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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."
I wonder if this is a bunch related to the people who somehow predicted, and convinced, the old head of Nintendo that optical media in video games was 'just a fad' back during the N64 design phase.
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.
...Duke Nukem: Forever has already won game of the year*.
*year to be determined.
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.
Playstation Fights Falling Sales. Granted, it's from July 2003, but still....
PlayStation is dying! No, no, wait. PlayStation will dominate!
No, no, wait....
And a Beowulf Cluster?not as stupid either, since Spectrum Magazine Had a report also where some guys put 73 PS2's together and using their graphics processor chip achieved supercomputing proccessor power.
"The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."
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.
"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.
That 70% of all statistics are just made up on the spot.
The xbox does have more processing power than the gamecube, but what is it worth? Would you rather have "game quality and innovation," or a few more polys and effects? What's the good of looking at slightly better graphics if the game isn't fun?
At any rate, regardless of technical details and opinions about the current generation of console hardware, I think we can all agree that it's pretty stupid to try and call a winner in the next generation of consoles. Predicting 2010? Give me a break.
[javac] 100 errors
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?
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 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.
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...
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]
Programmer: "Hey, I just managed to save a couple thousand cycles per frame with some clever inlining, loop unrolling and judicious use of PowerPC assembler."
Artist: "Great! I'll bump up the saturation on the 'graphics' by 7%"
Having spent 6 years now in the games industry, I can assure you it doesn't quite work this way.
Oh, and all the other stuff you said too is quite debatable.
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
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.
Actually the I/O Processor in the PS2 is based on the PS1's CPU - this chip is the one that takes over when you boot the PS2 with a PSOne game. Sony killed two birds with one stone with this "Playstation-in-a-chip": they got an I/O processor and a way to get almost flawless PS1 emulation... the keyword being almost flawless, since there are PS1 games that are incompatible. This wouldn't be the case if Sony had decided to just stick a PS1 inside a PS2.
Anyway, I can see Sony working right now in a "PS2 in a chip" for the PS3 - they have been revising the hardware for the PS2 to reduce the number of components with every new model, just as they did with the PS1, and I expect they eventually will get around to having most of the functionality of the Emotion Engine in a single, cheap chip. We can also expect a smaller, cuter and cheaper PSTwo after the PS3 is launched.
But now that I think about it... Since they are separate chips, will the PS3 be compatible with the PS1? I'd think so, but they would have to use two different chips into the PS3. I/O processor and matemathical co-processor? Or will they integrate the "PS1-in-a-chip" in the new mini-Emotion Engine?