More Next-Gen Console Smack-Talk

With the PS3 now out the door in Japan, Nintendo and Microsoft are engaging in what is essentially the last moment for smack talk before everyone's cards are on the table in the U.S. On Microsoft's part, they're complaining in Europe that they want to go head-to-head with the PS3, and can't until next year. Xbox EU Boss Neil Thompson says: "In a lot of ways we'd like people to put the system side-by-side and see whether people want a platform where they're paying for Blu-ray straight away." Meanwhile, Nintendo is taking shots at both companies, saying that the next-gen DVD format war is bad for consumers. Says Nintendo Canada's Pierre-Paul Trépanier: "I think forcing a decision on consumers would certainly not be part of Nintendo's strategy, because we want to get more people into gaming and we want to make it affordable. Forcing people to adopt a technology and a model that's proprietary and still not established is unfair to gamers."

Comments

I do not think it means what you think it means

[Control Group]

I don't see how M. Trépanier's comments qualify as "taking shots at both companies." He's saying that forcing unproven, proprietary formats on consumers is a bad decision. As far as I know, only Sony is "forcing" such a format. The HD-DVD add on to the 360 is just that, an add on, and won't even be used for game content (unless there's been news to the contrary that I've missed...?). So the 360 is using DVD as the medium for its core functionality (games), just like the Wii is.

(Or is it "Wii are"?)

Either way, I'm going to be one of the losers in line hoping for a Wii this weekend. Hopefully, the combination of deer season and a Wisconsin November will keep them short for me.

Re:I do not think it means what you think it means

[HappySqurriel]

Nintendo is a very classy company by most standards and tends not to make (unreasonable) negative comments about their competition; in almost all cases of negative comments made by Nintendo about their competition you can interpret what they're saying as "We respect what are competition is trying to do, but we do not believe that this is the best strategy for Nintendo to try to achieve our goals at this time". On another note, it is always interesting to watch reporters get Nintendo to talk trash about Sony and Microsoft; you'll see someone ask Nintendo whether they think that it was a huge mistake for Sony to release so few PS3s in Japan and Nintendo would say "We understand the difficulty of maintaining a decent supply of systems, but our goal is to try to expand the market and we believe that the best strategy for that is to ensure that someone can buy our console in a store for the MSRP" ... or something like that

Re:I do not think it means what you think it means

[Control Group]

But you're comparing the PS3 to the HD-DVD add on, which just doesn't hold water. If Blu-Ray fails, the PS3 is still a great games machine. If HD-DVD fails, the 360 is still a great games machine.

What you're doing is equivalent to: "if Blu-Ray fails, the PS3 is still a great games machine, but if HD-DVD fails, your Toshiba HD-DVD player is a useless piece of plastic." The two statements are unrelated, except that the HD-DVD add on for the 360 is cheaper than the Toshiba was in the first place - so, if anything, you're better off with the add on (assuming you've got a 360).

Sony opened themselves up for this by including the Blu-Ray drive as part of the core machine. MS avoided this by making it an add on. By the same token, of course, Sony has set themselves up to be successful if/when game developers start utilizing the extra storage capacity of the format, while MS has precluded themselves from so doing.

Re:lets hope

[Anonymous Coward]

Wulfram 2 -- Free Online 3D game, Runs on a PII !

You know, after the release of the Wii, I will never look at the acronym for the Pentium II the same way again.

Re:lets hope

[AKAImBatman]

i could only find 5 Gamecube games that i liked and those where muti-system anyway

I wasn't aware that Star Fox, Mario Party, Smash Brothers, Mario Kart, and F-Zero had been ported?

The 'choice'

[steveo777]

I think /. as a whole tends to agree with Trépanier. Don't FORCE proprietary media formats at us through a console. In the end it comes down to what the consumer spends their money on. A good percent of people know they're getting a Blu-Ray player and that it's non-gaming functionality directly competes with HD-DVD if they purchase a PS3. I'm sure a lot of them see the Blu-Ray as a bonus. But I'd say even more people are outraged that Sony is offering them a product that is overpriced because of functionality they don't want or need. The consumer has a right to be angry, too. I know I wanted to play the next Gran Turismo, but now I doubt I ever will.

Proprietary Models

[TPIRman]

Nintendo is a great gaming company, and I'm excited about their resurgence with the DS and the Wii, but it will be a long time before I'm willing to hear someone from Nintendo lecture the industry about a "proprietary model." The Wii's support for DVD is one of very few times that the big N has strayed from its defining "not made here" syndrome. Have we already forgotten Nintendo's numerous examples of proprietary lock-in—one example that comes to mind being the GBA-SP's notorious "headphone jack"?

Re:Proprietary Models

[chrismcdirty]

Don't forget, Nintendo as run by Iwata is much different than Nintendo as run by Yamauchi. Iwata seems to be more in touch with the people who play games, whereas Yamauchi was a crazy old man, rumored to have five heads.

Re:Proprietary Models

[Chris Burke]

Yeah, the GC mini-DVDs are also a nice example. Dragged kicking and screaming into the world of optical media, they still couldn't go with something mainstream. Most of their weird proprietary decisions seem to involve preventing piracy and enforcing their licensee agreements -- the GBA-SP thing was at least allegedly a form factor issue, though I don't buy that it would have been impossible to use a normal jack. Anyway, the point is that Nintendo has always been weird and supported strange proprietary tech, but only for purposes of locking down their own console. Sony and MS use proprietary tech as a lever to force consumer's to do things in other markets. This has always been the difference to me: Nintendo's megalomaniacal urges seem to only run as far as ruling video games with an iron fist.

Re:It's all about having space for game content.

[HappySqurriel]

So the PS3 has enough room to provide massive content in it's games.. and XBox and Wii don't. To me that's all I need to know. What's the point of a next gen console that can't even provide more detailed and massive enviroments to game in? A graphics boost is nice as is improved controllers but I want better gameplay and that means more data available to the games, better physics, better AI, etc.

I'll get a PS3 but I have no plan at all to upgrade my movie buying to HD-DVD or Blue-Ray or to use my next gen console for playing movies. The biggest deciding factor for me as to when I will switch to a HD movie format is when the format is cracked so that the security measures no longer work. I won't buy movies I can't copy and modify (removing menus, etc).

In the previous generation (PS2/XBox/Gamecube) most of the games produced easily fit on a single layered DVD, with only a few requiring a double layered DVD and (almost) none requiring multiple dual layered DVDs; in fact, most games were easily ported to the Gamecube on its single layered (1.5GB) optical disc. The Wii (we assume) now has about 6 times as much storage as the Gamecube did without requiring much more data in game (because of it's modest graphics).

The XBox 360 may not have the storage capacity of the PS3 but that shouldn't be too big of a problem because FMV should be far less necessary on a next generation console (the few double layered DVD games for the PS2 were mostly filled with MPEG-2 encoded FMV) and the XBox 360 can handle much greater compression on FMV than the XBox could, the XBox 360 can handle greater texture compression than the XBox could, and most polygonal data can be stored as a spline on the disc and polygonalized in memory; I know someone will say that polygonalizing a spline would take longer but the reality is that (with how slow optical drives are) it is much faster to store a model as a spline and then polygonalize it then to load a polygonal model from disc.

Anyways, I'm not so sure you will see more detailed massive environments then are already being provided on the XBox 360. the more detailed the enviroment becomes, or the more massive it becomes, the more people are required to produce the content; if game budgets are already in the $20-$40 Million range (requiring 1 to 2 Million sales to break even) I doubt you will see many game budgets explode to $40-$80 Million (requiring 2 to 4 Million sales to break even) to produce your massive detailed worlds.