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."
In short, it appears as though Sony plans to offer for free what Microsoft is currently charging for, and that could be a big plus ... it could convince many gamers that the PS3's expense is more reasonable
... PS3 better be incredible ... otherwise this will be another victory for MSFT.
Get Charged up front or have an optional fee later on? Hmmm
Sony is using the "Developers control Internet Gaming" solution used in PS2.
Problems?
-Every developer has a ton more work to do. There isn't an Xbox Live framework to work from.
-Each developer could decide to charge for basic gaming privelidges. Someone needs to pay for the Servers and the bandwidth.
-Games will have unique online systems, destroying continuity across the platform.
A couple bucks per month is worth these advantages. Why buy a hot-rod $600 PS3 and pay nothing for a junky online system?.
What was left out of the original translation from japanese is that Sony Computer Entertainment president Ken Kutaragi said that they would be offering everything from cellphone ringtones to a XBox 360 game emulator for the PS3, which he stated, 'Just involves turning a bunch of features off'.
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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.
I'm going to state the most probable reason and say the games will not take up nearly 25GB, Sony knows this and has decided instead to tout the POTENTIAL size of the games over the actual while saving money by including a hard drive that is suited to the minimum space really needed. In addition, they could do this while believing the games may reach 25GB, thus forcing poeple to buy expensive hard drive upgrades, further increasing profits.
Demented But Determined.
The article itself talks about Sony providing matching services, which is just what XBox live offers. That means there will also be a framework to make use of these services...
It also says that service is free, so where do you get the idea that game makers can or will charge for online play?
As for unique online systems, again SOny is providing a centralized online hub for free. So it pretty much blows that theory out of the water.
Basically think XBox Live Gold, only I don't actually have to pay to play games with other people online. I think it's pretty funny you're raising the boogeyman of people MAYBE having to pay for online PS3 games when you already have to for just about every 360 title.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So in a PS3 I get a whole Blu-Ray drive as part of that $100 extra cost. Only now it's not $100 more because I also get the equivilent of XBox Gold for free, which is $50 a year - thus the PS3 now only costs $50 more than a 360 (if you only plan to play online games for a year), and includes a Blu-Ray drive which allows games to hold far more data. Consider everything else is the same:
360 premuum and $500 PS3 both have 20GB hard drives.
360 premuum and $500 PS3 both have component out for HD video (though here the PS3 gets a nod since it supports 1080p)
360 premuum and $500 PS3 both have just as many ports (basically USB and memory ports, the more expensive PS3 also has media ports)
360 premuum and $500 PS3 both support the same networking options (ethernet in)
Seems to me like Sony has priced the console pretty well against the 360.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sony has an online service they charge over 250 bucks a year for. That adds over a thousand bucks to the cost of a PS2. (SOE online pass for EQOA for those of you wondering just where I pulled the numbers from)
That's an inetresting bit of information but irrelevent since the whole article this Slashdot story is based on said that the online matching service was free.
But the other thing they might do.. since you ask so nicely.. is to release some MMORPGs on their service. They could just buy the rights to AC or AC2 and port them to the 360. (a lot of the "exploit/macro/botting" problems can go away when you move to a console after all)
They don't go away at all. They just change forms. Online console play is rife with cheating and many controllers offer extensive macro options making that aspect even worse (since it's harder for most people to macro PC games, no as easy to set up as a controller that features macros).
In other words, there are a lot of things MSFT might do and even though we are all supposed to rabidly hate MSFT, some of us still would not mind seeing Sony take it good and hard for all the ways they screwed over their customers in their neverending effort to achieve total media lock.
And what would those be? Are you sure you hate Sony gaming, or could it be your real enemy is Sony/BMG? Be careful to pick the right target.
I will not buy msuic from Sony/BMG because of the whole rootkit fiasco and general cluelessness when it comes to media. But I have no problems supporting Sony Gaming and the PS3, which seems to be to be trying to make a decent attempt at following a path of openess - every PS3 shipping with Linux and so on.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Sony to nickel and dime gamers to stay afloat
I really don't like the idea of episodic content. I'm not paying any developer, publisher, or hardware maker more money for a game I bought (non subscription, I do play WoW) just so I can get a better gun, or a new level, but I am okay with real expansions.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
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...
There is one big flaw with your argument. You are assuming that Sony is not going to charge for their online service.
That would be a big flaw indeed if the main article itself had not quoted Sony as saying they were not going to charge for online matchmaking services. It's kind of hard to read "not going to charge" any other way unless you think it means they'll not take Visa.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley