Slashdot Mirror
Sony Pins Hopes on E-Distro
Ars Technica reports on Sony's plans for their online service. As previously discussed, they'll be offering online play for free. They hope to make money via an e-distribution system. From the article: "Yet it is unclear what Sony intends to sell. While the 60GB hard drive in the premium console is spacious, it would not be large enough to hold a collection of HD video, although the company could sell storage add-ons in the future. We believe that Sony will initially sell other content, including music and standard definition video, as well as gaming content such as that available today in the Xbox Live Marketplace."
>otherwise this will be another victory for MSFT.
you misspelled Nintendo. Microsoft isn't even winning* NOW, how the hell will things get better when they actually have some next-gen competition?
*in Japan the Gamecube is beating the 360 in weekly sales and Europe doesn't give a crap about the 360 either.
including music and standard definition video
Selling music seems like it would be a giant flop. Nobody I know of listens to music on their (CD-playing) consoles right now, I can't imagine anyone would want to purchase music to play on their PS3. Especially since it wouldn't be transferrable to an iPod, and knowing Sony, it may not even work on music players from people like Creative.
The harddrive in the PS3 is there to be used for Linux and your downloaded media. There will be a small area for caching if a developer decides to use it for that.
I was thinking more along the lines of something like Steam where people could buy games online. You know, E-Distro. Like they mention in TFA. Then again, Kutaragi's claim of "content" isn't very well defined.
Harddrive != fast loading. Despite what Microsoft marketing convinced so many Xbox fans to believe. With the tremendous amount of space at BluRay disc holds developers aren't having to do heavy compression and are able to just stream directly off the drive. There is no need to unload game data to the PS3's harddrive for the vast majority of games.
See if you sing the same song while you sit at loading screens on your PS3 games. I don't know what the BDROM throughput is but I guarantee it's nowhere near the speed of a hard disk. Plus, streaming uncompressed data works fine while playing movies\cutscenes, but when you start pulling nonsequential data off the disc like textures and speech you have to deal with latency caused by the laser moving across the disc radius. HDD was no big deal in Xbox because they didn't take advantage of its potential. Try burning an old installed PC game and play it off the disc on a 16x DVDROM drive and tell me with a straight face that it's just as fast as even a 5400RPM laptop HDD.
My point is that a 60GB HDD is hardly next-gen. They're calling this thing a computer replacement but you can hardly even find HDDs under 120GB on second-hand Emachines anymore. If they really wanted to boost speed they could have put in 1GB of low latency RAM and pre-streamed textures, or something. Of course I'm only speculating that the PS3's load times will be no shorter than PS2's, but I've seen no reason to believe otherwise. It's just another disc format limited by laser latency and spin-up time, and installing the game on HDD seems the obvious fix if my assumption is correct.
$499 for a 1080p BluRay player that also plays almost every major console developers games? Expensive, I don't think so...
Every journalist at E3 disagrees with you.
exactly, in one years' time the two consoles will have had an equal cost; assuming that you play games online. however you also get the added benefit of being able to play blu-ray movies and "full" backwards compatibility. even without the online capabilities, i think those two functions make up the difference b/w the two consoles.
personally, until i get both consoles underneath my tv by the end of the year hopefully, i see them both on even ground. maybe with sony in the lead due to a better gaming lineup.
You're kidding, right?
You're trying to claim that you can pull data off an optical disc faster than you can off a hard drive? That's the single most ignorant and asinine thing I've read today. And I've been reading slashdot.
$499 for a 1080p BluRay player that also plays almost every major console developers games?
Sony must be radiating some kind of Steve Jobs-like Reality Distortion Field, since they've apparently convinced you that you don't want a video game console, you want a Blu-Ray player. Those of us in the market for a video game console, however, will continue to not be impressed with playing Blu-Ray movies that don't even exist. Much less with playing them only at the whim of studios who can flip a bit and break them at any time.
Me, I'll just stick with my 360 and buy a Wii when it comes out. Guess I'll have to forego watching Blu-Ray movies. This will no doubt cause me no end of pain when, someday, there are some, and I won't be able to watch The Fast and the Furious: Moscow Retread in 1080p.
I'll be rueing the day, I'm sure.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
The basic theme of the PS3 seems to be openess
You'll forgive me if I believe that only when I see it, given Sony's track record.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...