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Sony's PS3 Strategy Brilliant or Insane?
1up's Jeremy Parish has a piece wondering out loud about the sanity of Sony's PS3 strategy. From the article: "The veil of mystery surrounding the PS3 is downright maddening, and a little worrying. Consider that by March 2000, the company had already set the PlayStation 2's October 26th release date in stone. Yet here in March 2006, Sony has only been willing to commit to a 'spring 2006' launch for its latest console. Less than ten days from winter's end and gamers are left scraping together scraps of conflicting information trickling from the company's various divisions to try and get a sense of the bigger picture." We may find out which side of the coin they're on tomorrow; The current rumour is there will be some sort of big announcement about Sony's next-gen console on the 15th.
It's brilliantly insane! Or is that insanely brilliant? It's one of the two...
This guy's the limit!
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Between the awesome lead XBox 360 has been able to gain given its earlier release date, this may be the end of Playstation. The next-gen Playstation sounds like it is a potentially superior product. But on one side, there's XBox 360 and the potential release of Halo 3. On the other side, theres Nintendo Revolution and its very unique controller. If Playstation doesn't find something to set it apart from these other two consoles, I believe Playstation's days are numbered.
I call it INSILLIANT!
Insane? Brilliant?
Maybe they're just confused and trying to cover for a botched launch.
Sony have wowed the world over with the PSX, then they had a few... Unfortunate turns of events with the PS2. But they realized one thing : just as in music and film, it's not the actual content that sells, but the hype and marketing!
We have had countless reports on how shittily designed the PS2 was. The only console we had to turn upside-down to have it read disks!
So now, they're combining an awful pre-launch, with a lame try at "yawn, we're going to try to copy xbox live and the revolution download system, but it will be crap", and the "oh yeah, it's gonna be so expensive you'll sell us your unborn children's souls!", I just think that Kutaragi has become arrogant, as much as Yamauchi was in the SNES heyday.
Remember, it won't be a success because of the hardware specs, or the games, or anything. It will be a HUGE success because hordes of brain-dead morons who actually find the "cheese you can listen to" ads funny, will line up and get ready to buy it. You think these people care about DRM or blu-ray?
ONLY MARKETING SELLS!
No matter how brilliant they may be, or how badly they screw up, I wouldnt expect this to be the end of the PS. Fanboy support alone should get them near at least a break even point. I think their biggest threat these days would be the hype over the xbox360. If MS can get a major hardware volume release, combined with a couple of good games just before Sony deploys they should be able to slap down the Sony marketing a bit.
In any case, it should be interesting.
The BR drive is slowly killing the PS3. Sony chose to push their new format rather than do what is good for the gamer.
This "poor man's blu-ray" will not fit into any market. Home theater enthusiasts will buy a professional HD player and the average gamer could care less.
What is making this decision so horrible is the fact that these Blu-Ray drives will push the PS3 to around double the price of the 360 even when selling at a considerable loss. The Cell processor, while powerful, in the real world doesn't have much on 3 3.2 ghz processors (besides a lot of $$$). Sony has an advantage over Microsoft in terms of "branding," but Sony has made a ton of poor architectural decisions.
It is simply inevitable.
All Sony has to do is turn out a powerful console equivalent to the xbox360 and sell it at the same price the xbox360 was at during release (make no mistake, this was on average $800+ after the console plus all the force-bundled crap) and they're set. Sony has 2 generations of backwards compatibility to ride on, games coming out still for the PS2 (see Final Fantasy XII, the be-all and end-all of console moving franchises,) and the fact that Playstation is still a very powerful brand.
The XBOX360's lead time has proven to be little advantage, as Microsoft seems to have lost in Japan entirely as a result of not having crap for games available, and is having supply issues abroad. 6 months will not make the xbox360 any better unless better games come out for it, and they don't have any console-moving titles coming out save Halo 3, and that won't help them in Japan.
The big announcement of course being that Sony is skipping the Playstation 3, ditching the Cell and going right to Playstation 4 which is powered purely by marketing.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
This sums it up nicely, we'll know which it is only after the release
Bruce Feirstein:
The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.
Sony have known for a long time that the Xbox 360 would be first to market. Rather than watch their potential customers make a huge investment in a competing system they are obviously going to do whatever it takes to make buyers wait for the PS3, which means constantly dangling the carrot of a possible huge announcement in the near future infront of the gaming public... which is exactly what they are doing. Hardly 'brilliant' or 'insane', their strategy strikes me more as 'bleeding obvious'.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
"see Final Fantasy XII, the be-all and end-all of console moving franchises"
Complete BS. Not many at all care in the states about the FF series. I've seen about 2 billion Halo LAN parties - I've never seen a FF lan party.
Zelda/Mario single handedly kept the Gamecube in the black.
since so few of us poster's read the articles, I noticed a throw in at the end of this one that caused major spewage:
"The 360 is proving to do just about everything right while Sony has offered nothing but cryptic promises."
now that's taken out of context, but its not even hyperbole. Its just flat out wrong. The 360 so far has done nothing right except come out first. Lets list the things they did wrong:
1) Under produced so that only 1% of the people who wanted one got one in initial release.
2) Under produced so that only 5% of the people who wanted one got one in the SECOND release.
3) No decent games.
4) that whole "broken" thing where you spent $800+ after waiting forever and it doesn't work. that went over REAL WELL.
5) did I mention that when it came out almost no one actually got one.
6) No decent games.
7) they were Microsoft. but of course, they can't help that.....
Ira
1) What was Microsoft supposed to do? Wait until AFTER Christmas to release just to have a few more consoles? It was a business decision to make a select few who got the console early happy rather than make EVERYONE wait. There is no sense in having unused consoles in a warehouse waiting for others to be made.
2) The 360 has set a record for most games sold per console up to this point. There are a TON of games released already with 9.0+ ratings. COD2, PD0, PGR3, GRAW, FNR3, etc. With Elder Scrolls 3 coming out in a week the 360 will have an absolute ton of top-end titles.
3) The console costs $300, you lost all credibility when you claimed almost 3x that. There are a ton fewer broken 360's than PS2's when it hit the market.
There is an article here practically every day that has a headline basically asking "has Sony lost its mind?"
Everybody seems to be missing the fact that the PS2 outsold the 360 in January. Sony does not need to rush to market with the PS3 when there are still some KILLER titles coming out this year. I'm not trying to be a troll, honest, but please stop posting these insufferable articles.
I'd have to say Sony is playing this rather smart. Whether they wanted to or not, they avoided the Christmas 2005 ("Q3/Q4") season, traditionally the biggest hype and buy time of the year. Fortunately for Sony, the XBox360 has been relatively uninspiring so far. Console players are typically kids (or people with lots of free time on their hands), so things like "spring break" and "summer break" are good times to get your marketing message out.
My vote is for brilliant. Sony controls the media, so sony controls the market.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-TJ
There actually is very little about the PS3 that we still don't know about.
Console developers know all that we need to know.
Console gamers know that the same games that made them buy 100+ million PS2s will be there for them on the PS3.
There is an unholy alliance that is going on between console gaming media and xbox fans who both have an interest in trying to play up uncertainty about the PS3. It is a fun spectacle to watch on discussion boards and articles like this one, but it will all be forgotten soon and completely by E3 this year.
Sony has become so dominant in the console market that they are pretty much proceeding along their own timeline completely oblivious to anything or anyone outside of Sony and the large PS3 developer community. They have had a timeline for the PS3 for five years now and there is nothing that is going to change it - except for that couple week hiccup with the BluRay spec being finalized that will probably push the release back a couple weeks into June in Japan.
There is no 'strategy' on Sony's part. The PS2 is obliterating the GameCube, Xbox, and Xbox 360 in the market in all territories. It is outselling the brand new 360 by 2 to 1 in the US this last month. They sold 300k PS2s last month compared to only 160k 360s.
Sony's six year old machine is dominating Microsoft's brand new machine by a wider margin for the each of the past three months. The PS2 is an amazing piece of hardware. God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, Burnout Revenge, Resident Evil 4, DQVIII, and now Black.
It's good to be Sony.
While I think the premise is interesting, the article has some really loopy conclusions. First, there seems to be a lot of MS love, considering the author's assertion that Nintendo is now a distant third and the 360 is primed to take over the market. The 360, which is plauged by issues and being outsold by the PS2?
Plus, his idea that every decade the industry just changes itself is a little bit absurd. The changes he cites came about for different reasons. Atari failed because of public indifference to "games" (hence "entertainment system"). Nintendo's failure was more technical than social, even against trumped-up charges of mistreatment regarding developers (which were serious, to be sure, but definitely not the main reason everyone jumped ship). Just taking periods of time and saying "hey, they're similar!" and then basing your entire analysis on that is ridiculous.
As for the secrecy potentially being a huge problem for Sony, I agree completely. He should have fleshed that idea out more, however, rather than just throwing around poorly-informed speculation.
...Yes.
While I can't be sure what their release srategy is, Sony knows that they control the majority of the console market. With this, they can continue to play and prod with release dates, demos, and specs. With each new tidbit, they make the fans drool all the more over the system, increasing the hype. (To be fair, Nintendo does the same to us Nintendo fanboys, only we get less promises and specs, and at a much slower rate.)
However, one has to wonder how long they can hold this off. I'm sure PS2 hardware sales are already dropping as game stores start pushing for reserving a PS3. Eventually, the numbers will reach over into game sales (where Sony makes up profit loss on the console), becuase no one will be buying a new PS2, and thus won't get Grand Theft Auto 10 or whatever. If they hold off too long, this could give them a big bite, though I'm sure that software sales will surge (including PS2 titles) when the PS3 comes out- assuming it has backwards compatibility.
In fact, the same thing is happening across the board, excluding the XBox (360). As news of the DS Lite travels, regular DS sales will slow as people decide to hold off for a few months to get The Next Best Thing. Same thing goes for the Gamecube and the PS2.
I think we are seeing what happens when products try to be all things to all people. The muddled information about the PS3's launch is understandable because everything else about the system is so muddled. How much will it cost? Will it be backwards-compatible? I've not seen answers to those are very simple questions yet.
And I think the reason we don't know the answers to the simple questions is because Sony hasn't yet answered all the hard questions internally. It just doesn't seem like there is a solid plan or a road map for the PS3 other than being "faster." Why are they using blu-ray? What is the H-D plan for the PS3? Why are they using bluetooth? What are their online plans? I should not have to dig through countless gaming sites to find out these details.
I think Sony has taken a lot of things for granted with the PS3. It could be that the installed base of the PS2 has clouded their thinking. But Sega proved that a next-gen machine had to have more than just technical superiority to succeed (and they were first to market with the Dreamcast!)
Sony needs to get the public informed about the PS3, and they need to do it soon. Else, the XBOX 360 may do to the PS3 what the PS2 did to the Dreamcast.
/me goes back to ignoring console gaming
It seems, in fact, that even the components are going to be copied: the bad bad Cell (anyone even remember the supposed promise of the Emotion Engine?) will be used in computers.
They're poorly trying to play catchup on the Xbox Live|SNES/NES download services. Downloading a dual-layer PS2 DVD sounds very bizarre, if their service is ever built to the specifications they listed. Certainly we will have the ability to, one day, get 9GB file via Wifi in Tbilisi, but what's the point now?
And where are the exclusive PS3 titles? Metal Gear, Gran Turismo... I know there are enormous fans of these games, but my inclination is "so what." I'll give you Symphony of the Night, but can anyone name another PS1 game that anyone truly cares about playing again via their download service? It seems that most of their decent earlier games (as in 8 years ago) are available for the N64. Sony simply does not have the franchises that Nintendo has cultivated and Microsoft has basically bought for Xbox Live.
Even the bluray will be available in other devices. (That, of course, bodes well for the bluray format, but does it really matter with the PS3?)
The PS2/Revolutionalike controller scheme honestly reminds me of the 32X, and we all know how badly that went.
I was about to write, "Like every videogame war, it comes down to the games..." but I attended E3 in 1999 and remember the amazing promise of the Dreamcast's games, which gave the system the most quality-game-heavy launch in the history of videogaming since the NES. With the iPod now the gold standard in consumer electronics, it's about creating a complete experience for the user, and I can easily see the PS3 as all-things-to-all-people.
Xbox360 is a 1.5 upgrade. PS3 is copycatting. Combine this with the rootkit fiasco, the accompanying media hype (always impossible to meet) that blurays require a DRM-friendly HDTV, kaboom.
Nintendo all the way. I don't doubt a great deal of hype accompanying it, but it will be more of the "look at this weird thing" variety, much like the DS, and look at the DS now.
No kidding...I am so frigging sick of the ramp-up marketing madness surrounding the consoles...its just plain disgusting. I'll be glad that there's no information on it. It all comes down to the games, now whatever marketing buzz you can generate over your system. Gamers will look at marketing and say "oh cool" but they won't make their buying decision based on that alone, the majority of them may be stupid, but not THAT stupid.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
You're a dick.
so long as all the blogs and media outlets are talking about Sony, talking about Blu-Ray, and talking about the really cool games that are coming with the PS3, they keep you from wanting to buy an xBox360.
Most people I know are waiting until all the consoles are released before they buy, and I live in xBox360 central (Seattle), so you know it's working.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Beware the ides of March!
BEWARE!
Et tu, nintendo?
Sigh. Like anyone reading Slashdot these days finds this funny. Back in my day... et cetera.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Phil Harrison, President of SONY computer entertainment is going to deliver a keynote address at the upcoming Game Developers' Conference on March 22, titled "PS3: beyond the box"...let's hope this will probably end the silence on the console, apart from the rumored announcement on the 15th.
My sig has been answered.
4. Because of 3. that same competitor, although I am using that word loosely, has had to rush a weak new system onto the market. That system is plauged with problems that are of a magnitude never see before in the console market
10. 360 games are getting laughed at by the console world for their miserable graphics
-5 obvious fanboy hyperbole
This PS3/360/NR to-and-fro here is amazing to me because of posts like these. In general most of the points are either valid, (currently) true, or at least arguable... but then you have to go and read stuff like this:
360: "a weak new system... plauged with problems that are of a magnitude never see before in the console market... laughed at by the console world for their miserable graphics."
I mean, jeesh? To be fair, this brand of drivel not isolated to Sony peeps. The same happens on the *other* sides, too (although not as much, weirdly). But it's bothersome because it just spoils whatever cred you came in the room with. Forensics 101 people!
My 2 cents? Well, simply, I like games. Mostly *analog* games like ping-pong, bolwing, pinball, skateboarding, etc. But I've owned an Atari 2600, Commodore 64, SNES, 3DO, Dreamcast and currently own an Xbox (I didn't have a PS1 because I was just starting my career, and knew it would be dangerous;)). I'm a pseudo-early adopter, and I think LIVE is awesome. I play online on my computer sometimes, but IMHO LIVE is just... smooth. Pick-up and play, which is what 'console gaming' is all about. I'll probably get a PS3 and/or NR also, but right now I'd love to get my hands on a 360, but like a lot of people can't find an un-bundled, non-Ebay Premium system to save my life (who wants to support that kind of behavior?). Although availibilty will probably (hopefully) improve within the next month or two. I check the BestBuys here in NYC a couple times a week. I've only gotten close a couple times when they've had some Core systems. And even those have sold out before I could get there. FWIW, I quizzed the sales people at several stores and they surmised that they get at least 50 systems a week (x 4 stores) and they're gone. Poof! Sure there are stores in Japan with THOUSANDS!!!! And I'm sure, too, a bunch in Europe. But for ME (and apparently many others) they're still hard to get in the US. Again NON-BUNDLED and NON-EBAY'd. So all those posters here who claim they're 'everywhere' are hopeful, or secretly Japanese. That kind of statement's factually accurate, but 'journalistically' misleading. Same goes for the graphics. I buy systems with graphics in mind (check: C64, 3DO, Dreamcast) and you'd be crazy not to see the difference graphics-wise 360-to-current gen. Sure, it MAY be only 1.5 gen, blah blah blah, and the PS3 MAY be so graphically powerful that it explodes every other system within a two block radius... but WE DON'T KNOW. All we know is the 360 is here now (at least on display) and PGR, Kameo, etc look darn nice. I actually respect the f* outof Nintendo for essentially going purely the 'it's all about the games' route, and foregoing the graphics pissing contest.
Blah blah blah. I'm rambling. But it is what it is. The 360 is out now, the PS3 isn't. The 360's graphics are better than any current console. The launch certainly was rushed, but wasn't nearly a hardware catastrophe (nor was the PS2 launch). AND the PS3 will be out sometime in the next year-and-a-half. And then only time and money will tell.
The Xbox was killed off early by Microsoft due to their inability to bring the manufacturing costs down over the life of the product. The main culprit was the idiotic decision to include a harddrive. Harddrives don't come down in price. Manufacturers come out larger capacity drives for the same price. And for drives of the size in the Xbox I wouldn't be surprised if the costs actually started to go up due to fact that almost no one uses drives of that size anymore.
Because the massive losses the first Xbox was generating Microsoft was forced to come up with new hardware faster than Sony or Nintendo. And it shows. They pretty much only had time to get IBM to slap a third core onto one of their existing designs and bolt an ATI card to it.
The Xbox 360 has had more things go wrong with its hardware and launch than all other console's combined. I can't think of another console that is anywhere close to the 360.
The 360 has turned out to be the biggest console disaster ever. I would love to hear which console over the past twenty years is even in the same league as the 360 for hardware problems or launch disasters.
i'd say in PS3's case, all press like this is great press, and the mystery creates 'headlines' like this one on slashdot. people get talking about it, and start thinking about skipping the x360 and saving up for this amazing mystery system. remember the INCREDIBLE ps2 cpu hype? they made it sound like the ps2 had A.I.. It turned out to just be nothing special at all. i just wonder how long before disc read errors start popping up with the ps3..
Your post is nothing but fanboy flamebait.
The Xbox 360 is indeed, the most complex console to date, as has almost every console released, ever. More things going wrong with it? The only thing I've heard of it overheating of the PSU, mainly because of the decision to make it external (and poor design, at that) and people's inability to put it somewhere where heat would not build up.
It certainly isn't the "biggest console disaster ever" - as I understand it, the 360 is setting records for "games-per-unit" sales, and since the hardware is completely sold out everywhere, I imagine that means positive revenue for Microsoft. They were able to sell them like gangbusters last Christmas, even bundled with hundreds of dollars of extras (thereby eliminating the loss per unit in one fell swoop).
The PS3, on the other hand, is going to cost 3 times the Xbox 360 to BUILD. Sony can only hope to **match** the games-per-unit record that the 360 is making, and that won't compensate for the loss they'll need to take just to sell the PS3 and keep it competitive.
Wow, on my main Slashdot page these articles are only tiny one-line entries below the "primary" stories. Must suck to be forced to read these articles before you can get to the content that you prefer.
The official statement, issued today through Reuters, is that the meeting will be an event to announce the future of the PlayStation side of Sony's business, which is particularly vague, although if we consider Koei's comments, it is highly likely there will be some mention of the the PlayStation 3. Next week also sees the Game Developer Conference 2006 taking place in the US, where it's known some SCEA developers will be speaking.
Sony's announcement:
Haha, tricked you! The truth is, there is no PS3. Sorry people, but you'll have to wait 6 more years for the PS4. Oh yeah, next week, we're having a conference about the PS4's capabilities
From the conference next week:
The PS4, AKA "Deus ex Machina," will be 100% compatible with 3d projectors, and will use IBM's hologram data storage as its storage medium. Please stay tuned for further updates.
If all you care about is graphics you can get an xbox 360. If you want good games get the Revolution. What is the point of the PS3? The only people that I can see buying one are people who are hooked on GT, or PS2 fanboys who would buy a PS3 if all it did was make toast.
"The current rumour is there will be some sort of big announcement about Sony's next-gen console on the 15th."
"Soothsayer: Beware the ides of March.
CAESAR: He is a dreamer; let us leave him: pass."
Who's the dreamer now?
I mean, we do know that PS3 is the next generation of Sony gaming platform, Apple seems fit to surprise us every few months with "just one more thing". We don't even know if Apple is truly has a new video iPod that may or may not be released in March or April. If Sony's strategy has been insane, I think most Apple's exec's should be locked away in straight jackets with the key thrown away.
For Sony, the bottom line is that the PS3 is hotly anticipated and we are aware that it WILL be released and basically what it is. If it was released today, you can be assured that they will sell millions in just a few hours. Does Sony really need a firm release date?
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Development shops have all but perfected the multiplatform release. Nearly every new 3rd party game is multiplatform. What that means to the gamer is that console choice is less risky. Developers assume less risk buy starting the development process with multiplatform design in mind. The difference between the 360 and ps3 will not likely be large enough to make developers say "hey we can only have this on the PS3 because the 360 can't handle it from a technical standpoint". Exclusives will happen on all three platforms but likely only by first party developers so the number of those titles will be small comparitively. Breakaway hits are flaky and unpredictable to begin with so ANY platform has a chance to produce those.
Basically to the consumer any platform is a great choice.
Now in an environment like this first mover becomes a big advantage. Having your console on the shelves with a huge library of titles ready to go just as your competition hits the market with only a few titles and a shortage of actual machines can make a critical difference. Next christmas when mom and dad go out to buy johnny that PS3 that is so hot its out of stock they in all truthfulness won't have a really good reason NOT to get him the 360 that is in stock instead.
Each platform has its advantages:
The 360 is a first mover, will have more titles, a larger installed base, a better online component and ease of PC game portablility.
The PS3 has the playstation name, is the current generation king by a huge margin, developer loyality, a huge japanese foothold, blu-ray, and better hardware at higher resolution.
The Revloution has a genius new controller, an excited developer community, a wise casual target market strategy, an established online commuinty, will likely be the cheapest of all of the consoles and has a huge japenese following.
That said, to the consumer, no matter what console you pick you will likely be very satisfied. In the end the unpredictable runaway hits that could happen exclusively on ANY platform will probably be the deciding factor though. Sony being 6 more months late to the market or MS not having enough machines to meet demand (what a problem to have) will likely have little to no impact on who actually "wins" this generation (sounds like gamers are the winners).
Ves
Comment removed based on user account deletion
LOL
How about PS1? Three different PS1s of mine completely broke and stopped reading discs. A friend of mine's PS1 only would read burned games.
Ever blow in an NES?
Off the top of my head, the most reliable game system released recently is the GameCube, but maybe that's because nobody uses them.
I'm not defending Microsoft here, but their biggest issue was supply. Some 360s have defects but is it any worse than before?
rm -rf
Sony and the media are doing to the same thing to Microsoft with the ps3 that they did to sega with the ps2. They are using hype and lies to keep everyone from getting excited about the better console, by saying just wait, don't buy yet the ps3 will be better. They killed any chance Sega had with their far superior console the dreamcast by telling everyone wait, don't buy a dreamcast wait 8 months for the PS2 it will blow you away. And here we are how many years later, and dreamcast launch titles still look and play better than 99% of the ps2 titles made.
"Everybody seems to be missing the fact that the PS2 outsold the 360 in January"
Is that because purchasers preferred the PS2 over the X360, or because there were all of 17 X360s to be had worldwide at the time?
"I actually respect the f* outof Nintendo for essentially going purely the 'it's all about the games' route, and foregoing the graphics pissing contest." This is because Nintendo is unique in the current industry. 1st - They are the only games company to manufacture a console. Xbox & Playstation are devisions of larger companies. 2nd - Nintendo has been in this since the beginning, well not quite the beginning but by that i mean they were there back in the days of crap graphics and sound, 2 button pads for gods sake. They know theres more to this game than "oh shiny". And as for those bemoaning the fact that the rev is basically a gamecube i say good, the gamecube is a nice solid little unit (top loading is a pain) with a quality over quantanty approach towards titles. My beast of a gaming rig is an evolution of an old 386 but that doesent mean there the same machine. TRY RUNNING F.E.A.R. AT MAX ON A 386SX 4MB RAM When all 3 are available to buy i will definatly end up with a REV and one of the other 2, which one though i couldent tell you. I may have come across as a bit of a big N fanby but im not. I got fed up with them after the N64, i got a used gamecube a few months ago just because it was too cheap not to.) The point is the 360 and the ps3 havent done anything for me, but nintendo have captured my imagination and thus my pre-order.
Well, Bart, your uncle Arthur used to have a saying: "Shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out."
Microsoft's sales since launch here have been mediocre at best here in the U.S.A. and negligible in japan.
http://www.craxtion.com/content/view/133/2/
They will have to release at least 3 AAA Japanese Style rpgs among other thigns to get the japanese to switch brands and they just need to churn out more quality titles here in the U.S.
Hmmm... Pie...
Ugh, your exaggerating the cost of the blu-ray... The actual pure drive components cost will be bumped down to probably around $30 bucks after Sony ships off their first million or two since it's their factories and their own tech no licensing required for the technology to other companies.
All the expensive chips required to decode the hd stream and convert the video is already there. Sony can probably just design some software to run on their cell to decode whatever mpeg stream blu-ray runs on and they've got other chips already to handle tv output.
Hmmm... Pie...
I'm so sorry i got a ps2, why I only got to play games from my favorite creator Hideo Kojima--Metal Gear series. Numerous obscure but fun japanese rpgs along with mainstream ones like FF, Xenosaga, Dragonquest. How about gran turismo, being able to recreat an old ae86 and tuning it to hell is so shitty. But i guess those and all the other games I've played and the genre of games I play are just mediocre altogether. Why i should have bought a gamecube to play mario party and metroid or something. Why not! I should buy the revolution so i can play Mario Dance party and mario fishing with funny controller thingy (thats not a goddamn revolution in gaming it's a different type of control and it's nothing new in comparison to arcades). I'm not gonna buy a ps3 no matter what. Even if i dislike colorful cute little kiddy oriented games i'll still have a grand total of 4 mature titles to look forward to during the revolution's lifetime.
Hmmm... Pie...
Back in the olden days when I was still a teenager in the year of 1999. I was obsessed with playing japanese rpgs with my psx (the first ps used to be abreviated as such!). It fell down a full flight of stairs (messed up younger sister :( ).
My obsession also incurred the wrath of my parents. Particularily my father who was not happy to see me gaming over 6 hours in a row and proceeded unto ripping the psx out of it's home on my desk causing all the plugs to go off, hurled it onto the wall which caused the cd thingy to pop open exposing my precious Xenogears disc one to pop out onto the ground.
I mouth was wide open in shock but alas my father was not satisfied he grabbed the psx once again and slammed my psx toward the very spot my xenogears CD was resting at. I witnessed the something I did not realize occured with cds, it was as if it had shattered like glass with many small particles along with the bigger chunks.
The most important thing is though, after the situation cooled down I plugged in my psx tried another game and to my surprise it was still running! Hooray i would play with it for another 3ish years at which point the ps2 replaced it (psx is probably still okay, just resting on the shelf).
Hmmm... Pie...
Sony has created the Playstation 3 (PS3), not as a game machine, but as a vessel to float the company into new lands. They are burdening the system with a new movie format (BluRay) unheard of levels of digital rights management for music and video, Memory Sticks and more.
The results are already starting to show. A year ago, Sony promised to launch the PS3 in Spring 2006. Instead, they waited till Spring 2006 to announce that they won't be launching the system until November 2006, in Japan , with other regions perhaps as soon as Spring 2007. Why? Digital Rights Management issues with the upcoming BluRay format.
The other divisions of Sony are dragging the PS3 down. The Playstation Portable (PSP) suffers from the same illness; too many hands in the basket. The PSP was designed around a slow-loading UMD format for distribution of movies which makes the machine less than ideal for game playing. Compared to ROM cartridges, UMDs are too slow loading and consume too much battery time. They make the machine more fragile and introduce problems with additional moving parts. In short, they are a sacrifice to the movie industry arm of Sony; giving up on the optimal game experience for the opportunity to sell you movies you probably already own on DVD.
The delays brought about by making compromises to the core functions of the system will put a great strain on Sony. Currently, their ark is full of holes and loaded with baggage. The flood waters rise. How many gamers will wait until this time next year in order to pick up a PS3 when Xbox 360 games are available today and are getting excellent review scores? How many will pass up the Revolution this holiday season when it is affordable and fun? How high will the waters rise before Sony can launch the ark?
Will it float?
More can be found here: Kamalot Blog
Is anyone coding in any interesting languages like say Mercury, Or Prolog or Lisp on consoles now?
Are any big-title games on PC's being coded in any of the above?
What are you looking here for???
Have you driven a fnord... lately?
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Jak and Daxter was famously written in a LISP variant, and it was a fun game (I didn't like the sequels as much though).
The PS3 will come with a complementary copy of Duke Nukem Forever.
You'll get to play them ALL OVER AGAIN with added Shininess(TM)on the PS3!
EpiAdv - if you like Pokey the Penguin, try this comic!