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PlayStation 3 'Hacker's Paradise', Sales Up
Via Game|Life, a story on The Age site suggests that password crackers are really enjoying their PlayStation 3s ... and not because Ratchet is a great game. An NZ-based security researcher stated at a local security conference that the supercomputing power of the PS3 is being put to more nefarious uses than Folding@home. "Speed is important to "brute force" password cracking, which relies on guessing all possible combinations of the characters that make up the password. The accelerated technique means passwords protecting Office, PDF, ZIP and Lotus Notes ID files can be cracked with breathtaking speed. However, many other password types are handled more securely in software and remain unaffected by Breese's claimed speed increase." Sony does have some good news this week, though. Either the holiday season or a price drop here in the states has led to a massive sales increase.
Tripling as opposed to last year's supply-constraints is hardly informative.
Note that Nintendo gave concrete numbers, not ratios as compared to unknowns...
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The massive increase they talk about is just in relative terms. Nintendo claims they sold 350k wiis last week:more than Gamespot claims the PS3 did all month, and that's because the Wii is still supply constrained. The 360 sold over 200k the same week too.
Even with the price drop, they are still third in the US week to week. The fact that Uncharted, the PS3s best reviewed exclusive this year, is doing poorly just makes it more painful: It seems that people aren't even buying the good games. Not even 300k so far in the US for Ratchet & Clank?
I wish the best to Sony, but I don't think they have a prayer until their biggest names come out. Maybe Final Fantasy, Metal Gear and Gran Turismo can stop the bleeding.
I was expecting something about Linux/OSS development on the PS3 :-P~
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Why was parent modded off-topic? The game is mentioned in the summary and is probably one of the factors behind the big increase in PS3 sales. I've not picked up my copy yet (too many other things to finish off first - Persona 3, Mass Effect and Crysis at the top of the list), but it does look astoundingly good.
I think, more than anything else, the factor behind the PS3's sales increase will be the fact that it is finally getting some games worth playing. For almost a year, Resistance: Fall of Man has been the only really top-notch title on the system, but this is definitely starting to change now.
Last time around, the PS2 won the sales war by on overwhelming margin despite being both the most expensive system and the least impressive technically. Why? The games. First of all, it had the key, core exclusive franchises that move systems like no other; Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid and Gran Turismo. However, this alone wouldn't have been enough. More important was the fact that the PS2 was effectively guaranteed to pick up any game that wasn't a 1-platform exclusive. Plenty of games didn't get an Xbox or a Cube release, despite appearing elsewhere, but despite the pain involved in the development, the PS2 got basically everything. If your family only plans to own one console and doesn't intend to change it for a good few years, this is a huge factor.
So far in this generation, no system has managed to establish a similar position on games. The PS3 is notoriously short of titles and most PS3s, my own included, are still mostly used as shiny and expensive PS2s. None of the franchises that helped Sony out so much last time have hit the machine yet. The Wii is an absolute desert for quality titles outside of a tiny number of Nintendo's own franchise games. In Japan, at least, its monthly sales lead has evaporated as the PS3 makes a fightback. The 360 is probably the best placed on games, due to its greater age, but it hardly has what I would call a commanding lead. MS have done a good job of attracting a more balanced line-up and, in Forza 2, have almost neutralised the advantage held by Sony with one of their "big" games (Gran Turismo), but they've still got a long way to go in some markets and in throwing off their image as the "fps" console.
The reason that the Japanese loves the PS3 so much is the same reason that they loved the ps2 so much when it first launched. The PS2 was the cheapest dvd player on the market for quite sometime, which a dvd player at the time averaged about 800 to 900 bucks. Same stands for the PS3.