Slashdot Mirror
MS Touts Time Advantage Over PS3 Launch
Gamasutra is reporting on Microsoft's loud exclamations on the advantage their November launch will afford them, compared to the expected 2006 launch of the PS3. In fact: "UK Xbox boss Neil Thompson has boasted that Microsoft expects to have a even more significant lead on the PlayStation 3 than previously supposed, suggesting that, in his opinion, the PlayStation 3 might launch in Europe as late as spring 2007 ..." More on this FUD from Next Generation.
The Xbox 360 will be competing with the PS2, however. And is anyone predicting that there will be more Xbox 360 games sold in than PS2 games sold in the time before the release of the PS3? Or at least in the time before the end of the 05 holiday shopping season?
Perhaps the sales of games will tilt a little more in favor of the Xbox brands and the PS2 sales > xbox 360 + xbox sales won't be as overwhelming as the PS2 sales > xbox sales were in the earlier days.
Rather than focusing on trashing a yet to be released console, I hope MS realizes that on their release day, their nemesis is still the PS2.
One word: Sega
I know how Slashdot likes to spread their funny acronyms whenever they have a chance, but this is certainly not fear, nor uncertainty, and certainly not doubt. The PS3 is going to be equal to or slightly better than the Xbox 360 in performance, but it's going to be launched at least a year after the new Xbox. That's pretty much a fact. It's definitely not going to be launched earlier than spring/summer in Japan, and then late summer/fall in the US. Given how Sony treats the European market, it's probably going to launch here about six to nine months later, so I don't think a 2007 release date is off the wall.
The word here is "may". A year ago it seemed like the X360 may launch with interesting titles, too. That usually gets resolved as launch draws closer.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Raises hand.
Former PS2 owner who going to be buying the 360 at launch. The biggest draw for me to the 360 is the online. MS has put together a solid online system that neither Sony or Nintendo can even come close to at this point.
There are many games that I am looking forward to for the system, many of which will use the online connectivity for more than just multiplayer aspects.
Also the media centre extender capabilities are a plus on top of that as well as I'm planning to set up a media server PC to host movies and record shows and crap on and it will be nice to be able stream movies/music/tv shows to the 360 if someone else is using the TV.
I haven't seen any ACTUAL games for the PS3 as of yet so it's kinda hard to judge based on that, but sony's online strategy seems like a mostly tacked on, hack-job kinda thing so I don't have too much confidence in that. And if I take their PSP online support as an indication it will probably be abysmal. On top of that there is the talk that making PS3 games will require $16M investment before you even start to develope a game for it and I have a feeling MS may be getting a pretty decent head start as first to market, especially when the power of the machines will ultimately be pretty close.
Also the rev I am actually interested in, which is something I haven't been able to say about nintendo's product in a long time.
It seems very malicious of Neil Thompson to suggest the PS3 will have such an extremely late launch date. Does he have a reliable source backing up this claim?
...so buy our product which you don't really want in the meantime.
I suspect he is trying to use the age old Microsoft-perfected tactic of instilling doubt about their competitor's product. Trying to say to people, the PS3 is years off (even though offically it is less than a year away)
Oh well, Microsoft using dirty tricks is nothing new I guess.
Also, why is it FUD if it's MS, and rumours if it's anyone else?
It's FUD to say the PS3 won't be shipping in Europe until 2007 when Sony has said no such thing and MS clearly has a financial agenda for spreading such nonsense.
Rumors are spread by people with either a) no vested interest, or b) an unconfirmed (or uncomfirmable) vested interest. You could call this a rumor if you didn't know the source, or if the source was independent, e.g. neither MS nor Sony (nor Nintendo).
Coming from the company with a console going head to head with the PS3, it is FUD to spread unsubstantiated rumors that make the competing system look as bad as possible.
You may as well say it's a "rumor" that there's SCO code in Linux. That's not a rumor, that's FUD coming from SCO. It's an unsubstantiated factoid designed for no other reason than to drive people away from a competing product and towards yours. That's the definition of what FUD is, and this is the same thing.
Come on guys. Every Xbox360 slashpost for the last three months ends up with some highly moderated post about how the Xbox360=Dreamcast. If it's gotten to the point where you're using one word and getting modded up X points, it's too far. There are other, far more intelligent reasons why a first release does not equal an advantage, but a comparison to Sega is not one of them. Sega is nothing like Microsoft, and the Dreamcast is completely different than the Xbox360.
Microsoft could not be more different than Sega in this situation. Sega was already running out of cash. Its arcade incomes had dropped next to nothing. More than that, Sega had lost its single major technology partner - Microsoft - just before launch, because Microsoft had suddenly decided to start dev on its own console. Sega lost its president just before the Dreamcast launch. It postponed the launch date an entire month after a solid promise of September 23. Sega was banking on the Dreamcast, but Microsoft will not go under if no one buys an Xbox360. Sega nearly did when few bought the Dreamcast.
With regards to the hardware, there are now declining returns on hardware performance. Three years of R&D does not look like three years of graphical and gameplay improvement to the mainstream. Nintendo has wisely realized this and correspondingly revamped the UI technology rather than the graphic tech. I haven't seen the PS3 in real action (few have), but I can't imagine it can do much more technically than the Xbox360, at least in terms of the difference between the Dreamcast and PS2. Sega pushed the online capabilities of the Dreamcast, but they were too far ahead of the game (this was when ISDN was fast). Now, with broadband penetration in most American middle class homes, Xbox Live 2 looks revolutionary.
Finally - and unfortunately - Microsoft has realized that it really isn't even games that matter to a consoles success: it's culture. The Dreamcast's launch lineup was unarguably the best console launch ever, and hedgehog heads and tails above the medicore PS2 launch and Halo-driven Xbox launch. What it was missing was cultural penetration. But owning an Xbox, in America and Europe, is cool. Turn on MTV and watch Pimp My Ride. It's not PS2s people want in the backseats of their cars, it's Xboxen. You never saw anything like that with the Dreamcast. Sega thought it was all about the games, and it never was. The PS2 succedded because the PS1 was cool, and because it racked up massive cool points with GTA3.
I could go on. Go research the Dreamcast launch and you'll see that not only is Sega/Dreamcast completely unlike Microsoft/Xbox360, but the market is a completely different animal now. But please, stop with the Sega comparisons. They're dumb.