Sony is going strong into the next-generation as the PS4 is the favored winner over the Xbox One and the Wii U. But this wasn’t always the case. This list of the 10 Biggest Sony Fails goes over some of Sony’s worst blunders early on in this generation. Some of these are just marketing fails. Others are huge malfunctions of policy. Still, others are peripherals that just weren’t worth a damn. These are their greatest misses, the 10 Biggest Sony Fails.

  • 10

    PS3 Home

    Our first entry on our list of the 10 Biggest Sony Fails, is Sony’s answer to Nintendo’s Miis. Every console needed some sort of social platform in this generation, and Sony’s was PS3 Home. Unfortunately, it was pretty glitchy and to get the most out of it, you needed to pay for new costumes and decorations for your home. Even after you did that, traveling to areas themed with a certain game only really helped you if you owned the game. Even then it was just a secondary way to launch the game and chat with game players, which was redundant with any game that already had its own built in chat system. Really, the best thing Home gave us was digital game shows, and even those lost their appeal after a while.

    loading...
  • 9

    The Great PlayStation Network Outage

    We probably don’t have to go over this sad event in Sony history again. Most of you already remember Sony’s prosecution of hacker George Hotz who figured out how to (legally) jailbreak the PS3 for homebrew software use. Of course, any amount of jailbreaking leads to piracy, which lead Sony to take legal action against Hotz, and which eventually lead hackers to attack the PSN, causing it to go offline. After weeks of downtime and vague statements about possible leaks of personal information,. Sony finally got the PSN back online and offered us some free games in return, but other than inFamous, none of these games were really all that popular. All of this could be avoided if Sony just didn’t overreact to the homebrewing community.

    loading...
  • 8

    The PlayStation Move

    When the Wii blew every other console out of the water at the beginning of this console generation, Sony and Microsoft decided, “hey, we need to get on some of this motion gaming business.” The Xbox 360’s answer was the Kinect, which did away with the controller interface all together and while it mostly is responsible for motion control shovelware, it is home to some amazing games like Child of Eden and Dance Central. The Move, however, did not fare so well. Marred by significant delays in response time, the Move was easily viewed as the worst motion control apparatus on the market. To this day there is no memorable Move game, with the possible exception of the Move patches that were eventually added to Little Big Planet 2 and Heavy Rain.

    loading...
  • 7

    The UMD and Memory Stick

    Sony has some weird obsession with proprietary hardware. The PSP ran off these crappy little discs called UMDs that were supposed to be the next big thing in portable media. Its storage was the “memory stick” which was completely unnecessary because Micro SD had already been developed at that point. Maybe Sony is just really paranoid that pirates will find a way to jailbreak their consoles, but to be fair pirates jailbroke the PSP anyway. In fact, the only proprietary media storage format of Sony’s that really took off was Blu-Ray, and even that is eventually going to be made obsolete by streaming media.

    loading...
  • 6

    The PlayStation Phone

    The Xperia Play, otherwise known as the PlayStation Phone, was supposed to bridge the gap between mobile devices like iPhones and Droids, and portable gaming systems. It had classic Sony game controls integrated directly into the phones design, and it was supposed to have a Sony exclusive line-up of games that utilized them. Unfortunately, it was a Droid phone and all the best Droid games were still designed with a touch screen in mind. The control pad was really just used to run classic game emulators. While it was pretty awesome to be able to emulate the Dreamcast on your phone, Sony sure as heck couldn’t advertise or sell their phone based on its illegal game emulation capabilities.

    loading...
  • 5

    The SixAxis Rumble Debacle

    The Wii and the PlayStation 3 came out around the same time, and so it was inevitable that they would be compared to each other. The PS3 was advertising its new SixAxis tilt technology across from the Wii’s accelerometer technology. Unfortunately, the original SixAxis controller didn’t have vibration, like the DualShock 2 did, because “it would interfere with the motion sensing technology.” Since the Wii had a controller with both motion control and rumble, Sony fans called a big “bullshit” on this one. Sony even proved themselves wrong by later releasing the DualShock 3 which had vibration integrated in along with fully functional motion controls. You deserve to be on a list of 10 Biggest Sony Fails when you debunk your own claims!

    loading...
  • 4

    Lair

    Lair was a 2007 PlayStation 3 release title that was all about riding dragons, and it was supposed to blow our minds. Unfortunately, it missed the target and blew out our wrists with a horrendous SixAxis based control scheme. While visually impressive, Lair was one of the most disappointing games of this current generation, featuring horrendous difficulty spikes, unresponsive controls, and a weak plot. Then Sony responded to poor reviews by saying that reviewers were playing the game wrong.

    loading...
  • 3

    Any Portable Sony System

    Sony has not had the best of times in the portable market. They entered when Nintendo had completely dominated the gaming space with the 3DS by offering a system (the PSP) that was more expensive and still required monetary investment in the way of memory sticks. They tried to rectify that problem with the Vita, but it, at one point, was selling worse than the Wii U, and you still have to upgrade its memory for it to be worth a damn. Now they are trying to sell the Vita by marketing it as a companion for the PS4. Will it work? We'll have to wait and see.

    loading...
  • 2

    Removing Other OS From the PS3

    The PS3 was advertised as one of the first consoles that was more than just a game playing machine. It was, in fact, a media companion, capable of watching movies, playing music, and even running other operating systems. In fact, one of the coolest stories that came out shortly after the PS3’s launch was about how the PS3 could be daisy chained together in order to make a missile guidance system. No fooling! Of course then Sony removed Other OS support because they were afraid of pirates or something, which of course was the beginning of Sony’s woes with Anonymous and the hacking community. It has since been proven that all of Sony’s excuses for the removal of Other OS were false. Other OS was hacked into a more recent PS3 slim with no problem. Sony just didn’t want us using it.

    loading...
  • 1

    599 U.S. Dollars Debacle

    Finally we bring you to #1 on our list of the 10 Biggest Sony Fails, the $599 U.S. dollars debacle. After their strong performance with the PS2, Sony thought they could do no wrong. They were convinced that gamers would spend $600 whopping dollars on their new system… and they just weren’t. The net was flooded with video clips, image macros, and more showing Kaz Hirai delivering his infamous $599 U.S. Dollars quote. It set the PS3 back quite a bit in this generation and may have cost it the battle against the Xbox 360. Sony made sure not to make the same mistake with the PS4, and is undercutting the Xbox One’s price tag by about $100, but that’s still $200 less than the PS3 was selling for at launch.

    loading...

More From Arcade Sushi