Sony says the same things about the PS3 that Sega did the Saturn

And that doesn’t bode well, does it?

I hate to draw the comparison, mostly because the Sega Saturn is my favorite game system of all time. But the parallels between what Sony’s Kaz Hirai is saying lately compared to what Sega said about the Saturn back in the day is kind of scary. 

This comes from a Sega Saturn white paper:

…growth won’t be possible on competing systems that offer a simpler architecture. It may be easier in some ways for developers to create programs for the competition because there’s less to learn and work with from a technology standpoint — but that means that developers are much more likely to run up against the limits of the system in a short span of time.

And this from Kaz Hirai’s mouth: 

“We don’t provide the ‘easy to program for’ console that [developers] want, because ‘easy to program for’ means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?”

At insertcredit, they point out that while that logic is flawed, following it could mean that the PS3 would end up being my favorite system. Nah. I don’t see that.

Here’s one parallel I do see: both Sega then and Sony now are full of sh*t. Another parallel? Both systems cost too much right out of the gate.