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Playstation 3 Already Won the Next Gen Battle?
damyan writes "The BBC are running an article that claims that the Playstation 3 has already won the next-gen battle, since 'The Informa Media Group predicts that Sony will sell more than 30 million PlayStation 3s in Europe by 2010. It puts Microsoft in second place with 10 million sales and Nintendo trailing in third with five million.' If only everyone could see that well into the future."
Until the battle occurs.
I can predict anything. Doesn't make it true.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
never fumble and release a crappy update to an existing game system
Atari 5200 anyone? excellent graphics (for early 80s), awful controllers.
"Meanwhile, Nintendo seems set to play to its strengths and emphasise game quality and innovation over processor horsepower."
It's interesting they should say that...the Gamecube's games look consistently better than PS2 games in no small part due to the additional power the Gamecube has over the PS2, and the relative ease of developing games on the Gamecube. Then, the article goes on to say Nintendo emphasizes game quality over power, which they already have plenty of! If this isn't a ringing endorsement for Nintendo, I don't know what is.
I wish they were right. Carts rule. No load times. Don't get scratched. Don't need a case. The main advantage of a CD is its storage capacity but all we've gotten out of that are boring cut scenes and an annoying whirr whirr whirr after you beat a boss. Ah well.
Why is the hard drive thing still an issue? It shouldn't be an issue at all yet since no specs have been released on the system.
Would an internal 4 Gig flash drive make everyone happy? Because that's not outside the realm of possibility yet.
Also, who predicts something as unpredictable as video game sales? This is a stupid thing to do. Maybe after we see some specs on the consoles in question. But, gamers are getting smarter and more tuned in to what makes a system good and for all we know Nintendo could release a system that simply blows the other 2 away 3-6 months after the other two are released.
All in all, I can't believe somebody like the BBC would run an article like this.
what?
The number of people who will use linux support as a criterion for deciding which console to buy is going to be so tiny that you're dreaming if you think it's going to have any impact whatsoever.
This is simply untrue. Tell me how many games MS has ported from PC to the Xbox currently. It's not a large number. If you're thinking games like Counter Strike and Rainbow Six, those weren't made by MS. I know Halo was on Xbox first and its sequel is easily one of the most anticipated games ever.
You're arguing the opposite point, and supporting what he said by using Halo as an example.
It's actually easier to prove that MS is not porting games from the XBox to the PC than to prove that games are not coming from the PC to the XBox (note in the latter I didn't state MS). MS has, in fact, released very few of their XBox titles on the PC, especially if you look at recent titles like Crimson Skies High Road to Revenge, the Project Gotham Racing titles, and the XSN Sports line.
On the other hand, I'd have to say that every console is suffering from the cross-platform development that is now common, in part because of the development costs for a game, and in part because of the number of platforms out there. Each platform has it's must-have games, but the cross-platform games each suffer unique problems because they are rarely optimized for any platform.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
Yet the price of the game is still the same if not higher.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Actually, IBM is the winner of the nextgen video game consoles. IBM designs the Cell chip together with Sony. A 64 Bit powerpc will power the XBOX 2. And last but not least, IBM will produce the CPU for the gamecube successor.
Ok, this is simply wrong. I will do my best not to let it propagate.
My current work is leading the XBox port of a PS2 engine for a major upcoming title. The Game Cube port was canceled half way through our development.
The Game Cube does not, _by far_, have the best development kit. Its not as bad as for the PS2, but there is no productivity boost there at all. Quite the opposite. The Cube lacks memory and DVD space; has fewer controller buttons, big endian vs. little endian. Fitting the same game as for PS2 on the Cube is twice the work. The graphics chip and memory cache is quite capable, but thats about it. It is so lacking in installed based and hardware compared to XBox and PS2 that often it does not make financial sense to support it, unless you're Nintendo or an exclusive developer.
The PS2, I've heard from collegues, is like writing a graphics card driver from scratch. You have fine-grained low level control, but you pay for it in complexity and arcane assembly coding. Support and docs are poor.
The XBox has _the best_ development kit, support and documentation. Its better than D3D SDK on a PC. Using an NVidia GPU it can do the most complex texture blending operations. XBox signature look is shiny bump-mapped environment maps and (simple) stencil shadocws. However the PS2 has far more fill rate/bandwidth which clever artists can use to great effet with particle systems, multi-layer polys etc.
Most developers care about the installed base of a platform first, and the PS2 wins hands down.