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European PS3 Launch Delayed to 2007
An anonymous reader writes "Sony has finally admitted that the November release date for the release of the PS3 is unfeasible. Specifically, it will not be available in any PAL territories until March 2007. Sony cites '(a) delay in the mass production schedule of the blue laser diode', forming a critical part of the much-maligned Blu-Ray drive. With the Xbox 360 having been released for almost 6 months in overseas markets, and the Wii looming large, can Sony afford a delay like this?" Update: 09/06 17:58 GMT by Z : Just to make sure you caught it, the announcement includes the word that the U.S. will only be getting 400,000 units at launch in November, with Japan at 100,000 units. Go Sony.
Sony really seem to be shooting themselves in the foot lately, even if this isn't their fault.
The only reason they're using Blu-ray in the PS3 is to try and take over the HD media market. So, yes, this is their fault. If the stuck with DVD which is more than adequate for next-gen gaming, they wouldn't be having this problem and the PS3 might have already launched.
But their insistance on trying to abuse a monopoly they don't actually have is causing them to become more and more of a joke and less and less likely to be even relevant this generation. If it winds up being a choice between a $300 Wii now and a $600 PS3 months from now the choice of which to buy becomes even easier than it was before.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
They are nothing less than the victims of their own unrealistic promises.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
What BLOWS me away is I'm actually considering the Wii the most!
ME! the wii, I'm an anti-nintendo guy, I don't like kiddy games (it's a generalisation I know there's a few normal ones) and heck I'm a tech geek, so it's underpowered for me - the controller is a gimmick and they focus primarily on party / mp games whereas I'm a single player gamer who likes storyline.
None the less! Somehow the Wii is the most interesting, it seems like they are the only console manufacturer who haven't lost their minds!
MS rushed the X360 (in my opinion) for Xmas and ended up making too many faulties plus they dropped the old Xbox 1 like a hot potato, hence treating their customers like shit.
Sony, well see my post - they are nutcases
Nintendo, well despite most of the stuff I said above they STILL sound the best overall, cheap, simple and likely fun - plus hell it'll be the cheapest so I can always re-sell it, PLUS I never owned a gamecube, so this gets me 2 consoles in one kind of.
It's a wiin wiin situation for me.
I know, it's standard Slashdot fodder to talk about something big, important or well-known coming to an end, but I am really starting to wonder if Sony will be able to survive all of this stuff. Frankly, I don't want them to. But just off the top of my head, what does the general public know about Sony?
* Rootkit CDs
* Exploding batteries
* Delays and Failures associated with their new proprietary DVD format
* Delays and Failures resulting from the previously mentioned DVD stuff
Sony used to be widely held up as the gold standard for quality and innovative design. As far as I was concerned, Sony "invented" everything. (I know that's not true, but still.) But with all this crap going on, it would seem that the company is not unified and is pulling itself apart by having too many leaders. Solutions that would seem obvious to everyone else, Sony is just too thick-headed to make happen. For example: Put out the PS3 with a REMOVABLE DVD drive that can later me upgraded to BlueRay when it's available. They can virtually sell the thing twice! Seems pretty obvious to me and I'm just a consumer with a worthless opinion and no experience in the industry.
It's amazing, isn't it? How you, as a "game developer" are more concerned about disk space than about gameplay?
In a discussion about format size, an observation about format size is simply an on topic discussion. It has nothing to do with priorities and nor does it imply priority.
It's kind of like saying, in a discussion about dogs getting loose, "The thought of getting bitten is a real concern for me." and having someone leap forward with, "How can you worry about being bitten when babies are dying in Africa!"
I work for a games company too. I think more capacity, more power, more everything is a good thing. If you pay attention, you'll note I didn't say add "at the expense of gameplay" or "more so than gameplay." Gameplay remains a primary concern but it doesn't stop capacity from still being a good thing as an additional way to push the genre forward.
How many CDs did Pac Man fill?
And, given that Pacman is still released semi regularly for the Gameboy, as part of "classic" collections for the PS2/Xbox, etc., how much do people still play it?
Yeah, it was a great game for its time. Yeah, for its time it sucked in far more of our time than most modern games do. But, standing against modern games like say Oblivion with its wealth of content, it captures maybe half an hour of a modern gamer's interest. Now compare it to World Of Warcraft. Even in its heyday, did its median player play for anywhere near the amount of time the median player of a modern classic plays for?
At the end of the day, whilst gameplay is core, there's a reason why most gamers, exposed to what a whole DVD full of content can be like, play older games and quickly get bored, realizing PacMan is nothing more than repetition of the same concept, requiring four or five core strategies, repeated for 255 levels.
Were you frustrated when you scratched the disk of your Super Mario Brothers 3 cartridge?
No, we were frustrated when dust got in to it and no amount of blowing would get it to work again.
Gameplay has stagnated in the past 10 years - since the Playstation era. There have been no new innovations in gameplay in that time, only improved graphics.
To name the first few the immediately come to mind...
Tomb Raider (and its clones) - a genre of gaming that didn't exist before the PS1.
Massively Multiplayer online worlds with human to human interaction on a level of accessibility that text based systems never had.
Sandbox games like the Grand Theft Auto series (that, curiously, only become possible with enough depth of content that relies on the large storage you disdain).
The only games which come to mind with innovative gameplay are games like Guitar Hero with its specialty hardware.
Unlike the classic arcade games of yore. None of which required trackballs instead of joysticks, afterburner cabinets that turned upside down, VR headsets or lightguns.
Of course, Wii is looking to change all that.
The Wii is, by definition, specialty hardware. It introduces a new class of, admittedly more reusable than many, peripheral.
If you're determined to look at a single aspect of any given argument, you can confirm your beliefs. If one only looks at numbers of children killed, guns are bad. If one only looks at numbers of crimes stopped, guns are good. Neither is that impressive of an argument to more open minded people.
Similarly, you saw a game dev comment on storage with no mention of gameplay either way and saw it simply as a confirmation of your beliefs that tech is more important to him than gameplay - despite absolutely no supporting evidence. You complain about how easy modern discs may be to scratch, ignoring how easy cartridges were to get dust in to (I for one have had far less frustration with scratched discs than I ever had with 5.25" floppies that got fingerprints on them or 16K ram packs that fell out of the back of ZX81s everytime I typed hard). You lament