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Mysteries of the Next-Gen Consoles Solved
Chris Morris, of CNN Money's Game Over column, has several final details on the next-gen consoles. He delves into availability, games, the new ads for both the Wii and the PS3 and (of course) "Who's going to win?" From the article: "For the past two generations, Sony has sold far more PlayStation units than its competitors have sold of their systems. Publishers, for their part, expect the field to be a lot more even over the next five years or so (which should be about the time you're asked to start focusing on the PS4, Xbox 720 and whatever funky name Nintendo comes up with next)."
The Xbox 640 ought to be enough for anybody.
Allow me to post my 4-month old predictions so I can try to find and reference this post if I'm right and sweep it under the carpet if I'm wrong. End of 2009, in terms of number of consoles sold: 360 = 40% (has already built up momentum on both customer and developer sides) Wii = 35% (I think it will explode out of the gate) PS3 = 25% (Will have momentum issues (shortages guarantee this), but IMO will not age as quickly as the other consoles later on) Like the article, no definite winner. But there is significantly more $ spent on 360s than the other two.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Of course they will. They'll be: Wii, Not-So-Wii, and Frickin' HUGE!
And of course we won't look like the Tron guy. We'll all have night elf avatars.
IBM
As a former designer at a very large video game company that will remain unnamed so nobody comes after me with baseball bats for vaguely speaking in defiance of an NDA, I saw first-hand the nightmare that was PS3 development. We had a team assigned to 'port' one of our 360 titles to the PS3 for launch, and the porting process took almost as long as building the game did in the first place. As a non-developer, I don't know too many of the nuts-and-bolts of it, but I do know that the PS3's texture memory seems to be substantially more limited and/or volatile than Microsoft's and many of our game assets had to be retooled into lower bit-depths and smaller sizes to keep the system from crashing in areas where the 360 performed like a champ. New SDK's were released almost weekly right up until the bitter end of the PS3 'development period', many of these containing sweeping changes that required massive retooling of key aspects of the title, and nothing to do with the PS3 system, be it the OS, hardware, ever really seemed finalized or stable.
While I'm positive that these issues have been resolved (or at least, hopeful) -- I'm still going to wait quite a while before I even consider purchasing a new Sony box. With the massive amounts of hurdles developers have been jumping through to appease the flaky nature of this product launch, I don't expect to see very many quality games for this system for quite some time.