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Games Already Filling Blu-Ray Discs
Eurogamer reports that according to Sony's Phil Harrison, PS3 launch titles are already getting close to the 25 GB limit on Blu-Ray discs. He views this as a positive thing, and suggests that the company will up the limit on the media format to 50 GB sometime next year. From the article: "Harrison also responded to questioning about the claim that the capacity of Blu-Ray will be used simply to provide more high definition movie sequences, effectively filling the discs - and games - with non-interactive content. 'It's not just about graphics,' he said. 'It's about 7.1 audio, it's about speech, it's about having up to 1080p movies built into the game; it's high-res textures, it's animation, it's everything that goes into making a very rich and varied next-gen experience. Partly it's visual, partly it's sound, and partially it'll be down to gameplay benefits as well - more levels, more detail, richer experiences.'"
Though look at it this way, 25 gigs of crap is still crap.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
It reminds of me when there is a road that is far too busy, then they spend 5+ years expanding the road, only to have it not be wide enough for the new amount of traffic.
HD-DVD movies are filling their disks, without the extras, already too.
It's kind of like a law, give them space, and it will be filled.
Let's just hope the game play is good enough to justify all that additional sound and 1080p graphics.
You can lose something that is loose, so tighten the loose item so you don't lose it.
hmmm, kinda like that whole "its not the size, its how you use it" sexual innuendo line. Seriously though, why does a game need 30 GB unless there's a freakin ton of voiceover work, cutscenes (which are not gameplay, yo), and large useless textures?
People piss and moan about Blu-Ray, "You don't need it!" or "Most people don't have HDTV's!" Well, some of us do. And if you don't, I'd hope that you'd prefer a format that will upgrade with you should you ever choose to get a 7.1 audio system or HDTV. When you're posting your Sony flames, just think of the irony in Slashdot posters arguing that we don't need a new technology.
Caffeine is my anti-drug!
Duranin - A NWN2 Roleplaying Persistent World
But of course, after buying that much high def textures and videos, there is no money left for the scenario (and don't tell me a DVD wasn't enough to put decent interactions, some of my favorite games only required a couple of 3"1/2)
New generation of console hardware arrives with more storage. Developers use the space.
Shocking.
I don't see why they don't just downgrade the cutscene quality; barely anyone watches the cutscenes more than once anyway. I can't imagine sitting there thinking "WOW LQQK AT THE 1080i CUTSCENE!!!! WHAT QUALITY!!!!!!". I CAN, however, imagine sitting there thinking "come on, come on, get back to the game already!"
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
W00t for the 3122131 maps of 8000x6000 sqr ft Doom 6!!! I for one cant wait to shoot-shoot-jump-shoot-jump-shoot-run-strafe-shoot -crouch-shoot-shoot-shoot-jump-shoot-jump-shoot-ru n-strafe-shoot-crouch-shoot-shoot-shoot-jump-shoot -jump-shoot-run-strafe-shoot-crouch-shoot-t -crouch-shoot-shoot-shoot-jump-shoot-jump-shoot-ru n-strafe-shoot-crouch-shoot-
shoot-shoot-jump-shoot-jump-shoot-run-strafe-shoo
at 1620x1280 !!
Seriously, is anyone still turned on by this??
(sorry this is a not-so-old-man rant).
I am waiting for my humble Wii =o)
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
The one thing I was dissapointed with at the TGS was that the next gen titles still used old techniques. For example, instead of using true type fonts that use vectors, and would look nice at any resolution and scale, they still used plain old bitmaps. Even worse, proper physics are still not used in games like Virtua Fighter 5 and you still get a foot through the stomach. I would expect them to use some of that extra power to calculate and fix some of these artifacts of the elder systems. If not from these first gen titles, then from the next batch at least.
'It's not just about graphics,' he said. 'It's about 7.1 audio, it's about speech, it's about having up to 1080p movies built into the game; it's high-res textures, it's animation, it's everything that goes into making a very rich and varied next-gen experience...
And yet, with all that, still no content. You can fit--how many Libraries of Congress?--onto that disc, and they're just pouring in huge textures and cinematics, higher resolution audio. Not that I'm saying that video games need to have a lot of text; maybe it's more true that video games don't really need to fill so much space.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: wake me up when we need a daughterboard for the AI or, better still, the PLOT.
it's about having up to 1080p movies built into the game;
I was hoping that the power of the next-gen consoles would mean developers finally stop using cut-scene movies and do everything in the game engine. Why waste disk space on movie files when doing it with the game engine is smaller and better for immersion?
Maybe, due to the compression problems of the Blu-Ray disc (or PS3, I forget which and too early in the morning for me to look it up) the discs are being filled because they simply aren't compressing the data as much as something that they would put on a DVD. Alternatively, maybe they are filling the discs by not compressing them simply for propaganda such as this... I don't doubt that Blu-Ray/HD-DVD discs will, indeed, eventually be necessary and very beneficial to games (short of everything being downloaded to the HDD)--especially for full 1080P. I just doubt that any game currently being made REALLY fills the entire thing using the same level of compression as a DVD (especially since I was under the [mis]understanding) that few, if any, of the launch titles would actually be full 1080p.
Read my blog posts on usability.
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/27/ 167222
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
Games on the PC has had "HD" content for years. I remember playing Quake 2 at 1025*768! And we had 5.1 sound for some time too (my first true 5.1 game was Doom 3 in 2004). How come they could fit the game on a batch of CD then?
That seems like a typical response from Sony these days. When asked whether they're simply going to use the space for high-def cutscenes, they respond with, "No, we're going to synergistically leverage the high capacity and bandwidth of the new BluRay media format to deliver super high-resolution full motion video and multichannel surround audio."
This guy's the limit!
Now, you commonly have models that reference the same textures or normal maps, and these models might be very far away from each other in the game world. You could seek around scooping up all the shared resources, but that would be really slow and loading times would be attrocious. What you really want to do is load up a giant chunk of data pre-packaged, and the only way to do that is to duplicate the shared resource. With giant disc capacity, there really is no downside except that some data gets squished further toward the "slow-read" inner ring.
Higher capacity helps gameplay by improving load times, allowing denser data to be loaded and flushed more frequently, and making the game world richer. As far as 25 gigs of pre-rendered movies goes, I don't think you'll see that. It's just not cost effective. Those cinematics cost an ass-full of money, and maybe a few games will go nuts with it. But it certainly won't be the state of the industry in 2 years or anything.
Virtually unlimited storage has only made programmers more lazy. It has done nothing to make better games. One of my all-time favorite RTS games (Serf City/The Settlers) came on a single floppy disk.
More stuff != better game
Is there a name yet for "The enjoyability of the game is inversely proportional to its graphic design and art budget"?
Here is little hard drive history http://pcworld.com/article/id,127105/article.html
Help test the
Check it here. A fully modern-looking first person shooter, in 96kB. Procedural synthesis for teh win!
Circumcision is child abuse.
This strikes me as a really bad sign. Sony has given developers 25Gb of storage and they are filling it already - This implies to me that either developers are being lax about how much space their games require or Sony is forcing them to use inefficient data formats.
Developers have 3 times the amount of storage on a disc than the previous generation (over 20 times if you count the gamecube). Some of the biggest games on the original Xbox were nowhere near the 9Gb limit, IIRC Morrowind was a mere 5Gb.
I don't know what the data rate is on the BluRay drives in the PS3 but no matter how high they are there's going to be serious amounts of loading from disc. If all this space is just for high def cut scenes then it isn't too bad.. but isn't the PS3 meant to be the death of this practice due to it's enormous power?
Thr REAL problem for sony is the competion mainly, the 360 has halo 3 (I think) coming up and that could produce a threat in itself, then combine that with the new and improved Xbox Live (includng possible updates) and there you have one-half of the equation, add Nintendo in with it's totally loyal fanbase and the "basis on fun" theme, AND the high price of the ps3 compared to the other consoles, and that all equals an uphill battle for despite the general opinoin of the public.
I read the title and the first thing I thought was shovelware. Even if it's just one big title like a huge Final Fantasy Epic, it still smacks of "we have to add 1.2 GB more stuff, I don't care if it's pencil-sketched drug-induced paranoia-invoking laser light shows, just fill the frickin' disc."
[
I have 2 words for 25GB of data Load times.......
Yes, your character may be moving through a dimly lit room where you can't see anything. But, your character is moving through a dimly lit room where you can't see anything at 1080p!!
[Insert pithy quote here]
I mean, I'm no game development expert, but 25GB of assets? I'm sure a good portion of that is video content just encoded at super high bitrate, but if by chance half of that is game assets, wouldn't that lead to horrid load times?
"Harrison also responded to questioning about the claim that the capacity of Blu-Ray will be used simply to provide more high definition movie sequences, effectively filling the discs - and games - with non-interactive content. 'It's not just about graphics,' he said. 'It's about 7.1 audio, it's about speech, it's about having up to 1080p movies built into the game;"
Translation: "Are we filling the disks up with cutscenes? Damn right we are!"
Why else would reviewers be describing the SIXAXIS as "cheap" or "flimsy" if it's Sony's intent that the "player" never actually pick the thing up?
The truth is, sound does enhance the overall experience as well as the visuals. Voice overs (if done well) can add dimension to characters. Yea sure, none of that really stands out if the game is crap, but that's not the point. I'm not such a technphile, but one reason i play games is for the immersion or the escapism. If added capacity on a disc will enhance my gaming experience, then i welcome the change.
You constantly struggle for self improvement - and it shows.
Hooray for bad Engrish on fortune cookies
not me. I have a 1080i tv set.
That depends upon if nudity is involved in this budget..
Oh gameplay enjoyment... that kind of enjoyment.. I get you..
DS ROM's are a couple megabytes. Xbox 360 discs can hold .8GB. PSP ROM's can be up to 1.8GB. PS3 games can be up to 25GB. Are PS3 games 10,000 times more enjoyable than DS games? Are some DS games not more enjoyable than an average PS3 game?
Larger ROM size allows the game creator more flexiblity, but there's not necessarily a correlation between ROM size and more enjoyable games.
Already in something like Dead Rising, it is annoying to have to wait for the cutscenes to load. If these scenes are gonna be that much bigger in 1080p (and I have a 720p tv), are they going to take that much longer to queue up? I'm assuming the drive has to read movies fast enough to play them at your standard 29.97 fps (no, wait, progressive scan so I guess its 59.94 fps) when showing the movie, so I'd guess it is fast enough for that. Right?
Say something nice about sony? okay... um... Sony-Ericcson makes good phones.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
I'm 33 and my first computer didn't have a hard drive, just a floppy. I think each floppy could hold 128k on each side. Yes, you had to flip it over.
For hard drives, I think my first was 1 Gig. Maybe less, because I can't remember how big it was on my first IBM compatible. Old age can make the memory fade. ;-)
Unless you count my dad's TI computer--wasn't really mine. It didn't even have a floppy or any storage at first. I think it had 16k of RAM. Eventually he bought a cassette tape drive...
me too. and the numbers are growing every day. and we want content that takes advantage of it.
He said "better", not more lossy.
Which, it seems, is certainly not the norm among games developers these days.
Meta will eat itself
Half-Life 2, surely a game most /.ers can agree was (one of?) the best in recent years, takes up only a few gigabytes on disk. Its graphics still look better than anything I've seen a console render, and its gameplay is a thousand times better than most games that rely on flashy FMV sequences to tell the story. What developers should be focusing on is not how many flashy videos that are not interactive they can cram onto a disc, but how good a game they can create with these wider limitations. If I wanted to see high-quality computer generated movies I'd watch Star Wars.
Back in the day, games were ALWAYS worried about the flashiest graphics. Always. Every game had screen shots on the back of the box, usually picked from the best of many supported platforms, and bragged about their great graphics. I remember what a 'waste' VGA was and what an outcry there was about VGA games 'ruining the game with fancy graphics'. Who needs 256 colors! it's about the gameplay, and 16color EGA games are just more fun!! Besides a 386 with a VGA card was outrageously expensive.
Don't even get me started on CD ROM based games - what an outrage, 800MB of PURE UTTER CRAP how could they possibly need all that space? it must be junk!
etc, etc.
10 years from now, when BlueRay2 is out we will here the same old complaints...1Terabyte? why? oh why? I had tons of fun playing 4.3G DVD's..developers are just greedy and lazy.
Duh.
Duh.
JON
I disagree. High res textures can be nice (providing the card gives a good FPS and the load times dont go crazy), but I wish games would have LESS audio than they do now.
Heres a typical game of battlefield 2 in audio-only-o-vision
"Get Ammo here!"
"enemy infantry spotted"
"ok"
"thanks"
"we are losing this battle! start fighting or ill find someone who can!"
"enemy boat spotted"
"i need a medic here"
"thanks"
"ok"
"thanks"
"get ammo here"
"im bingo on ammo"
elapsed time... maybe 10 seconds. If I wanted to endure constant, repetitive brain-melting nagging in both ears at once, I'd move in with my mother. I do NOT need it in video games. I ESPECIALLY do not need to 'hear' my characters voice. That actually BREAKS immersion, because I'd bet good money that:
1) my character will be male 100% of the time. (ok im male too, but not all gamers are)
2) my character will be young, probably early 20s at most
3) my character will have a US accent
4) my character will speak slowly so that everyone can follow what he says
5) my character will have a tendency to 'quip' be 'irreverent', sarcastic, and generally behave like any action-movie cliche going.
Adding audio to cutscenes or gameplay does NTO automatically enhance it. In the same way that adding video does not automatially enhance a story. If it did, books would have been relegated to museums long ago.
This is just a sad excuse to fill the disc, and claim that games that ship on a 'mere' DVD arent as good. More != Better.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
I am with you 100%, and, although I think this point has been well-trod on the slashdot forums ... I think it is the primary reason why there is so much negativity surrounding the PS3.
Take the Walkman for example. An excellent piece of hardware (at the time) that perfectly fit a customer need. What did Sony follow up with? Crappy Minidisc and mp3 players that rely on proprietary Sony technology.
Everquest is another example of the same trend. EQ1 was a classic game that defined the direction of future MMOs and had fans drooling for sequels. What does Sony follow up with? Star Wars Galaxies and EQ2. EQ2 is not a great game by any means, but SWG is the biggest disappointment in gaming history (in my opinion). It was the first MMO follow up to EQ1, with the best possible license (SWG had more pre-release forum members than any other game ever) ... and it turned out to be a big sham. The game was throttled by suits and killed by execs.
Now enter the PS2. The best, most popular gaming system ever. Gee, how will Sony follow that up?
And that's exactly why people have negative feelings about the PS3. I think we all feel as if our gaming system of choice is being killed by executives who would rather push next-gen movie formats than make a great game system, and when you look at Sony's history, that doesn't seem like a pessimistic point of view, it seems like a realistic one.
burrocrisy
and that would be what? Ruling by jackasses? Never has a slashdot misspelling been more apropos
Prerendered cutscenes are somewhat outdated, however, if they are done well, they can really add to the game.
Check out Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3 for the best examples. Yes, they are both still on video game store shelves, years after their release.
burrocrisy
and that would be what? Ruling by jackasses? Never has a slashdot misspelling been more apropos
You obviously haven't played many games from the '80s. A good portion of them were just jumping to get to platforms and avoid various objects. Take a look at the original Donkey Kong. Wikipedia article -- Appears to be a free flash version...
All true, but doesn't change the fact that Sony has decided to target the smallest possible market niche: The early adopter. Good for them, or something. I for one don't have the thousands of dollars to spend on the PS3, HDTV, and 7.1 home theater system to enjoy any of it.
Isn't that known as "the Daikatana effect"?
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
Sony's engineer's are touting how much they are giving the developers power to do what they want to.
It comes down to this from the article:
Partly it's visual, partly it's sound, and partially it'll be down to gameplay benefits as well - more levels, more detail, richer experiences.
Having better hardware does not necessarily make the games less innovative. I don't see why people seem to think it's mutually exclusive. I see few drawbacks to more powerful hardware in the longterm that will come down in price fast (the newer the tech, the more expensive it is but the faster the prices will come down).
Believe it or not there are people who like cinematic rpgs and like to look a luscious graphics while playing them. Your console can both appeal to these people and those who have virtually no powerful cinematics and still be an awesome game through gameplay (gta), katamari damacy. Or better yet a mixture of both like God of War.
Hmmm... Pie...
Or maybe, just maybe, there is no vast conspiracy to fill disks with needless fluff and instead they are actually using the space for game content.
Don't forget they may in fact be reducing compression to free the CPU for other work like AI...
To paraphrase another poster, it's hilarious to see all the "A DVD of space outg to be enough of anyone" style quotes going around Slashdot. You'd think the site was devoted to Amish techophobes whenever we see a Sony story.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I would rather they made the games longer, instead of more detailed. More levels, more planets, more maps. But I guess that would mean we would buy less games. . .
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Please find a review with the word Flimsy in it before you go making up stuff again.
Ohj that's right, you and the other anti-Sony trolls can't do it because there is none except in your bizzare universe of SOny hatred.
Try objectivley looking at and admiring all the NextGen systems instead of sticking your mind in this dark hole.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No, Daikatana was friggin ugly. Maybe the Epic Effect? The iD effect?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Fair Point. For some reason it was just the first one to come to mind. (viz Hype, Graphics, and filling as much space as poss)
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
Why do modern games need to come in such massive packages. I'm sure one can fit tetris in a floppy disk and it's a pretty fun game. I don't get all the whinage here anyway. I've never seen such a large group of tech oriented folks so much against having new tech. If this helps speed up adoption rates of higher capacity removeable discs then what's the complaint.
Bleeding edge product's prices will fall fastest as with equal time and mass manufacture. In 4 years the ps3 will be more expensive then the wii but you have the hard drive to mostly blame then (components of blu-ray, a much smaller cell chip, along with cheaper video/system ram, will have reduced to near ps2 lvls now--with blu-ray taking a $5-$10 dollar component cost increase at max over dvds).
Hmmm... Pie...
You obviously haven't [verb]ed many [objective]s from the '80s. An [adjective] portion of them were just [verb]ing to get to [subjects] and avoid various objects. Take a look at the original [substantive]. Wikipedia article -- Relevance percentage: 0%
You fail.
That's what my concern is about. I mean really... which is worse, having to pop in a second DVD for the odd game or waiting minutes instead of seconds for loading times... not only when initially starting the game, but at various points throughout the game as well. The longer access time of BluRay discs will more than make up for anything gained by not having to decompress files in real-time.
Now if you could 'install' your 10 favorite games from the BluRay discs to a local hard drive, it would be much less of an issue.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
DS ROMs are not limited to a couple megabytes, although many of them may indeed be that small. The storage capacity of a DS cart is actually quite large, considering, at 1GB.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Everyone has a 1040i set? Blast! The Sorny salesman told me they were new, and I'd be the first on my block!
Canthros
25 gb of game data, assuming we can compress graphics/textures/audio with a factor 10 to 1 and leaving 500mb for the uncompressed game engine we can ship 245 gb of art/audio with each game. This seems to be very high to me. Are we talking about uncompressed data here? The real problem is not the bandwidth etc as most games are very sequential and you know exactly what to load when but the problem is in the content creation, how do you create this 245gb of art?
...what matters is what you like, not what you are like...
and what about in 5 years at the END of this console's lifespan? the same people paying big bucks for a ps3 are same people with the HDTVs. especially, it's the same people that would be interested in the next gen format war - and sony wants to win it. if you don't want a ps3, it's probably because they're not selling it to you.
you don't have to use 25 GB! k?
How are we supposed to download that? (I'm talking Steam-like downloading here. Although, a 25gb torrent wouldn't exactly be smily faces either.)
Software grows to use all resources. It's been like that for some decades.
Translation: More unnecessary splash screens, more in-game ads, more non-skippable scenes between action, and longer time to play what should be a short game.
Information exands to fill the space available. And so does dreck.
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Nintendo completely redesigned their controller to make games more fun, while Sony added capacity so people can watch high-resolution cutscenes. Just because a large group of people all disagree with you doesn't mean you're the one doing the thinking.
Every time I want to play a game, it's amazing how often I say to myself "You know, this game needs more cutscenes so that I can sit there and watch the same thing over and over and over and not get to play the game for an even longer period of time!".
While I'm sure this is great news for graphics artists, wire frame designers, and pixel plotters, it doesn't mean we gamers will thank them for it.
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The single-mindedness of some people is just amazing. Who ever said that everything BluRay will add is cutscenes? I guess you will be better off then, re-buying the same game over and over (cf. Nintendogs), just for some more choice in game character and content?
It remains up to the game publishers how bloated their games will turn out in the end. 25GB (or 50Gb for that matter) might pave the way to mayhem, if nobody is forced to trim out the garbage anymore before shipping, but all it actually offers to the vendors is c h o i c e.
To you as well, btw. You have got the right to not buy, and the right to be part of a self-reassuring fanboy community.
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
t remains up to the game publishers how bloated their games will turn out in the end. 25GB (or 50Gb for that matter) might pave the way to mayhem, if nobody is forced to trim out the garbage anymore before shipping, but all it actually offers to the vendors is c h o i c e.
Exactly. However, in our experience in the gaming community, we should pay attention to the reality that what is likely to grow in terms of data storage on game disks is likely in-game ads, cut-scenes (both in length, in number, in alternative choices, etc), game previews, movie previews, and mini-games (add-ons). The addition of alternative cut-scenes (based upon play) is actually a very good thing, in the hands of a good game story editor, in that they are less restricted. I don't know how many times I've run across a game cut-scene where it said things like "now you will grow up to be a warrior with this powerful weapon" when my character already had: a. more powerful weapons and b. was pretty danged huge as I'd maxed out physique and strength by that point.
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I'd rather play a game in high resolution on my HDTV than in low resolution on an old TV. Simple as that - you're out of your mind.
And I'd rather save the $2000 for a decent sized HDTV like the 85 percent of consumers, and wait a few years until 2010 to buy one for only $300 that's the same size.
I think the PS3 will probably sell for $250 by that point as well. And it might have more games I'd actually play by then.
In the meantime, I'll be enjoying my Wii and playing fun games that work now, not living on the bleeding edge.
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Interesting comment. Now I'm curious if you can apply the same argument to something like say... sound technology.
The last big jump in gaming technology that I recall (please someone correct me if I'm wrong), was EAX (A3D actually), and that was around 2001 I think. So IMHO we have audio technology licked, so arguments of something only slightly newer/better (EAX 2.0, 3.0, etc..) being the next big deal, sound fairly thin to me.
Similarly, the difference between rendering the broad side of a barn between 480i and 480p are rather significant as is the difference between 480p and 720p to 1080i. But I'm curious if folks *REALLY* see a significant difference between 1080i and 1080p of that same old side of the barn, and if the gigantic price difference between a 1080i TV and a 1080p TV match up?
By the time most people have HDTVs, we'll be three or four console generations further along anyway. Not only do the prices have to come down massively, but a lot more content has to be produced in HDTV to make it viable, and they have to make smaller versions (believe it or not but most people don't even have the room for a 50" TV).
Exactly. By the time we reach 50 percent utilization of HDTV it will be 2010 - most people will use their 2001 or older TV sets with their digital cable boxes quite nicely to see HDTV (at lower res). Market adoption curves currently projected - as I read in the print edition of the Wall Street Journal - show that we won't have full adoption of 1080p HDTV until at least 2015.
No matter what Sony wants, them's the cold hard facts.
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I had an order of magnitude more fun with Half-Life 2 than Half-Life 1. Guess which one had a bigger graphics budget. Sure, HL2 would still be fun even if it didn't have the awesome graphics(gravity guns for the win) but your statement rings of argumentatum ad foeditatem.(argument towards ugliness)
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
then ps3 has achieved it's goal. it WILL sell you to, and at exactly the price you are willing to pay. perfect economics. where exactly has sony gone wrong?
I never said I wasn't buying a PS3. I'm just not going to buy one now. I have a GameCube, and xBox, and a PS2 at home.
I bought the GameCube when they came out, bought the xBox probably a year after they came out - once they had a few games I wanted (but am disappointed with the lack of titles still), and my son bought the PS2 just this summer - he got lots of games used from his friends - cheap.
I've preordered a Wii and am probably picking up a bundle at CostCo or Fred Meyer or ToysRUs or Target on release day as well - since a friend of his missed out on a preorder and I know marketing and sales and where to hunt.
I'm down on the 360, but might get one if I can find a store that sells Japan-release games they pushed that will work with a US box and do English subtitles, don't care for sports or FPS titles on the whole. Especially now that the price dropped. Don't have HDTV until 2009 at the earliest when they will sell for $300 for a decent set (classic market price curve).
I'll probably buy a PS3 - with a lot of Japanese games that work in US region - when the price drops to $250 retail. By that point I might actually want to buy HDTV, of course. Should be able to get used US game titles for $20 by then.
But buying it now is a waste. Especially with all the first-release tech problems. I'll let others be the guineau pigs.
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It makes it harder to pirate the disks in the future. Imagine if the Dreamcast had a strict policy of filling all game disks to the full 1GB with garbage data that was inseparable from the game code. It would have been much, much, harder for people to distribute pirated games. The same goes for the Xbox and DVDs. Mind you, now that dual layer writeable DVDs are affordable, this is a bit moot.
Sound Technology could get better...nobody really knows at this point. What Sony is trying to do is stay ahead of the game. Why plan for today's technology when the console is going to be around for 7 years?