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FFXIII Exclusivity Under Discussion
In an interview between a French-language newspaper and Sony Computer Entertainment France president Georges Fornay, he revealed that FFXIII's exclusivity is still under discussion. Gamespot reports, and attempted to check with Square-Enix about the reality of this situation. If the high-profile RPG's exclusivity is not a lock for the PS3, it could be a crushing blow for Sony's future plans. "The development costs of games have exploded, and it has become more difficult to have exclusives, outside of our own games. But we have for launch day [in France] 30 games, including MotorStorm, Resistance: Fall of Man, and Virtua Fighter 5. Moreover, we are expecting 200 games [for the PS3] by the end of 2007...As far as Final Fantasy XIII goes, I can tell you that the exclusivity is in discussion."
I guess X was a big hit, but I don't think "final fantasy" resonates the way it did. I don't know if the franchise still guarantees a hit.
I haven't played the latest (XII), but there's been a lot of crap games (X-2), media/merch crap (advent children, spirits within).
I'd think another player would have toppled FF off the tip of the RPG mountain by now.
I just don't see how a exclusive lock on final fantasy is as lucrative as it once was (like it was with VII).
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
They may not have much say in the decision, but being in such a high level executive position probably puts him in the communication chain to hear about such a decision. I'm sure that if there were problems with FFXIII exclusivity, that the issue would make the email rounds among high level executives. Its naive at best to suggest that because he's in charge of the French division that he would have no way of knowing.
I remember the Sony fanboys saying the exact same thing about a Devil May Cry 4 port, despite your insistence that it was obvious. XBox and PS3 are, currently, neck to neck graphically.
...nope, that was Sony stock falling.
But seriously, I'm not in the least bit surprised. In fact, I've been expecting FF13 to go cross-platform for quite some time now. Square has more reason to go cross-platform, now more than ever before. When they were with Nintendo, they were pretty tight, and were more intimately familliar with their hardware design. They switched to Sony only because Nintendo screwed them with the N64. FFX came out long before the XBox or GameCube, and even FF12 was in progress while those consoles were in their infancy. And up until now, there hasn't been any direct competition with Sony that revolved around the exact same user-base. That's changed... and we have two very similar consoles, with similar (or at least potentially similar) install bases. The fact that Square has already jumped ship on many other titles, makes me think they're not adverse to doing so with any... and it just seems the safest, and most ecconomical, to do so.
There's only one line of reasoning as to why they would be better off remaining exclusive. That is that if the PS3 were to fail, the resistance to the 360 in Japan may not simply go away over-night... meaning NO ONE would have a system capable of buying and playing FF13 on. If they were to port FF13 to the 360, the Japanese may simply ditch the series as well as the PS3, and go completely over to the Wii. Still, in the US, where Final Fantasy is the strongest, porting FF13 to the 360 would generate enormous sales, enough to counter any strange occurences that Japan might provide.
I gave FF13 a 75% chance of going over to the 360, back in November... this news raises that to about 90%.
It's going to go, let's just sit back and watch the fireworks.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Not in the slightest. Square would have no way or reason to go multi-platform until now. FFX came out before the GameCube and Xbox even launched... what would they have gone to... back to the N64? No way, that's the one they ditched in the first place. The PS1/N64/Saturn generation was no contest, either. The N64 didn't have the media they needed, and the Saturn didn't have the robust 3D graphics processing they needed, Square had no choice. FF4, in its infancy, was designed with a patched NES engine. The SNES gave Square everything they needed in hardware. I guess they could have gone Sega... but their relationship with Nintendo was at their absolute peak.
So no, there has never even been a choice, due to technical or marketing reasons, up until now. There would, therefor, be no reason for Square to "threaten" anyone to go multi, since noone would believe them.
I can just hear the interchanges:
Square: "Sony, give us a good deal on PS2 exclusivity"
Sony: "or what? You're gonna go back to the N64?"
Square: "...."
Square-Enix: "Sony, give us a good deal on PS3 exclusivity"
Sony: "or what? You're going to move over to the 360"
Square-Enix: "That's about right"
Sony: "....."
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
I don't think I need to tell you...
that the end of Motorola processors would pretty much be the end of the Macintosh.
Different argument, same logical fallacy. There is more to the PS3 than the exclusivity of a single title (or set of titles), and if FF___ is multiplatform then buyers will simply use other metrics to make their decision. I don't particularly care about Halo - Combat Rehashed, so that wouldn't affect my decision. I wouldn't want to have to buy a console AND an HD drive, so that's a strike against the 360. I want a console with enough power that it still looks relevant in 2-3 years. I like that I can run Linux on the PS3. Of course, I'm not everyone, but those are some examples off the top of my head. The point is not that the PS3 is better/worse than the 360, merely that title exclusivity is not a console's only merit. Personally, I buy on hardware features/overall capability rather than a given title's availablility, but that's why I'm a PC gamer (when I game).
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Disk requirements to backup of a 320GB hard drive using a double sided disk (forget about a single sided disk). 1) CD - don't be silly, 2) DVD - 32 minimum, 3) Bluray - 6 minimum, 4) HD-DVD - 10 minimum. I will leave it to you to work out the cost but needless to say it is not going to be cheap. Now lets make it more interesting try backing up 1TB and your costs just went up three fold.
.. etc and stupidity. Sure there is tape (the commercial industry standard) but that is not exactly cheap and neither is HVD (Holographic Versatile Disk) which hopes to replace tape in the fairly foreseeable future.
It does not take much to work out that a CD is great for music, DVD is great for Standard Definition TV while Bluray or HD-DVD are aimed at the rapidly growing High Definition TV market. Using them as a backup media is going to get expensive, especially now that home users' storage requirements are approaching or well past 1TB.
The only viable backup solution for the average home user is to backup to hard disk but this does not take into account fire, flood, theft
So what do we do for home backups? The cheapest solution is a hard disk (or disks) backup system and hope.
I personally have never had any issues with Sony since I have never been forced to purchase their products but I don't think Bluray is going to be much use as a backup medium given the ever increasing storage requirements of the home PC market.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.