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Blu Ray Drive Will Cost $100 Per PlayStation 3
fembots writes "The Inquirer is running an article detailing how Blu-Ray drives for the PlayStation 3 will cost Sony a small fortune. It turns out that at the release of the console in the first half of 2006, Sony will have to pay more than $100 per drive which will dramatically increase the unit cost of the PS3."
Do you want to pay an extra $130 ($100 cost of drive plus 30% profit margin) on your new PS3 for a DRM-laden drive that can 'punish' you? No thanks.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
Where did that figure come from? Sony owns the patent so it's not from licencing, unless they need gold wires/contacts through out the reader I doubt that $100 figure is accurate. It will have both an economy of scale as well a verticle intergration for this hardware, I'm more inclined to beleive 40$ of raw materials and a fudged math estimated R&D of 60$ per unit.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
IIRC, Microsoft sold each XBox at a loss, and game sales made up for the loss. Is it possible that Sony will think the same way?
Over the life of the console, this will come down significantly. So the average cost of that player will end up being somewhat less. Also, if you consider what a new standalone Blu-Ray player will likely cost when Sony introduces the PS3, it makes the PS3 look like a much better deal, even to people who mostly just want to play Blu-Ray, not games.
As I recall, in markets outside the United States, the PS2 saw a large percentage of its initial sales attributable to being an inexpensive (for the time) DVD player, that happened to also play games. It looks like they're repeating what worked well for them, before.
Now it does add value (just like the DVD drive in the PS2) if you want a Blue Ray player. That said, I still think it's a good move for Sony in future-proofing. We are already seeing multi-disc DVD games, and with the kind of graphics that people will expect on the XBox 360 you will need lots of space for artwork and models. That means more and more multi-disc games. Having all that extra space will surely help as time goes by.
It's a gamble. I think it will pay off, but it is a surprisingly high cost for the drive. The Revolution and the XBox 360 are both sporting DVD drives from what we know right now.
The one thing that comes to mind most with this is: one more reason for Sony to hike the price up. I've been buying consoles at their release since the PS1. But even though I now have a job and it pays well enough, I'm not planning on buying a XBox 360 because it is WAY too expensive. I'll wait for the price drop, or to buy one used because someone didn't like theirs. I trust Sony and would like a PS3. I was planning to buy one. But if it costs more than $300, I'll wait on that too. The Revolution is the only one I don't know the price of, but I'd be willing to pay up to $300 (I expect them to launch at $250), and I intend to buy it.
Sony and MS are trying to price me out of the market (especially with games). And at this point, they have succeeded at delaying my purchase. If they're not careful, I'll learn I can live without it. If there is one thing I learned during this last generation, it was that I was right assessing the previous generation. N64 vs PS vs DC games? 30+ vs. 6. vs. 4. 'Cube v XBox vs PS2 games? 15+ vs 5 vs 8. DS vs PSP? 10 vs 4.
Nintendo systems always seem to have the most games that I want. Sony and MS aren't helping themselves with their prices.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Sony has with its previous consoles sold the console at a loss initially, then gradually moved into profitability on each unit as their production costs come down. The Microsoft XBox was selling at a tremendous loss initially and is probably still doing so now, right up to the point where the console is being discontinued-- Microsoft H&E is still continuously losing money.
Sony will probably sell the PS3 at a loss initially.
Costs for Sony don't mean costs for you as a consumer. Businesses don't necessarily set prices for goods based on what it cost them to make it, they set prices based on what they think the market will bear. If you raise the price of your product by $100 and only half as many people are willing to buy your product as a result, your revenues have just gone down, right? Of course if you lower your prices below your per-unit cost you aren't going to make any per-unit profit, but there's more than one way to make profit; for example, Sony makes licensing fees on every PS3 game sold, and the more people own PS3s the more people there are out there buying PS3 games.
We didn't know whether the PS3 was going to be $300 when that number was batted around. We don't know whether the PS3 is going to be $400 when that number was being batted around. We have no idea what the PS3 is going to cost except that it's almost certainly going to be too expensive. If you don't like that, Nintendo would be more than happy to sell you something cheaper.
If you ask me, console gaming is pointless if you have a worthwhile PC.
So $300 for a console that will last you four to five years is crazy unreasonable highway robbery, but $3000 for a computer that will play this year's top-of-the-line games (but might not play next year's top-of-the-line games unless you buy an expensive new video card) is only just, normal and rational?
Right...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
What people are forgetting about here is the HDTV specs, which roughly triple or quadruple the memory requirements of video footage stored on a game cartridge/disk. Forgetting about the dual layer capabilities in the future, a 24G Blu-Ray disk, divided by 4, equals 6G. Approximately the size of a standard DVD. "But wait!" you say, "A DVD already can play HDTV!" Ah yes, but a typical game with multiple avenues of game play doesn't record the content of a single linear gameplay... it records many different avenues of gameplay. Which winds up tripling or quadrupling the storage requirements.
My two cents worth of opinion? With this decision, Sony is going to have a much better HDTV compatible offering.
i wonder if Sony is spreading this rumor to let microsoft increase their price on the 360? there is no source behind this rumor as others mention. the price might be quite lower than people assume, but if sony could fake out microsoft by letting them shoot for a higher price. sony may come back with a $299 console
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Sony: Say, Random HD-DVD Manufacturer, how much would we be paying for some HD-DVD drives for the PS3?
Random HD-DVD Manufacturer: For the PS3? Well, since you're going to be buying about 6 quintillion of them, I'd say about $25 a drive. Hell, make it $15 if you put our logo somewhere on the case.
Sony: Let me rephrase that. How much would we be "paying" for some HD-DVD drives if we wanted to justify an insane price-point for the first 12 months of the PS3 release?
Random HD-DVD Manufacturer: Oh, then it's $100 per drive. But if the first batch would turn out to be "bad" for some reason, we would of course be obligated to ship you 5.9 quintillion drives at a vastly reduced price - Say about $25 - to make up for our error, if it would help ensure future business with you.
C. Montgomery Burns: Excellent!
Yeah yeah, I know, new technology, blah blah blah. All I know is that this 4th gen console war is quickly making me want to dust off the Dreamcast.
"The Inquirer is running an article detailing how Blu-Ray drives for the Playstation 3 will cost Sony a small fortune. It turns out that at the release of the console in the first half of 2006, Sony will have to pay more than $100 per drive which will dramatically increase the unit cost of the PS3."
Though this story was recently posted by the inquirer, it's very old news, and only a third of the story.
I already rebuked the story a couple days ago on my own website at http://www.gamegeeknews.com/?p=140 which itself referenced a GamesIndustry story from the end of June.
In short, Merril Lynch Japan has determined that it would cost Sony +$101 per part to manufacture each of the PS3's key components (Cell CPU, nVIDIA GPU, Blu-Ray Drives). That said, it expected Sony to sell the PS3 for $399 and to stomach a +$100 loss on each system sold. So this isn't new news, it doesn't mean the PS3's price is going to sky rocket... It's all already been covered.
there's no real point to sony including blu ray discs on PS3 games. a standard single layer blu ray holds 23GB, you could get that much space from 3 dual layer DVDs (actually, you get a little more with the standard DVDs). then sony would save about $70.
i doubt that sony will use multiple layer blu rays for the PS3 games themselves, really it's just for movies. and who is going to be willing to connect to the internet to watch a movie anyway?
seriously, who is dissatisfied by the visual quality of DVDs? people consider DVDs to have the best picture quality around, i dont see how sony could possibly expect to win any kind of format war, if you can call it that since nobody's going to buy HD DVD either. people will see these new technologies and think "i probably need $2000 in equipment just to use this"
and they'd be right. it's the same reason why everyone doesn't have a DVR, cable HDTV channels, or any of the more hardcore TV watching stuff out there. TV isn't really worth watching anymore, so why pay monthly fees to use a DVR or buy a $3000 TV for marginal picture improvement. at this point, you'd have to be pretty blind not to be somewhat satisfied by standard picture quality. you can see what's going on, can't you? then why does it matter?
"What kind of effect will procedural textures have on this? Surely a procedural algorithm would be smaller (in code at least)?"
You're right. Procedural textures would be significantly smaller. They also have the added benefit of scaling up quite nicely.
There are a couple of problems with procedurals that I suspect is preventing them from being used in gaming. One is that their very nature means they can generate a shimmery/sparkly effect when the detail gets too small. I imagine there are software work arounds for this, but those eat up cycles. That is an unfortunate side-effect of using procedurals with Lightwave. It is easy to make a very noisy render with procedurals if you perform an extreme camera movement, like zooming way out for example. We've been able to partially fix it by having the higher detail procedurals fade out when the camera reaches a certain distance. Raster textures are nice because they get filtered in such a way that this effect doesn't happen near as badly. The other problem is that it takes time and CPU power to generate these cycles. When you're rendering, the difference isn't noticable. But in a real time environment, the CPU (GPU?) will have to generate the appropriate texture value for every pixel on the screen that is rendered. From what I understand, I'm quite certain this would prove to be a headache for the programmers who are trying to maintain a constant frame rate. However, I suspect that some clever programming could alleviate some of these problems. (one of these days I'm going to write a procedural shader so I can understand this a little better...)
There is an interesting way they can solve both the problems I've mentioned. That would be by using a procedural to generate a raster texture. They'd still use up texture memory, but they'd also be able to do that with a managable rendering speed and probably even refine out the sparkly issue.
Anyway, yep, they could save disk space that way.
"Derp de derp."