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Eurogamer do some excellent "Digital Foundry" articles comparing PS3 and 360 versions of games (and where appropriate, PC and Wii-U versions as well). Let me find some links for you.

Far Cry 3
Need for Speed: Most Wanted
Mass Effect 3
Darksiders 2

There are lots more if you want to look.

tl;dr version - in most cases, the graphical and performance differences between PS3 and 360 "top end" games are so miniscule that you need detailed frame-by-frame comparisons to spot them. Broadly speaking, what differences do exist show the 360 having an advantage on Unreal-tech games (which is a lot of the big shooters). There are a few games which do swing heavily in favour of one platform or another (eg. Skyrim towards the 360, Final Fantasy XIII towards the PS3), but these are the exception rather than the norm and tend to reflect a developer which is much more comfortable with one set of hardware than the other.

Neither console crushes the other in performance terms in the real world. End of.

"Slashdot has always been full of shit, getting older just means you can recognise it a lot faster."

Not quite, I can look at trends in the younger generation that worship Steam and DRM where-as most of the olderschool PC gamers during the 90's detest DRM. Earlier this decade if you made pro-steam worshiping DRM statements you'd be downvoted to oblivion. Now with younger mods/steam fans you see many mods give +5 insightful to more and more glowing comments on Steam DRM. This is a generational transformation and you see it in the modding trends of what gets modded up/down or just left alone/ignored.

Now this doesn't mean all young adults/teens/kids like DRM it just means kids tend to accept what they grow up with and don't question what has always been there. Think about the differences of growing up on command line operating systems like DOS vs say windows xp or windows 7 with fully functional web browsers plus easy-mode steamstore. Huge difference. Night and day kind of difference.

Kids/teens don't know what has been lost/don't care. People who grew up during the earlier gaming (pre online only games) era are hugely disappointed by the downright criminal changes in the industry because they WATCHED the industry grow from when it was tiny so they have superior understanding and perspective. They were there during game-modding golden years of Quake/duke/doom/etc that has been smothered (Supcom 2 was locked down and made difficult to mod at publisher request). Games like diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 have been increasingly fucked with because of publishers greed.

Not only that, kids are ripe for corporate PR manipulation. Just see this article here where the talk about 'engineering' psychological changes via PR campaigns for the acceptance of F2P / online DRM.

Quote:"But the most important aspect is there is a psychological transformation of the customers and the publishers that has to happen before everything is F2P on every platform. We are promoting these steps with other titles we're doing right now in our company."

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-11-12-ditching-far-cry-piracy-gameplay-and-just-about-breaking-even-crytek-on-the-ups-and-downs-of-the-crysis-series

Now I may be wrong, but I believe that WipEout HD/Fury is proper 1080p60.
That was one of the big things that held up the game - Studio Liverpool weren't going to ship it until it was running smoothly at Full HD.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-wipeout-hd-fury-interview

From reading the interview, it seems they had to decide between 1080p and 720p with 2xMSAA and chose 1080p although it was a lot harder, they wanted to push the boundaries. They also implement a few cheats as well, things like dynamically altering the horizontal resolution (and then, I assume, scaling it up to 1920 pixels wide)

I'm sure David Braben wouldn't want any pesky used copies floating around:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-03-19-braben-used-sales-are-killing-single-player-games

Given those remarks I don't think he's the kind of person who would think to kill off the used market with zero DRM and low prices...

There is something you've failed to consider regarding consoles and hardware. PC hardware is extremely flexible, but that comes at a cost for developers - it is practically impossible to optimize games for a broad range of hardware anywhere near as well as can be achieved on the static hardware of a games console. Example: The PC version of Battlefield 3 is naturally the best looking, but requires a fairly beefy computer to really shine. On the other hand, the PS3 with it's nVidia 7800(ish) runs the same game orders of magnitude better than a 7800GTX in a PC.

Quick not-exactly-scientific BF3 comparison:

1) Youtube vid of a 7800GTX in a PC managing 30-50fps at 1024x768 and low details: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7PKpGyjqBw
2) Comparison of PS3 and X360 pulling 25-30fps at 1080p and rather better details: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-face-off-battlefield-3?page=2

As such, this arguments boils down to economics and personal preferences - do you like control pads; can you live without cutting edge graphics; do you have other things to spend your money on than hardware upgrades? If you answered no to any of those, buy a PC. Otherwise, buy a console.

Nintendo ...they're much more innovative and take bigger risks than Sony and Microsoft.

I'm incredulous at this outrageous claim of yours. You must be taking the piss here. :(

Have you seen the extra-ordinary games that Sony has published/released on the PSN this generation?

Here are some of them, to just name a few: fLow, Journey, The Unfinished Swan, Pain, Heavy Rain

Here's a quote from Eurogamer regarding this:

While Sony has frequently been dragged over the coals during this hardware generation - sometimes with good cause, often without - the one thing it can most definitely be praised for is its dedication to the quirkier, artier end of the gaming spectrum. Few would have thought that such a corporate Goliath would excel at shepherding these delicate projects into the limelight, but from Flower to Noby Noby Boy to Journey to Linger in Shadows, the PlayStation Network has been the only console storefront to really carve out a niche for arthouse projects.

I would go as far as to say Sony has been the biggest risk-taker this generation, with its dedication to encouraging these kinds of games.

Do you have a source for the CPU ? I never found anything that stated how fast it is and how many cores only that it's an IBM PowerPC chip (which isn't surprising since the Gamecube, Wii and X-Box 360 all use some derivative of that).

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-08-30-how-powerful-is-the-wii-u-really

As for RAM keep in mind MS and Sony reserve memory for their systems as well, they just don't tell us how much.

We do actually know that. The Xbox 360 reserves 32 MB of its unified 512 MB for the OS and the PS3 reserves 43 MB of RAM and 7 MB of VRAM.

For anyone who's unfamiliar with this, and is curious, Greenpeace has a Guide to Greener Electronics.

[Greenpeace rep Casey Harrel] said in a Kotaku interview, that Nintendo (as Kotaku writes, "barely even attempt to submit, or make available, the information Greenpeace require to make accurate judgements." According to Casey (I think; Kotaku suddenly uses the name Corey): "Nintendo consistently scores the poorest on our Guide to Greener Electronics primarily because they donâ(TM)t submit, nor have any publicly available information, on over half the criteria that we use to assess company performance on the Guide."

In other words, Nintendo's "worst environmental record" is the equivalent of a database null. It's not "the worst", it's "unknown".

For the information Nintendo does put out, Greenpeace's rep does note, "those that they do have answers for, are quite poor."

In a response, Nintendo says, "We would like to assure customers that we take our environmental responsibilities seriously and are rigorous in our commitment to comply with all relevant laws relating to environmental and product safety, including avoiding the use of dangerous substances in our manufacturing processes and ensuring the safe disposal and recycling of materials."

Whether one loves or hates a company, it's a bit difficult to fault their abysmal environmental record just because they didn't fill out a third party company's survey.

Disclaimer: I'm a rational Nintendo fanboy. I love their products, but I can criticize Nintendo and their products as well.

This article has a picture of the perp: "Uniloc founder hits back after Minecraft fans vent fury in "disgusting" emails ".

From the caption: Ric Richardson, who sued Microsoft in 2003 for violating his patent relating to technology designed to deter software piracy. The parties settled out of court. Guess he's going to be busy with more e-mails and other stuff (pizzas, subscriptions, "police woman" strippers, etc.)

o me, that lack of power is a VERY good thing because it means the developers will be forced to make their games fun rather than pretty.

And who is going to bother to make games for it when they can just continue to make games for platforms that sell far more (iOS?)

I don't mean to rain on this parade because I think efforts like this are fantastic generally, but I have serious reservations about this being able to go anywhere...

One last issue is how will Ouya address Android piracy? If developers are experiencing high piracy rates on Android already, how will this diminish in an Android based console? That question alone is vital to address to get strong and sustained support for the platform.

The Ouya's 'store' requires online access to play the games through it. I believe the games will all phone home to verify your online status. In addition, the store won't work if you have your console rooted. Some of that info is here http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-07-16-ouya-responds-to-skepticism

Game sales are down for consoles maybe. With a bit of googling, you might find silly things like NVidia's 23% revenue growth attributed to PC gaming alone. And of course that Steam has 100% sales growth in 2012 over 2011. Oh and Diablo III selling like hotcakes. But hey, this profit growth is all because DRM is making people NOT buy games right?

The latency issue is all (well, 90%+) about I/O, and no emulated system is complete without I/O.

Have a look at the latency measurements here. Around 70ms at best. These aren't emulated games, but I don't think that makes much difference.

On the original systems, typical latency would be just one frame, around 2ms.

If cherry-picking hardware is allowed, replace the LCD with a CRT, replace the wireless USB with a parallel port game controller, and block your ears.

> Feel free to point out necessary part of a desktop system it is missing,.

Have you tried to run Linux on 256 megabytes of RAM recently? Forget about recent versions of KDE or GNOME or even XFCE or LXDE. Check out this review http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df-hardware-raspberry-pi-review

> Once you get going, first impressions may not live up to expectations -
> and it's important to understand why. The big issue with Raspberry Pi
> in the here and now is that there is no hardware acceleration of the desktop
> and as such the OS feels clunky and very unresponsive, with navigation and
> movement of windows often feeling lumpen and slow. Functionality
> elsewhere is also limited. The Midori browser included doesn't support
> HTML5 or Java, and there is no support for Flash (and the Adobe platform
> is unlikely to be implemented). Web browsing is therefore an exercise in
> patience and you'll need to be prepared for the fact that there's a lot
> of online content you won't be able to access.

> The vision of the Raspberry Pi as an everyman computer capable of
> web-browsing, office work and media playback really isn't there yet - but it's
> important to stress that the software is in the very early stages of development.

Given the DRM in GTA IV, I think Rockstar Games might actually support this Rockstar. Birds of a money-grubbing* feather flock together.

*I just realized "money-grubbing" sounds a fair bit like "mother-fucking". I guess that explains some things...

Seems GAME AU couldn't get Diablo 3 because of financial problems, so customers who pre-ordered the game won't get the game and won't get a refund.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-05-14-game-australia-falls-into-administration

Agreed. I tend to logical positivism in that it doesn't matter if it's real or not if you can't tell the difference. I think the big problem is with the definition of "real" and "exists".

A good working definition of a "real thing" for me is "A doesn't stop observing/changing the universe connected to it, when I stop observing/changing A". That would be true both of "real reality" and the "simulated reality" of this thought experiment.

For example, the persistent shared universe of Eve Online is more "real" for its avatars than an offline game of Elite in the sense that you can't simply enable cheats on your workstation and be able to fly through walls. You don't get the change the rules; only the people running the shared simulation get to do that. Therefore, the simulation may not be "physically" in the sense that it can be kicked, but the electrons and magnetic domains that comprise the data of that simulation in the server very much are real, and exist whether I'm logged in or out. And if Jita gets burned, I as a player can't just restore from a backup and go off into my own private version of the universe.

Seriously, anyone who's arguing that data isn't "real" might be okay in philosophy or computer science, but probably hasn't done much IT work, and found themselves staring at a missing backup tape which very definitely physically isn't there.

It is a bit to blame just those three. Look at the publishers.

Take the company who made Unreal Tournament: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Consoles-PC-Games-Unreal-Gears,10437.html
PC gaming is dead and we left the sinking ship, they said. PC gaming, if it lives will be, lol, Farmevilles on Facebook.

Of course a year later they are back to targeting the PC as the primary market: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-08-16-epic-games-working-on-five-new-titles talking about being wary of "betting their company" on every game produced in a market that is Halo, COD and Gears.

I really have to wonder the point of bothering with PC gaming anymore. Most PC games today are now just unoptimized console ports, and there is restrictive DRM from companies like EA and Ubisoft. I do consider Steam to be a bright spot, and its DRM is so invisible that I've never actually encountered it in practice, but then again, Steam is already moving to consoles as well, and Blizzard seems to be dipping its toes in the water.

I just think integrated platforms, like consoles and mobile devices, always win out in the long-term. I certainly don't want to maintain graphics card drivers or other PC-related issues anymore. It's boring and takes time away from playing games. Consoles today practically are PCs, but without all the headaches.

the problem is what we claim one thing can do. a qr code v40? that is less than what one cga adapter could modulate. frame size frame rate? do you realise how much data can be wrangled by a modern gpu? http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2011-gaming-graphics-charts/Mafia-2-Enthusiast,2670.html
at 1080p with 16x anisotropic filtering and 118 fps that means it can modulate 9.279897e+9 worth of data symbols(frames) and modifies the frames 16 passes (or pretends to based on it's drivers) and you kids wonder why your toys break!

I really have to wonder the point of bothering with PC gaming anymore. Most PC games today are now just unoptimized console ports, and there is restrictive DRM from companies like EA and Ubisoft. I do consider Steam to be a bright spot, and its DRM is so invisible that I've never actually encountered it in practice, but then again, Steam is already moving to consoles as well, and Blizzard seems to be dipping its toes in the water.

I just think integrated platforms, like consoles and mobile devices, always win out in the long-term. I certainly don't want to maintain graphics card drivers or other PC-related issues anymore. It's boring and takes time away from playing games. Consoles today practically are PCs, but without all the headaches.

There's particular relevance to this subject today in relation to the news (via Eurogamer) of a potential weakness in the password system protecting Xbox Live accounts.

If MS can't refute this one quickly, I suspect it's going to get quite serious. Potentially "Playstation Network hack" serious.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-07-26-crysis-2-racks-up-three-million-sales 3 Million.

He never got on the plane, get your facts straight, sounds like he almost did though, cause German kids are the #1 security threat to this country.

Source:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-02-21-the-boy-who-stole-half-life-2-article

It's a pretty good read.

I can't help thinking how a real criminal would have proxied, and sold the code rather than published it, but to the FBI it's all the same.

If OnLive could do 5-20ms they would. But according to this article it runs about 150-200ms. And of course this will vary depending on your location. Google has the cash to distribute a lot more servers than some little gaming service.

While this may be true in your particular case, many people are within the 1000 mile radius of an OnLive data center on a decent connection.

People talk a lot about how the network latency would make the input lag to OnLive unbearable, but consider this: 50ms of latency gets you from Montreal to Dallas (~2800km), and GTA IV on the XBox 360 has 133-200ms of input lag despite being local. In fact, every console game that Eurogamer measured had at least 67ms of latency, and they claim that the average seemed to be about 133ms. Gamers are clearly willing to accept this latency (GTA IV, with latency higher than OnLive in many cases, is clearly a very popular game), making OnLive seem much more practical.

I'm by no means close to an OnLive datacenter, or even in the same country (I live in Montreal, and the nearest OnLive datacenter is in D.C., if memory serves), and to me the latency would seem to be on par with a laggy console game. That is to say, not great, but no worse than I've seen with some console games. To me, the real issue with OnLive was the low bitrate; it looks OK (just OK) when there's no movement, but playing a match of UT3 on vehicles was unpleasant due to all detail being lost while in motion (and this on either a 50 meg down 14 meg up VDSL2 connection, or a 60 meg down 3 meg up cable line).

The good news is that it's a lot easier to increase the bitrate of a video stream than it is to break the speed of light ;)

You might be interested in this article covered in a number of places online.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/ms-killed-pc-xbox-cross-platform-play
http://gizmodo.com/5593116/were-pc-gamers-too-good-for-microsofts-cross+platform-gaming-project

The story was covered at slashdot, but my search-fu only really extends to google.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but children are property until they reach a "legal age". If a 13 year old runs away from home, they will be brought back to the parents (property owners) the same as a dog, car or other item that can be identified as belonging to parents. Children also cannot enter in to binding contracts without parent consent.

Many caring people adopt (a.k.a. purchase) children from other countries, which would certainly lead to a better life for the purchased child. The story doesn't mention if the sellers had any sort of selection criteria or if they just passed them off to other human traffickers.

Which is worse?
1. Child is sold and lives a life of being exploited (sweatshop labor, sexually abused, etc.)
2. Child dies from neglect because parents were too busy playing video games? Wouldn't be the first time.
    http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/news200605wowbaby
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/05/korean-girl-starved-online-game

Eurogamer's Digital Foundry blog did some extensive testing with HDMI cables which shows that it really doesn't matter what type of cables you buy: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-hdmi

Tadaaa http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-06-21-pc-race-driver-grid-online-mp-revived

Here you go, there is a more complete article some where but I don't have the link to it at hand. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-06-09-will-ps3-exclusive-dust-514-head-to-xbox

A much better comparison was done months ago here: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-hdmi
It's a digital signal, so with the correct capture equipment, they were able to get a checksum of the image sent from different HDMI cables. And guess what, they were all identical.

It used to be about how BluRay will fail completely. Now it's "only" selling half of the market.

No, BluRay will likely never have the complete hold of DVD, simply because download is a real option. But it's certainly not going anywhere.

What do you think will be in the next consoles?

He is not allowed to discuss the terms of the settlement (and those terms have not been made public)

They were, just not officially.

It's actually a surprisingly good deal as far as settlements go, since they basically only required him to stop doing what they didn't want him to do. He doesn't pay any damages. If I were in his place, I'd certainly take it when it was offered.

However, it's pretty much the exact opposite of what he claimed he was going to stand for when he took the donation money. Where it goes now is not particularly relevant (and I doubt he'll renege on his promise with that regard, at least... it would be too much of a reputation hit, even on top of what he already has).

The settlement isn't that confidential. Geohot Sony settlement details leak

Yea I wouldn't believe them after what happened to world of goo:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/world-of-goo-piracy-at-90-per-cent

I would bet that most people who pirate don't distinguish based on whether the original had DRM or not. $10 indy DRM free games get pirated like everything else. What a shame and embarrassment to pc gamers.

Neither of those screenshots are even close to looking like something with as much graphical complexity as WoW.

You got me curious. Had WOW had a sudden leap in quality since I last saw it?

Looks like NOT.

I don't see anything there that is not equalled by Epic Citadel.

Yes that was an engine demo but you could walk through it freely - and it looked great on the first iPad. Add in more characters and some animations and it seems like you could easily equal the quality of graphics WOW players enjoy today on the iPad2, scaled back a bit on the first iPad.

Game development is a quick and dirty process, and they need to be multi-platform to sell more. There is no time to learn the specifics of a platform and designing your game to exploit it.

And that's why you use platform specific libraries to exploit it if you don't have the time to do it yourself. God of War III's morphological anti-aliasing is a good example of the capability enabled by Cell:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/the-making-of-god-of-war-iii
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-mlaa-360-pc-article

To quote the relevant part of the first article:

According to director of technology Tim Moss, God of War III worked with the Sony technology group in the UK to produce an edge-smoothing technique for the game that the developers call MLAA, or morphological anti-aliasing. Indeed, Moss's colleague Christer Ericson took us to task on the specifics of MLAA a few months back in this DF blog post, revealing that the team has put extensive research into this in search of their own solution.

"The core implementation of the anti-aliasing was written by some great SCEE guys in the UK, but came very late in our development cycle making the integration a daunting task," adds senior staff programmer Ben Diamand.

The specifics of the implementation are still unknown at this time (though Ken Feldman suggests it "goes beyond" the papers Ericson spoke about in the DF piece) but the bottom line is that the final result in God of War III is simply phenomenal: aliasing is all but eliminated and the sub-pixel jitter typically associated with this technique has been massively reduced compared to other implementations we've seen.

The custom anti-aliasing solution is also another example of how PlayStation 3 developers are using the Cell CPU as a parallel graphics chip working in tandem with the RSX. As Richard Lemarchand discussed in his Uncharted 2 post-mortem, the basic theory is all about moving tasks typically performed by the graphics chip over the Cell. Post-processing effects in particular work well being ported across.

The more flexible nature of the CPU means that while such tasks can be more computationally expensive, you get a higher-quality result. The increased latency incurred can be reduced by parallelising across multiple SPUs.

In the case of God of War III, any given frame typically takes between 16ms and 30ms to render, give or take a millisecond or two. The original 2x multisampling AA solution took a big chunk of rendering time, at 5ms. Now, the hugely more impressive MLAA algorithm takes a total of 20ms of CPU time. However, it's running across five SPUs, meaning that overall latency is a mere 4ms. So the final result is actually faster, and that previous 5ms of GPU time can be repurposed for other tasks.

Game development is a quick and dirty process, and they need to be multi-platform to sell more. There is no time to learn the specifics of a platform and designing your game to exploit it.

And that's why you use platform specific libraries to exploit it if you don't have the time to do it yourself. God of War III's morphological anti-aliasing is a good example of the capability enabled by Cell:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/the-making-of-god-of-war-iii
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-mlaa-360-pc-article

To quote the relevant part of the first article:

According to director of technology Tim Moss, God of War III worked with the Sony technology group in the UK to produce an edge-smoothing technique for the game that the developers call MLAA, or morphological anti-aliasing. Indeed, Moss's colleague Christer Ericson took us to task on the specifics of MLAA a few months back in this DF blog post, revealing that the team has put extensive research into this in search of their own solution.

"The core implementation of the anti-aliasing was written by some great SCEE guys in the UK, but came very late in our development cycle making the integration a daunting task," adds senior staff programmer Ben Diamand.

The specifics of the implementation are still unknown at this time (though Ken Feldman suggests it "goes beyond" the papers Ericson spoke about in the DF piece) but the bottom line is that the final result in God of War III is simply phenomenal: aliasing is all but eliminated and the sub-pixel jitter typically associated with this technique has been massively reduced compared to other implementations we've seen.

The custom anti-aliasing solution is also another example of how PlayStation 3 developers are using the Cell CPU as a parallel graphics chip working in tandem with the RSX. As Richard Lemarchand discussed in his Uncharted 2 post-mortem, the basic theory is all about moving tasks typically performed by the graphics chip over the Cell. Post-processing effects in particular work well being ported across.

The more flexible nature of the CPU means that while such tasks can be more computationally expensive, you get a higher-quality result. The increased latency incurred can be reduced by parallelising across multiple SPUs.

In the case of God of War III, any given frame typically takes between 16ms and 30ms to render, give or take a millisecond or two. The original 2x multisampling AA solution took a big chunk of rendering time, at 5ms. Now, the hugely more impressive MLAA algorithm takes a total of 20ms of CPU time. However, it's running across five SPUs, meaning that overall latency is a mere 4ms. So the final result is actually faster, and that previous 5ms of GPU time can be repurposed for other tasks.

So I'm going to support Sony - by buying all the good games they release this year.

And the next.

And so on.

Since you obviously need to be spoon-fed, here are the numbers for FY2010: Total Income: >$8 BILLION Total Profits: $679 Million Where are these losses you are talking about? And to back it up, just one of many sources you could have found: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/ms-shifts-10-3m-xbox-360s-in-fy2010

So, cheap games are a threat to Nintendo, eh?
Also, second-hand games are claimed to be a threat to the games industry.
And I'm not even going to enumerate the times that piracy has been said to be killing gaming.

Maybe Reggie Fils-Aime needs to take up a position in a less competitive industry - or, if he really believes he's worth the salary he's paid from Nintendo he should MTFU and deal with it.

LucasArts developed a 100% faithful remake of the original Monkey Island in 2009.

The new graphics and audio are superb but scene-for-scene, and dialogue-for-dialogue, it is 100% faithful to the original. It even has a classic mode where you can substitute the original graphics and music for the reworked stuff - it's 100% synchronised. Clearly a fine tribute to the original and aimed at people who appreciated it at the time.

Screenshots available at this site I found.

It's four to five hours

Actually, 3D may actually have something to offer...
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-12-14-killzone-3-split-screen-co-op-confirmed

With 3D, since they have to double the graphics output, it makes local co-op easier to do. It won't be co-op in 3D, but hey.

There was also a method patented a while ago for local co-op using 3D glasses a while back as well...
http://www.techradar.com/news/television/sony-uses-3d-trick-to-split-screen-for-multiple-viewers-704298

Nice to see a throughly researched article :/

Looks like co-op might actually be making a come back :)

Analysts are looking as far ahead as 2014 for XBox Kinnect. Sony has also said that there's 10 years of life in PS3. So if Nintendo comes with a new concept that is as groundbreaking as Wii (in terms of tech and/or marketing) in 2012 then they sure as hell haven't been outpaced by either Microsoft or Sony.

On-board processor was dropped [citation needed]

Here, here, here, and here.

Depth camera runs at 320x240 so it can't detect fingers? Maybe not, but it's doing infinitely more skeletal recognition than Move is.

Actually, Kinect only allows skeletal recognition for its own Avatars -- that functionality is not available to games developers. Both consoles are doing an equal amount of skeletal recognition in the SDK exposed to developers -- none.

Not ambitious? PS3 or PC could do the same thing trivially with two cameras? OK, then why aren't they?

Because, quite simply, everyone else knows it's not worth it. In fact, Sony was offered the Kinect technology and chose not to use it, specifically because they knew its marketability is limited.

Sony has already tried the no-controller camera-driven games with the EyeToy, which bombed. There have been all kinds of toy programs using webcams, which are all forgotten. Adding a depth camera does not fundamentally change the interaction -- in fact, it barely affects it at all. In userspace, Kinect is EyeToy, is doomed. You cannot play engaging games without a controller.

Overpriced? Perhaps, but I have a hard time believing that Microsoft is pricing it significantly higher than they have to - they want it to be a success and the know it's up against a less expensive competitor.

If they cannot sell two cameras and a toy motor for less than $150 I'll eat my hat. Do you really believe, for instance, that they "can't sell" a 250GB hard drive for less than $129.99 when normal 250GB hard drives can be had for less than $50 (a third of the price, ultimately)?

Basically, it sounds like you don't think they're going far enough, but I think if they went as far as you want them to they would completely price themselves out of the market. At some point you have to compromise ship something practical.

If I put a box of trash up on eBay for only a 10% markup over what it all cost me, how many people do you think will buy it? The market doesn't care what you spent. It cares what the price is and what they get out of it. $150 is going to sail right over everyone's head. You may bookmark this post and refer back to it when the Kinect line is officially discontinued (I will give it say Summer of 2012, after Microsoft loses a lot of money, which is what their games division has been doing all along.)

The quality is suboptimal as was shown with the review.

This one?

Almost 18 months ago now we came up with several good reasons why OnLive couldn't possibly work, at least in relation to the specs and claims being made by the company itself. Now we've been hands-on with the final product, the company needs to be congratulated on just how close it has got to sorting out the latency issues which were one of the key concerns. Out of controlled conditions, OnLive has managed to get within spitting distance of console response times and that's a clear technological achievement worthy of recognition.

Yeah, that totally reads like a complete and utter failure.

Cheap, dead-simple "Game rental", buffet-style. Pay per hour, not per game.

I've tried OnLive, and yes, it is simple, but their game rentals are in days, not hours. I wish they had a pay per hour service, but unfortunately right now the game publishers are killing the service before it even started. Every game has a different rental price. For example, Borderlands costs $8.99 for 5 days or $5.99 for a 3 day rental, while Batman: Arkham Asylum is only $6.99 for 5 days or $4.99 for a 3 day rental. The publishers even have arbitrary restrictions like "this game may be played on PC clients but not Mac;" even though the OnLive client runs fine on Mac.

I will give them credit: most games have a free 30 minute demo mode which lets you play 30 minutes for free. This is a great way to try out new games and find out if they suck or not before potentially buying them in a store. I would not buy a game here though - If OnLive goes out of business, and I can't see how they're going to make much profit, to be honest, all my games I've ever purchased are GONE permanently.

When the "1st year free" offer runs out, I'm not going to resubscribe. $50 a year just to be able to pay full retail price to buy games stored in a digital locker that I can't even download to my own PC, and can only play at 720p with compression artifacts? No thanks.

They certainly wouldn't use TCP for something so latency sensitive, and it seems logical that they'd have designed their system to tolerate packetloss.

In terms of QoS queues, they're already making peering arrangements with major ISPs (BT seems first) in order to get preferential treatment.

I'm not sure why everybody thinks the latency EuroGamer is reporting is so high; it's not much different from LOCAL latency that EuroGamer reported for console games:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-lag-factor-article

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-console-lag-round-two-article

If 150ms of latency is acceptable for an FPS on a console, how come it's not acceptable for an FPS on OnLive?

They certainly wouldn't use TCP for something so latency sensitive, and it seems logical that they'd have designed their system to tolerate packetloss.

In terms of QoS queues, they're already making peering arrangements with major ISPs (BT seems first) in order to get preferential treatment.

I'm not sure why everybody thinks the latency EuroGamer is reporting is so high; it's not much different from LOCAL latency that EuroGamer reported for console games:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-lag-factor-article

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-console-lag-round-two-article

If 150ms of latency is acceptable for an FPS on a console, how come it's not acceptable for an FPS on OnLive?

Less than 5ms is nonsense (a simple framerate calculation , but Digital Foundry did quite a few input lag tests.

Anywhere from 60ms to over 100ms is common. Apparently gamers start to notice input lag at 166ms. Also, input lag and network lag shouldn't be confused with each other. The ping values you see in your game aren't 1-on-1 comparable to the input lag rates reported here.

To be honest, the 150ms input lag surprises me in a positive way. It's much lower than I had expected. For a game like UT3, 150ms is probably way too much and apparently that's one of the faster games, so OnLive's input latency is probably still too high for most games.