb in the X and Y axis – while the area of the sphere dictates its position on the Z axis.
While the two remotes undoubtedly share these similarities of both function and likeness, the process of controller evolution has seen competitor’s evolve using the other successful controllers on the market. One of the more relevant examples of this stems from the PlayStation, which was heavily influenced by the incredibly successful Super Famicon controller in terms of button layout, whilst adding handle-like grips. The N64 (which had also opted for grips for the players hands) added a small analogue stick in the centre of the controller which proved to be a revolution – and caused Sony and Sega to respond with updated models of each respective controller. This was the birth of the Sony ‘Dual Shock’ which has changed in subsequent console iterations very little since its conception.
Regardless, the Move has been outshone by its competitors since its release – with the Wii’s vast but established fan base taking a large slice of the motion control market, while Microsoft’s Kinect (released shortly after the Move) has gathered momentum commercially due to its unique selling points of mapping the entire player’s body (48 skeleton points) in addition to sophisticated voice recognition – playing to its marketing tagline “You are the Controller” in that the player does not need a remote like with Nintendo or Sony’s motion technology. This has likely factored into the release of Sony’s latest Move related software – the Move Me.
The Move Me
The Move Me is a simple piece of software that can allow the user to connect the Move to their computer and begin to program Applications and Games that make use of the Move technology – which in turn can be used with the PlayStation 3 console. However, in regards to the program and even the way it has been executed, it is hard to consider the Move Me a finished product.
This is because it doesn’t act as a conventional product should. The Move Me cannot simply be used with the console – nor can it be used with the PC should the user be unfamiliar with the process of coding. Immediately this has limited those who might want to use the content down to a niche group of academics or programmers with the necessary experience. However this does not have to be the case.
The Nintendo Wiimote and the Microsoft Kinect have been well documented as being ‘hacked’ by users to preform completely unexpected and sometimes inspirational tasks. The Wiimote for example has been transformed into a surgical training tool in Banner Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix (Good, 2008) and has been used by researcher Johnny Chung Lee to create 3D head tracking and a cheap alternative interactive whiteboard (TED. 2008). Kinect on the other hand has been used to create a sophisticated method to help the blind using the room mapping feature of the camera known as the ‘Navi Project’ (Zollner, M. Huber, S. 2011).These examples demonstrate that there are also inventive and creative uses of the Move technology that, should the Move Me be successful, could easily place the software in the commercial spotlight.
To do this, the Move Me user base needs to grow into a community. Generating a creative community around the Move Me would not necessarily be difficult to accomplish – with Media Molecule’s Little Big Planet (a developer that is part of Sony Computer Entertainment) proving to be a perfect example of how it could look and operate. The Move Me could act as a hub in itself for accessing or even purchasing new applications for the player’s PlayStation 3. Or this function could be taken up by the already established PlayStation store. The PlayStation Network is available in 58 countries, with over 600 million items downloaded worldwide (Kish, H. Schertenleib, S. 2009) – credentials that more than highlight how distributing via this method would be more than viable.
Sony could even adopt the approach used by Apple and the App store, in allowing these small innovative games to be sold from the store, with the profits shared between the developer and Sony. This tactic, coupled with a low price for the Move Me could even spark a rise in the presence of indie companies that choose to work with Move technology given the current rise in small but critically acclaimed indie games that are finding success through distribution networks such as Steam and even Xbox Live.
When Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo was formed, co- founder Masaru Ibuka created a 16 page document known as ‘The founding Prospectus’. This in itself may seem irrelevant to the current day Sony, as in the current market Sony could be seen as struggling, with reported full year losses forecasted at 2.9 billion dollars (Martin, 2012) – making a loss for the fourth straight year in a row. However with the Move Me at least, it feels like there might be something more than simple yet idealistic words to be found in that old document, from the times of Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo and badly cooked rice, that could be used to shape the Move Me into the product that it can be.
“My first and primary objective was establishing a stable workplace where engineers could work to their hearts’ content in full consciousness of their joy in technology and their social obligation.” Masaru Ibuka, Co-Founder of Sony/ Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, The Founding Prospectus, 1946 (Nathan,1999. 10)
Bibliography:
Good, O (2008) Surgeons 50 Percent Better After Wiimote Sim. Available from: ,http://kotaku.com/5032474/surgeons-50-percent-better-after-wiimote-sim>
Martin, M (2012) Sony expects full year losses to reach 220 Billion yen. Available from: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-02-02-sony-expects-full-year-losses-to-reach-220-billion
Nathan, J (1999) Sony: The Private Life.
PlayStation Museum (2011)The Complete History of the Sony PlayStation, Available from: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryi1QBA6XyI
TED (2008) Johnny Lee demos Wii Remote hacks. Available from: < http://www.ted.com/talks/johnny_lee_demos_wii_remote_hacks.htm >
Zollner, M. Huber, S.(2011) Navi – Navigational Aids for the Visually Impaired. Available from: <http://hci.uni-konstanz.de/blog/2011/03/15/navi/?lang=en
Kish, H. Schertenleib, S (2009) ACGi Sony Computer Entertainment Research and Development Presentation.
Controller family tree. Available from:
History of Controllers (2011) Available from:
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