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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."
Actually not as stupid a question as it sounds - the PS2 has an official linux site, and the dev. environment is pretty similar (well, once you use the SPS2 stuff, anyway :-).
:-)
:-))
Given the advances in NUMA architectures in the Linux kernel, and the Cell processor being designed for parallel processing, it actually begins to sound reasonable... I'm sure there'll be developers who hit the metal, but given how fast the thing is supposed to run, I think it's a viable option
Then of course, it'll *really* be a war - closed MS Xbox-2 versus PS3 running Linux
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
"Meanwhile, Nintendo seems set to play to its strengths and emphasise game quality and innovation over processor horsepower."
Seems like most of their games lack the real looking "beauty" that XBox and PS2 games have. Most of Nintendo stuff still looks cartoonish or like Anime on steroids.
Hey, they have their share because people like that but maybe that's why they don't have to worry about raw horsepower?
Is it just me, or is this kind of hokey?
According to the report, the PS3 is expected to sell 32 million units in Europe by 2010, more than the combined sales of the Microsoft and Nintendo machines.
I mean, seriously, what are these so-called analysts basing that on? The article doesn't say.
Probably, the PS3 will do well, but it seems beyond premature to make up numbers like these without supporting them in any meaningful way.
Or between development and release. Granted, Sony may have the clout, but don't forget there are plenty of ways to mess up when it comes to releasing a new console. The Playstation 2's line up, for example, was pretty weak when released, and if someone makes the rash decision to drop PS1+2 support from the PS3, sales will plummet (though it looks MS may already have made that mistake with X-Box 3 if rumours are to believed.)The Dreamcast, on the other hand, had a very strong line-up, great hardware, but Sega's lack of decent advertising did the console no good. I think this is rather jumping the gun.
What sony does that has really set them apart from Microsoft, is to focus on the game developer. With that in mind, You'll probably see the official PS3 linux, as also the nice SDK's... It's all in the titles that the platofrom runs that makes it successful... Just cuz the XBox has the best hardware hasn't made it the #1...
--alop
That's the one thing that Sony really has going for it... it's the one reason that I think a lot of people want it. There are a lot of very good games out for the PSX or PS2 that many people don't want to stop playing... I still play PSX games on my PS2, because they're fun, not because they're pretty or anything. If the XBox2 doesn't have this, they're going to lose a lot of customers. People want to upgrade, not have tons of different systems from the same company in their house.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
that will decide if PS will win or lose.
If it will have a hard, really unbreakable anti-piracy protection, and the competition won't, it will lose.
Too many people depend on pirated games, uncrackable system won't ever surpass crackable ones.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Im still a hardcore nintendo fan, Nintendo does the best games, Zelda, Mario, etc.
And now, after the Squaresoft Enix merge Nintendo will hopefully get the Final Fantasy games where they belong; on a Nintendo Machine.
Lets all hope that Nintendo kicks some serius ass this time.
Only reason i bought an X-box was that is was able play DVDs and you could install Linux on it,
I never once purchased a game for that box.
And I never really liked the PS2 hardware, or any of the games.
Go Nintendo!
The platform the the PS2 is now releasing their online games on (it escapes me now) is pretty damn good... and like Xbox live it doesn't require companies to have their own huge server farms for their online games which was the huge problem that caused the PS2's lack of multiple good online titles. I think the PS2 is catching up quickly, and if the PS3 takes more cues from Xbox Live they could outpace it quickly... oh, and online gaming is free with the PS, which doesn't hurt things either.
Why don't you embrace your slashbotness instead of living in a dreamworld?
One thing I noticed when living in Europe for a while is that people generally didn't give X-box too much of a chance, and Gamecube was very much behind that. Sony must have done a really really good job with the Playstation, because their name recognition was far beyond anyone elses. If one so much as mentioned a gaming console, people would assume it's a Playstation. It's kind of surprising when one considers that Nintendo still has dominance over the handheld market there, yet is very far behind with the GC.
This really isn't that far out a prediction, given that the current console battle was won by Playstation 2 despite that fact that it was (IMHO) the weakest of the three.
Basically I see Microsoft as being the one with something to lose. Nintendo is by all accounts quite happy to sell fewer than the rest of them but turn a tidy profit doing so, while putting out the high quality first-party games they've always done. Of course, the fact that they're still killing in the handheld market probably helps the bottom line...
CD/DVD production costs are an order of magnitude less than tooling a line to print ROM boards, ad printing them.
... hi bingo
A cartridge may be more expensive than a CD, but console with a cartridge port is cheaper than console with an optical drive. Especially back in the N64 development days. So it all depends if they wanted to minimise the up front cost of the console or the cost of the games. It's another of those razors and blades issues. Sell the razor cheap enough to get lock in and then people put up with expensive blades. Of course it didn't work out for N64, so it may not have been too good a plan.
Judging from reports of the hardware in the XBox succeessor, having an IBM PPC chip of some variety and ATI hardware (which sounds extremely similar to Nintendo's plans), the XBox may or may not be backward compatible. I'd venture to say it would be very difficult to do so, agreeing with rumors of an emulation layer of some sort for old games.
I'm looking to get rich. I've got steps #2 (????) and #3 (PROFIT!) planned out, but am having trouble coming up with #1.
All three consoles can and will have very powerful technology, but I think the article is too optimistic and only tries to be "buzzword compliant" when talking about games having motion sensing and voice recognition integrated and the Internet being the "battleground".
These technologies are still at their early years, and making a game with those features increases the difficulty of developing it to a completely new level, as if fragment shaders, 3d audio, physics, and AI wouldn't be enough of a headache. Some current games already started to include voice recognition and motion sensing features in some way, but talking about the videogame industry leaning itself to that I don't think so.
Regarding the Internet, it's indeed an incredible tool and makes wonders with some games, but contrary to what some people might think, I don't believe it's still profitable or even really reliable to do globally, Microsoft's approach to Xbox Live seems to be right, but they're still bleeding a lot of money, so I wouldn't expect the online component to be a reliable revenue stream anytime soon.
Think about it, even Sony with 70 million consoles out there is still skeptical an cautious about online gaming and Xbox Live suscribers don't even amount to 10% of MS' global installed base. Then Nintendo is still battling with MS for second place (the usual "we are, you're not" from both sides), even though they put online gaming as a very low priority.
That said, maybe when these consoles start reaching the end of their respective life cycles, these kind of technologies will be more mature and then we can start to think on having a strong shift towards new ways of interaction into the next decade.
If the current generation serves as an example, the remainder of the decade we'll still be getting remakes and rehashes of old games, and innovation will take a backseat to the ever-increasing economic pressure on the market.
Also, writing off Nintendo as the distant third place was also not very smart to do. Big N's policies may not be attractive to us gamers, but do remember this is still a business and Nintendo is the only company able to sustain a healthy profit every generation, and their current strategies with regards to pricing seem to signal a very important price point which only them have been able to attain. As with the iPod Mini, sometimes the price point is the single most important thing for success, and most of the time this market is not driven by cutting-edge technology.
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
It's impossible to tell what's gonig to happen for the next generation, because I'm guessing that the next gen console's are going to be more concept-type devices than the predecessors.
It's looking more and more like Sony is going to do the all-in-one type box. Will they be able to maintain their current market share? What about backwards compatibility? (PS2 compatibility is expected). With the launch titles give enough bang for the buck to get a quick launch? (I actually say no. They're going to stall coming out of the gate).
Microsoft looks to be playing it safe, moving from the HD based system to a more unhackable flash-memory type system. What will this do to sales? As well, MS faces the same problem. What about launch games. They had Halo for the X-Box (Without Halo, the X-Box may have been another N-Gage...)
As for Nintendo..well..they're the wild card..arn't they? What the hell are they planning..everything to speak is in riddles and doublespeak.
My best guess, is that the DS technology is some sort of affordable touch-pad. And they'll use that in their next system, in the controllers.
At worst, you'd be able to see additional information, maps without switching screens. As well, doing basic inventory management, things such as that.
At best? If their next system had the horsepower to feed out a 3d signal to the controller. Imagine being able to look down at your controller, playing Zelda for example, and seeing an overhead view of all the action around you? Or checking out what is behind you in a FPS.
Something like that would be revolutionary if it caught on. Personally, I think that if it's affordable, it's a great idea.
BTW, same problem for Nintendo. They had a bad launch for the GC and that hurt them. They need to launch with some big games right out.
I have to wonder if this is acutally going to be in the PS3 or if it's just one of Sony's extravagant claims that won't be fulfilled (ala Toy Story level graphics on a console).
On the PS2, PSOne backwards compatibility was easy because the sound processor (I believe) was the same processor as the PSOne. However, since the PS3 plans to use a cluster of Cell processors for everything (the Cell processors which are completely different than either of the previous two processors), it seems like they would actually have to emulate the PS2 and PSOne. How well will this run?
Lets save the predictions until AFTER Doom3 for Xbox ships. If the title is anywhere near spectacular, it and Halo2 could blow Xbox sales way past expectations....
People definitely "like that." :)
I'll gladly take the Nintendo style graphics over the recent PC, XBox, or PS2 graphics *any* day. The problem is, the latter are all focusing on making "realistic" looking games. First off, if you're aiming for realism, even the tiniest failure to do so breaks the suspension of disbelief and ruins the entire experience. Second, realism isn't all that interesting - if you want real, get off your ass and go outside.
The "anime" look most Nintendo games has is much more friendly of a visual medium given that what you're playing is in fact a game. Take Zelda: Wind Waker, for example. There is not a single graphical style that could have been better suited to that game. The graphics didn't "get in the way," I didn't keep noticing how "hey that doesn't look right" (like I do in any game that *attempts* to look real), and the style actually allowed quite a few things that realism simply can't do (the wind blowing, for example).
The cartoon style is just much better suited to a real game. Leave the attempted-realism to movies, which draw you in base on sensory input. Games are driven by interaction, and the graphics should be those best suited to facilitate that play. If the entire game is based solely on running about shooting things, then maybe realism is a good thing, since that's the only thing the game can offer you that the original Quake doesn't.
I think you are missing the point. The parent poster is pointing out that the production cost reduction has been no benefit to the consumer. The prices stay the same and, in his opinion, we are getting an inferior product.
But, adjusting for inflation, the prices have dropped significantly lower than the change in media cost. Additionally, the production cost of games has increased significantly in that timeframe. Usually if a price (with no adjustments for inflation or anything else) doesn't change for 20 years, it's seen as a good thing unless there have been significant advances that should have driven that cost down. Games are not music. Every cost associated with producing music has been driven down in the last 20 years, while every cost associated with producing games, except for the media on which it is distributed, has been driven up in the last 20 years. Music CD prices have gone up slower than inflation (with every cost decreasing) while game prices have remained the same despite inflation (with every cost increasing).
-PainKilleR-[CE]
The next day Nintendo released a press release and sales figures showing it blew away the XBox in yearly sales AND worldwide sales. That they nearly sold out during the XMas season, and that their installed base was more than anticipated.
The BBC has been pumping hype into the XBox and PS as far as I can remember, and posting lame nonsense about Nintendo ever since.
If you don't like a system, fine, dont play it. But dont use your powers in the media to falsly post lies about a company to think the sky is falling, when in fact, its a bright and sunny day.
If you buy the PS/2 Dev kit, you can turn your console into a linux workstation and start writing easily in a familiar environment. We make this available to everyone, and lots of cool stuff with just appear as people get to try out their own ideas. At least that's the theory.
In practice, the barrier to development is HIGH. There are no high level libraries, and the amount you have to learn about the box to do anything with it is far to high to get anything useful done on a nights and weekends basis.
You buy the kit, it's neat to have RedHat 5.x, it can really run X Windows and Emacs and everything (though kinda slow).
But when you try to build anything you just hit a wall. The documenation is poor (probably better in Japanese) and confusing. The build process is complex, since there are custom languages for the two vector units (which are NOT identical and interchangable), and the main processor is not fast enough to do much real time work by itself.
The video and audio outputs are custom and can't be accessed though any standard mechanism (like OpenGL).
After spending about a month of spare time, digging through docs, reading things online and generally fiddling with pieces until they seem to work, you manage to add 1 and 1 on a vector processor, then get the result back and display it on the console. And you're proud. If you do keep goingand build a real game you can only distribute it to other people that have bought development kits, unless you get a real licensing deal with Sony. That means big money, big business, small/simple games need not apply and don't even consider trying to distribute for free.
What this high barrier to entry means is that the strengths of open source aren't really there, because very few programmers can really use the environment, and few others can even read the code that first set wrote. There isn't much sharing, and not much that's fun to play comes out of it.
plus-good, double-plus-good
Sure, that's possible theoretically. But not if the goal of removing the hard disk to is reduce the cost of the system.
As others have pointed out, that probably isn't the goal, MS is probably trying to reduce the hackability of the console.
Your right that 4 gig of flash would be expensive right now, but look at how the price of flash has dropped over the last few years. Replacing a hard drive with flash may not be as wildly expensive as everyone thinks (think of the bulk deals that MS could get).