Slashdot Mirror
Playstation 3 Not A Video Game Machine
Gamespot has coverage of a pair of interviews with Ken Kutaragi in which he states that the PS3 isn't really a gaming console. Instead, it will be an all around device that will allow the owner to experience all sorts of different types of new entertainment. From the article: "The PS3 is the product we have been aiming for since the establishment of SCEI...We haven't been creating our [past] PlayStations for the sake of games. Our belief, and the motivation behind running our company, has been to [explore ways of] applying the power of computers to entertainment and enjoyment. We equipped the original PlayStation with a 3D graphics chip, and we equipped the PS2 with the Emotion engine. The PS3 isn't designed to lean towards games. It's not a computer for children. In the sense that our goal has been [to create] a computer that's meant for entertainment, you could say that the original PlayStation and PlayStation 2 had existed as steps towards the PlayStation 3."
Okay let me get the obligatory out of the way.........this all depends on what your definition of the word is is.
Madre de Dios! Es El Pollo Diablo! -- Captain Blondebeard
Is it me or is Sony starting to sound like Microsoft?
A pr0n machine?
Instead, it will be an all around device that will allow the owner to experience all sorts of different types of new entertainment.
Just like Paris Hilton's bed!
They want entertainment to become prevalent on machines that the media companies have more control over than the users. This will eventually create a corporate utopia where every little thing is restricted and must be paid for to gain access to. Obviously, this corporate utopia will be a consumer dystopia. The average consumer won't even notice or care. They tend to drink whatever kool aid media companies serve them.
they wouldn't call it a playstation.
well i guess you can play music and movies... uh nevermind.
If that's the case, why is it still called PLAYstation? I guess because they couldn't use "Sony 360" or "Sony Revolution". Marketing droids... [sigh] they're just not creative. It's kinda sad, isn't it?
Windows isn't the answer... it's the question. NO is the answer!
Yes, its not a game machine... it just comes with a gamepad so you can play games :/
The more you focus on trying to be everything to everyone, the more you start to fail everyone in everything. Focus on your core, the stuff you're good at, and you will have those interested in that core beating a path to your door.
Also, the codec comment is a little disturbing. Codecs do matter. If you have unlimited processing power, you still cannot convert a privately held codec due to the DMCA. Also, converting things to the PSP format is what it seems to imply, but I think that's a very small feature in the big picture.
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
We like iPods, we like Cell phones, we like digital cameras, but we don't buy PDAs that do all three. Even camera-phones are tremendously underwhelming to all but tech-nerds and 14-year-old girls.
I would suggest that Nintendo is poised for a MAJOR comeback if they do the system right. They have said in no uncertain terms that the revolution is about games, not convergence. You heard it here first.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
We went through this before with the PS2.
Tell me what an emotion engine is, exactly, and why anyone should care? It's a processor. Woopty doo, you gave your video game machine a processor.
Unprecidented.
The PS3 will not be a supercomputer. The PS3 will cost $300 - $500. When an IBM workstation with dozens of PowerPC cores costing half a million dollars can only do 40 or so GigaFLOPs, there's no way in hell that the PS3 (based on the same basic Power Processor architecture) can do 2 TeraFLOPs. Not if they're measuring the same thing anyway. Otherwise, why doesn't IBM just use those in it's big iron instead of Power PCs, and market themselves as offering "A Gazillion YottaFLOPs!!!!"
Because IBM has a reputation to uphold, and they market to people who aren't teenagers dazzled by the biggest number they can think of. The people they market to will hold them to their promises.
Sony is just hype.
Yes, digital convergance. Yes, bringing it all together. Blah blah blah. Sony, you're not the only one working toward this goal, and frankly, you're not NEARLY in the position MS is in to offer it. Their market penetration on the desktop PC gives them a powerful edge, as does the fact that they started doing it in the last generation, so people who were looking for that kind of convergance already found a good thing with the X-Box.
Sony should not be allowed to market.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Just like how the "emotion" engine was supposed to allow PS2 games to exhibit emotions in some vague and poorly explained way. Sony was trying to push early PS2 games to develop AI that would react emotionally to things (like drivers getting aggressive, and so on) to emphasize this point. In the end it was just marketing hype -- it's a game console, okay? Deal with it.
The closest you can get to claiming the PS2 had functions other than games was the DVD playback; and a lot of folks DID buy them for just that purpose, but it still primarily was a game console.
Throw in a Tivo-like system and an out of the box way of delivering eyetoy video emails and an integrated online network with consistent user logins and THEN you can start calling it an Entertainment Computer or whatever you decided on this week.
When I get home from work and before going to bed, all I really want to do is load something up and get some thrills from killing people with a big noisy gun. Whoever delivers that best wins.
'_PLAY_station'
'Play' is typically assocated with 'Games'.
Does have some interesting potential though. Combined with bullet time style video recording style and some kind of Tivo, the system probably has enough power to allow the user to pan the camera and explore a TV show/sports event while watching it. Or allow some level of interactive (non-game) entertainment.
What are all these types of new entertainment? What have I missed?
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Nintendo. It is all about the games.
the PS3 isn't really a gaming console.
Hope you don't tell that in your commercials, because you won't sell lots of PS3's if you make people believe it isn't a gaming console.
Instead, it will be an all around device that will allow the owner to experience all sorts of different types of new entertainment
Like what? Do you want to make me believe you reinvented the wheel? What kind of new entertainment could there be?
Smell-O-Vision?
Pr0n 2.0 - the next level of filth?
Tinfoil origami?
Or is this Sony's way to tell us that the PS3 will be just another DRM-crippled multimedia platform?
In that case I think Sony is making a terrible mistake (didn't they learn anything from their mp3-player fiasco?).
You had me until, "You heard it here first." Please.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
The customers are the game players. I feel they're trying to alienate us game players by ignoring the fact it is almost solely a game machine. I'm not going to buy a mobile phone that wasn't designed to be a phone. So if the PS3 isn't a game system, but a media center, I won't be needing redundant hardware.
If Sony announced the Playstation wasn't going to have games for the first year of release because it wasn't a game system, how many would they sell?
My take on consoles is that they should always just be exactly that, a gaming platform. What, with DVD players going on the ultra-cheap these days (though finding DivX players for cheap is not so easy), who the hell needs their gaming platform to play DVDs? Streaming MP3s is a whole other thing entirely and that my friends will bring a lot of usefulness, imagine selecting your background music from your selection of MP3s. Gran Turismo anyone? I know that the games are all getting stale and while in my heart I always feel that Nintendo has it right in a lot of ways, so much of what they do is unfortunately so boneheaded. It will certainly be interesting to have similar processors between the three consoles and I predict that a lot of big publishers *cough*EA*cough* will spend a lot of development money on porting between the three.
As much as I love the Gameboy SP and its clamshell I finally got to see someone actually playing a PSP the other day. It was 989's Baseball game and I'll not waste anytime talking about 989's games or baseball, but I was totally and completely stunned. If Sony just digs in and keeps the PSP around for five years until its price can get closer to $70-90 (the average cost of a Game Boy), people will buy it like there is no tommorow. I asked about battery life and he said 7-8 hours on average. That really isn't all that bad is it? I don't think I'll give up the GBA any time soon for a lot of reasons, but when the PSP ever gets to below $100, I'd certainly have to at least think about it. The DS is so gimicky, I mean the best they got coming is dog raising sim? That's pretty sad, and while I realize that the PSP has mostly puzzle games, there already seems to be stronger third party support for it. I hate to say it, but the gamers just want games and they will buy whatever console has the most games. In case you were born yesterday the third party developers have a firmer and firmer hand in deciding the "console wars."
My point is this. The new features would be nice, and with all the power in the next generation of consoles it really doesn't make sense to not make the box somewhat more multipurpose, but I doubt many people will care about such things and will end up buying the machine for what it is, a video games console.
Of course Microsoft and Sony want to be a part of your whole entertainment experience. The want to control the content you download, be it games, movies, tv shows. They don't want just a slice, they want the whole pie. They both see set top boxes that record what you watch and offer you services on demand as the future. I don't see everyone buying it personally, but with downloadable games and what not the future is certainly looking interesting. Look at it this way. Kids destroy video games all the time. Now there is no disc. No fuss. Having the Nintendo catalog on demand may cause a huge number of people to buy a Revolution, but quite honestly I can emulate a whole bunch of consoles on a computer as well as old DOS games and just about anything my retro heart desires. Hell, give us new Mario games or something original.
Like I said, gamers will always go where the games are.
zosxavius photography
Now they're saying the same thing about the PS3, and pretending they never said it about the PS2.
No, actually, I don't. Not as in "I am being sarcastic" or "I dont think there was all that much hype", but as in: I do not actually have any memory about the hype around the Emotion Engine. I wasnt at all interested in consoles or hardware or playstation or anything related to any of those things at the time, so I actually never did experience any of this hype everyone keeps talking about. I have tried to search for it, in order to compare that hype to the reality of the PS2(I do own a PS2, I got one for christmas last year- as in 2004)
So I've been looking for any of the hype- Penny Arcade mentioned a tech demo video that was shown and complained that they certainly never saw anything like that coming out of their playstations. I have not been able to find that video. I have not been able to find the original "ducks" video or the "feathers" video mentioned in the recent tech demos. I havent been able to find ANY PS2 hype at all. I have only found lots of people bitching about Sony and saying "Remember all the hype about the emotion engine? The PS3 is going to suck!"
Well I don't remember. Show me. (I have seen maybe one or two articles which just list a couple of numbers- numbers dont do anything for me. I'm looking for videos or screenshots or detailed rants about how PS2 is going to change the way people use computers worldwide- stuff like that.)
P.S.: I've seen a couple of people complain that the E3 videos were pre-rendered. While this may not be entirely what you were expecting, "pre-rendered" and "real-time" are in no way mutually exclusive terms. They refer to different operations on the same variable, and are otherwise entirely unrelated to eachother. One means "this was done before now" the other means "this was done at the same rate that you are seeing it played back". Rendering something in advance in real-time is something you do before a big demonstration so that people arent put off when the system crashes because it's still a year away from being released.
PPS: CAPTCHAS SUCK. (and I will continue to type that until something about them is de-sucked)
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
...for most pretentious person in the video games industry goes to Ken Kutaragi!!!
oxymoron of the day - Xbox gamer
Observing the fallout from E3, Sony counters the XBox 360 and it's media centric marketing with a "me too" and some "vision" cooked up in meetings earlier this week.
I'm not complaining, an XBox Live equivalent would be nice and some media functions are alright. If it play's HD DVD that's just dandy. Much of what they've talked about over the last few weeks however is just a bit of software the PS1 was more than capable of (minus hddvd) from a processing power standpoint.
As for the interview... They can posture, reposition, and justify all they want. Working all the talking points and feature equivalents 'till they're blue in the face. But it still, sounds like something they made up in a meeting yesterday rather than something I'd really want to do. I deffinately don't believe that the PS1 and PS2 were stepping stones to "aging" video online into HD as if that were possible.
Maybe they will do something interesting, but nobody is going to care if there aren't any games worth playing at launch.
But I am not going to go digging through a garbage dump for old issues of GamePro, Game Informer, Electronic Gaming Monthly, and the like, just so I can scan the Playstation2 hype articles, and put them up on the Internet to impress, J. Random Slashdot-Poster. Especially since the only reason he didn't read them at the timne was because he wasn't interested in video games.
I have to admit that I never did pick up a DVD player after getting my PS2. But if the situation were different, I might have.
My point is that the core market may be gamers, but some people will be interested in the other uses. If you don't watch many movies, then the DVD functionality of the PS2 is probably fine. Many induhviduals would like to experiment with online games, but are turned off the complexity of PCs. So not every feature is useful to everyone, but there is crossover.
I don't see any point in remixing standard video to HD. Any HDTV has the capability to play standard video and can give you more options as far as converting the aspect, etc. You could try to make an HD version of something and anti-alias lines or change colors or something, but why bother? I don't think an automatic process could improve the video quality by much.
Since the games division of Sony accounts for over 25% of their annual profit, I would have thought they'd really be concentrating on that...
Amazing that Sony is doing everything in it's power to compete with XBox 360... They are #1 in the console arena, they don't need to compare themselves with #2 ... it just gives more attention to #2.
But, as we've seen at E3, they're perfectly willing to lie to the public (Killzone 2 trailer fiasco, mythological performance figures), and market capability they can't deliver (PS3 convergence) in order to compete with #2 Microsoft.
It seems like Sony knows MS is ready to take the crown. Sony is in trouble. I smell the fear.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Regardless of whether or not the demos were pre-rendered or not, the demos that Sony typically uses have a certain dishonesty to them. I'll try to explain.
Most of the time that people are looking at real time demos of a piece of hardware they're looking for an estimation on how games will look when they purchace the system. Sony's demos seem dishonest (except maybe their getaway demo) because they have generated an artificial test for the power of the system. Look at either the Doc-Oc demo or the Hand-bat thing demo; in both of these cases the geometry in the scene is reasonably limited (there're probably fewer polygons in these demos than are in a standard PS2 or XBox game), there is no AI, no Collision Detection and no physics. This means that all the processing power of the system can go to small features.
What I'm trying to say is that, because of how the demos are formed people will assume that volumetric rendering, subsurface scattering, and what not will be readily used in every PS3 game. The reality of the situation is that very few games will have the available resources to devote to these small features.
"Kutaragi revealed that the PlayStation 3 will become an "entertainment supercomputer" for the home." ...yep, I love the words they use to market their products. Hell, the only entertainment you need powerful processing power for is gaming. The rest works perfectly fine on a Pentium II after all, as long you have a nice enough sound card. (unless there is some wierd video format that needs very powerful computers...)
And after all, there was Nintendo entertainment system becuse nintendo refused to call it a video game in the beginning becuse of the video game market crash IIRC. That didn't stop the fact that the NES was only used for games...
Which of course is because that nothing that does all three does any of them particularly well. Link me to a device that will play my music with at least 20 gigs capacity, allow me to use it as a drive, and have features at least approaching an iPod or another highend mp3 player; be a cell phone with entertaining ringtones (ok, this isn't hard); and is a digital camera with at least 5 megapixel reso and optical zoom, very good pixel quality, and other "good" digital camera options, and I'm all over it. Oh, and throw in features of a low to mid end GPS as well, and some generic PDA features. And it better be pretty small as well -- should fit in my pocket with no problem. And it should all integrate with my PC.
Helluva task for some designer, not to mention keeping the price of this down since you're miniturizing everything.
"The Playstation 3 is a computer LOLOL."
When the PS3 fanboys responded with "Dell PC case", the Xbox fanboys went back to playing Halo 2.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Do you work for IBM?
I understand that perfectly. God fucking damnit why can't anyone just read my post and take it for what the words actually say? I said "the complaint of real-time vs pre-rendered is meaningless", not "The PS3 videos are all reasonable representations of the machine's true power and what you can expect to see in actual gameplay"
In most cases what they really meant was "in-game engine vs fmv". I'm disagreeing with the fucking terminology, not saying PS3 is going to be better than PS2 with wireless controllers.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
No, why do you ask?
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
This is the same old song-and-dance as before. Anybody remember what the full name of the PS2 is? That's right: "Sony PlayStation 2 Computer Entertainment System." Calling the PS3 a computer will be just as meaningless as calling the PS2 was then.
Rob
So I've been looking for any of the hype- Penny Arcade mentioned a tech demo video that was shown and complained that they certainly never saw anything like that coming out of their playstations. I have not been able to find that video
It was the Ballroom scene from FF8. They showed it rendered "in real time".
I can't find the video.. it was never released online, only shown at E3.
Here are some photos someone took of that scene though:
one
two
three
Calm down. You're arguing against jargon that was well established in gamer circles long before you paid them any attention. I think most everyone innately understands the distinction you're trying to make, but the terms "real-time" and "pre-rendered" have specific meanings to gamers in this context. I'm sorry that you don't approve, but I'm afraid your only options are to accept it or be constantly annoyed by it.
;)
Besides, "fmv" just stands for "full motion video," which can mean the same thing as your definition of "pre-rendered" or any number of other things, so your counterexample is equally flawed.
Me is very drunk biatch.
Sony to unveil PlayStation 2 New console system will reportedly feature graphics on par with "Toy Story"
I forgot how much they love to hype bullshit.
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
"Even camera-phones are tremendously underwhelming to all but tech-nerds and 14-year-old girls."
They are tremendously awesome when POINTED AT 14-year-old girls, though
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
battery or the external car battery?
Great for you but, as odd as this may sound on Slashdot, computers are not for everybody. I'm reminded of this every time I go home and help my family put their computers back together again.
I think most people outside of Slashdot just want a machine that works. Put in the disk and it plays (no install, don't worry about drivers, DLLs, or Codecs). Updates are automatic. Everything is presented on your TV and can be accessed with your remote control.
You bring up a good point about focusing on your core. But, Sony's core is home entertainment (TVs, games, music, movie, etc.) and Microsoft's core is being a platform for a variety of 3rd party products (word processors, web browsing, email, games, etc.). To me, an "all in one" box is an obvious step for both of these companies.
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
You, my friend, are absolutely WRONG!! ;)
;)
The emotion engine was not hype at all, it was used to full effect in Gran Turismo 3
Every AI opponent you faced had their whole life simulated before the race. Their upbringing, how they got into racing, what happened to them in previous races, etc was generated randomly and the racer would react according to this.
For example, one racer may be brought up in a poor family, only racing to make enough money to put food on the table. Once, he almost won a 50000cr race, but spun out on turn 11 of Laguna Seca, and got injured for 5 years. Now, in the race you're competing against him in, there is a turn that resembles the turn in Laguna Seca that caused his tragic injury. But he also needs this money or his parents won't be able to afford the medical care they need. Should he risk it all at the turn, or just let you pass? So many conflicting emotions!
So he just drives in a predetermined pattern completely ignoring the position of his opponents, like the AI in Pole Position.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
I hate to be the first to tell you this, but these devices are out there. Several of my friends have them. I'm personally saving up to buy one.
--
Its a lean, mean, grilling machine!
And I would love them to include a small language again, preferably Python with SDL bindings - thank you :)
- barkholt
I could be wrong but there seems to be alot of people ignoring the fact that it will probably be the games that will be the deciding factor.
I wouldn't suggest that the quality of the system will be the determining factor of it's success. I do realize, however, that if a console is created well and has more features, it's more likely to get the good games. But we will probably never see Halo on a Nintendo system and we will never see Mario or Samus in any other console.
One thing I hope for is that all the next gen systems will be similar in such a way that it will be easy for Square to make the FF's for all consoles. Also, if Grand theft auto games are still only exclusive to the PS3 (and then later ported to 360) this will make it really hard for nintendo to make a comeback. If Nintendo can come up with some really competitive games at the release of the console, I think theres a good chance of it dominating the US console race. But we will have to wait and see.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
In other words, it's going to be much more expensive. Not an impulse buy for Mom at Wal-Mart.
Just as with the PS and PS2, I'm sure that eventually there will be a lower cost variant. But are there going to be enough first rate games to lure fans away from their PS2 and towards a $400+ system with extra controllers and at least one or two games, as a system is traditionally purchased?
They aren't bullshitting you, it's just the Japanese way of beating around the bush and giving you bad news in an indirect fashion.
You sick fuckwit, good thing your genes will never be passed on.
If its anything like the previous playstations, its a razor-sharp jaggie factory.
The N-gage didn't fail because it was an all in one , the reason it failed was because it was Designed poorly , didn't do the things it was ment to rather well , had a very silly screen , was a very uncomfertable phone .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
of course you didn't bother to consider that he may be a 14 yo boy did you? asshat. don't jump to conclusions. if he isn't however, ditto.
And still not something I would buy.
The thing is, this convergence box, regardless of who makes it, is going to be somewhere in between a console and a computer in terms of complexity and cost.
Cost is a big issue, because it's one of two things that consoles really have going for them (the other being ease of use, which I'll get to in a moment). Basically, consoles can deliver a whole lot of bang for the buck because they've historically used less powerful hardware, but been much much more optimized specifically for gaming. You can either despecialize the hardware (and become more computer-like), or just throw enough raw power into it that software can pick up the slack. The second option seems to be sony's chosen path, and the high price tags being thrown around for the PS3 reflect that.
Ease of use is the other one. How functional beyond games can something get with a game controller as a primary interface? Once you add a keyboard and a mouse, you're going back to a computer. I guess the point is, this convergence thing is going to be a simplified computer, or a beefed up video game console.
I'd have more faith in a computer company (Apple comes to mind first), successfully paring down their knowledge into something workable than I would a company like Sony kludging together a bunch of different pieces well.
Like the parent post said, the computer is an all in one magic box. It's already here, it's been around for a while, people have experience with it. All that's left is to strip out some of the extra parts and make it easier to use. Sony still has to build something that works first, then strip out the extra stuff, and make it easy to use. That first step is hard.
MS would seem to be in a better position than Sony to do this, except stuff that just works has historically been rather difficult for them.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Bah, using the example of the N-Gage is a bad one. It failed because it was designed poorly. If they "got it right" then everyone would be walking around with them. You state all these reasons why being multi-prupose is bad, yet you state an example of a fantastic multi-purpose device in your subject. I know the Slashdot mentality is to put down things that do more than one thing...but that always strikes me as hypocritical...seriously, look at what you are using to access Slashdot. Now to be surprised that gaming consoles are going in that direction is not surprising. Gaming consoles are computers! You still get the advantage of it being a console because every single box is the same hardware so the software companies can focus on making games rather than having to test it on every video driver/processor on the market. People complain that it will add complexity and thus make it easier to break. This argument is weak at best. A machine is only as strong as its weakest component and it is pretty clear that most problems are in the dvd drives failing. Your consoles are not going to gain much more complexity from a hard drive and an internet connection and a few more input/output ports. It honestly isn't a big change from what you have now. What will change is the software written for consoles. It will allow you to do so much more than before. And if you don't care...don't care and just play games on it. Seriously, I know the old delphian knife argument...and if it were true, then we should have an e-mail machine, a web surfing machine, a game playing machine, a word processing machine, etc etc. In summary, consoles are computer and software will allow them to successfully be multi-purpose.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
No offense intended, I love my cube but no way it would be even close to its current state without SONY, let alone its new sibling. Microsoft clearly has infuence inasmuch as Sony did then.
Its a little strange to hear this from a community who spends a considerable amount of thier life & resources to use devices intended to play games for other purposes, or more often devices whose purpose has nothing to do with games playing othello. I applaud them for touting its multientertaining(TM) features. Saves us some of the effort.
Yeah DRM is evil at least its not as droconian a WarnerBrothers box (TWC) and a Microsoft box (XBOX) and a SONY box (PS3), hey, wait a minute
Those multinational conglomerate bastards!
I miss my SEGA and ATARI boxes!
I was trying to say at least the PS3 will show a Disney movie. But I probably shouldn't say it too loud.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Yes...and what did you use to get this message placed on slashdot? Oh, right...a do-it-all box. Please, tell me you see the irony.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Wow, even after giving them the benefit of the doubt for jpeg artifacts, horrible lighting, and a crappy sub-vga camera... Doom 3 looks a lot better.
Most of the other posts in this have been marked flamebait.
Not all criticism of the playstation 3 is unfounded!
If you remember the hype for the PS2, its very obvious that what we see now is only hype as well. Sony claimed it would "render toy story 2 in realtime". I think we know how well that turned out.
'Aging' ripped videos, as in aging wine, so the quality of the video increases from standard to high definition?? That's beyond stupid. Their PR dept sounds like an 8 year old making up shit from stuff he heard about computers. And alcohol.
Another stupid part:
"In terms of codecs, the Cell has the power to easily transcode high-quality [pictures and audio] in real-time. So [file] formats won't really be too important,"
File formats won't be important? So the PS3 magically reads everything? What are they trying to say? Of course, whenever we hear Sony talk about "formats" (either software or hardware), it ends up being another stupid proprietary format nobody wants, so whatever.
Finally:
"The PlayStation [3] is not a game machine. We've never once called it a game machine,"
Just shut the fuck up already. The entire goddamn world will call it a game machine because IT'S A GAME MACHINE, JUST LIKE THE PS2 WAS.
Is that you?
What are you doing in Sony outfit?
Games, movies, music, VVoIP (voice and video chat), PVR, etc. All things you can do on your PC, but they could be done easier on a next-gen console.
Over time, I can see this expanding to cover things like web-browsing (as people switch to HDTVs and websites adjust content) and on-demand news and entertainment.
I don't see this becoming an "all in one" box for everything a computer does now, but it would be great if I could off-load all those things to my console and just use my PC for "real computer stuff" (like Programming and Porn!).
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
It's not flaimbait if it's funny, interesting, insightful, and informative.
The PS2 wasn't the first game platform to use backwards compatibility. The Gameboy Color (released 1998, the PS2 was 2000) first did that, by being able to play regular Gameboy games. True, it wasn't exactly a giant leap, but it was still backwards compatible.
So Sony started the DVD thing, but Nintendo started the backwards compatibility.
In an age where ANYONE can have a voice (look at blogs)
How do you reconcile your rant with the fact that PS1, PS2, and PS3 have a secret bootloader?
Companies only exist because people use their services, if they alienate the customers and screw them over, something better will come along.
How will customers be able to tell that they're being screwed over? See also the parable of the boiling frog.
I'd have more faith in a computer company (Apple comes to mind first), successfully paring down their knowledge into something workable than I would a company like Sony kludging together a bunch of different pieces well.
Two words: Apple Pippin.
If you're looking to have this mythical convergence box you keep hearing so much about. Find out about current, less restrictive, alternatives.
Okay, you know us MythFans would get all foamy about that.
-- I have fans? Wow.
However, if one looks at the standard apps that come with OS X that deal with media, one will find that most of them have a full-screen or "tv-oriented" functionality already built into them. DVD Player will go full-screen with a remote thing and is very straight-forward. iPhoto will give you little forward/back buttons and let you navigate in full-screen with a media-center-oriented interface.
Personally, that's what makes sense to me for computers in the living room -- code the apps so there's little difference. People will want similar functionality whether they're showing off their stuff in the living room or in the office.
Not to mention other little things like the emphasis on color, etc. Anyone who has used OS X on a 640x480 TV compared to Windows can easily feel the difference in usability and viewability. It's striking in some cases.
But it does make more sense for the video game people to fight over this space first. They have a sellable product that brings in a crapton of revenue specifically for the console's use, unlike pretty much all other living-room oriented devices.
Actually, this has gone round and round for years.
The Xbox was going to be the ultimate conversion device, that brought gaming and networked communication to a head, with possible movie and music delivery services. The PS2 was the same. Nintendo stayed away. Going Back a generation, The Dreamcast and Saturn were both convergent devices, with modems and browsers. The Playstation talked a good talk about becoming the center of you digital universe, but didn't do anything about it. Nintendo also stayed away. In the generation before, the Genesis had a modem and console-to-console communication services, as well as being one of the first devices to support a cable modem of sorts. By the end of it's life, it was going to become the center of your multimedia universe, to compete with 3DO, CDI, Pippin, Turbo Duo, and everyone else time forgot. Nintendo promised a modem and a CD player (the playstation, oddly enough), but didn't deliver. During the previous generation, the NES had the odd distinction of being the first console you could legally gamble upon, with a modem connection to a state lottery. It also had knitting machines and a whole host of useless accessories in Japan to help it become the Family Computer (FamiCom) it was named after. They also used ROB in the US to sell the machine as "more than a game machine," then promptly dumped the adorable useless thing. I don't recall any moves on the Mastersystem's part during this time, though remember that the mastersystem had games on both cards and cartridges, and nobody really discovered what they had planned for that expandability.
Before the NES, the line between consoles and computers was extremely blurry, with ATARI computers competing with ATARI consoles and Intellivisions competing with Colecovisions. Ok, I was too young to remember much of anything but Bullwinkle cartoons. But remember, back then these things basically were computers, with keyboards and recipe programs and typing applications. They were basically all omni machines, and if they weren't they promised the functionality that they could become one.
In other words, everyone is offering the omni machine. Everyone. It's marketing. Everyone knows that the PSP is about as useful as a movie player as your watch, but still they hype the possibility to sell more PSP's. Your living room monitor is a crappy screen to read text from, but people still like to hear that their console will connect to the internet and let them read their mail.
The FLOPS issue is not as big as you would think. Supercomputers are expensive primarily because they're custom, and use extra hardy equipment, not because there is a particular ops to cost ratio. Plus the PS3 is optimized to push as many FLOPS as quickly as possible through, for maximum graphics throughput, with really no eye to what to do with them. 8 chips on die with really long multiple pipelines working in tandem? Basically if this thing had to think out of order, that efficiency will quickly come crashing down, and I doubt it has a lot of registers, but on linear datasets with no dependencies this puppy will scream. My PC rates as 3 GigaFLOPS for the main CPU, and it's a few years old. And it can actually think. Add in clock cycles for the graphics processor and the other chips onboard, and I could see a modern computer with a modern graphics card ranking as 20 GigaFLOPS. Now with a few years yet to be released, and a development cycle designed almost exclusively to do ridiculous amounts of mechanical transformations to fixed data pipelines, and I could see 2 TeraFLOPS being possible. Much like Intel pushing the P4 MHz rating artificially high, this would be high for basically artificially engineered reasons, but it's definitely possible. By the time this ships, Blue Gene should have passed the PetaFLOP barrier. And as both of these are IBM's babies, they should have the technical knowhow.
When Nintendo teamed with SGI to create Project Reality, the specs they announced were truly insane. By the time they actually shipped that machine, the N64, the specs were still the same but because of the elapsed time they were just generally good.
The ______ Agenda
Why should I (or anyone else for that matter) if you don't remember Sony plugging the Emotion engine? Hell, I remember it, and I wouldn't have consider myself more than a casual console gamer at the time.
** A Sketch a Week **
http://www.sketchplease.com
Is it just me or is Slashdot sounding more and more like Fark every day?
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Here is some "insider" info for you (its all obvious anyways):
- Next-gen games will look only marginally better then current high-end PC games (Doom3, HL2, etc).
- This will be the *smallest* step between generations we have seen so far. (The current consoles are quite capable!)
- For devs, the biggest difference is that most games will need to have some sort of online play to remain competitive.
- Nintendo will distribute low-budget games online (billing service included). Expect Sony and MS to do the same.
Except that the realtime ballroom ffxiii scene was shown at E3 during the Launching of the PS2!!!! So ya, I hope Doom 3 looks better.
And, yet, there is not one single PS2 game that looks as good as the FFVIII dance scene in game... None. No GC or Xbox games that look that good, either, but the GC and Xbox do have games that come closer to that quality in game than the PS2 does.
I think you mean annual earnings, not annual profit. Sony hasn't made an annual profit, as an entire company, in three fiscal years.
You wouldn't buy it.
Because, you'll be bitching that 20Gb is too small because the iPods would be at 512Gb at that time (hell, the original iPod was 5Gb, and you already want a 20Gb capacity), you'll complain that the cell phone is lousy, that camera is too slow, or that you can't shoot a picture and listen to music at the same time. Of course, you'll want the camera to be a reflex, because all of the 'good' one on the market will be, and add a few additional requirements too (plays FM, bar code reader, usable as a bootable hard drive, remote control features, plays GBA cartridges, vibrating dildo mode, portable home cinema projector and swiss army knife functions)
A device have to do *one* thing correctly. It can do additional ones, annd that's cool, but must focus on one. This one should be the one that dictate the design decisions. The rest is (sometimes usefull) marketing fluff. But are not the reason people buy it.
What confused me was this paragraph: "Users will be able to store their content in an online storage server called the 'Cell Storage.' And the Cell processor, when it's not being used, can refine the content's quality. We call it the 'aging' process. For example, users can 'age' their Standard Definition (SD) video and up-convert it to High Definition (HD) video. We have many plans [for the PS3], but this 'Cell Storage' service is something that we definitely intend to launch. By using the Cell's security feature, users will be able to rip DVDs that include copyright protection and lay it in the storage area to refine its video quality."
Sony claims it can convert SD video to HD video. And, 'refining' video quality? How the hell are you supposed to get higher quality by just putting it somewhere? The only thing I can think of is using some crazy algorithm that coppers use to analyse low-quality video to get a single decent-quality picture. Any ideas what they're on about?
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
Funny, most attempts to do an all-in-one set-top/console have been fantastic failures. Philips is estimated to have lost $1 billion (with a B) on the CD-i, which offered edutainment and movies and games... but none of them were in any way compelling.
By comparison, I seem to remember Next Generation magazine once lauding Sony's focus on games, to the point that they actually had representatives from an education software company removed from the building, since the original PlayStation was meant exclusively as a game machine.
Considering that the original PlayStation removed Philips, Atari, and 3DO from the console market, and mortally wounded Sega, I think that strategy worked pretty well.
--realinvalidname
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Well, Apple is an interesting case, mostly due to their unpredictability. With the iPod, for example, they didn't create the market, which is really the hardest part of creating a new product. (For example, the Segway. A cool product, but people have a hard time seeing what it's good for. So all they hype and marketing was just sort of shrugged or laughed off). Basically, all the other crappier mp3 players that preceeded the ipod got a bunch of consumers wondering about what an mp3 player really could be, and then Apple jumped in and delivered something pretty darn close to that.
The other thing is that with Steve Jobs' love of secrecy, he doesn't mind lying a little bit in order to keep his plans more hazy for the rest of us. He was constantly badmouthing flash players, about how their capacity sucks, and flash memory is too expensive for the amount of space you get. And then all of a sudden Apple comes out with the shuffle, and everyone forgets what they were saying about flash memory a few weeks before.
At this point, I'm thinking that Jobs is lying about his whole being a vegetarian thing, because he doesn't want anyone to guess that OS 10.5 will ship with a side of BBQ ribs. mmmmm...that'd be sweet.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
I RTFA earlier today and I believe this is a huge mistake.
Spoken like a true slashdotter...most of us think RTFAing is a huge mistake too.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Like the first post about the Cell on Slashdot analyzed, it is not just a hardware concept, but a software concept, too. So, in theory, my Thompson TV and my Sony PlayStation3 and my IBM Cell-Blades could be combined with the power of my Cell-equipped toaster to crach the next PGP challenge!
If only Sony would not repeat the half-hearted approach they took with PS2 Linux, which was a real shame.
Of course, you playing kiddies have no clue what I am talking about, do you?
The big do-it-all box doesn't seem to have hurt Dell's sales.
The integrated stereo -- now home theater -- system was displacing component audio forty-five years ago. Fisher Model 800-B Receiver (1962)
Camera phone sales are skyrocketing. 36 percent of shipments in 2004, an estimated 55 percent this year, 87 percent in 2009 Restrictions placed on camera phones
You mean like MP3s? Yeah, corporate media really shoved that format down our throats, didn't they...
The Atari 7200 was backwards compatible with the 2600.
"We need to get over this notion, that, for Apple to win... Microsoft must lose." - Steve Jobs, 1997
I'll admit that my counter-example is flawed, but real-time and pre-rendered certainly arent exclusive.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
And with this, I am utterly sick of the console war. Wading in the bullshit, indeed.
Ken Kutaragi in a somewhat bold move confessed the device sony presented during E3 wasnt actually playstation 3, it was a joke by sony entertainment, "I mean seriously, you think we would dishonor ourselves with this thing?" said the sony repman while tossing the boomerang controller around the hall. "It even has the spiderman logo, I mean, spiderman3, playstation3! get it?! hahahahaha! " the audience was a bit confussed first but joined in laughter when they grilled a steak in the device revealing is true nature to the public.
Sony announced "All the demos we showed were made in a $10,000 supercomputer, the rest of the trailers were CGI's of some fine ps2 games coming this summer, we just wanted to scare the crap out of MS! you should have seen Allard face when we showed killzone 2 I think he actually soiled himself, hahahahaha! golden! golden! " the audience cried in laughter.
Go ahead MOD my day!
More opinions here
For some reason it bums me out to see the line between computers and video game systems fade away. For Sony to call the PS3 a computer...that just doesn't feel right to me. Maybe I'm just more knowledgeable now or it has something to do with computers being able to emulate actual game consoles but I miss the way consoles used to feel like an exotic piece of hardware.
I remember when the Sega CD was getting close to a US launch and all of the magazines had screenshots of Japanese games and specs on the machine. They didn't say, "it's a 486 processor with a VGA graphics card built in" or maybe they did and I just had no clue what they were talking about. The specs seemed exotic and special, like there was no way I was going to have a machine like the Sega CD without getting an actual Sega CD. Being naive made consoles seem like so much more.
My Xbox Live Gamer Card
I'm so glad you posted a link to something that actually mentioned this. OK, it says, "create characters similar in appearance to those in the Walt Disney film "Toy Story." which doesn't go along with people always saying, "Remember when Sony said they could render Toy Story in real time on the PS2."
c net
Check it out, especially this part:
Now let me bring to your attention an Xbox article. http://news.com.com/2100-1040-250632.html?legacy=
"One of the basic premises of the Xbox is to put the power in the hands of the artist," Blackley said, which is why Xbox developers "are achieving a level of visual detail you really get in 'Toy Story.'"
So Microsoft and Sony said almost the exact same thing about Toy Story. I'm going to bookmark these two links and spam them about any time I see someone talk about how Sony said they could bust out Toy Story on the PS2. Search for it on google, it's like the #1 response to people dogging on the PS3/PS2 media hype.
My Xbox Live Gamer Card
We'll never see Sonic on a Nintendo system either. Wait...
http://www.bynarystudio.com
woaw, hold on there. I believe also meant to put the word "cunt" in there somewhere.
I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines.
but would just like to point out that the PSP is quite nifty as a movie machine. Today I slogged my way back from Kuwait to the UK (planes, trains and automobiles) and the PSP saved my sanity. Few episodes of The Shield, couple of episodes of 24 and a couple of hours of Lumines kept my quite entertained thankyouverymuch AND the battery is still at 48%.
Slashdot has been nothing FARK with moderation bitchslaps for at least couple years now. Where have you been? :P
I'm surprised they haven't added a "Japan" section with headlines linking to all the weirdest Mainichi Daily News stories.
Once they have that, all it will take is the addition of allowing image tags, and their journey to the Dark Side will be complete.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
No doubt, I just wanna play a game. I don't need it to play movies or music. I don't need it to interface into some online store selling crap I don't want. I don't want it communicating with the home base about everything I do. I don't want it advertising to me. I don't want it to have content controls I won't use. All of these things figure into the price you pay.
I can already tell unless I come into some unexpected cash, I'm not going buy any of these new consoles.
You seem to be wrong Sony Corp hasn't been unprofitable for a LONG LONG time. Profit slumps yes, but not in the red.
I've been saying exactly this over the past few days and consistently get flamed for it: The Xbox 360 and PS3 are MEDIA CENTERS that happen to play games, only the revolution is designed as a game console in this round. This has nothing to do with which one is more "1337" it is a simple fact.
Most families are going to be put off by the high price tags, complex nature, and low number of games produced for these two "consoles." Production is going to be very expensive and time intensive, this generation will have fewer games released than any before. Most people with a tivo are not going to shell out the bucks for Xbox or PS3, and no one is going to impulse buy one because of one key title (think Halo), Here is where Nintendo again has the upper hand on the gaming side, small, easy, old games for mom and dad, solid franchise titles, great innovative content and control schemes, and the ability to pick up third-party developers with the low cost development they announced. MS requiring all HD content and 4x AA with no slowdown at all is asking more than most developers care to deal with, Factor 5 (rogue squadron) dropped support already, and Midway will not even try to make Xbox launch with any titles and publicly called the Xbox 360 "a niche player" and talked about how impossible development is so far for it.
All the fanatic loyalists are quickly seeing the man behind the curtain now that the media glitz is wearing thin.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Are we talking about the same Ballroom scene here?
The scene in the picture is NOTHING like the prerendered ballroom scene. There's only one dynamic light (easy for any system even in those days), and there's no anti-aliasing just for starters. They purposefully made the scene very dark to de-emphasize the aliasing artifacts. The darkness also de-empahasizes the rendering hack that is the background. The ballroom scene in FF8 is much brighter.
The background is a hack, probably just a few dozen polygons with textures faking the dance hall background, instead of thousands of polygons depicting the contours of the walls and ornaments.
The quality of character graphics is similar to FFX real-time cutscenes, if you look at it critically. You have the dynamic level of detail, so you have tons of polys dedicated to rendering the face when it fills up half the screen, but scale it back when you're further away and need more polys for the rest of the scene.
It's nothing special, all the major consoles of this generation can do this. (Resident Evil 4 on GC,for example). The only thing is, you're only going to see it during cutscenes for two reasons:
1. You need all the console's horsepower to do it right. No time for AI or physics here, everything is scripted.
2. You really need control of the camera to create enticing movements that really show off your effects. Otherwise, the effort is wasted.
Now, I'm not down on consoles, just a realist. This generation was a step in the right direction. Now, just imagine being able to render even higher fidelity than RE4, even with real-time anti-aliasing, physics and AI. Now that will be impressive.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
From their Fiscal 2003 report (I had that direct linked from something earlier, don't feel like searching the SEC website right now):
"Sony's sales for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2003 decreased approximately 2 percent and operating income decreased approximately 5 percent compared with the previous fiscal year."
From the same report regarding fiscal 2002:
"Sony's sales for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2002 decreased approximately 4 percent compared with the previous fiscal year, and an operating loss was recorded compared to operating income recorded in the previous fiscal year."
Now, correct me if I am wrong, but operating loss is the exact opposite of profit (operating income). So fiscal 2002 had an operating loss, and fiscal 2003 had seen sales and income slump beyond what it had slumped to in fiscal 2002.
Although, it seems fiscal 2004 they made a profit, which I was unaware of. But your "LONG LONG time" seems a bit off the mark, being as 2002 and 2003 are not a long long time ago, nor in a galaxy far far away.
You can have an operating loss and still make a profit because of the "Other income and expenses" item on the Income Statement(negative numbers are in parenthesis). Operating Loss/Income is only income directly related to their primary businesses. However, Sony buys/sells stock in other companies, buys/sells factories, pays tons of taxes, pays/collects interest on loans, and does a zillion other things that generate profits/losses.
When you want to say whether a company was profitable or not, you look at the net income on the Income Statement.
Their income statements don't have anything about losses in 2002 or 2003. I haven't read Sony's SEC filings and haven't had enough accounting classes to fully understand them anyhoo.
Notice I said:
"more and more like Fark"
I am commenting on this as being an accelerating phenomenon.
Asshat.
Oh now I've done it!
Sometimes my arms bend back.
it's not really a video game console, more like a DRM-drenched box you rent for a one time fee.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
With a LInux kit the PS2 actually becomes something akin to an all in one box. E-mail, IM, web browsing, even spreadsheets. The PS3 is probably just an extension of this idea, the PS2 serving as a test platform.
They've been aiming for the Do-Everything machine since the creation of SCEI... Riiight. They didn't want to make a game machine when Nintendo asked them to make a CD-rom system for the SNES. They didn't want to sell a complete CD game machine when Nintendo scrapped the SNES-CD idea. They didn't want their machine to be for games when they released THOUSANDS of games for their systems. My take on Kutaragi's comments is that he flubbed up in the interview. The PS3 is going to be a game machine that happens to be a Blu-Ray/DVD player with an internet connection and Bluetooth connectivity as well. Sony is going to sell the PS3 on the ability to play Blu-Ray as well as DVD (backwards compatibility for your movies!) since Blu-Ray players still haven't reached American shores to my knowledge, and probably won't before the PS3's release. After that we can all start fighting over HD-DVDs or Blu-Ray. I've gone off on a tangent >. Sony doesn't want people who don't play games to see the PS3 and think games are all it can do. I used to work in retail, and I've seen lots of people pass over X-Boxes because they want a DVD player that can play mp3 CDs... The X-box does that, and it's probably cheaper than the DVD player they're going to end up buying. But they don't know that.
The real impact of the PS3 will be the announcement by Apple of a partership using OS X on the PS3 to function as a complete home information/entertainment system. Will this happen? Only Steve knows. It completes Job's vision of 2005 being the year of HD video and spells the quick end to the XBOX 360.