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Hopefully console manufacturers will shy away from overcomplicated designs as they have been quite costly for them in the current generation of consoles, but this is probably wishful thinking.

Well, it was said a while back that Sony aren't planning on investing as much in the PS4 as they did on the PS3.

I don't remember how much it was supposed to have been that Sony spent developing the PS3 but it was something absolutely horrendous, and I suspect that whatever the benefits of its much hyped custom chips were, it probably didn't offset what they cost to develop or the benefit they provided. Even the cost of subsidising the early PS3s to get market share apparently cost Sony several billion (and they were still expensive).

Yeah, I know that the PS3 is doing better now, probably due to the cost being reduced, but are they still in the red on the project overall?

Anyway, bottom line is that- far moreso in the current economic climate than in 2006- Sony probably realise that they shouldn't- and couldn't- follow that path again, and will probably go for a (relatively) more off-the-shelf XBoxy approach.

To be honest, while id Tech 5 with its heavy focus on textures is an interesting experiment, I'm looking a lot more forward to id Tech 6. It looks like it will use raycasting on sparse voxel octrees, same as the Unlimited Detail guys. That will by all accounts amount to a generational leap in graphics, doing for geometry pretty much what MegaTexturing does for textures.

John Carmack has been talking about voxels since 2008, but the hardware weren't up to it back then. Apparently they're doing research on id Tech 6 now.

While the Unlimited Detail guys have made some promising demos using static geometry with static lightning, I believe rendering a more dynamic game world with animation and varying lightning remains an unsolved problem. I can't wait to see what Carmack and his team can come up with.

-2006: Citigroup and M$ Develop a New Digital Identity Solution

-2008: Citi's Market Montage Solution Supports 200,000 Updates per Second with SQL Server 2005

- june 2011: Citigroup hacker attack affected more customers than first thought

-a week later, in the neighborhood of Redmont (about the PSN outage): "As a company, you can look back 8, 9 years ago, when Bill Gates wrote his Trustworthy Computing Memo that basically said, 'We need to change the way we architect our products and it has to be designed into the way we architect our products and services.' So it’s in our DNA, across the company. This is not just an IEB thing. So this has really been a multi-year effort for us as a company and it’ll continue to be one because this future, which we think is very much about services and very much cloud based - whether it be entertainment consumption or productivity - in order to do that, you have to have a secure environment. So we’re going to continue to do that and we don’t want to see any of our competitors hurt along the way. We think that’s bad for consumers."

http://www.industrygamers.com/news/microsoft-had-to-cap-kinect-pre-orders-because-demand-too-great/

Is nobody going to chime in and point out that Zynga is in the business of stealing the work of others, changing a few tiny features, and then claiming it as their own? Their CEO even said, "I don't fucking want innovation."

Read on here.

From http://www.industrygamers.com/news/panasonics-jungle-a-non-starter-right-out-of-the-gate-say-analysts/
"Seabury said that while porting a game from Windows or Mac to Linux isn't rocket science, "it's also usually not worth the cost and it's difficult to find talent with the right expertise.""
Finding someone to spread code over a few limited PPC cores to push 620p 'HD" is?
Artist, developers and coders will learn to write for this as they did any system and get really good at it too.

May we have a citation for your claim that Wii Sports is the best-selling?

Here you go.

I have no sympathy for third parties when they've purposely choose to knock out PS2 ports with bad controls, amateurish efforts and 900 versions of the same sort of game (ie numerous Resident Evil "lightgun" games) when Nintendo is releasing quality like Super Mario Galaxy.

3rd parties, when they do a quality job, do make money. The Wii has 79 million+ sellers. http://www.industrygamers.com/news/wii-ds-combine-for-79-million-sellers/

That is up from 54 last year. So for one year alone they have had 25. Thanks to the Wii being cheaper to develop for having a million seller on the Wii is much better than on the other systems and not reaching that number isn't even a bad thing (hence the reason they're already looking at Red Steel 3 when RS 2's sales have been lower than RS 1). Wii games sell in smaller numbers over a longer period of time so unlike PS3 and 360 games you can't really judge the success of Wii games on the first week sales. Wii gamers aren't obsessive and need to buy games straight away.

The Wii has genuinely brought about a completely way of doing things. Some third parties can't cope with it and fail. It's a shame but they have no one but themselves to blame.

>>>Nintendo did have a great run in the 80's and 90's, but the last 10 years have not been kind to Nintendo and each time it seems to be getting a little worse >>>

Really? Well let's see:

Early 80s - #1 was Atari

Atari caused the North American Video Game Crash of 1983 which Nintendo made its coming into in 1985 (was released in 1983 in Japan, 1985 else where)

Late 80s - #1 with the NES Early 90s - #1 with the Super NES (beat Sega) Late 90s - #2 with the N64 (beat Sega again)

N64 was beaten by the Playstation due to the N64 usage of cartridges that cost more to manufacture, took longer to manufacture and coundn't hold as much information.

Early 2000s - #2 with the Gamecube (it was a statistical tie with Xbox)

Sales of the Gamecube were 22 million, 2 million short of the 24 million of the Xbox and way behind the 140 sold of the PS2. While it wasn't far behind the XBox, it was no where near the major player it had been compared to Sony's Playstation.

Late 2000s - #1 with the Wii (outselling X360 and PS3 approximately two-to-one)

Not sure if that will help them in the long run though, more so since Wii sales have been slowing down at a massive pace from 803,000 units Wii's sold in Oct 2008 to 507,000 sold in Oct 2009 while I'm aware of the other 2 systems have been gaining hardware sales, and software titles which is what really moves a system.

While Nintendo had a rough patch during the PS1/PS2 years, it appears they rose to the top again. Of course it helped that Sony made a major mistake with overpricing their console at $700 but still, the stats speak for themselves. I wouldn't call #1 a rough patch.

The stats are speaking for themselves, your right. Wii Publisher Backlash is a showing that publishers took a chance with the Wii and their sales stats aren't worth supporting the Wii. And a Wii without many third-party games is a system not many will want to play.

>>>only the rare non-Nintendo made game is worth playing let alone buying instead of renting

Sega games on Wii? They are still fun.

Sega games on the PS3 and XBox 360 are fun too.

Aim for the nose

There seems to be a consensus that the MS exclusivity deal precludes imbedding the software into the PS3 for now, which is why they are doing the workaround with the disc. Frankly, this appears to be a "novel" interpretation of the contract signed with Microsoft but since Hastings is on the Microsoft BoD I don't imagine there will be any litigation as a result. http://www.industrygamers.com/news/netflix-finally-confirmed-for-ps3/