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Ken Kutaragi's Famous Last Words

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the six-hundred-dollars-is-only-cheap-in-japan dept.

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.'"

5 of 527 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah, well... by iogan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... 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
    1. Re:Yeah, well... by Mursk · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yeah, we're getting into fois gras/escargot territory. Stuff that may be fancy but no one in their right mind would want to eat. ;)

      --
      "This thing does science so hard, you say, 'I've never seen that much science.'" -Sam
    2. Re:Yeah, well... by Traiklin · · Score: 3, Interesting

      and all you have to do is upgrade your PC every year or two to keep up with playing those fancy games.

      yet on a console that you buy 4-6 years prior will still play those old games (with no need to update), you don't have to worry about compatability (Does my graphics card cut it? Do I have enough ram? Is there enough room on my hard drive? is my processor fast enough?) you can just pop a game in and hit start. Plus as time goes on games only look better on a console since developers don't have to worry about catering to people who bought the latest nVidia/ATI card from 8 months ago (cause by this time the newer one is out), they know what they have to work with and don't have to piss around.

      The only truely nice thing about PC gaming over Console gaming is Saving a game, on a console you are forced to find a save point before you can save and quit (and when you are gaming late at night wanting to go to bed this becomes a meaningless chore) where as on the PC you just hit ESC hit save and quit.

  2. Re:The Dual Shock Wii by Jerf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You can subtract out the effect of the force feedback on acceleration fairly successfully, but not perfectly. It'd cause the controller to noticably drift, probably in a matter of seconds of force feedback, so that where a straight controller was driving the car straight a moment ago, now it's 5 degrees to the right. It'd add up fast. Expensive precision components might limit this to an acceptable degree but it'll be too expensive.

    The reason Nintendo can "get away with" having force feedback in their controller is they have a second (and probably third and possibly fourth) point of reference in the sensor bar, so they can correct drift by referencing this other point (or points). (I don't have inside info, but the bar is presumably a bar because it has a position sensor on each end, or it'd be a "sensor button", and since accuracy is probably a big deal, I'd add one in the middle for another reference point; not as good as having a non-colinear reference point but still better than just 2; how much better would depend on a math analysis.) Or, more accurately, they never have drift problems because they don't have to try to trust the controller in the first place, just the sensor bar's assessment of the position and velocity, and the controller's report of acceleration.

    So, my conclusion is Sony removed their rumble because it was far too late to add a sensor bar to their package, and so the only other choice was dropping force feedback. Their controllers will still need periodic re-zeroing, although clever programming and a bit of guesswork can minimize the need to do this explicitly. Still, it could have some tricky cases; if you've ever powered up your console while an analog stick wasn't centered, you've experienced this already. Make sure your new PS3 controllers are correctly horizontal when powering them up.

  3. Re:Remember the PS2! by Raptor+CK · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yeah, but the Xbox at least got a Media Center Extender option and had Live.

    The PS2 phased out the IEEE 1394 ports, and the hard drive/LAN adapter was used for... Final Fantasy XI?

    There's the problem. MS actually figured out how to sell more than just a console, Nintendo figured out how to make a profit selling just a console, and Sony... hyped up a piece of crap which was crippled more and more with each hardware revision.

    And let's not talk about how many of those 100 million shipped PS2's were replacements for burnt-out DVD drives.

    --
    Raptor
    "Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do things that I'm never going to do."