Game Industry Folks Siding With the Wii

Gamasutra's semi-regular feature taking the pulse of folks in the game industry turns its attention this week to the PS3 and Wii launches. From the comments submitted to the site, it seems that many industry vets are generally more excited about the Wii than with Sony's offering. From the article: "'Definitely a Wii (already pwii-ordered). The price point of the PS3 and the lack of enticing launch titles makes me as interested in a PS3 as I am interested in getting a root canal.' — Ryan Conlon, Gearbox Software. 'I am buying a Wii because Sony is too arrogant, from their dev tools to the price point.' — Ed O'Tey, Electronic Arts. 'Wii — pre-ordered. I applaud the attempt to expand and explore game interaction with the Wii. I will not be purchasing a PS3.' — Jim Perkins, EA Canada"

Comments

Yes

[Xiph]

It probably has something to do with Nintendo trying to do things in a new way, while Sony/MS are "just" doing the things they do better. Novelty and originality does count.

Re:Yes

[PieSquared]

On the same note, the 360 and PS3 are both pretty much a graphics upgrade. Which means two things, first that (if you have a HDTV, which I don't) it'll look prettier. Second, there is allot more effort, and time, and money, going into making a game for them. If people thought there was too much of a problem with sequels instead of innovation last generation, it'll be worse today: for the 360 and PS3.

With the Wii, though, Nintendo is pretty much forcing developers to innovate at least a little, in order to properly use the controller. If I want a graphics update, I'll get a new card for my PC. I go to a council for a distinctly different experience then a PC, usually based on the controller, since that is the real difference. And now, the Wii makes the controller even *more* different then the PC, which to me is an even greater reason to play. That and it doesn't cost *that* much money.

Re:Yes

[interiot]

On the same note, the 360 and PS3 are both pretty much a graphics upgrade.

Actually, the Xbox's network service has a definite step forward, better even than what PC's have (other than not being free). It's got 1) integrated IM that works the same across all games, 2) seamless brain-dead demos and xbox live games, 3) worldwide leaderboards in just about every game, 4) achievements and gamerscore.

And if you can pretty much get the controller for the PC via the Gyration mouse. http://youtube.com/watch?v=piEz74G6WPA http://youtube.com/watch?v=HUGabGDLg8g

Re:Yes

[Total_Wimp]

Novelty and originality does count.

Yes, but not as much as you may think.

-I love Belgium beers. The U.S. buys Budweiser.
-I loved Firefly. The world loves Desperate Houswives.
-I have art over my mantlepiece. The suberbanites put a large mirror there.
-I love that little place down the street. The U.S. loves Applebees.

It really doesn't matter what you think of the Wii. The lines waiting for teh PS3 this morning were completely full. The prices on eBay are already legendary. You won't see that with Sunday's launch of the Wii.

I wouldn't make the mistake of thinking that origionality or quality actually "count" in the grand scheme of things. But that doesn't mean that you can't enjoy your Wii anyway.

(I would caution those who champion the Wii to take a closer look at what they're doing. They're saying it's great before they've even seen a unit in person. Some guy in another thread insinuated that PS3 purchasers were acting like sheep. Proclaining the Wii as "superior" without haveing every played it is absolutely no better)

TW

Re:Yes

[Phoenix00017]

I would argue that it's a bit more than a graphics upgrade, especially on the part of the PS3. The Cell architecture will allow much more advanced AI and physics, among other things. This has the potential, if the developers take advantage of it appropriately, to really make some new offerings in gaming. We're seeing PCs take the same path with the introduction of the Physx physics card and a dedicated AI chip. The other big step is pure processing power harvested as the ability to present many more entities on screen. Look at Assassin's Creed or Dead Rising as games that have started to use crowd effects to great advantage.

Re:Yes

[soft_guy]

Some guy in another thread insinuated that PS3 purchasers were acting like sheep. Proclaining the Wii as "superior" without haveing every played it is absolutely no better

It is a little better. The people who are twirly eyed over the PS3 do so based on three characters: P S 3. The people who are twirly eyed over the Wii have been following the tech news on the various consoles, read probably multiple articles and even hands on reviews on the subject.

Also, I suspect that it will hard to buy either a PS3 OR a Wii this Winter Shopping Orgy (Christmas). Both companies will be able to sell everything they can bring to market, although perhaps the scalping on the Wii will only be 50% as bad as on the PS3.

Re:Yes

[SetupWeasel]

Yeah, but Belgum beers, Firefly, art, and that little place suck.

We're talking about the Wii here. Stay on topic.

Re:Yes

[Alef]

Then your Wii will give you the most pleasure, but I suggest you get out more.

Only on slashdot, "getting out more" equates to playing multiplayer games online...

Re:Yes

[Total_Wimp]

So us Nintendo fanboys get to sleep in with out girlfriends and still pick up our console of choice.

I know what you were trying to say, but you gotta admit that typo is pretty funny :-)

TW

Re:Yes

[AArmadillo]

Two problems with this. First, is Amdahl's law. Colloquially, Amdahl's law debunks the fallacy that if one woman can have a baby in nine months, then nine women can have a baby in one month. Let's say the average game has 75% code that is parallelizable. Quite a feat, to accomplish that. Then by Amdahl's law, you would see a maximum speedup of 2.9 for 8 processors over one processor, assuming all processors were equal (hint: on the cell, 7 of the cores are just fancy FPUs). To compare, you would see a speedup of exactly 2 for a three processor system. A 45% increase in performance for 266% more cores is not a particularly good tradeoff, and this again is assuming that all cores are created equal.

Then, of course, there is memory bandwidth. The Cell has one memory bus to serve eight cores. In addition, local memory bandwidth for read in the Cell is 16MB/s, from Sony's own slides. Thus Sony recommends (on the next slide) to not read from local memory, but to write out to main memory and read from that. So eight cores are going to be constantly contending for the main memory bus. That is a horrible situation in hardware if I've ever seen one.

Re:Yes

[dockthepod]

You are confused with some of your figures. Each SPU has access to 256K of local cache. This is very very fast memory... no misses. They can't directly access main memory, so there isn't really contention. However, the programming model is more complicated. Nothing console devs can't handle ;) The 16MB/s figure (if that's correct, don't remember exactly...) is related to reading VRAM (sony confusingly calls this local memory) from the Cell, something you don't generally have any reason to do. The GPU has fast access (~20GB/s) to the Cell's memory (called Main Memory) which is much more useful. You can split up your texture usage between the two memory pools and cut down on memory contention. Anyhow, too many winter brews, so I'll stop rambling.

Well...

[voice_of_all_reason]

I'm getting nintendo solely because the effort required to get a PS3 was analagous to a real life game of Dead Rising.

That THAT is why I want a wii

[Thansal]

The standard post the people bring up when ever we start drooling over the Wii (and we do drool a bit)is that is is "all about games".

Well, when people that are involved in making the games express prefference on the Wii, I sorta feel compeled to think that the Wii will have more games (and more importantly, a diverse selection).

the anounced titles for the next year (Wii vs PS3) has be interested in 3 games coming out on the PS3, and about 10 games on the Wii.

Ironically enough...

[fatty ding dong]

Nintendo is the only company with a next-gen system that ISN'T trying to force a new media standard on gamers. In the past, Nintendo was always the odd one out (sticking with the old cartridges, small optical disc instead of CD or DVD). Now, Nintendo is tapping into the mainstream while the other big two are forcing their standards on gamers. It cost Nintendo when they absolutely had to have their own unique media, now it appears Sony and MS will repeat the mistakes of the past.

Show the gamers a game that makes good use of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray and they may buy some of the hype. Until then, all glory to Nintendo.

Re:Wii Campers?

[tuffy]

Since there's going to be plenty of Wiis available, there's little incentive to camp out for one to make a quick buck on eBay.

Re:Wii Campers?

[Kimos]

I wonder... why I have seen no media stories about loads of people camping out in front of stores, for a chance to snag a new Wii?

That's because, in theory, there are plenty of Wiis to go around. Nintendo is manufacturing millions. It shouldn't be hard to get one within the first week or so. At least that's what I'm banking on and from what I've read I don't seem to be alone. With the PS3 everyone knew they didn't make enough to meet demand...

Jab at MS: I tried to pre-order but every store I went to said that after the Xbox360 scandal they've ditched pre-orders almost all together.

Re:Wii Campers?

[trmj]

I believe you'll find your answer here.

It is all Relative

[jcrash]

It depends on what you want. If you are looking for certain titles, you will be getting a specific console. If you are looking for the MOST games, you will probably be getting a Nintendo. If you are price-conscious (as virtually all consumers are), you will definitely get a Nintendo.

Nintendo is making the right move at the right time. Assuming they decide to come out with a wiii (i.e. next generation of console) faster than the others do, they will then be able to price is similar to this model and maintain their consumers. Honestly, $700 starter cost for a console is probably out of reach for around 80% of the average gamers. This is a market where you are going to make more money in the middle than at the leading edge.

Re:Poor Sony

[Red Flayer]

I mean, overall as a company in previous years the gaming department was the only thing keeping Sony afloat

What? Whose ass are you pulling that out of?

Sony's recent financials show that Sony Pictures, Sony Games, and Sony Financial Services have been sharing the load -- and the games division has been responsible for less than 1/3 the operating income the last two years, and slightly over 1/3 in 2004. For 2006, Sony Financial Services dominates their operating income.

Re:Wii Campers?

[HappySqurriel]

That's because, in theory, there are plenty of Wiis to go around. Nintendo is manufacturing millions. It shouldn't be hard to get one within the first week or so. At least that's what I'm banking on and from what I've read I don't seem to be alone. With the PS3 everyone knew they didn't make enough to meet demand...

Yeah, I pretty much feel the same way as you (and I think most people do aswell) ...

The fact is that with how many units Nintendo is producing, and how quickly they should be able to restock, there is little chance of a long term shortage; what this leads to is that there is little opportunity for profit so less scalpers are interested in the system. With scalpers not camping out for days (or weeks) to get a system it is more likely that you will be able to get one on launch day without camping out yourself.

Ultimately this means that the Wii will have a (successful) launch that is very orderly; there aren't going to be riots or muggings, all that is going to happen is most people who want a Wii on launch day are going to get one with (potentially) some having to wait a week or two. This means that there is little that is news worthy so it gets less press.

I have wondered for a while what would happen if the press put a different slant on the stories that they release if you would see companies react differently; if the PS3 launch was reported as "Sony was incompetent and released far too few systems which caused massive riots at Best-Buy" rather than "The PS3 is the hot item to have, and its launch caused riots" would Sony try to ensure that the PS4 launch was orderly? If the Wii launch went well and news agencies reported it as "Nintendo had a successful system launch this weekend selling 950,000 systems; that is over twice as many systems as the XBox 360 or PS3 were able to sell in their opening days" would there be a greater focus on producing enough units to meet demand?

It seems to me that because news agencies focus on negative things that a lot of companies will produce negative things (shortages) in order to get coverage on the news; I'm not saying that Sony went out of their way to produce too few systems, just that if they only got news coverage for a good launch they would ensure that production was on schedule.

Let's not forget..

[ACAx1985]

This article fails to mention Matt Stone and Trey Parker. Two weeks was too long to wait for a Wii, so freezing yourself in a Colorado mountain top and hoping to thaw on launch date is the only viable solution. Didn't see them so stoked for a PS3 :)

Re:Poor Sony

[deckstuff]

xbox 360? japan? more ps3's were sold on the first day in japan than the number of xbox 360's sold in japan all year long

http://www.the-magicbox.com/topten.htm

of course DS sales (and presumably the wii) > ps3 + xbox360

Well maybe it is.

[LWATCDR]

Developing a game that uses the PS3 fully will cost a small fortune. It is a big complex machine.
Developing a game for the 360 is going to be a little bit cheaper.
Developing a game for the Wii is a lot cheaper!
It isn't a lot different than the Gamecube. Game makers have got to love it. Your old tools and skills transfer. No need to develop massive amounts of HD content. And best of all. Millions of consoles on the market.
Right now the best a PS3 game can hope to do is what, 100,000 units? That and it does look like a lot of fun!

Now what I hope is all 100,000 PS3s hit EBay today and the price plummets to $50!
Have a nice day.

Re:Well maybe it is.

[LWATCDR]

The PS3 is going to be a lot more expensive to develop for.
1. The programing model is totally different from anything you have ever done.
2. Textures. It takes artists more time to do a more detailed texture. So what if it is only 5 times bigger? Yes it takes more work. Does it take five times? Maybe not. Will it take at least twice as much time? Probably so.
3. Blue ray! How many plants can press blue ray disks? What about the media costs?

The 360s programing model is a little different but not nearly as revolutionary as the Cell.
The Cell has a huge amount of potential but getting to that is not going to trivial.
The 360 will have the cost of the HD content and a little bit of cost with a slightly different programing model. The big bonus is that a port to of from the PC will be pretty easy.
The PS3 is a lot more complex and probably doesn't have as good of development environment as the 360.

Re:Well maybe it is.

[sabernet]

As someone who did a short animation in both standard resolution(720x486) and HD(1024x768) let me tell you that it is a helluva lot more work, requires more hardware and more storage as well as much more detail involved. people paid to get more detail and they expect to see it.

It is for this reason many shows need to hire additional makeup artists and even completely redo sets when HD came around. So yes, a rough looking wall in Standard may just be a photoshop "cloud effect" but in HD, you need the cloud effect, the noise added, some scratches here and there(but well distributed as to not tile funny), etc... Equally, you have to streamline how many of those superlarge textures get fed into VRAM at one time, etc...

It is a huge huge shift from Standard to HD.

Also, devkit costs: The 360's dev costs aren't bad for a console. The Wii is fantastic for a console(2000$ to get started with hardware and all, however I omit manpower in that figure), while the PS3's costs are exorbitant. I remember reading something from Gamasutra a while back about how it would cost you 12 mil just to get STARTED on a competitive PS3 game all things considered. As a reference, Final Fantasy 7 cost 14 mil back in the day and that was considered a supermassive budget.

Add to that that any company with a GC devkit can get started now with just a few addons and you're set.

Re:Reminds Me Of A Conversation...

[L7_]

seriously, unless you log in, you are just a paid sony astroturfer.

It's not a war, the Wii is not a side

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

There are stores that sell consoles. You can buy a Wii. You can buy a PS3. You can buy an Xbox 360. You can buy all three or just buy a discounted PS2. All of these products will still be available in two, three, four or more years time (except maybe the PS2). Why does everyone have this obsession with X being the best or Y being the winner? Just go out and buy what makes you happy. Years ago I bought a Nintendo 64. Everyone said it was a flop. Countless articles today still claim it was a flop. But guess what? I never noticed, I just played Super Mario 64 and Goldeneye and I was happy. I can understand why this all matters if your 401(k) or pension portfolio is dominated by game company stock. But otherwise, just get out there and have fun! I know I will. (Probably on a Wii ;-)

Re:It's not a war, the Wii is not a side

[poot_rootbeer]

"Why does everyone have this obsession with X being the best or Y being the winner?"

Because the console that is "the winner" will always be the one for which the most game titles will be released, therefore improving the odds that it will be the one for which the best game titles will be released.

Re:Wii vs PS3

[Billly Gates]

I played teh Wii at a Gametstop in california. The wiimote rocks! Its for hardcore gamers as well and you can buy the standard gamecube controller for it as well. What is going to take it off are the amount of titles for it. Assuming it makes #1 the title base is expected to grow to 60 by years end.

Also the wiimote makes it difficult for hardcore games too because reaction time and angle are important in using it. It will vary on what you are playing. WIth the ps2 and gc I feel the point of most games is to hit the right combinations of buttons at a very fast speed. With this I can focus on using my arm and focusing on winning and not memorizing arkane buttons at the fastest speed possible like in mortal Kombat. Yes, I know that game is 10 years old but I began to hate console games after playing as it became the new thing with console makers overloading their controllers with bottons. It was dumb and pointless.

Games like NFL sports title and Mario Kart will rock on this!

Re:Wait a year

[Phisbut]

Their Wii will be collecting dust as they play new games in HD.

Right. The same way their NDS is probably collecting dust as they play new games on their PSP...

Re:real problem with the PS3

[Thraxen]

Bad, bad, bad idea. Sure, they would still sell to the hardcore gamers, but that would piss off so much of their fan base that it would hurt them more in the long run. People can accept the fact that some hardcore geeks snatched them all up and flipped them on Ebay... they get to be the a-holes, not Sony. At least the average consumer still has hope they might catch a break and grab one at a store for a reasonable price. But if Sony did that themselves then they become the a-holes and that is NOT the image you want as a company. You also might also make a fair number of your software developers a bit uneasy with a stunt like that.

Re:Im not impressed by anything that's out yet.

[Phoenix00017]

I couldn't agree more. However, the key word is "yet". Look at the first generation of games on any new system and they aren't even in the same ballpark as the last few games on a system. The last Spyro game on PS1 competed well graphically with many of the PS2 launch titles, and Final Fantasy XII is stacking up well against 360 and PS3 titles. Gears of War, now that developers are starting to learn the 360 development tricks, blows away the both the PS3 and 360 launch titles.

However, IBM has made no bones about the fact that the Cell is difficult to develop for (from the article on the Cell processor):

The architecture emphasizes efficiency/watt, prioritizes bandwidth over latency, and favors peak computational throughput over simplicity of program code. For these reasons, Cell is widely regarded as a challenging environment for software development. IBM provides a comprehensive Linux-based Cell development platform to assist developers in confronting these challenges. Software adoption remains a key issue in whether Cell ultimately delivers on its performance potential.

Recall though that developers had the same complaints about the PS2 and its "emotion engine". It will take time to truly take advantage of the cell processor. I will be buying my Wii and waiting a year or two to see what churns out for the PS3. The potential is there, yes, but whether or not anyone exploits it remains to be seen.