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Ken Kutaragi's Famous Last Words
When we look back on this E3, I think one of the moments we're most clearly going to remember is the dead silence in the Sony press conference following the price announcement. Eurogamer and GameDaily has coverage of Phil Harrison's spin work, trying to recover from that moment, discussing how Sony is not ripping off Nintendo and Microsoft probably won't meet their 10 million units goal. More interestingly, they discuss an interview with Ken Kutaragi conducted by a Japanese website. From that piece: "SCEI president Ken Kutaragi has defended the PlayStation 3's high price tag once again, declaring that not only will consumers be prepared to pay the cost but that the console is 'probably too cheap.' In an interview with Japanese website IT Media, partially translated by IGN, Kutaragi said: 'This is the PS3 price. Expensive, cheap - we don't want you to think of it in terms of game machines ... For instance ... Is it not nonsense to compare the charge for dinner at the company cafeteria with dinner at a fine restaurant? It's a question of what you can do with that game machine. If you can have an amazing experience, we believe price is not a problem.'"
... I don't know about the rest of you, but I never, ever eat in really expensive restaurants. As good as the food may be, it's simply not worth the additional cost. Which is why I'll be getting a Wii and not the PS3.
Nyhetsankaret.com -- det bÃsta av Sveriges Nyhetssido
"Sony is not ripping off Nintendo", "Microsoft will not meet its goal" Where have I heard talk like that before? Oh yeah... Baghdad Bob.
In the last 120 days, the value of the dollar has gone from about 120 yen to under 110. If this trend continues, it could give the 360 a pretty decent home-field advantage. Granted, all components are made outside the US (and possibly outside of Japan), but demonimating the wealth in dollars is probably much easier than doing so in Yen.
You know, Ken, if the gaming press is saying that's probably too expensive, and a lot of hard-core gamers are looking at your price and honestly wondering if they can even afford it, maybe you should listen.
On the other hand, by E3 it was already too late to change course on that.
It's amazing how badly E3 went for Sony. I'd say Microsoft at least broke even, Nintendo scored in a big way, almost entirely at the expense of Sony, which lost big.
On Slashdot, digg, and other gaming sites I've been looking at, the Sony fanboy has overnight become an endangered species. That is what is really telling me Sony has a problem. If even the Retardusfuckwitis Internetus, a species Sony nearly owned last week, is defecting, you're gonna die.
We're talking about a game system that's competing head-to-head with lower-priced machines.
As nice as it is to say, "It's okay because it'll be worth it," there will still be a huge market who says, "We disagree," and buys someone else's product. Case in point: Wal-Mart. You could shop anywhere, why shop at Wal-Mart? America says, "Because it's cheap," and doesn't care if the quality is a little lower or the manufacturing is a little shadier. I can't speak for the rest of the world, but I think the same principle will apply to some degree.
In that case...waiter? Check please!
-------
"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
Bottom line, I probably will not buy the PS3 for a good long while. And don't even bring up that crippled "cheap" version...
"This thing does science so hard, you say, 'I've never seen that much science.'" -Sam
When the Playstation 2 was released many people at least partially justified a purchase based on its inclusion of DVD playing capability. Even I did, and I think I've watched a total of 2 movies on it. If the public sees a PS3 as an opportunity to get a new Playstation AND a new DVD player, then the price isn't so bad.
Microsoft's add-on HD-DVD won't cut it, since history tells us that console peripherals NEVER catch on.
Me? I'll get the new Nintendo and wait for at least the first price drop on a PS3.
IF you see the PS3 as more than a game console, and intend to use it as a Blue-Ray disc player and/or whatever other features Sony decides to add to it, then it might be worth it. From a purely gaming perspective, unless there is some game only on the PS3 you can't live without, it just ain't worth it.
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
Kutaragi-san kind of reminds me a little bit of Jack Thompson, in that he's a complete sociopath, totally full of himself, and constantly says ridiculous, asinine stuff when pleading his case. I daresay Sony's image might be a lot better were it not for him.
Heh, I usually like slate.com, but their recent article Love Thy PlayStation, Love Thyself
Why you should make a $500 game console your life partner. was a bit over the top.... sure it was tongue in cheek (I don't think they're really arguing it's more cost effective than a good marriage) but it's kind of weird how they ignore Nintendo and lump Xbox 360 with the PS2 and TurboGrafx 16...
"The PS3, after all, has been built expressly to keep mind-blowing novelty coming and coming and coming. Periodic infusions of novelty--new games--will keep the endorphins flowing."
Uh, yeah.
Anyway, I hope the PS3 blows up in Sony's face... it's a lame-ass way to try and subsidize a win in a format war. At least they finally aren't limited to 2 controllers w/o a multitap....
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Or at least, that's what I'm getting out of the whole thing. We already knew the PS3 was going to be expensive to produce. The only question was how much Sony would charge for the machine.
Right... no one's ever seen next generation graphics before, or even various services via the network.
Seriously, I never had any intention of buying any of the next-gen consoles when they were released (that includes the Wii; by the time it comes out, I may finally get around to getting a DS :)), but the more I hear about the PS3, the more I realize I'm definitely not going to be buying any of the first-generation PS3s. Two versions, one an un-upgradable "cheap" version, weird controllers without force feedback, and the $500/$600 price tag all are making me that much more willing to wait for a PS3.
I'm more than willing to wait until the PSThwii gets released, with a single version that supports everything, and hopefully with wireless controllers that support force feedback. Oops, sorry, that's supposed to be "PSthree" in the style of the "PStwo" and "PSone" rereleases.
And to think, if anything, I'm a Sony fanboy...
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
1. Screw the Cell processor. We want more standard stuff. Like an 8-core or something.
2. Give us a physics coprocessor.
3. Keep the backwards compatibility.
There.
... it was determined today that Ken Kutaragi has a stick thoroughly shoved up his ass. When asked is this was a flaw or intended, Kutaragi responded "Sony has no flaws," and that no matter what he is God and we should all bow down to him because he knows what is best.
I will by buying a PS3..
one.. it will play HD movies on my HD set..
two.. it will play HD games on my HD set..
three.. i like HD stuff
four.. it will fit on the shelf next to my mythTV box rather nicely..
with the harddrive and all the options for inputs / outputs.. i think this is going to be quite a bit more than a "games console".. try more like a media console..
Well, I can see what the guy means. People pay waaay more than that for gaming PCs. But the critical point is that I haven't heard anything that leads me to think this console will be that much better than other cheaper consoles. If it made everything else out there look like a pile of junk from 20 years ago, then sure. But it really has to have some tremendous wow factor for it to work out they way he hopes. Even then, adding a large price increase for some bundled add-ons sounds like a bad idea. People will just figure out how to add them after market. Nobody wants to void a warranty, but if it saves you literally hundreds of dollars, a lot of people might consider it.
"Contrarily the lookaside buffer might not be the panacea... "
Sony has done the worst possible thing, they built the Titanic of consoles. It is big, it is expensive, and it is going to sink. It tries to cator to everyone but ends up being something no one wanted.
On the face of it, it appears that 360 is cheaper than PS3 by a hefty margin. Until you factor in that the 360 can't play HD DVD media and the drive to do so costs $200. You add that price in and the 360 basically costs the same as the PS3.
Of course, you do have the option of passing on the HD-DVD addon for the 360 if you only want to play games. However, like with the PS2, I'm guessing Sony's banking that people will view the PS3 as not just a game machine but also as an introductory Bluray DVD player.
So while Kutaragi could use a degree in tact and spin, he does essentially have it right when he says you're getting value for your money.
Personally, I'll get a Wii and then wait a year or two for Bluray manufacturing to get cheap and the PS3 price to drop with it.
The PS3 price really isn't that bad when you consider that games will only be $120 each.
SmR
This man is a genius! I've got to get me a piece of this...
I hereby announce that not only are the rest of you Slashdotters fully prepared to Paypal me ten bucks every time you get to read one of my fabulous posts, but I'm letting you all off easy by not demanding twenty.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
...they will try to arrange some big-time crossover marketing enticements when they release the PS3. For example, discount coupons on PS3 games and Blu-Ray movies, to make the $600 price tag "seem" more like $300.
Of course, that would depend on the games and movies being available on the launch date.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I suggest the key thing to consider is that for Sony (and for MS/Xbox), this is not just about games; it's primarily about owning every home's entertainment computer, and the format it uses to show movies.
Sony have clearly decided that they will still sell millions of PS3s at this price - thus they establish a user base for Blu-Ray, and kill HD-DVD. Thus they hope to win this decade's version of the Betamax/VHS war.
Having beaten HD-DVD, in following years they can cut the price of the PS3. If more 360s or wiis are sold early on, Sony don't care too much - because there's much more than gamers at stake.
That may be the strategy - but of course that doesn't mean it'll work. Sony's repeated desire to corner the market with a new content formats (UMD etc) has led them to disaster before, and may do so again...
>> Is it not nonsense to compare the charge for dinner at the company cafeteria with dinner at a fine restaurant? ... If you can have an amazing experience, we believe price is not a problem.
Obviously the next question to ask is how many people can afford dinning at a fine restaurant. And by the way, price/affordability is probably an important deciding factor on how "fine" and "amazing" the experience is. If you can't pay for it, how do you expereince it, right?
I think it will be very difficult for Sony to convince people not to just get an Xbox 360 and a Wii instead of their console. You can get the entire spectrum with the Xbox 360 and Wii, and they both arguably will do a better job at what they were designed to do than Sony's new console, with the exception of HD, which Sony might have an edge on the XBox 360 with. I honestly don't think we'll be able to tell the difference between the two graphically.
.02
online gaming, live type service: Xbox 360 and Wii
HD: Xbox 360
New gameplay possibilities: Wii controller
Sony will definitely be fighting an uphill battle, especially if Blu-Ray fails to take off.
Just my
Over and over again I read posts complaining about the price. Sure, I agree, it is waaaay too expensive. For me. But what about all the 360 "value pack" sales with prices approaching $1000, and ebay sales for even more? I think Sony saw all that happening and decided that it wanted a bigger piece of the action than Microsoft.
I have no doubt that Sony intends to execute the release of the PS3 as closely as possible to the 360. They'll get their $600 for the console knowing that the market will bear nearly twice that if the demand is high. Retailers can set any price they want (abouve $600, that is). The systems will move. It sucks for early adopters, no doubt.
off topic: I am a 30 years-old male who loves games (target demographic), but can't get in to fps on consoles (mouselook >> analog stick), and thinks that sports games are uninteresting at best. I am more excited about the Wii than I have been about anything video game-related since the original NES.
I was thinking of getting a 360 but didn't because I wasn't going to pay $400 for a console without games that I saw as must have (still none in my eyes, although there are games I want to play).
I probably would have bought a PS3 at $400.
There is no way I'm paying $600 for a console. When the non-crippled version is available for $400 I'll probably buy it. If I can get it used for $350 I'll buy it. I'm not paying $600 unless it comes with 5 games of my choice.
And let's forget that stupid "it's also a blu-ray player" argument. That's a great argument... for anyone who wants a blu-ray player. I don't want a blu-ray player. I don't care. I don't have a HDTV so it doesn't make a difference to me. It's like saying "buy a Sega-CD because it's also a LaserDisc player (I know it wasn't)". That's how useless it is to me (and I'm willing to bet most everyone).
When the PS2 came out the DVD player argument was actually quite good. DVD players were in demand and there was a very noticeable leap in quality over VHS, along with the convenience (no rewinding, better sound, random access, doesn't degrade with repeated playings, etc). The market was starving for DVDs so they were being bought. The ability to buy something that cost a little more than a DVD player that also played excellent games and PS1 games was a good one (not why I bought mine, but a good reason).
No one cares about Blu-Ray or HD-DVD except a few early adopters. For the rest of us, you're just asking us to buy a $600 toy (plus games at $70 or $80 a pop). No sale.
I thought MS's pricing was bad. MS is going to do very good this holiday season. All those people waiting for PS3s? Lots will buy a 360 and a couple of games instead (especially if there is a price drop or redesign, say the new 360 full version (not core) for $300 or so). The Wii will be under $300, with many rumors placing it at $150 or $200.
Billy wants a video-game system for Christmas. Do I buy him the one with Mario for $200, the one with Halo for $350, or the one with Warhawk for $600. Guess how many average american families will choose that last one.
Sony, you lead for 2 generations. Obviously, it's time for you to step aside for a while so you can look at your play book and get a clue. I hope Nintendo can put it out and get a big lead, but Sony is shooting themselves in the foot with a RPG.
The 3DO launched at $700 and could play Video CDs and do all these other things too. It died, pretty much completely due to the price (it could have been a good also-ran like the DC if the price was better). The CD-i was the same thing, and it cost $400 (when other consoles were $150-$200). It bombed too.
Sony: it was nice knowing you. Come back in a generation or two.
Go Nintendo!... and Microsoft's price suddenly looks sane and like a bargain.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Sony made money or came close to breaking even on every console it has made.
The too cheap comment is probably the fact that sony feeling competion from MS subsidizing its consoles heavily has to do the same. And with that Blu-Ray drive the console probably cost more than they wanted it too.
Remember the 360/xbox where/are "cheap" because MS has lost about 2 billion+ dollars getting into the console business.
Fortunately for Sony, the PS2 came out at a time when a lot of people still didn't have DVD players so Sony was somewhat vindicated by that. But Sony has a habit of overhyping and under-delivering (i.e. using cut scenes in product promos and passing them off as real graphics). I think that this round, the PS3 is going to have a tough sell since no one seems to really want to be an early adopter of Blu-Ray / HD-DVD.
I had high hopes for this latest round of next generation systems. I bought a 360, and while it's pretty impressive there still isn't a huge library of games, let alone decent ones, for it. I want to get a PS3 but I am not going to buy one right away if there aren't any decent launch titles (learned my lesson on the 360). I still think the Wii is too gimicky but I might be proven wrong. I want to actually play with one before I decide.
I am starting to wonder if we aren't about to have another video game crash. But maybe I'm being too melodramatic. Either that or Nintendo is about to make a triumphant return to the "good old days". Will be interesting to see...
I honestly thing that the Dual Shock Wii is actually a sign that Sony recognizes that Nintendo is a serious threat to their dominance of the market; a more serious threat than Microsoft because Microsoft will not (probably can not) make inroads in Japan.
Much like the PSP to DS battle, if Nintendo can gain the upper hand in world-wide sales they should be able to leverage the lower cost of development to have a greater number of third party games made for their system. With the unique control interface most of those third party games are exclusive games; look at the current Wii/DS third party line-up and you'll notice that (almost) none of the games are multi-platform.
The motion sensitive elements of the controller are designed so that if things go badly for sony they can still get some games ported to their system; something the PSP lacks. I'm not saying they expect it to happen, but they didn't expect it to happen to the PSP either; and neither did the analysts.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Only Kuntaragi himself can afford it!
I'm not scared of anonymous cowards.
Having said that, however, Quoting Phil Harrison:
How is that not ripping off Nintendo?
(*Steadfastly refusing to call it a Wii)
The Statue of Liberty is America's lawn jockey.
Either
That comment of his was really unwise.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Microsoft probably could have gotten away with charging $599 for the Xbox360 last Novemeber. Probabaly would have solved a bunch of the early problems with massive back-orders and bad press from not being able to supply enough units. Had they done that and waited for E3 to drop the price--I am thinking there would have been a second surge of XBox360s sales. BTW--of what use is HD-DVD/BlueRay? Why do I need it? Regular DVDs have been doing just fine. I can even make my own DVDs. Since gaining the ability to burn CDs and DVDs--I am going to be reluctant to adopt any technology where I have to depend on someone else to create my content. Is HD-DVD supposed to provide better games or higher quality movies?
Just the fact that they are having to perform damage control means it hasn't gone over well with most people.
Just like the fact that Nintendo had to perform damage control on the name "Wii" means the name didn't go over well with most people.
Duh.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
The PS3 is understandably expensive. Unfortunately that doesn't excuse the price. Sony decided to put the Blu-ray in, I'm guessing, not so much so that people would actually use it, but so they could make claims of supremacy over HD-DVD. I suspect the plan was, come a year or so from now, quote some high number of Blu-ray players in homes, most of which would be PS3's. Even though I doubt most of those PS3's would ever have had a high def movie in it, because there's still an overwhelming majority of the population who don't have an HDTV. It's one thing for people to have a player, it's another for them to actually use it. Microsoft had a better plan, offer options and upgrades. Start with a $300 system... add a hard drive... add a HD-DVD... add who knows what to come. Eventually you have a really expensive system, without a huge onetime outlay of cash, and without being forced into an all or nothing proposition. Then of course there's the controller. I won't claim the took the idea from Nintendo, but I think it was a bad idea. Nintendo was trying to simplify controls with motion sensing, whereas Sony decided to add it on top of an already complex button laden control scheme. I don't want to have to try to move the controller with my thumbs on both sticks and finger on the shoulder buttons. Even for someone whose been gaming since the 2600, and falls right into the target market, that's a bit much.
PS1: US launch September 1995, price $299.
PS3: US launch November 2006, price $599
So, with Moore's Law saying that processing power doubles every 18 months (for the same price), the PS3 should be at least 128 times more powerful than the PS1 if it were the same price, and with the price being doubled, that means it ought to be over 256 times as powerful. If the PS3 is actually better than this, then maybe Kutaragi's technically right.
Not that I'm going to drop $600 on a console, however 'cheap' in terms of price-to-performance it may be. As much as I want to play MGS4, I can wait. (And at that starting price I might have to wait a long time.)
You must think in Russian.
...that the Wii-volution is coming from Japan too, and it's the cheapest!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
When will sony get it into their thick heads. WE ARN'T BUYING THE PS2 TO PLAY DVDS, we didn't buy the Xbox to use it as a back up HD. We buy these machines to PLAY GAMES. We can buy better quality DVD/Blu-ray/HD-DVD players for the same price as a PS3 and still get a Wii.
Sony and Microsoft both need to wake up and see why Nintendo has bent them both over and raped them this E3. Nintendo make games, Sony and MS make hype. Untill Sony and MS start to make games Nintendo will bitch slap them around the room.
Sony only did well with the PS2 because of third party support. If the PS3 is so uber expensive (and ment to be difficult to work with), then they just won't get the support. The Wii on the other hand is a gamecube on crack, the prototype developers kits are add ons for the gamecube, so companies already have exprience with it.
The last thing to have a price tag this huge was the N64 in the UK.. it dropped within 3 months because the sales figures were hellish. The PS3 will do it too.
I like muppets.
On the contrary, I expect many to view the PS3 with a "dine and dash" mentality.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
This reminds me of:
they're screwed.
I'd be willing this shell out this much money (even more) iff they opened up the developement kit so I could write/distribute games for the PS3 without being a professional developer who pays royalties to Sony.
A couple of reasons:
1. I want to play my DivX's from my PC on my PS3 which will be hooked up to my big screen TV. Without open dev kits, DivX developers wont make this happen.
2. I want to tinker with my PS3 and see what I can write as a quick and easy console game. Always wanted to do that
3. I want be be able to buy one and turn it into a web-server, file-server, email server, fire-wall and a bunch of other stuff.
4. I want to be able to plug in a keyboard and turn it into my word processor, web browser and email client - ok, not really, but a family who cant afford a PC for their kids might be able to save up enough money for a PS3 if it could do this as well as play DVDs and games, etc, etc.
Of course, this goes against their business model, but if SOMEONE was wise enough to do this, I think they'd do really well. If you think they couldn't make money doing this, consider that a Mac Mini sells for $500-$600 and comes with a free compiler and doesn't charge royalties. Although, they need to add a HD-Dvd drive upgrade, a tv tuner, TV out connections, controllers and some software. I wish Apple or a Linux company would do this - it wouldn't be very profitable immediately but would make game developers shift away from Windows.
I really don't know what the fuss is about.
Sony will charge high prices for the initial release of the PS3 and they will sell them as fast as they can make them. After demand decreases at that price, they will adjust the price to match the competition.
They can do this because there are people that will pay the initial release price and be happy to do so. The XBOX 360 was arguably underpriced on release: how many were sold on ebay for prices way above the MSRP?
Freaking about the price of the PS3 is meaningless, because the price is temporary, and will come down when it makes sense for it to do so. In the meantime, Sony will recoup their costs on a production line that is still scaling up to volume production, early adopters will voluntarily get screwed and appreciate the experience, and life will go on for everyone else.
Until then, I'll be playing games on my GameCube, PSP, and PS2, and will be generally chilling out. I suggest everyone else do the same.
-Nurf
---
Dear Ken, Good luck with that. Love, Everybody.
It seems that everyone has taken the "probably too cheap" statement out of context. By reading the interview it is clear that Ken means that the console is probably too cheap because Sony expects it may not be able to keep up with demand at that price.
From Sony's last quarterly earnings report, it is clear that the company is spending massively on the development and launch of the PS3. By pricing the console as high as the market will bear, they can recoup some of that money.
In other words, it doesn't make sense to sell out of your console at a lower price point when you can make more from the same number of sales by pricing it higher.
What all this means is: Expect availability numbers to be low this November if the PS3 price is very high.
Personally, I don't care about Blue-Ray and I won't care for at least a couple of years (if it makes it at all). In the meantime, I'll be enjoying the Wii and the 360 this holiday season.
Jay Bibby reviews Flash and casual Web games at... http://jayisgames.com
Small portions of food. Expensive drinks.
I'd rather go to a bar with 10 cent buffalo wings and $1 beer.
The Sony PS3 is more like a cafeteria than the Wii is. The Sony is "the best" of everything, thrown together so that you only get a little of what you want. The Wii seems to be a very targeted product, like, say, fine italian food, designed for a specific purpose.
Could the PS3 experience even really be "amazing?" Maybe. But from the talk everyone who has a shot hands on with the PS3 simply isn't interested once they've encountered the Wii. Lines are around the block for the Wii and the PS3 display is easily reachable in 30 minutes.
But, suppose these 18th series rehashes of the same FPS, RPG, and racing series games provides an amazing experience...maybe it does to some people, fine. But an experience worth 600 dollars? For just the console? I highly doubt it.
I haven't bought a console since N64/PS1, and I'm considering buying the Wii and only the Wii. Because it provides something I don't have with the other systems, games that would be better played on a console than my PC.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
If the Xbox 360 is McDonalds, then will someone explain to me why we should be relating the PS3 to Olive Garden and not Burger King?
Guess what? The DVD player was crippled. Absoutely crippled. It faded in and out until I bought an RF adapter, giving it essentially the same quality as my VCR.
Gee thanks.
I'd buy a Sont gaming system because of a peripheral why? I can't recall.
Never again. And I was a fanboi. Sony HD TV, Sony Vaio laptop and a Sony Vaio gaming rig (long sordid story involving a defective surge surpressor, a lightning storm, a hideous City of Heroes addiction, and enough money to walk out of Best Buy with something FAST)
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Everyone is talking about the PS3 as a game console. What if the PS3 ends up being more than just a game console. What if the cell turns out to be a very viable 2nd PC?
What if you had some very good web-based applications? Off the top of my head, I am thinking Google Calander, email, and earth. If there was a good word processor and some other office software, then the PS3 just might be that alternative PC.
A $599 PC / Video Game / HD DVD / Media Player might just be worth the price of admission.
What do you think?
"'Fancy' usually amounts to an Olive Garden or some other such chain restaurant,"
I think you are confusing fancy with family here. If they will serve you if you aren't wearing slacks, a jacket and a tie, it's not a fancy restaurant. Hell casual fancy don't require the jacket and tie anymore, but pants and a decent shirt are required, I can get service in Olive Garden wearing long shorts, it's much more of a family chain than a fancy chain.
Trip, as you may know, was the CEO of 3DO, whose console was released amid much fanfare for a retail price of $700.00. It over a year to get the price down to even $500.00, and further price reductions were slow in coming. Meanwhile, the Sony Playstation came out, and the rest was history.
I have no idea what Sony is smoking on this one.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
What rankles the most about SONY is their lack of follow-through on their console products. It's not always SONY's fault though. The United States market is one of the most prohibitive for products offering features which really make them useful. In the United States we have limited video options, good to great audio on everything but legally any company that wants to make their game system genuinely useful faces laws and regulations which amount to a crowd of "grease me please" palms; and that's just for what kind of display can be used. Consider device interoperability...can/won't work with Firewire/USB/DVD/CDR/BLU-RAY/HD-DVD...there's a frustrating matrix of can and can't do which isn't always up to the hardware developer.
Given the well-lawyered environment of the United States market place we shouldn't piss and moan because of what technology companies do. If they cared to SONY could publicly give reasons for every shortcoming and price point experienced by consumers with the game hardware. That they don't just means that consumers are an afterthought and better-off-stupid because Asian hardware manufacturers are a closely linked community who can make life painful for giants. The RIAA and MPAA can also tie up product deployment indefinitely.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
(preemptive warning, I'm not a console gamer) So the console itself is more expensive, and maybe even the games are (guessing here). I'm a cheap bastard, as evidenced by the fact that I live off less than 1/3rd of what I make, banking the rest for an early retirement. This doesn't stop me from spending a shitload of money on things I really care about. (Example being that I own individual pieces of dive gear that cost more than my car did.) If you're going to spend a lot of time using something, a high initial cost is less important. All of the arguments I've seen in this thread regarding expensive food are nonsequiturs. A better analogy is a bed. You spend between 6 and 8 hours a day in one, and you own the same one for at least a year or two (I would hope). When you amortize the cost of a bed, the daily cost becomes negligible. Would you knowingly settle for 2 years of sub-par sleep just to save 50 cents a day? Some people do, and I just don't get it. If you plan on using a gaming console on a regular basis, the initial cost should be less important than the enjoyment you get from using it (within reason). If you plan on using it infrequently, then cost should be more important. It's as simple as that.
"However, when released, both had sales that were unthinkable for previous game machines. This is because both offered experiences that could not be had on previous machines."
Yep. That is correct. The problem is this time the Wii is going to offer the new experiences for probably less than half the price.
Prettier pictures will not do it anymore. The pictures on the PS/2, GC, and XBox are already pretty dang good. The 360 bumps that up a bit and it looks like the PS/3 will be about equal to the 360.
All I know is that at my office every gamer is talking about getting a Wii, including me.
The one detail that everyone is leaving out is that development for the Wii will be very familiar to all the current game programmers. Both the PS3 and the 360 are pretty different beasts from what is common.
That can be very good but it takes time to learn how to use them effectively.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3873239408 289378637&q=e3+Sony
I'll be McDonalds turns a much higher profit than the top 50 resturants in the world combined.
I seem to recall the NeoGeo really killed the SNES.
I do enjoy dining at nicer restaurants. I'm not talking about excessively over-priced places, I mean $20-$30 for a dish. I think the atmosphere, service and quality of food justifies the added price.
To continue the stupid analogy, however, what is being discussed here is $20-$30 for a Wii or Xbox360 versus $100 for the kind of experience the PS3 supposedly provides. Except that when the dish comes it's no better than the less expensive dish. The waiter, however, assures you that the dinner comes served on the finest silverware available.
It seems Sony is convinced the consumer will percieve the PS3 as more than just a gaming machine. You'd think they would have known better given the fiasco with the PSP. If people want to watch movies they'll buy a DVD player; you can get one for $30 nowadays. If they want to browse the web or download content they'll use a PC which they probably already own. If they don't own one at this point they're probably not going to care about the added functionality of the PS3 either.
The bluray technology is far too new for anyone to embrace. They're going to potentially pay twice as much as they would for a DVD and have only a tiny fraction of the selection. That's assuming they even own an HD television. And then there's the competing format, HD-DVD.
History has shown that people buy gaming consoles to play games. Nintendo had ambitions of turning the NES into a home computer. Needless to say that plan went nowhere. The 3D0 was another system, like the PS3, bloated with features and over-priced. I don't know if the PS3 will suffer quite the same fate, but it isn't looking good.
As for manufacturing costs and exchange rates, I don't think that really applies here. It isn't quite like autmobiles which are entirely manufactured in one nation or another and exported. The vast majority of the sophisticated components in all three consoles, the Xbox360, Wii and PS3 are manufactured in Taiwan with a decent portion coming from South Korea, maybe Singapore and not much from Japan. People still seem to think Taiwan is producing bootleg crap, but they're doing much of the more advanced manufacturing for most electronic devices. Of course a lot of these companies have exported this work to China, but for the most part China is doing assembly more than anything else.
The reason products are so excessively expensive in Europe is all thanks to European governments. They impose heavy import tariffs on products, which is bad enough in and of itself, but then they go and add ridiculous sales taxes on everything. In general it's expensive to do anything in Europe and its reflected in the price of goods.
The US, however isn't nearly as excessive with the taxes which is why we can get products for close to what they cost in Japan. But because of how products are produced pricing is generally based on manufacturing costs.
The gist of all this is that the PS3 is overpriced and it offers little that's compelling.
I can't eat at fancy restaurants, because I'm saving to buy a PS3
why was I modded funny? :(
The Wii/Revolution's Specs:
PowerPC CPU@729Mhz
GPU 243MHz w/3MB VRAM
80MB System RAM
XBox360 Specs:
Tri-Core CPU@3.2GHz
500MHz GPU
512MB System RAM/Video RAM
PS3 Specs
8 SPE PowerPC CPU@3.2GHz
550MHz GPU w/256MB RAM
256MB System RAM
Incorporated Ageia Physx Technology
The Wii's graphics come closest to the original XBox and will in no way be able to give you anything like the PS3/XBox360. While PS3 and XBox360 games might be cross developable, I do not see how anything released for those powerhouses could ever make it to the Wii without some serious decreases in graphics and playability. It'd be like trying to play F.E.A.R. on a Pentium I with a TNT video card. Theoretically capable, but would you really want to?
I've been gaming since I was five, now, 25 years later I hear this bullcrap spewing forth from a suit that couldn't give two shits about anything but his bottom line. If the PS3's like a dinner at a fine restaurant, then the Wii is like a dinner at your Italian Grandma's house, where everything is hand made, everything's made with love, there's lots of it, and she's always telling you to eat more, you're too skinny, what's the matter with you? It's not trendy and people won't ooh and ahh in jealousy, but damn if you won't be fat, happy and ready for more.
What a completely awful analogy, though, and still a telling one. Hello -- think quickly of the type of food you might eat while you're sitting around the living room with a handful of friends, playing a video game. Is it a) penne, broccoli, and sun-dried tomatos sauteed lightly in olive oil with a fine levain bread and some balsamic vinaigrette; or b) a big old pizza? They're both Italian food. Which one goes with a video game?
We might like option a) -- I cook that sometimes -- but "video game" does not naturally bring fine dining to mind for anyone.
And the fine dining price isn't $600; it's more like two grand after you've got in the restaurant door with your HD monitor.
Sony's plain going to blow up trying to extend its Playstation brand to get this win over Blu-Ray. That's all this price is. They may as well have the new system use Memory Sticks and charge extra for the privilege.
Personally I think both MS and Sony have anticipated the HD market and gotten caught in a reach.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Sony's asking you to eat at a $150-a-plate fundraiser for its Blu-Ray victory campaign. That's just about the right analogy.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Sounds more like a home computer then a gaming console to me. They are starting to blur the line. Personally, I'll just stick with my PC. It's faster and does alot more.
"I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian."
Here in Buffalo, we just call them "wings".
"Something's wrong with you...and I hope we never do meet again." - Deftones When Girls Telephone Boys
The Wii is twice as powerful as the GameCube. Have you ever seen Resident Evil 4 or Metroid Prime on the GC? No Xbox game looks that good, IMO.
By saying that the Wii has "the power of an Xbox", you are just showing that you know very little about the current generation. Consoles are much more than what the numbers show on paper.
The GP is right: on a normal TV, the 3 consoles will look virtually the same.
The Tlog - a technology blog
I'll be buying one. I think is just the fact that game consoles are being marketed to more gen x'ers and not starving college students and kids anymore.
Since when did operating systems become a religion?
One thing that hasn't been mentioned is, how much the games will cost for the PS3. We already have to pay $60+ for 360 games, how much will blueray games cost? $70-$90? more? I think if games cost more than $60, it will pretty much kill the PS3.
Ok, I'm kinda tired of hearing people complain about the BluRay DVD player. It's included, it's included at a very low price, deal with it. Yes, I, apparently for one, will consider the $600 price tag a very fair deal considering I'm getting a very capable (more the 360) game console, as well as a very cheap High-definition DVD (new HD-DVD player = $500, new BluRay Player ~ $500) player for when I get a HDTV. Also, no one mentions getting an 60GB hard drive which I'm sure is for more than just saving your game (read: built-in DVR). So, also for $600 I'm getting a capable DVR/Tivo. And enough of the "No one bought a PS2 because it had a DVD Player", as it is a completely false statement. My proof? I bought a PS2 partly because it has a built-in DVD player, and I didn't already own one. In fact I used my PS2 to play movies for at least a year or two before buying a stand-alone player. The only reason I bought the standalone was because the PS2 didn't like DVD+-R's. Not to mention, I don't recall the Xbox 360 being cheaper, seeing as they sold out in 10 seconds flat and eBay prices were ridiculous. As for it being cheaper because of add-ons, Sony tried that route with the PS2 hard drive with the result of most software companies not developing titles that utilize hardware that wasn't guaranteed to be in the system. So I can easily see the Xbox Addons going by the wayside. Also, BluRay would allow a game maker to create a very large amount of content that can be accessed on a single disc, which brings down design/implentation costs. Also figure that with multiple-core Cell processors, that games can have alot more going on at the same time. This means that not too far down the road, games developed exclusively for the PS3 will be able to do things that games on no other current-gen system can do (similar to the controller waving of the Wii). So yeah a $300 xbox may be cheaper now, not having to but another $300 xbox down the road to keep up with the PS3 games, sounds liek a deal to me.
At the time of the PS2's release, the DVD was obviously going to be the next big thing in home video, it was just a matter of when. It had too many things going for it over VHS: better visual and audio quality, digital, no degradation in quality with playback over time, much more compact media, menus and options for things like subtitles, alternative audio/vocal tracks as well as special features like deleted scenes, interviews, easter eggs, etc.
Now look at what Blu-Ray offers over the DVD. Higher resolution and copy protection. That's about it. Without an HDTV, the higher resolution doesn't even mean anything. So only people who already have high end home entertainment setups will have any real compulsion to buy a Blu-Ray player right now, and how many of those people are going to want a reasonable compact, quality standalone Blu-Ray player and not a huge "all in one" device like the PS3?
Finally, the war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is far from over, so in buying a PS3, you're buying into a format with a less than certain future. I expect Blu-Ray to fare pretty well (eventually) but we have to remember that Sony doesn't exactly have a track record in establish new media standards (Betamax, UMD, both huge flops).
Joe Consumer is not going to buy a PS3 just to get Blu-Ray, at least not until HDTVs and the PS3 itself come down dramatically in price. For now it is going to have to be the games which sell the PS3, and the games for the PS3 aren't looking all that much more compelling that what the 360 and Wii will be offering.
On a computer it would be unplayable, in a console it would work, might not be pretty, but it would work.
But comparing the Wii to a P1 based solely on clock speed vs. the "faster" PS3 and XBox360 is nowhere near accurate. Isn't the PowerPC processor in the Wii RISC vs. the CISC processor in the 360? I don't know about the PS3 unfortunately.
The same hard core gamers that would buy not one but two high end graphics cards, each costing nearly as much as the PS3 into placing them into one machine to play games balk at the price? People complained about the pricing of the PS2 which in my estimation still hasn't seen its full potential. They'll complain about the PS3, some will buy it, some will wait. Sony knows this, the PS3 has a whole lot more in it and will likely be able to adopt to whatever playing style evolves for a good time to come, although dated now the PS2 has weathered the original xbox, gamecube well, it is still an entertaining platform and I am sure the PS3 will continue that tradition.
If you can't afford it, don't buy it, they'll drop the price eventually.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
To all you people who keep equating the Olive Garden to fine dining, you're way off. Olive Garden is mid-range crap. "Fine Dining" would be a place that has $20-$30 entrees. The type of place most average people only do on special occasions or twice a year.
Sounds like PS3 is going to appeal strictly to the Mercedes / country club crowd.
I don't know. I don't think people will pay 500+ bucks to eat a PS3, even if it is a fine dining experience. Even the Wii will probably be too expensive to eat, at least casually. Maybe I'll take my family out to Best Buy once or twice a year to enjoy a nice, tasty, game console, but I think the majority of people will stick to eating older consoles, which will be much cheaper after the next gen ones come out.
Now, some of the particularly savory parts of the Wii might be tempting, if they can be bought for cheap. I tell you from experience that a PowerPC processor (when prepared with the proper sauce) can be delicious. The PS3's multicore, though, I'm somewhat skeptical of. I think that's just too much food in one package.
All this console talk is making me hungry. I could really go for a Z80 right about now.
I think Sony's position is that people will gladly pay $600 thinking that they are getting a great deal on a Blu-Ray player. But to most people, PS3 is just a game machine. They'll compare it to Wii and 360 in terms of games and not other features. When parents have to buy their kids a game machine this holiday, they are going to compare apples to apples - Wii, PS3, and 360. And they'll be shocked at the PS3 price and that'll be the end of that. Wii has the motion sensitive controllers. Geared toward people in a same room playing together. If not, it'll be kinda boring gesturing by yourself... 360 has Xbox Live. For people in a room by themselves going online to play against anybody. And PS3 has...uh...Blu-ray player...If people don't want to play games, but want to watch a high-res movie in their mostly low-res TV. As MS guy said before...I'd still buy 360+Wii for the price of PS3 and just wait for the next gen video player wars to die down.
You never play DVD's on your PC? Wow.
La Caille's Entree Menu
Champignon Ravioli - Twenty-Nine
Veau aux Champignons - Forty-Nine
Carré d'Agneau - Fifty-Seven
Filet Café de Paris - Sixty-Six
Yeah, I guess that's pretty expensive...
Menage de Trios - Financing Available
*choke* WTF?!?! Do I need a copy of my credit report?
Well, at least when you go on a date to an expensive restaurant you can usually get a blowjob out of the deal. It's been my experience that this is not the case when you take a date to McDonald's, regardless of how Happy the meal is. "It's been a really long time since I've had a Big Mac. Well, thanks. See ya."
"Look, Smithers! I'm Davy Crockett!"
Internet flamewars about the pricing aside, I don't believe these consoles will be equal. I'm not hopping on the Sony bandwagon yet (usually because it's heading for hell down all the various hellish backroads), but what if he's right? What if that sucker gets released and people start demoing actual games and seeing actual graphics and actual game play and start writing on their blogs and such, "OMG... this thing rocks" then what will people say? In the end, if you're not buying one, it's probably not because it's too expensive. Gamers throw a ton of money around when it suits them. No, you'll not buy one because the games are weak, or because of bugs, or because of horrible reviews about the controllers or bad design of some other piece, like the bluetooth is bad, or Blu-ray sucks, etc., etc. It won't be because it's $600 bucks.
Darrell Lyons, noted owner of Lyons restaraunts, aka the Denny's equivalent is telling us about fancy restaraunts. HA!
You know, this is a popular myth/meme/assumption that in reality is just not true.
If you go to www.pricewatch.com and search for 4GB mp3 players, you will find that the cheapest 4 gigabyte flash-based DAP (as opposed to hard drive DAP) is the iPod nano.
I picked the iPod nano example because it's the most obvious and blatant one, but if you actually research other categories of DAPs, you will often find that the iPod is cheaper purely in hardware terms.
The iPod is cheaper for the simple reason that it has economies of scale that no other mp3 player manufacturer can match. That's why even Apple haters like me have climbed aboard the iPod bandwagon (although I use Rockbox on my iPod instead of the default Apple firmware, since Rockbox has many features that the standard Apple firmware lacks).
In fact this pricing strategy dovetails nicely with the rumors of production problems Sony is facing with the PS3. If they aren't going to be able to make enough PS3's to meet demand, it makes good sense to get top dollar for the ones they CAN make. Why should Sony sell the initial batch of PS3's for $400 only to see them all resell on ebay for $600+ ?
When I buy a cellphone, I buy a cellphone. To make calls. Not to make pictures.
When I buy a car, I buy a car. To drive. Not to show off.
When I buy a Pepsi, I buy a Pepsi. To quench my thirst. Not to "experience the flavor".
When I buy a game console, I buy a game console. To play games. Not to watch DVDs.
If it can do the rest, it doesn't bother me. As long as it doesn't impede the console's ability to play games, it could cook coffee or wash my dishes, I don't mind.
But if console A can play games for 200, and console B can play games (of similar/same quality) for 600, it's going to be the one for 200. It can't show videos? Ok. It can't cook my dinner? Ok. It can't order me a pizza? Ok.
I have appliances for that. I have a DVD-player, I have a microwave, I have a cellphone. It doesn't have to do that. And in case the console breaks down (let's face it, the lifespan of any given electronic device gets shorter and shorter today), I lose one appliance.
I don't suddenly get teleported back into stoneage 'cause everything just stopped to work.
When I buy a gadget, I want it to do the ONE thing I buy it for. If it can do more than that, it's ok. But I tend to go for perfection. And so far, my experience is that if something can do EVERYTHING, it can do NOTHING really well.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Can you confirm your specs on the Wii from a source that hasn't been discredited as making shit up? The site that first gave those specs has made stuff up in the past and isn't considered reliable. Note that neither gamespot nor wikipedia speculate on the actual chips inside.
I think your parent was correct in saying on a 480p or less they'll look the same.
Both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 are HD machines. EVERY game made for the 360 and (probably) every game made for the PS3 will be programmed around a 720p (1280x720) resolution or HIGHER. that means that AA, poly count, particle effects, etc. all have to be downgraded to a point where they can pump out those graphics at that high a resolution. Similarly for the games to look THAT good they have to crank up the texture resolution as well. If you're only using all that power on a 480p set a MASSIVE portion of those console's power is just sitting dormant. The graphics don't dynamically adapt to shift their optimization to a lower resolution. In the 360s case some games are actually rendering internally at 720p and downscaling the output.
on the other hand the Wii is expected to not run any higher then 480p (640x480) which means that it does NEED all the power to crank out stuff at a high resolution and the graphics can be optimized around a low 480p output.
I forget who it was but one of the early 360 developer interviews the developer claimed that they would have 10 to 20 times the amount of graphics power to put towards the poly count, and other graphical effects if they only had to output in 480p. Considering there are a lot of games that look identical between the Xbox 1 and 360 when running in only 480p it's definitely feasible that at that resolution the Wii can compete...
Besides Nintendo is fantastic at that stuff, the GC was way underpowered compared to the Xbox 1 yet it had comparable graphics in a number of titles. Optimization is the key and from what I've heard Nintendo is the king of easy to program consoles. One PS2 game developer I spoke to claimed that his company prototypes all their games on the Gamecube and then ports to PS2, despite the fact that they don't even make GC games, it's THAT easy to program.
Collector's Edition
Sony will sell the PS3 at a price that is under the profit maximizing price. The fact is that Sony doesn't want to sell low quantities at very high prices because of strategic elements. The company must consider network effects - in particular they need a large user base that attracts quality 3rd party game developers. While Sony does have the most third party support CURRENTLY - I'm sure big name developers will switch if given the opportunity (remember Squaresoft). Sony will still price discriminate where impatient consumers will end up paying very high prices - but I'm guessing the company could extract more consumer surplus if it priced higher - without any adverse short term effects.
This is not the first time a superior gaming system has been offered at a superior (or outrageous, in this case) price. Remember the Neo-Geo? That thing had blazing arcade-style graphics for $599 when Nintendo had a far less capable - but much cheaper - NES system at $199 (if I remember correctly). The NES blew the Neo-Geo away! Why? Because the average gamer SIMPLY CANNOT JUSTIFY $600 on a system alone. Many of us gamers are used to getting a system, controller, 4 games, and any other miscellaneous items for that sort of cash.
Sony's major miscalculation is believing that gamers look at the capabilities of the system alone. Gamers actually look at how much fun they can have with a given system AND how much that system costs, THEN how awesome the graphics and specs are. $400 is really the high top end of what the majority of gamers will spend on one system, which is why you dont see the 360 slumping a whole lot. $600 is simply out of reach for many gamers.
This really sounds like the Apple vs PC discussion (especially before the mini). There are two different mindsets: 1) PCs are "good enough" and cheap so I love them, and 2) PCs are cheap but not "good enough". The features Apple brings to the table far outway the price difference. There isn't a right or wrong in it--just an opinion. Some people like chocoalte, some vanilla. Some like what the PS3 offers, some don't think it's worth it. That's why it's great to have competition and choice.
All Xbox 360 games have to support 1280x720. Wii games have to support 640x480.
If we're going to do this logically and not technically as you have, the Xbox 360 requires games to be capable of three times the resolution. Factor in the fact this means the textures (and models?) must also be in high definition, and then you've pretty much justified the RAM and CPU.
And the original Gamecube was 485Mhz. Can you tell me that all Gamecube ports of Xbox games were starved of the Xbox's 733MHz?
NOW tell me no one would want to eat them. Personally, I don't like a lot of things. But I am always willing to TRY them. I had quite a bit of trepidation about both items. First off, creating foie gras is just not a humane thing to do to a bird. Second - well, you've seen snails, right?
But I tried both and damn if they're not tasty. I wouldn't eat foie gras again due to the cruelty issue, but I'd suck down any escargot that was prepared by someone that knows how.
You'll probably not have to wait long as the base version is not "crippled" in any way, and starts out at $500.
What are you thinking the crippling is? Chances are you are mistaken, as you can play in full HD over component cables using the base model. And all movies released for the forseable future will be able to play at full res on this setup.
Were you really planning to use the built in CF reader to attach a camera card to the PS3? Or were you thinking to play, you know, GAMES!!! It's only "crippled" if you aren't intending to play games or watch movies.
I think it's pretty darn expensive as well but I really cant understand why people have to proclaim the base unit as utterly useless. It's not like the base unit for the 360 where you don't even get an HD - at least game makers can assume you are going to have an HD on the PS3. The stuff not included in the base unit for the PS3 are things that at a fundamental level will not change what offerings games support, and that to me in the key point. The base unit is only crippled if it ends up crippling games, and that it will not do.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When it comes to the Ps3 youre paying for the Bluray-Dvd feature right now that no one really even cares to have. It will take about 2 years for Blueray-Dvd to even catch on or it may go the way of the Umd formatted disc. When Sony released the Psp they tried to spoon-feed us movies on Umd formatted discs & they shot themselves in the foot because no one really wanted to pay for Umd movies when they can simply tweak their Psp to play movies from say a 4 gig backup add-on. I dont think the Ps3 will do well this Xmas because I cant see too many people that would spend (600+ games= well over 700+ bucks?!? WTF?) I personally would rather buy a used Ps2 and play catchup on all the really cool games that still rock and are dirt cheap now on the Ps2 (Kindom Hearts, God of War, Prince of Persia, MGS) with the option to tweak it and and run the games from an internal HD. The Sales of the Ps3 will eventually rely on the games & gamers that have the skill to tweak the ps3 (accept a bigger HD + run games from the HD=alot of money saved for more important things). The Xbox360 will only survive because there are alot of gamers that still Drool over Halo & games you can pretty much play on your pc (Tomb Raider, Splinter Cell). The old Xbox will become the pefect system to run all the older consoles (Emulation) via a tweaked system w/a bigger HD and backup data to. The Nintendo revolution (Wii) will have Nintendo return as king and once again hold the flame as preventing the near console crash in the past. Nintendo has once again got the formula right. Design Simplicity = Satisfaction = Alot of Wii consoles sold. Its almost like its 1985 all over again and History is repeating itself. Microsoft & Sony is an example of a saying from Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell "Overspecialize & Breed in Weakness...its slow death." The next gen consoles wars has just begun. And right now Nintedo has Sony & Microsoft by the Balls.
Otherwise you would realize how STUPID you come across. A fine restaurant is OLIVE GARDEN?!? ROFLAMO. Tell that to some hotty.
In an abstract world where pure free market economies reach immediate equilibrium, maybe this is true, but that's completely discounting the real-world backlash of much of the gaming world and the terrible perception this gave people of Sony.
You place WAY too much emphasis of the lasting impact E3 has on anything. Microsoft was pretty much roasted for the showing last year, but a good launch cured all that.
That's all Sony needs, is a good launch with a few good games. Then everyone will forget this E3 in a heartbeat.
Do you honestly doubt there will be lines at Best Buy for the PS3 launch just as there were for the 360? Or that ebay shillers will be fetching top doallr for units come November?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes, I have seen RE4 on the GC, I happen to own a GC and a PS2. 2 or three really purty games does not a decent library make.
When I say that the Wii is comparable to the XBox, I'm taking into account not just the CPU, which being PPC based is probably faster than the X86 in the XBox, but also the pitiful amount of texture and system RAM. I'm sure, once the developers have had a few years to learn how to tweak the hardware to the max they'll release some really nice looking games, just about at the end of the Wii's service life. Hey, just like RE4 and the GameCube.
The main selling point isn't that these consoles look good on a 'normal' tv, it's that you either already have an HD capable set, or will get one during the service life of the console. In which case, PS3/XBox360 will be rendering some really fine graphics at 1080i, while the Wii will still be stuck at 480p.
So, my comments stand, if games are released for all three consoles, the Wii version will have to be butchered down graphically to work. It's inevitable when the other two consoles have 6X more RAM than the Wii, even if you discounted the other hardware specs.
I actually had a DVD player before the PS2, but after I bought it I used it as my only DVD player for a year or so after giving the other DVD player away to family.
Given the costs of next-gen players I'd bet the PS3 will be my only net gen HD player for about two to three years.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Olive garden is a perfect example of an outward mass market pretense of fancy without any actual substance. Their ingredients are cheap, their food bland, and it is made acceptable to the US mass market by having too much salt, sugar and cream. Farcically for a restaurant with that name, I failed in my quest to eat a single olive all night, presumably because this ingredient is too challenging for their average customer.
How does this relate to the PS3? Hmm. Well, it doesn't exactly. Because oddly enough the superficial dressing that is equivalent to the sugar and salt is the graphics. Which are expensive, but are the easily mass market saleable part. And the expensive ingredients and highly trained chefs of a good restaurant - the gameplay that really matters in a well designed game. But that - that is difficult to achieve.
This isn't going anywhere is it? But damn, I'm not eating in Olive garden again.
I figure that the price would be entirely justified if they opened up the linux OS on it, with an untouchable ps3 boot partition. If I could use the thing as another computer (almost as I see fit, unlikely) then I would have no problem shelling out the cash for it, my living room PC is near death, and was never too quick to begin with. Let me install my design tools and I could use it as my dev box in a pinch.
give some free reign with the OS and hardware, and they would have no problem with the geek/tech/money crowd (well, the money crowd does not have many problems with these matters).
|plastic....or gasoline?|
Unless Sony stops making DVD entirely and makes all new movie under their media arm only in Blu-Ray format, I just can't see this taking off.
Spoken like someone who has never watched both the HD broadcasts of Battlestar Galactica and the DVD versions.
With the Blu-Ray discs able to hold a higher bitrate I think the newer HD media is going to be pretty stunning, and a lot of people will seek to adopt it - a demand that will drive down the cost of smaller HD capable displays.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Here is the run down on the hardware
... Standards and Practices !
http://www.ps3portal.com/ps3-tech-specs.html
It is a great deal folks, just check it out. Think too, how much incentive M$ is spreading around right now. Always buy hardware not hype.
PenGun
Do What Now ???
I wonder if Ken Kutaragi and the Iraq Minister of information went to the same school of marketing?
"not only will consumers be prepared to pay the cost but that the console is 'probably too cheap.'"
The next blurb I expect from Ken Kutaragi
"The PS3 will change the way people think about games, it will rise up from among the lowly consoles and start a rampge acros the country, devoring the revolution as snack and then raping the Xboxs through their USB ports, people will watch in amazment at the PS3's feats of strengths and praise it for releasing them from the tyranny of boring consoles".
Please note that "Sony, you lead for 2 generations. Obviously, it's time for you to step aside for a while so you can look at your play book and get a clue." and "Sony: it was nice knowing you. Come back in a generation or two." both sound a lot like those smart-ass lines people say on Survivor when they get ready to vote Sue-Ellen off the island for hiding a granola bar from the rest of the tribe.
Well what can I say except, "Sony, the tribe has spoken."
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
For $600 you get - 1. A blue ray player for the HDTV you DONT have yet, and for Blue Ray movies you haven't bought yet either. 2. Marginally better graphics than Xbox 360. 3. The ability to buy additional items for games via microtransactions. 4. Metal Gear Solid 4 with good old Snake. 5. A half-baked tilt controller with no rumble (which has been standard in most consoles the past 10 years). 6. A hard drive for caching, cuz God knows these Blue Ray drives will not be speedy. 7. A half-baked controller that looks the same as the previous 2 console's controllers. 8. The ability to buy another Gran Turismo game that is 'graphically enhanced', but pretty much the same game. 9. An IBM cell processor which isn't all its cracked up to be. 10. Hope that there will be a future graphically enhanced version of Guitar Hero, or Katamari Damacy to show off the sheer power of this system.
I'm completely willing to pay Sony's asking price for the PS3. People knew it was going to be expensive, and what do you know, it is expensive.
In Canada with our once devalued dollar, the PS2 would launch at $299 USD and we'd be paying $499 CDN for it. But thanks to the poor American dollars, and the rising Canadian dollar, as PS3 launched at $499 USD is now only $549 CDN. So really for Canadian, the PS3 isn't expensive at all. It's only $50 more than the PS2 was at launch!
The PS3's price hype has worked tripley against Sony:
1) It seems to have stifled the PS3's momentum
2) It has drawn attention away from a -completely- underwhelming showing of the Xbox 360. (In terms of future games, I'm very disappointed in what's coming out for the 360.)
3) Its taken attention away from PS3 games that at least truly appear to distance the PS3's technical abilities from the Xbox 360 (MGS4, Heavy Rain, Assassin's Creed, a handful of tech demos)
Ultimately though, I think people -want- the PS3. They're underwhelmed by the 360, and they want the PS3 to be spectacular. They've been waiting for it forever. It will be flying off the shelf when it launches whether Sony deserves it or not.
Sony has stated that Mac OS X or Linux will be able to run on the PS3 via it's HDD. To me, _if_ it pans out, that's worth something.
"Like its predecessors, PS3 will also offer brand new experiences, he continued: "Things like next-generation graphics and various services via the network. And, as with the PS and PS2, we believe people who like games will, without question, purchase it.""
He suggests people will simply buy this system because it is PS3. Nintendo had this same idea once and it didn't work out.
And wake up. People ARE questioning it. You NEVER had this kind of reaction for the other system launches.
Sony, you're in big trouble now. As the gamers like to say, they've been pwned.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
You need to consider what an impact RAM has in the equation, not just for the operating system but for shoving around textures. Strip the OS down to absolute minimum and it'd still look like Quake1 graphics.
You're confusing the XBox's X86 CPU with the XBox360, which uses a 3 core PowerPC chip with each core clocked at 3.2GHz. Considering that they Wii's single core PowerPC CPU is clocked at 729Mhz, then it's reasonable to compare them and state that it is nowhere near as capable as either the XBox360 or the PS3.
But that's what Nintendo wants. Nintendo is not targeting the bleeding edge best visual experience dedicated gameplayer, they're targeting casual gamers who might want to play party games like Donkey Konga or Mario Kart. They might release a Metroid or Resident Evil once in a while to keep their name in the news, but it's not like they really sweat over it.
Essentially, the Wii is a classier version of one of those Atari Retro Joysticks with 8 Classic games built-in things.
"Expensive, cheap - we don't want you to think of it in terms of game machines ... For instance ... Is it not nonsense to compare the charge for dinner at the company cafeteria with dinner at a fine restaurant? It's a question of what you can do with that game machine. If you can have an amazing experience, we believe price is not a problem."
That doesn't make sense. I know what he's getting at here but even so, this is a bad example because the average Nintendo player won't afford a fine restaurant. A large part of the targeted audience consists of families with a kid or two and are usually on a tight budget. Then we have the poor students who already have debts to pay. I think that when parents decide whether they should go for a cheap console or whatever the alternative is, they rarely come to think of that lets-get-the-quality-stuff part. It's purely based on what the kid wants and what they can afford, and usually, the latter part plays the biggest role. Some people say that Sony has one main advantage with Playstation 2: the games. I agree, BUT, this is 2006 and soon 2007. Things have changed for the better now as publishers rush out games to as many consoles as possible and the exclusives that now exist are equally comparable between the consoles. Nintendo has a lot of classics, but the 360 has a superb development platform allowing many PC developers to switch side with ease. Sony, on the other hand, has a very complicated architecture and from what I hear, developers don't believe in the PS3 as much as they first did when it was on schedule. So what if Ken is talking about hardware? Is the PS3 really that superior? Is it superior at all? The graphics are equal to the 360, the sound system is about the same. The only real advantage I can think of is the Blu-Ray, which obviously opens for long movie scenarios, but I don't see how that's gonna make anyone spend hundreds of bucks extra. I feel obliged to tell that I do not dislike the PS3. In fact, I plan to rush out and buy it, but mostly because I already have a 360 and plan to get a Nintendo as well.
Full Tilt
This is perfectly indicative of just how out of touch with their customers all of Sony electronics divisions have become.
Example: 400-disc DVD player I bought which is crippled unless you have HDMI/HDCP, remote with a flip-switch for the guide, auto-play of last DVD (which you finished watching last time) when you turn on the unit, draconian menu-cripple features controlled by the DVD producer and not you as the user (One of my DVD's won't allow you to STOP or Power Off while it's showing the FBI warnings!) The complete list of problems with this unit is too long to list here.
Example: Privacy invasion/crippleware automatically installed on PCs when you play one of their CDs.
Example: Minidisc
Example: Proprietary batteries for EVERY device that are all different from each other.
This price announcement means NOTHING to me, as I already long-ago decided I WILL NEVER BUY ANOTHER SONY DEVICE AS LONG AS I LIVE.
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
Sony's problem is that they're trying to repeat the failed strategy of the PSP: Use a new game console to drive adoption of a new video format, and use the new video format to drive adoption of the new game console.
Haven't they figured out yet that this chicken-and-the-egg scenario doesn't work?
The current marketshare of Blu Ray is effectively zero, so how on earth do they expect desire to play Blu Ray to drive console sales? With their console priced so high, can they really expect the kind of marketshare that would drive Blu Ray adoption?
It's like they think they're re-launching the PS2. It's nothing like the PS2, which people did actually buy thinking that it could be used as a game system and a DVD player for slightly more than the cost of either by itself. The difference being that DVDs were already extremely popular irrespective of the existence of the PS2, so everyone wanted a DVD player anyway. That is not the case today. Not only is Blu Ray only a contender in the ongoing format wars, it isn't clear that either next-gen format is going to take off as very few people see DVDs as inadequate (whereas the advantages of DVD over VHS are many and obvious). The only thing indicating that Blu Ray has a chance is that the PS3 will play it.
So the only hope they have of breaking the chicken-and-egg problem is by driving people to buy their console, and hoping the people with the console then drive Blu Ray adoption. Yet they clearly aren't pricing their console to do that. Whatever small group of people buy PS3s at its current price point are not going to be enough to justify Best Buy filling their shelves with Blu Ray movies. They need to lower the price so that people will buy it.
Yet here we have them telling us that the price is fine because people will want to play Blu Ray discs -- the exact opposite of what will actually work. Which means that at best they are spinning for the sake of their investors and the press, at worst they are deluding themselves. Either way the strategy is not going to work as it is.
Either they lower the price of the console fairly quickly, or both PS3 and Blu Ray will go down as case studies in bad business strategy.
The enemies of Democracy are
I don't know if many will agree with me, but my biggest beef with the "new" controller is that it's simply the PS2 controller all over again, but without rubmle and some added motion sensing stuff. Of the three current-gen consoles, the PS has by far the worst controllers of the bunch. They're quite frankly painful to use. I'm really disappointed. Even the banana controller would be better than the one presented at E3.
The problem with you theory is this:
Production.
If Microsoft, and Nintendo have more production and holiday sales than Sony
(* and at two times the price that is VERY possible) Sony could be in for a "very big problem" that will take a year + before they can try again at a lower price.
Remember "NEVER, underestimate the power of holiday sales" Its not called Back in Black Friday for nothing. And Sony is pissing it away to make more money on the initial run, while Nintendo and Microsoft could have more unit sales.
you paid too much for the PS2.
Shouln't you be comparing the value of then Yen to the canadia dollar?
these prices are starting to hit PC prices. I can do a lot more with a PC then I can the console. They will need to come out with a lot of PS3 only titles that I really want, or I'll go with out.
If there are 10 must have games, the I'll consider it, but 600 bucks to play one or two game is not worth it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Dean Kamen probably said the same thing when the Segway HT first came out...
Well, it appears the going rate for two chicks at a time is $1 million, at least according to Lawrence...
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
TheSo, my comments stand, if games are released for all three consoles, the Wii version will have to be butchered down graphically to work.
That's what they said about the Cube & the X-box/PS2. They were, frankly, dead wrong in nearly every case (and even backwards in a few notably games!).
I think what you're overlooking is that the successive jumps between console generations have shrunk. The 360 doesn't look all that much better than it's predecessor. Neither, frankly, does the PS3 IMO. They're better sure, but looking at the hardware specs you'd expect more. Sure, down the road developers will squeeze more out of the systems, but rember last genation? How much better the Cube & PS2 looked over their precursors? Do you feel that way about this generation? I sure don't.
I think we're at the point where they'll have to puch the specs a LOT too see a real, immediate difference in graphics power. I also think Nintendo's the only one who's grokked this. That's why they've opted for putting their money in innovative inputs rather that graphics power; that gets a lot more bang for their buck than sinking that budget into more graphics power that adds 4 more light sources, 3 of which most people won't noticed.
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
The wii uses a gyroscopic sensor from gyration to do its mice like movements. The sensor is for position and speed and the accelerometer is for tilt.
Don't forget that you'll likely have to purchase a $30-$50 adapter from Sony to read your legacy PS1/PS2 memory cards and game saves on the PS3.
You're confusing the XBox's X86 CPU with the XBox360, which uses a 3 core PowerPC chip with each core clocked at 3.2GHz. Considering that they Wii's single core PowerPC CPU is clocked at 729Mhz, then it's reasonable to compare them and state that it is nowhere near as capable as either the XBox360 or the PS3.
Not true.
Just because they're all PowerPC doesn't mean that they're all comparable.
The Gamecube used a PowerPC 400-series derivative. It was custom-made for Nintendo and code-named "Gekko". Most PPC4xx uses are for embedded systems, PLC's, and the like.
The "Cell" used in the PS3 is a PPC4xx derivative x8-per-die. It's very similar to having eight of the Gamecube's CPU all-in-one, though each core is probably simplified a bit to make it easier for the custom SMP scheduler to optimize usage on the fly. It's roughly equivalent to a high-range ARM processor.
The XBox360 uses a PPC6xx derivative. Specificially, a PPC604/620 derivative. These were workhorse chips that sacrificed power management and heat for the cause of performance, and were sought after in the days when they were used in high-end Power Macs (the lower end systems used the 603 and variants). This variant appears to use a 3-core setup (which is amazing, since the 604/620 series caused trouble in multi-proc setups). The 604/620 has a floating point unit that kicks ass and takes names later. It's integer unit is the same relatively weak integer unit as is found in the 603. Think "Pentium Pro" here, but with Pentium 3-class floating-point.
The Wii uses a PPC750 derivative. The 750 was an offshoot of the 603, except with a vastly more complex integer unit, better branch prediction, and scalability for just plopping another unit into the design without causing huge shakeups in the rest of the chip. So if 8 pipelines isn't enough, just add 3 or 4 to get the performance you want. It worked well for that. The 750 was more widely known by Apple's marketing name, the "G3". More recent efforts have been able to (tell me if this sounds familiar) tack on a SIMD unit to make something similar to the MPC7400 ("G4"). These chips are no slouch. At ~750MHz, these can easily keep up with 3x~3.2GHz 604/620's in the integer department, but are quite likely to get trounced by the same in FLOPS tests without a SIMD. These competed with the Pentium II in their day.
It's not such an easy comparison when you find out that "PPC" isn't some magic way to make a whole processor family comparable on MHz alone. The Wii will more than keep up with the other two, even in the almighty "omg awesome graphics!!1one1" department.
A couple weeks ago when Revolution was renamed to Wii, I said that it looked like Nintendo was trying to make the revolution fail.
After E3, I think Sony's trying out this "Make your Console Fail" strategy that Nintendo was Using, and Nintendo finally realized that the "fail" strategy won't work out for them.
This E3, Nintendo puts up an excellent display of what the Wii will do and Sony just sits back and rips off everybody else. Meanwhile MS is so worried about it's stock portfolio it's talking more about market share and sales like the audience is the board of directors instead of focusing on the future of the 360. They should have jumped all over this motion sensitive controller craze since they experimented with the freestyle pro back in 99 but totally ignored it.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
"Is it not nonsense to compare the charge for dinner at the company cafeteria with dinner at a fine restaurant? It's a question of what you can do with that game machine. If you can have an amazing experience, we believe price is not a problem."
Okay, if every "experience" concludes with a "happy ending," it might be worth the price.
"But I want the duck!"
"You can't afford the duck. You can have the chicken."
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
It's never a good sign when you have to hold a press conference and directly try to blatently convince your customers your product is not too expensive. That's why we have marketing.
Find coupons in Greeley
If this is a trojan horse for jumpstarting Blu Ray, then the base unit should have HDMI/HDCP. With ICT available at any studios whim. Having Blu Ray limited to 540 line playback over component, completely obliterates the point. 540p is not going to look much different than DVD.
First. HDMI for all PS3. For the above reason, don't cripple your arlready expensive base systems movie capability. If you are going to cripple it in the base. Rip out the expensive Blu Ray drive and put a DVD drive in the base to drop the price even more. There is zero point to a blu ray if you can't Guarantee > 540P.
Next. Free Content (first taste). Sony is also a studio. Find some trashy action flick that went no where, but has good visuals. Include as free pack in. Cost is negligible, but it will show the movie ability of the system.
Do this and a $500 launch point is not too bad and it serves the trojan horse principal.
On the gaming side, try to stay at least within $100 of Xbox or you are hosed.
You are incorrect. There is a very slight loss in video quality but I have used 1080i over component before and it looks just fine. Remember, this is component video not S-Video! With good cables you can get a very clean signal as there is a lot of bandwidth of signal with three cables.
Sony already announced that movies will not have ICT turned on, and a number of other studios followed suit. On the HD-DVD front, Microsoft is going to have a player but they don't have HDMI on EITHER model.
What so are seeing the studios caving in to the reality is that there are millions of people today that own HD equipment that cannot support HDMI. With the battle brewing for marketshare no studio is going to be stupid enough to turn away even a single customer.
All you have to believe is that movie studios like money, and then you'll see why they will let people play movies at full resolution without HDMI.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
From one of TFA's (emphasis mine) :
If you're a complete music fan and video fan, and you want to have huge amounts of digital content, then you can upgrade to whatever size of drive you like. You can put any in that you like - it is a computer, after all.
This is very surprising information to me. If it's not a lie, it means that you can install your own damned harddrive (unlike with the PS2, where you pretty much have to pay double price for the "official" one). This is an unexpected step in the direction of user freedom, though offering no way for us to take advantage of it cost-wise (no one wants the $500 hardware, and the $600 one already has a big drive) seems very Sony still... Still, it's umm, something I didn't expect.
Sendou Wave Kick!!
Right, you had a DVD player before the PS2. I had a DVD player before the PS2 was released. If I hadn't, I would have considered that when deciding what game system to buy. Yet remember this important fact: You and everyone else wanted something to play DVDs irrespective of the existence of the PS2, because DVDs were already established and extremely popular.
Not really, I was a very early adoptor. What I am saying though is that a big part of the reason I bought the PS2 was that I could also use it as a DVD player and thus get two uses out of one box - the same reason I'm buying a PS3. If the PS3 did not have a Blu-Ray player I'd pass and only get the Wii instead of getting both.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Resolution (detail) isn't the only thing that makes games look different. Lighting, precision, shaders, etc all have a large impact on the final image quality and the number of objects that can be rendered on screen at any given moment. Rendering at a higher-res and resampling to a lower resolution also does wonders to get rid of aliasing, fwiw.
Charging the initial adopters a premium may save Sony a few bucks in the short-term, but people everywhere are being turned off by the price today, 6 months before release. People can't assume Sony will lower their prices to something affordable in the near future, and in the meantime they will buy a 360 or a Wii or both. Once they've already committed to a 360, only a small percentage will opt for a PS3 as well.
Tilt sensitive controllers have been available in the past from 3rd party vendors. They never really caught on because the form factor makes them pretty useless for anything other than emulating a steering wheel, and the control isn't as good as with a joystick.
Nintendo is genuinely offering something new, with wand design that can emulate a light gun, a sword, fishing real, fire hose, and probably a lot more. I'll be buying a Wii just to see what developers come up with. As for the PS3...well, maybe it would be nice to have a BluRay player, if it is really any good and not a piece of garbage like the PS's DVD player.
Since when do you get a blowjob out of having a pretty Sony Playstation?
My wife and I quite enjoy an occasional trip to a 4 or 5-star restaurant
You do realise it only goes up to three stars?
That place sounds mad good. And they've got a sense of humor too...
...
Carré d'Agneau
Rack of New Zealand Lamb with a Grand Marnier glaze and mint pesto.
Could a million coyotes be wrong?
Fifty-Seven
Menage de Trios
Triple Great Barrier Reef Lobster tails
boiled with clarified butter and herbed olive oil
Financing Available
The only way this pricing strategy works is if Sony has calculated there will be enough buyers at the high price to allow component costs to decline. Sony has designed the system to have a long lifespan. Games look pretty good 6 months prior to launch, much better than many existing 360 games. Sony's strategy is to cater to the hardcore and rich for the 1st year to recoup its investment. Subsequent price drops will bring more into the fold. Lotsa people are still picking up PS2s and quality games are still being released for it. Bluray hasn't launched yet no one has really seen its features. Once HD really catches on by 2007/2008 the "I'll get the dual function machine" factor will kick in. Sony seems pretty confident that people are going to really *want* a PS3, and I for one think that will be the case. Just wait. Yes their press conference was a dud, surprising since they did what everyone asked, showed playable games and got rid of the batarang. No force feedback tho is a baad baaad move. I hope they fix it before launch.
Just for the sake of debate, I'm going to disagree with everything. . .
There is a HUGE pent-up demand for Blu-Ray. The whole transition to HDTV has already been underway for years, large quantities of HD sets have been sold, and there's *still* no practical way to buy or rent movies for them. HDTV owners are crying for this, some of them would kill for it. The improvement in quality with Blu-Ray over DVD is *far* greater than the improvement of DVD over LaserDisc, which had already been around for many years -- and DVD crushed LD like crushing a bug.
Did 3DO really die out "pretty much completely due to price"? The first ones sold were too expensive, but the price rapidly plummeted to more sane levels -- and it still didn't become a success. Obviously there was something else besides price holding it back.
I'm not saying PS3 will be a raging success, I'm just saying I don't like simplistic arguments. There's always a way to spin them the other way.
"Is it not nonsense to compare the charge for dinner at the company cafeteria with dinner at a fine restaurant?"
And that's exactly what the PS3 is; a fine restaurant. The kind that sucker tourists and elite snobs go to. Looks great with classy decor, but the meals, while carefully arranged, are expensive, small, and frankly don't taste any better than something you can get at a less fancy restaurant for a fraction of the price.
Hey, lots of people do love the taste of caviar, and that's ok, but you're going to have to pay through the nose for it. I guess the PS3 will be the same way until a couple price drops.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
I figured Sony pretty much locked 1st place up. Now? The past generation doesn't matter
This is the most exciting thing about VG's IMO: the speed at which a winner can lose. In my short lifetime alone I have watched the crown passed from Atari to Nintendo to Sega to Sony.
The Wii is the first system since the SNES that really got my attention. I am *always* trying to find things to do with the inlaws that aren't painfully boring. Being that "pop" likes strategy games already, I'm hoping the Wii will be a big hit i n my living room this Christmas.
barack to the future?
Well $600 was indeed too much, and I'm not buying that one.
However since the base model is $500, and can play movies at 1080i and games at 1080p (you can do component video over 1080p, read AVSForums to understand what you can and cannot do without HDMI or HDCP) I see no need for the $600 model as someone that just wants to play games and use the Blu-Ray player.
So now that we've settled on $500 as the more accurate cost, consider next that with inflation factored in $500 is not that much more expensive than the $300 PS2 at the time it released. For me in partiular it's less of s atretch to spend $500 today than it was to spend $300 then. And I am right in the prime target market for gamers (30's) who are mostly seeing similar rises in income over time as they grow older and get promoted.
Think of the millions of people who have been buying HDTV's like mad. Those suckers cost a huge amount compared to the PS3! Obviously people are ready and willing to spend money on HD video products.
Lastly look at the insane prices the 360 reached last Christmas. Many tens of thousands of people were willing to risk using eBay and many paid for more than $500.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There is a HUGE pent-up demand for Blu-Ray.
No more or less then there is pent-up demand for HD-DVD. We still don't know which way the market will eventually settle on. The market could just as easily say phooey to them both and stick with good ol' DVDs.
If the market for Blu-ray goes sour, Sony will be in big trouble, since they're betting a lot on its success. If the market for HD-DVD goes sour, neither Nintendo or Microsoft will care, since the 360 is just hanging around HD-DVD for the fun of it, and Nintendo isn't useing either technology.
The whole transition to HDTV has already been underway for years
Which is really the problem. HDTV is still high-end stuff for people with a lot of money to blow. It still has a long way to go before it reaches mass-market penetration, and I don't see the next round of consoles helping too much.
The improvement in quality with Blu-Ray over DVD is *far* greater than the improvement of DVD over LaserDisc
Very weak argument, here. Few people compare DVD quality to LaserDisc. The comparison was always to VHS, which has obviously inferior quality to DVDs. The DVD to HD-DVD/Blu-ray won't be nearly as obvious.
IIRC, the thing that proved DVD as a successful home format was The Matrix. Only big home theater buffs bought Betamax or LaserDisc. I suspect that if HD-DVD/Blu-ray doesn't get a major breakthrough title like The Matrix, we're going to be using DVDs for a long time to come.
Not a typewriter
Lighting? You mean that recent trade to mark everything that has an edge with a radioactive glow? Yeah, we sure need a hell of a lot of that.
Rendering at a higher-res and resampling to a lower resolution also does wonders to get rid of aliasing, fwiw.
Oh yeah, and so does taking off your glasses, if you're shortsighted. Unlike optimized anti-aliasing, it's distorting the pixels.
The base version of the PS3 is $500 and can play movies and games at 1080i and p over component output.
You are ignoring my point that there is demand for HD video today that is not being well met, as the cable channels that do offer content are very repetittive. That is where demand will come from even with the PS3 coming into the market at an earlier point (I see no point in debating any further the point DVD was really at when it is irrelevent to my current point).
From that standpoint PS3 sales will indeed be somewhat driven by the presence of the Blu-Ray player.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There were forms of middle-class taverns with waitstaff and table seating in ancient Greece, called kauponi, and evidence of earlier analogs in several mesopotamian cities.
True. The PS3 and X360 are all mighty and stuff, but the Wii is the only interesting, novel console out there. The other two are, well, pumped-up Playstations with optional hard drives.
Likewise, the handheld sector: The only two interesting consoles out there are the GP2X (because Gamepark equals hotness) and the DS (because it's innovative). I don't care about the PSP - if I want to look at movies on the go I get a GP2X, which doesn't even require me to use some funky proprietary DVD-workalike. And allows me to play homebrew games without fighting a silly cracking war against the developer. Considering what the PSP does it's pretty frickin' expensive, even if the games were better than what I get for the GMX and the DS it'd be expensive.
Sony will retain many customers but it's not going to last forever. Sony's gaming section might just turn out a second SEGA. (OTOH, if that means they'll release an awesome last console...)
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Ken Kutaragi probably also thinks that gold-plating his nuts for a few grand is "probably too cheap" for the "value for your money".
They did well with PS2. I remember feeling similar about the cost but the blue cloud was that I could buy PS1 games and we even did when we got our PS2, we bought 2 games at $40-$50 and about 5 PS1 games at like $10 each and we played them (we didn't have a game system before that) It was pricey but we had 6 or 7 games with it. I give them credit for the compatibility.
What they didn't do was use Minidisc for storage. Maybe not games but instead of their fucked up flash, they could have used minidisc. It's also a great technology that Sony is killing because they won't let it be used in ways other than those they deam acceptable. Cheap, small, robust, removable storage, who gives a shit what people store on them? Instead they put in this crappy 8MB flash system, they aren't cheap, they aren't big, they spent money developing it, they had a great technology already made and deployed and it's better. Open up minidisc, use it, get them out there. Then make the best minidisc players, I have complete confidence that sony can do that.
Now with the PS3, it's like they started believing their own bullshit or something. They are making games. Blu-ray is better than HD-DVD in just about every way, they are going to kill that technology. They are going to hand the keys to their competition because they are too damn arrogant and they should recognize some things, MS isn't going to give it back.
Look at UMD movies, why on earth would you buy them? It perplexes me, on one hand Sony is promising BD and HD movies. On the other hand they are selling movies that can only be played on a little toy.
Maybe they know some stuff we don't. They've played Xbox360s, they know what they are up against.
I want Sony to do well, I already own Sony software. I really don't like MS controlling yet another part of the industry. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe the PS3 will be the best thing to ever happen, it doesn't look like it from here though. I'm vexed by their behavior recently, just knocking off the competition, out pricing the competition, it seems like they can't do anything right at the moment and Stringer should maybe take some actions. It would be better to put it off another 6-9 months and hit it rather than fuck it up even worse. If it's really going to be $600, it had better rock, it had better come with some games, and it had better have some exclusive titles coming that will blow us all away. BD alone just won't cut it.
Yeah, fuck lighting. All games should have only one light source, fixed at one point an infinite distance above the playing area.
You're not arguing "the graphics capabilities are the same", you're trying to justify to yourself that the difference doesn't matter. An intelligent conversation with that attitude isn't possible.
Well, Sony will never go away, but they won't enjoy the top spot anymore in the market with the huge price tag of the PS3. The XBox 360 was rushed and its starting to really show. The overheating issues with the system and the lack of HD Movie support at launch is evidence of that. There's been a lot of interest in the Wii and its new controller. Red Steel and the new Metroid games look to be fantastic games with the wiimote controller, and I love the retro dual-analog SNES-ish controller for the games you can download through The Big N's online service.
I think we'll see the 360 and Wii clamoring for the #1 spot for a while with the PS3 trailing along behind in 3rd place until its price finally starts to come down. If the video of FFXIII anf MGS4 are any indication of what the system can do in realtime it will be one hell of a machine, but the Wii shouldn't be underestimated either.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
"Is it not nonsense to compare the charge for dinner at the company cafeteria with dinner at a fine restaurant?"
Is this Sony telling us that they expect 40 customers? I'm only half joking. When I go to Chez Thierry, I am not expecting a basic meal that I can buy at any WalMart cafeteria. I'm expecting Thierry to greet me personally then go back to the kitchen and make me a really nice dinner. Whaddaya say Ken? For $700 clams (where I live) are you going to build it custom for me (I'm left handed, have a medium grip, and prefer the mellower experiences. Something to share would also be nice), hand deliver it and recommend a fine ale to go with my game of choice or do you plan on boxing it up and selling the same ho hum product through every retailer that'll take it.
There really isn't anything amazing in the Wii relative to a $300 Xbox 360, so what if they bring it out at $150? How about $100? I would almost guess that I could get my parents to get one at that price.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
...if you remove all DRM and any other hardware / software restrictions. Include a 250Gb hard drive (I know...that's a pretty small hard drive these days); allow me to utilize that cell power running any OS I please using virtualization, burn CDs / DVDs, make professional quality audio or video using included tools, etc...you get the idea. Give us what we want and I'll even pay twice what you're asking for it...maybe more?
Want to control me and vendor lock me into your business model / upgrade cycle? Fuck you.
I will get an expensive one. Then it'll get a piece of cat5 stuffed into it and one of the two nics on my Nforce4 board. Linux will go on the PS3 and I'll have to get a HDTV, one of those 32" Samsung CRTs probably, to stuff the HDMI output into. So $1200 - $1400 for my home theater. Cool.
... well yeah, and a card reader, oh yeah and a Blu-Ray for both machines.
....
.... that will be tough I fear.
... Standards and Practices !
I get WiFi for whatever, Bluetooth
This is gonna be fun, hell I might even get a few games. Free membership on Sony's game network
I wonder if I can get Quake 4 through onto the TV
PenGun
Do What Now ???
The problem with a 600$ system has little to do with the system itself and people not buying it - the problem is no developers will make games optimized for a 600$ system that few people are likely to buy. Game will be made for the Xbox or Wii, and then "upped" a little bit for the PS3, but we are hardly talking stunning use of the capability, and hardly worth 350$ more.
Nintendo, maybe even Microsoft, could have gotten away with it, having a large number of first party games, but Sony can not.
At Google, the cafeteria IS a fine dining restaurant.
... are not the last gasp.
Much of corporate Japan is rampant with narcotics abuse.
Mr. Ken Kutaragi's words, translitterated, indicates a certain
level of narcotics ingestion.
Given that much of corporate / Federal Japan is intoxicated, by either
alcohol or narcotic depressives or stimulants, Mr. Kutaragi's
words, Nihongo or Eigo, are the subject of a drug induced
Final Fantasy.
When the "slug" hits him, he wont know what hit him. Better dead!
Toodles!!
Clearly this is the "must have" feature that Sony has been looking for. I think any number of teenage boys would pay $699 for a game console that gives blow jobs.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
My GOD! If you're going to COMMENT, at least read all of the replies! If you check about six posts up, you'll notice that I already TALKED about this. In suburbia, and in Florida ESPECIALLY, fancy restaurants are near NON EXISTANT.
I DON'T THINK OLIVE GARDEN IS FANCY. I said MOST PEOPLE think it is, ie, those people have not been exposed to culture or class or WHATEVER you want to call culinary taste.
But everyone is MISSING THE FARKING POINT. My post wasn't about food, or culinary snobishness. It was about the fact that most people are not looking for whistles and bells when they are looking for a game system. If they're looking for a media center in a box, sure, but when it comes to games that are fun and numerous and varried, Nintendo = FTW.
Fancy names or "atmosphere" or live music and dancing are NOT what food is about, and neither are they what games are about in the basic, most dumbed down sense. Games are about fun, food is about substance and nutrients.
Now will you people STOP NAGGING ME ABOUT THE FACT THAT THE ONLY RESTAURANT IN MY TOWN IS OLIVE GARDEN?! Gosh, string me up in a tree why don't you?
No, Mr. Green. Communism is just a red herring.
P$ 3
Price is not a problem for consumers. If they charge too much, we don't have to buy the product.
Price *is* a problem for the company, tho. They *have* to buy the product (from the manufacturers).
Cheers, Ken. Thanks for not making PS3 our problem.
five star restaurants do not have a mass market, they basically live on corporate meals and the occasional private couple and a bunch of really rich people with too much money. But five star restaurants are a niche market in itself. Add to that that the games coming out for the PS3 are more McDonalds than Paul Bocuse you have a huge problem on your hands. Another message, to all marketers, people do not have an endless amount of money to buy junk stuff, there are real needs like housing, clothing, retirement and food which have to be fullfilled first before luxury items can be bought, so the higher the price the less people simply will even look at it, period! Is it just me or are the corporate people getting more and more out of touch with plain old reality. From Microsoft at a software standpoing I get this feeling, the movie industry and the RIAA seem to have been thinking for years that they have a right to one hand in the peoples cash wallet and now Sony with a mass market mc donalds item thinks it can sell it as much as its predecessor with Paul Bocuse prices.
To do this, you need three things:
1. A silent track of known duration (one minute is fine)
2. The ability to make and replay playlists
3. A clip starting 17 seconds into Pink Floyd's "Time", the part where all the clocks go off within a few seconds of each other. Or find something else that's equally difficult to ignore.
Draw up the playlist to have 24 five-minute silent tracks followed by the alarm track. When you invoke the playlist, skip to whatever track you need to so the alarm goes off on time. If you need it to go off in 53 minutes, you skip to track 14 and fast-forward two minutes into that. For anything over two hours of delay, I'd recommend making longer tracks unless fast-forwarding really sucks on your player.
I actually use a looped track of "synthetic surf" made from brown noise to help cover external noise (I get to sleep faster that way), which does require at least 128kbps to not sound distractingly "swirly", but it is disk space well used. My particular player (Archos Gemini XS100, 4 GB) has a clock but not an alarm setting, so I at least know how far into my playlist to advance. It is enough to enable me to take lunchtime powernaps in the car, knowing I will wake up in time to go back to work. The cover noise helps considerably, I forgot the player at home yesterday and had a much more difficult time getting to sleep even though my car's clock also has an alarm. I didn't have cover noise, and I feared the weak "beep-beep" of the car's alarm would not suffice, so I never really got to sleep. With the player, I am not afraid to slip on the big Druish Princess headphones and zonk out.
If sleep isn't the goal, you can also slip an alarm track into your playlist to go off appropriately -- maybe with 30 seconds of silence up front just so you can't miss it. It takes a little bit of planning but it works on any device that will accept a playlist.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Woah, cal down. I'm not saying lighting shouldn't be considered in graphics technology, but some games today push it too far, and it looks like that's the way it will be in the next generation even more.
s /924363_20060325_screen047.jpg/ oblivion2_screen012.jpg_ 20060308_screen004.jpgs /928234_20050915_screen001.jpg
Examples: http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2006/083/review
http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2006/news/03/21
http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2006/066/924363
http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2005/257/review
The point isn't that resolution is the only important thing, the point is that if the console ONLY has to produce a low res image things like "Lighting, precision, shaders, etc " all have more resources available. Producing an image orders of magnitude higher in resolution sucks up a good majority of power differences. If producing an imagine in 1280x720 takes up 80% of the PS3s graphically power that wouldn't be used if it was only rendering in 640x480... that means that the GC only has to be 20% as powerful to compete at that resolution.
Collector's Edition
Oh, I fully agree that all things being equal, you can render more stuff faster in a lower resolution frame. In this case, however, all things are not equal.
There are a lot of factors involved in rendering an image, and it isn't something one can go "well, if you render in a lower resolution you need x% less power". Bandwidth comes into play. Pixel shaders come into play. Vertex shaders come into play. Goemetry comes into play. And so on.
The Wii's graphic hardware (well, the specs that have been "leaked") isn't something that produces images at 480p that look "the same" as the images produced by the 360 or PS3. Examining screenshots from Red Steel should demonstrate this -- there is no detail to any of the geometry in the images; they're all flat textured surfaces.
hmm, I see your point. Stuff like a limited amount of pipelines would definitely hinder the graphics. But as long as the software support is up to date (shader 3.0 etc) They could still employ techniques like Normal Mapping and other software based techs to bump up the perceived graphical performance. Heck the Xbox 1 has a few titles that look as good as most of the current next gen titles simply by heavily using software techniques. Chronicles of Riddick, and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory are two such titles that come to mind.
In the last gen the GC often had Xbox level graphics but specs closer to that of a PS2... I'm sure they've got something up their sleeve in terms of development tools.
Collector's Edition
I'd actually say that GC on average had better looking games than the Xbox... It is almost useless to compare the paper (clockspeeds, et al) numbers with architecutres that vary so greatly. The GC design was very well done and really allowed the hardware to hit its limits. The Xbox design was constrained by its PC heritage, which really hurt it IMO.
The Wii's graphics will definately be an improvement over the GC, and won't by any measure of the word be bad. They just won't be as good as the PS3 or 360. But they don't have to be -- they just have to be "good enough", and I think they've succeeded in that arena.
Nintendo is focusing on their new control scheme; they aren't interested in being the top dog in some spec pissing match. Their real challenge is ensuring that 3rd parties don't push out games where the only "draw" is some noval use of the controller (such as their tennis E3 tech demo, which was essentially "press a button when the ball is near your player").
Absolutely right.
I used to be pretty much anti-Ipod in the past, but the lack of agility in this industry is utterly pathetic. Competitors in the DAP market these days, even big ones like Creative and Sony, just don't have the balls to do anything *CREATIVE* or *DARING*.
When the Shuffle was released, it caused a price drop around the industry. Then, instead of taking the reins, DAP makers just stuck with their current 512MB and 1GB flash players, and tried to compete on price and features.
Then Apple released the Nano, taking the (AMAZING!) step of adding a second flash chip. Why none of the other DAP makers bothered to do this, I have no clue, but it is obvious they were too afraid to stray above Apple's pricing. Unfortunately, now they're stuck with 1GB players as their high-end, while Apple offers 2GB for $50 more, and 4GB for $100 more.
Six months later, they've BARELY started catching up, and you can bet once again they'll sit on their laurels, and wait for Apple to make the next move. PISSES ME OFF, but sadly this is how the DAP industry will work until Apple starts sitting on their laurels. Well, at least we have Rockbox so you can get around Apple's mandatory database.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
The fact of the matter is that the high end PS3 is a good value. The amount of high res textures you can put on a Blu-ray disc is almost twice as much as you can for an XBOX360 and about ten times the amount you can fit on a dvd. That is the main reason for the blu ray drive. Sure it might be a while before publishers are using to 50-200g per disc, but just think about the lush environments that will be available. If you scoff at the price, wait a little while. They have said the price is for "Early Adopters", so if you are not an early adopter, stop whining.
Lets do some quick math to emphasize my point.
XBOX 360(non-crippled) $400
HD-DVD Drive $200(maybe $150)
Wireless Net adapter $100
Xbox Live $50 Per year
That is already at $750 with no games and a smaller hard drive, less powerful processor, no HDMI output, less powerful video card and until you get the HD-DVD drive, you will be stuck with the meager 4.7g of space for high res textures. Not only that but the PS3's online service will not need the yearly/monthly fee and seems as though it might be more powerful than the 360's service.
Regardless of whether you think you want a HD-DVD/Bluray DVD player, it will benefit the GAMES, not just movies. Just think if we were still using CDs to play PS2/Xbox games, and Xbox shot themselves in the foot by not including that mass storage media. The amount of space required for these games has increased exponentially and it will continue. Developers will not be able to count on a 360 game being able to use more space than the amount on a standard dvd or a hard drive. PS3 developers will know they will have a hard drive for caching no matter what and also they can possibly use 50g of space on one disk and hopefully up to 200g further on in the life cycle. Think about that, and then let me know why the 360 is better. To me, it is the most non-innovative. Xbox live is the only innovative thing they had and that was with their last console and they charge you for it.