PS3 Industry Leader In 2007?

1up has a piece on a report indicating that the PS3 will likely be dominant in the industry by the holiday season of 2007. From the article: "Research and Markets also foresees online gaming becoming an increasingly important part of the gaming experience, with Microsoft's Xbox Live service leading the charge. The research overview provides no speculative details on whether Sony or Nintendo's services will be comparative. The next-generation console market as a whole will actually peak in 2008 according to the report, eventually generating $21.9 billion, whereas software sales will rise through 2010 at $16.8 billion. "

Comments

Possible...

[Pxtl]

Sony may have a usable devkit that doesn't cause permanent brain-damage by then.

The difference between the 360 and PS3 is pretty much an ideological one only - PS3 is designed with a focus on hardware power and capability, while the 360 is focussed on software architecture.

Notice how the antedeluvian PS2 hardware can still keep up with modern boxes - that's the payoff of Sony's approach. Conversely, the payoff of MS' approach is more solid launch titles and Live.

Besides that underlying core difference, they're pretty much Coke and Pepsi. I couldn't care less who wins....

at any rate, I'm buying a Rev.

Re:Possible...

[furiousgeorge]

>>Ah, the pathetic myths people perpetuate.

Dude. You should really not talk about things you know nothing about.

Brain damage? That may be a bit extreme, but the sony tools suck. Period. If you think they don't, please give concrete examples, contrasing them with what else is available.

Right now what do you use to develop on the PS2? You either use Metroworks Codewarrior, or the product by SN Systems (I use the former).

Notice --- neither of those are produced by sony.

No big deal you say? So what happens when you find a bug? You get to report it, and then Metroworks and Sony play the blame game for a while until somebody takes ownership of it and maybe eventually gives you a fix.... maybe not. Things are even worse on the PSP.... Sony has 'locked down' certain things you could do on the PS2 for 'security reasons'. And since the tool vendors (compilers, etc) are outside Sony, they don't get access either. End result --- things like our library's interrupt driven real-time profiler can't be run on the PSP. Just stupid stupid stupid.

I have to debug in Codewarrior all day and I would agree that it's causing some sort of damage to my brain. Try waiting for 5-10 seconds for it to step over a line of code in the debugger. Totally random. Yeah, it's been like this for years. Not to mention the continual crashes. Oh yeah, and the random crashes occasionally trash your compile state so you have to do a full rebuild (on my current game, that takes 25 minutes). CW *is* good for two things: 1) it's good for being able to find you the definition of something (define, class, method, macro, whatever. VS still has problems and sometimes can't tell you and you have to search for it yourself). 2) it enforces coffee/cigarette breaks because of it falling over and pooping it's pants regularly.

MSDEV just works and the debugger is probably the best out there (want to try to intelligently debug threads on the PS2? Oh sorry - YOU CAN'T). Hit a break point on your XBOX and want to see whats in the render target or how your texture stages are populated? Click click you can see it in the UI. I won't even go into the XBOX having a unified memory system instead of the VRAM ridiculousness you have to fuck around with on a PS2. Having to manage VRAM DMA uploads to stage your rendering? In 2005? You've got to be fucking kidding me.

You don't get this from MSFT. You report a bug. MSFT, XBOX and Visual Studio are the same entity. Problems get fixed. And lets admit it - Visual Studio is the best all round development tool there is out there. If you can't agree to that, well.... then I can't argue with somebody who is ignorant and/or blind to the facts.

Quote all the Sony press releases you want.... Shall I pull out the old ones stating that Sony was going to be producing Emotion Engine PC's that would take the world be storm? Or have those been swept down the memory hole by them now claiming to do the same thing with Cell? (how soon we forget). Getting Nvidia and other people to produce a bunch of separate tools doesn't give you an integrated solution. It only gives you even more nonsense you have to deal with when things don't work properly.

MSFT has a kickass development system for XBOX. You may not like it, but the fact remains. I'm certainly no MSFT fan.... but i've got XBOX and PS2 development systems on my desk and there is no question which one makes my life less painfull. If you have a real argument why it should be the opposite that is based on experience and not a future tense press release on what Sony might do, I'd be interested in hearing it.

People's Tastes

[Anonymous Coward]

Believe it or not, the general public's tastes change rapidly (and in, somewhat, unpredictable ways); one day 'Grunge' and 'Alternative' music is king, the next day Pop and Hip-Hop rule all. This patern exists in all entertainment fields and the companies who successfuly predict the next wave become highly profitable and culturally important. Sony benefited, more than any other company, from the shift from videogames becoming more of an acceptable pastime (for adults) and the importance of 'Mature' videogames.

The question becomes, where are videogames going?

• Are they going to become simpler with a greater focus on control (Nintendo)

• Is conventional online play going to become more important (XBox)

• Are Massively Multiplayer games the wave of the future (PC)

• Are simple web-based games the next big thing

• Or is everyting going to stay pretty much the same (PS3)

Re:RTFA?

[AuMatar]

A lot of us don't want a centralized service, especially not with a monthly fee. What do I get out of live? A friend's list and voice chat? You couldn't pay me enough to use the voice chat, I don't want to listen to a bunch of 13 year olds calling each other faggots. The friends list is an ok feature, but not worth 10 bucks a month. Oh, and if I do anything MS disagrees to (modding a chip, or get reported for cheating by someone who doesn't realize I'm just better than him), I can get banned for life from ALL my games? I don't think so.

In contrast, I would bet that a lot of the PS3 games end up having free multiplayer- they'll just run the servers. Pretty much like 99% of PC games are today. I see that utterly burying Live.