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PlayStation 3 Delay Official
An anonymous reader writes "It's official! PS3 has been delayed until November in Japan. Apparently, it's because of copy protection technology issues associated with Blu-ray." From the article: "Today, Sony officially conceded defeat to the recent flurry of rumors and speculation, with Japanese newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun reporting the machine has been pushed back until November. There aren't many details out right now, but Sony says issues over the finalization of copy protection technology related to their Blu-ray disc drive is the cause of the delay. As the news is coming out of Japan, that creates a worrisome scenario for America and Europe."
If it's November for Japan, and they don't do the same launch date worldwide, could the Revolution be out before it? Isn't it supposed to be a worldwide release around that time?
Maybe somebody with a better memory could put out some dates they've seen.
From the rumors that have been floating around, they're trying to make it All Things to All People, which is the surest way to please few of them.
I've been saying here since early January that we wouldn't see the PS3 officially launched in the States until March of 2007 at the earliest. (and to the AC who called me a 'good liddle fanboy', thpppt!)
It's now March of 2006. They do not yet have, to my knowledge, working hardware for the video game end of things. They don't have working Blu-Ray drives, and in fact the specs there are changing. (latest news: no degradation on analog HDTV sets, which is good.) They don't seem to have decided on a final feature set. I think a November launch might still be possible, but it's gonna take a lot of overtime by a LOT of people. And they'll have to decide on their final feature set _right now_ and push like hell to make it happen.
Sony seems to be in defensive mode, beset by rivals. It doesn't feel like they have a unified vision of what the PS3 should be. Rather, at least if you can believe the zeitgeist of the rumor sites, they seem to be in defensive mode, where they claim they'll do everything that all the other consoles do, better. That's not gonna happen. They don't have the time or the manpower to make it happen. If they keep trying, the PS3 is going to be the Duke Nukem Forever of consoles... because the 360 and Revolution will be moving targets. Now that Microsoft has hardware on the ground, new features are just a matter of writing code. If there's one company on the planet who's got expertise in doing that, it's Microsoft.
At this point, I'm not sure that the PS3 will make November. Whenever it does ship, it will be monumentally expensive, but the wealthy Japanese consumers will buy it in droves anyway; it will be successful in Japan. When they ship it in the US, they're not going to be willing to take the enormous financial hit it would take to sell it at $400; they're going to be priced higher than that, maybe a lot higher.
Now, this part gets _really_ speculative. They saw the EBay market for the 360 (many 360s sold at $800+), so I bet they're going to try a very expensive US introduction. And, paradoxically, I think it will be completely rejected as 'too expensive' by the American consumer, even though the _exact same people_ would turn around and spend $800 for one on EBay. It's okay, you see, for the Average Joe to be rapacious and greedy, but when corporations do it, it's "wrong". And I'm not sure Sony will get that.
Even if they're smart and take the financial hit of introducing at $400, I still think they're likely to end up in third place, this time around. The 360 is really solid; it's an excellent machine and they're doing lots of interesting stuff with it. And the Revolution is _really_ interesting; Nintendo is focused on doing stuff that's fun.
This time around, Microsoft shipped a Mustang. It's big, loud, and powerful. Sony is going to ship a Porsche; quieter, a little faster, more expensive. (if they choose to eat the extra cost, that would make it a great deal for the consumer.) Nintendo is going to ship a Miata. They don't win drag-races, but Miatas are cheap and fun to drive.
Overall, I suspect Nintendo has a good chance of being the big winner this time around. They'll do well in all markets. I suspect the 360 will place a solid (and profitable) second.. they'll do really well in the US and Europe, but will be lucky to sell 25 consoles in Japan. Sony will do well in Japan, simply from a combination of brand- and country-loyalty, but I now suspect they'll do a huge faceplant in the US and Europe.
The link you give is to an entirely different article. That article is about a Howard Stinger interview from several weeks ago. This article is about an article written in a Japanese newspaper this morning.
Moreover, the "dupe" you give is wrong. The article slashdot posts there claims the announcement is "official", but the "official announcement" there is nothing but a misquote. The article took a quote from Variety Magazine saying the PS3 would be out "before the holidays", attributed Variety's commentary to Howard Stinger, and made it sound like PS3 would not be out until "the holidays".
This honestly makes me a little suspicious about this article (today's article, the new article you think for some reason is a dupe), to be honest. We've already had one case where Variety implied a November release for the PS3, a video game blog misquoted it as a Sony statement, and Slashdot reprinted the misquote as an "official" announcement. What if we have a case now where a Japanese newspaper implied a November release for the PS3, a video game blog misquoted it as a Sony statement, and Slashdot reprinted the misquote as an "official" announcement? Can we get a corroborating source besides just 1UP, or an actual quote from Sony about this somehow?
Well, I'm sure the Blu-Ray's ability to revoke keys is a bastard for contract makers. Imagine say someone posted a working Blu-Ray hack a week after the PS3 launches. What do you do? Freeze sales? Recall? Tell people their player is broken before they've played the first disc? HD DVD is more of a "If it breaks, it breaks. You can't undo damage that's already done." The whole premise is futile because there'll always be an "historic" player somewhere to decrypt all movies up to that point, that has never touched any disc with revokation. But they can sure make a mess out of trying.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Heck, even if you're sick of the same old game box, you can always run Linux on the darn thing and use it for other purposes. The way I see it, these game system makers are just taking advantage of the fact that people always want to have the newest box.
Not that 960x540 is half-bad:
A motion picture DVD on a progressive scan player is already 720x480 at 24fps or 720x576 at 25fps depending on TV system. Compared to DVD, 960x540 at movie frame rates is only 50% better than NTSC DVD and 25% better than PAL DVD. Is that so noticeable? Based on specs alone, it looks more like the difference between composite and S-video than the night and day that is progressive-scan DVD vs. HDTV.