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
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.