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PS2 to Have 10 Year Lifecycle, PS3 Not Cheap
Anonymous PC Gamer writes "CNet is reporting that Sony's Ken Kutaragi has said that he expect the Playstation 3 to have a ten year life cycle. Methinks Sony's production woes are going to be their achillies heel this time, especially in America. Will Sony be able to survive a couple of months of having another expensive, hard-to-find console with Bill and Co. bloodthirsty at their heels?" From the article: "I'm aware that with all these technologies, the PS3 can't be offered at a price that's targeted towards households. I think everyone can still buy it if they wanted to...But we're aiming for consumers throughout the world. So we're going to have to do our best (in containing the price)."
That's virtually the same as saying "from the we-know-there's-confusion-in-the-writeup-somewhere -but-we're-too-lazy-to-RTFA dept.", isn't it?
So you spend a fortune on this machine, expecting it to last 10 years and after a few years disk read errors rear their ugly head! Great!
Did you get that thing I sent ya?
I think Zonk has been drinking.
Perhaps. His mother certainly was.
Trolling is a art,
Imagine using a 486 DX-33 to play computer games on
That would have been, imo, during the golden age of PC gaming and a hell of a lot better than the bullshit games we have now. Relentless, Doom I & II, System Shock, Ultima Underworlds, Descent, Tie Fighter, Sam & Max, and a shit load of other great games were all 486 games. So yeah, I'll take it. Today's games are bump-mapped high-resolution shiny polished turds. Doom 3 may look nice on today's hardware, but it's no Doom II. What the industry need to do is quit focusing on the technology behind the games and give me some half decent games.
Trying to plan a console to last ten years is ridiculous. Yes, the rate of change has slowed. No, it hasn't slowed that much.
How can any company even remotely guess what will be current and popular in ten years? FIVE years is stretching it. The PS2 was released in late 2000, and it was really obsolete by early 2004. You can (obviously) still get games for it here in 2005, but pretty much everything else on the market was consistently better by then.
If you assume a generation time of 2 years (shorter than the commonly-accepted 18 months, but computers aren't speeding up as quickly anymore), each additional 2 years of lifespan will make the initial console twice as expensive. Microsoft is obviously planning for 5 years, and they're launching at around $300-ish. If Sony wants to last 10, they'd basically have to add two and a half generations' worth more hardware.... they'd probably have to ship at around $1800. And they'd have to guess everything PERFECTLY.
In other words, Sony is hoping for no unpredictable innovations in the next ten years. Hey, that's a bet I'd put billions on!
The PS3 is looking rather like the Itanic, er, Itanium. Sony has spent untold billions on development. Their product will do some things a lot better, but it's not as good at general purpose processing. They can't ship anywhere near the same price point. They're trying to predict the future ten years out, and it doesn't look like they can accurately predict their own ability to ship their product. (They're still dropping features, so they're probably not seven months from putting product on shelves). March 2006 is very likely marketing spin to hurt Microsoft.
Guesses: Sony will ship late (VERY late) and too expensive for the mass market. By the time they get the price to the level that Joe Sixpack will buy their hardware, it will be firmly and permanently in second place. Possibly even in third. It will still be a viable platform, but the XBox will have enormous momentum by then. Sony will never make back what they spent on Cell.
My really daring prediction: Microsoft will actually make money on their console division.
Being the Revolution can play Gamecube discs and use their controllers means the Gamecube format can live on. (in fact, the Rev has just faster versions of the same PowerPC and ATI graphics card, so backwards compatibility is not hard at all here). Since the Rev is only supporting up to 480p as far as HDTV/progressive scan goes, and Gamecube games can already support this, it seems the Gamecube format can be a stepping stone to developers learning the Rev format. Developers can still make Gamecube games and Revolution owners can still play them. Unlike playing PS1 games on the PS2, playing GC games on the Rev will look just as good as playing them on the original console.