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EA Says 'Next-Gen' Is 'Now-Gen'
Via GamesRadar, a Reuters report noting that the 'next generation' consoles are now more-or-less broken in. Sales for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii have transitioned to the point where software sales are going to be well worth the effort for development houses. "'[Black] Friday marked one of those points where you can say something's changed," [EA CEO Riccitiello] said. 'Around the world, based on the data I've got, it was pretty clear that the transition is now over. Key to that was Sony Corp's recent price cut for its PlayStation 3, which should ensure the struggling console hits the company's fiscal-year sales target of 11 million units.'"
EA wants you to think they think outside the box. EA wants you to think they're on the cutting edge. EA wants to be more relevant. Any surprise EA is trying to assess "what everyone thinks" ?
Cheapest Xbox360: $280
Cheapest PS3: $400
Cheapest Wii: $565 (it's sold out, and that's the cheapest offer Amazon.com found!)
Cheapest Wii if they were in stock: $250
In any case, Sony's got quite a bit further to cut the price if they intend to compete with the Wii and the Xbox 360.
And so the number of sales is indicative how? I'd say that when you've got three consoles that were sold out immediately after release, you've made the transition. The market may not have been able to accomodate the demand, but three consecutive sell-outs - especially when followed continuously by extremely strong sales for the Wii and 360 - indicates that the transition to next-gen has been made. I mean, two years to decide that developing for the 360 is a good idea?
I just got a PS1 and I'm as mad as hell over this announcement.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
Does this mark the end of EA Sports games on the PS2 and other "Last-Gen" consoles? Madden NFL 2008, for example, seems to have been released on practically every console, as well as Windows and OS X. I think I've seen a few other new PS2 titles from other publishers too. When will these consoles cease to be worth developing for?
Bear with me for a little while here.
Sony's target is to ship 11 million PS3s during this fiscal year (April 2007 - March 2008). In the first half of the year (April - September) they shipped 2 million PS3s. Even with increased holiday sales, 9 million in the remaining 6 months is absolutely crazy - it's actually similar to Wii sales.
Let's look at it another way:
In the previous fiscal year, Sony shipped 3.6 million PS3s. 11 + 3.6 = 14.6. 14.6 million PS3s shipped by the 31st of March 2008, which means around 14 million sold to consumers. According to vgchartz (which may be a little off but for the purposes of this discussion is more than accurate enough), the PS3 is at 6.36 million sold (to consumers) as of the 25th of November. 14 - 6.36 = 7.64 PS3s that they need to sell in 4 months... That's 1.91 million PS3s per month, which is more than current Wii levels of production (1.8 million according to Nintendo themselves).
EA is delusional, and Sony won't hit their target. In fact, they'll probably reduce their forecast in the next quarterly report (out in January). Otherwise, massive egg will be on their faces when they do their fiscal year report in April.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
He thinks the Wii's sales will start slacking off any day now, and then most of the money will be spent on games, which means him. Of course, the market for the Wii is nowhere close to saturated, and Microsoft and Sony are very far from earning back the losses they incurred upon selling the hardware.
So the last gen was the next gen, the generation before that was the superconsoles, and the next gen was going to be the HD era, but now the last gen is the old gen, the next gen is this gen, and the superconsoles are retro? Where does that put retro?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
So what we have now is as good as it is going to get for the next five to ten years? That's unfortunate. That's where the PC gaming will always be superior. PCs were already outperforming consoles by the time the newest gen of consoles were released. And while my console systems will be performing about the same in five or ten years as they were last year, my PC will be performing perhaps twice as well next year as it is this year.
Console gaming companies need to come out with a different model. These are videogame systems; not car stereos toasters. Perhaps they need to introduce some sort of leasing model where gamers lease the consoles and then they come out with a more advanced console (or upgrade the current ones) after a year or two. It obviously isn't reasonable to release a $500 console every other year because gamers won't spend $500 every year (per gaming system) just for the hardware.
I really have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that a gaming system that provides essentially the same experience and quality is sufficient for five or ten years. I mean, think about it -- would you want to have been gaming in 2000 on a rig that was built in 1995 or even 1990?!
The federal government has now concluded that "Yesterday's tomorrow is now today's today!"
That's what I call pretty low standards, then. Judging from the looks of the new Need For Speed: ProStreet they still seem to think that shoving unfinished games down our throats is next-gen, too. Even IGN gave it just a 6.8. Sorry, but EA would be the last publisher on whose opinion I'd give a crap. Period.
A big problem that people have with these comments is that the new games being released for the PS3 and Xbox 360 really are not so much better than what could be done on the previous generation of consoles.
Are PS3 and Xbox 360 games really THAT much better than the stuff for the Xbox and PS2? Graphics may be a bit better, but if you exclude the "HD" factor due to most people not having a screen that can do 1080p, then what is better about the new titles?
That is the key, when there is a substantial improvement in overall gameplay compared to previous generation machines. An advantage to the PC as a platform is that the idea of next generation is foolish because faster processors and more advanced video cards are released every three to six months. As a result, game companies are forced to aim at what will be available in 3-5 years, not at what is available currently. You want cutting edge, you get it from a PC game.
The $280 Xbox 360 is so badly crippled it might as well not exist.
Actually, it's a shame it *does* exist.
Game developers have to target the *lowest common denominator.* That means they have to target the non-HDD 360. That meanst they can't count on streaming game data, or anything else. So, the non-HDD version not only is crippled itself, but it cripples the potential of the games themselves.
Same thing with the lack of HD-DVD. Game data is at the point where it fills a DVD to capacity. Game developers have to over-compress textures, reduce level complexity, reduce the amount of cinematic content, and whatnot. (Yes, this is already happening. Check out comments by some of the Unreal Tournament 3 devs.)
I think this is the 360's biggest weakness. It gives Microsoft an early advantage, but as you pointed out, the price advantage is essentially gone. Now we'll see if the early lead is enough to overcome the technical deficiencies in their most-crippled console.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Why are consoles "next gen". Why isn't a real computer with standardized hardware that everyone can write software for "next gen". Why are we still living in the backwater of the disposable $500 computer for games?
The console is valuable, not because it's powerful (they're not). It's valuable because it presents a stable target for developers to write games for. They only have to support one (or a limited number of very similar) graphics subsystems. They get a known set of controller types that everyone will have at least a simple version of. Overall, it's a stable way to write games. It's also valuable because the vendor of the platform markets your games for you (to an extent) because they make money from them too.
So why hasn't someone specified a PC into the ground, making deals with a graphics vendor, motherboard vendor, etc. to produce a set of hardware to a specific set of specs and then started partner with game authors to produce games for it? I don't even know of a console that comes stock with a keyboard yet, much less makes it easy to do any ordinary task like add up numbers (a computer that can't be used to compute... what an idea).
Why are consoles the "next gen" again?!
And if EA keeps releasing games like that P.O.S. NASCAR whatever (2007, methinks), next-gen consoles intriguingly start looking like last-gen consoles. I wonder, does an assessment by a game company that doesn't even _try_ to keep up with current tech (compare all the disasters EA released as half-assed PS3 ports of 360 games) have any value to anyone?
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
Agreed. By removing the backwords compatibility chips, Sony released a system that plays the fewest amount of games on the market, and that definately would say sales.
So true. Which is why the recent trend to omit split-screen gaming in favour of an online component is just bloody annoying. Here's what every (applicable - stuff like RPGs are excused) current-gen game should offer:
There are some games who do this right: Warhawk offers four-player split-screen online gaming. Halo 3 offers split-screen online gaming. There are some games who get this horribly wrong. Motorstorm does not have a split-screen mode at all. What the hell? That's as if Mario Kart got rid of the split-screen mode. Geez.
Really, if the N64 can do four-way split-screen gaming, every current-gen system should be capable of doing it for every current game. There's no excuse.
It does have an SD slot, and it would really only take some licensing on their part and a firmware update to allow use of HCSD cards (which is pin compatible with SD) to allow 8 gig cards and for games to be played from them. It wasn't too long ago that full retail games were shipped in 1.5 gig mini-dvds for the Gamecube.
Wha? If we are looking solely at "Downloadable Casual games" than the 360 blows the PSN, and Wii out of the water. As stupid as it sounds, it's true. The 360 with Uno, Hearts, Catan, Texas Hold'em, Pac-man, Luxor, Bejeweled 2, etc... has a far better catalog geared to casual gamers than the Wii and PSN combined.
What $17 PSN games are based around Motion control? Which are worth playing? Each retail game I played (Heavenly Sword, Warhawk, Motorstorm) that implemented motion control played like ass with it, and I was thankful to turn it off. Is there any PS3 game that has motion controls that are as sensitive and responsive as say... ExciteTruck?
Even worse is that cross-platform games are now made for the lowest common denominator. Even though every PS3 has a hard drive and blu-ray, GTA San Andreas will be made to run on the wimpiest 360 available. This is significantly slowing down progress in the next generation, particularly for the PS3.
I'd love to play Warhawk using tilt control, but the damn Playstation controller gives me hand cramps (really, Sony, there's nothing you could find to improve in that thing in the last decade???), so I use a somewhat bigger Logitech controller which doesn't have tilt support for longer game sessions (and Warhawk typically leads to longer game sessions).
The wii tilt games get old... except wiisports, which I love, I don't like tilt on the wii either.I still love Super Monkey Ball, Wing Island and Excite Truck, among others :-)
Nintendo's true genius was giving wiisports awayI agree. Wii Sports is the number one reason why the Wii sells that well.
Imagine if every XBOX360 came with Halo, or if every PS3 game with MGS4. It would define how funt he system is, even if there wasn't enough content for a while.I think he genius of Wii Sports is that it's viral. Give anyone a Wii Remote - your kid, your spouse, your granny - and they'll figure it out and get hooked within minutes. Halo 3 or MGS4 would not do for their respective consoles what Wii Sports has done for the Wii.
Anyway, the wii's games look like PS2 games.Some do. Others look like nothing on the PS2 - Residen Evil 4 or Super Mario Galaxy blow away anything on the PS2.
And graphics are important to every gamer. A shitty game is not fun with great graphics, but a good game is a great game if it has great graphics.So Heavenly Sword should be great? I don't see it.
I think the wii's graphics will hurt it more than people realize in a year or two,I think not. I'm just playing through Indiana Jones 4, and the game is as awesome as it was the day it came out. Graphics on the Wii (and the last gen, too) have reached a level where you can do pretty much anything you want. They're good enough for 99% of all games. Super Mario Galaxy will be as great in five years as it is now, just like games like Monkey Island or Zelda: A Link to the Past have held up just fine.
and nintendo will not make as much money as Sony in the next five years.I find that extremely unlikely.
I also don't think Microsoft will be able to beat Sony (even though the 360 is the best system). MS will try to outdo the PS3 in a year, screwing 360 owners a bit, and taking a loss on their systems.Here's my prediction: As soon as sales of the Wii start to go down (maybe in half a year or a year), Nintendo will lower the price to 200 US$ and bring out Wii Sports 2. Then, they'll sell 120 million Wiis within four or five years, overtaking even the PS2.
The other two will both sell around 60 million consoles, with the PS3 possibly selling a bit more than the 360 with the release of MGS4 and the new FF.
None. They're $9.99.
The 360's selection of causal games is only slightly larger than what the PS3 has, and that's with a 1-year head start. I don't see how you can say it "blows it out of the water".
But clearly you've never browsed the PSN catalog for PS3.
I know it's in vogue to simply dismiss or try and discredit the parent post by claiming they are a fanboy, or ignorant; though it does allow one to reply without any form of reasoned or researched response it also lends nothing to the dialog.
I check every Thursday. There simply aren't that many downloadable games for the PS3 yet, let alone casual oriented ones. According to this list. there are only 29 PSN games available in the United States as of tommorow (PixelJunk Monsters should come out tomorrow). And according to this list. there are 101 Xbox live arcade games out today .
How about this, I'll make a list of games I consider "casual games" and I'll stop when they outnumber all available games for the PSN. Will that be good enough?*
Uno
Hardwood Hearts
Hardwood Backgammon
Hardwood Spades
Texas Hold'em
Spyglass Board games
Soltrio Solitare
Tetris Splash
Word Puzzle
Zuma Deluxe
Bomberman
Geometry Wars
Caracasonne
Catan
Bankshot Billiards
Ms. Pacman
Pacman
Asteroids
Missle Command
Frogger
Galaga
Contra
Joust
Defender
Centipede/ Millipede
DigDug
Gauntlet
Golden Axe
Gyruss
Paperboy
*I stopped at 30, but if you want more games to add to the list, click on the link I provided above.
Congratulations on padding out your list by including "classics" and games from inside a series (though you apparently didn't do the same when you were counting PS3 games). I especially like that you picked some classics that are available as download on the PS3 as well. Lastly, if I were you, I'd go back to the PS3 wikipedia list that you linked to, after you've learned to count.
I count 21 games in your list that I would consider "casual". I had already conceded the point that the number was higher than the 360, and was merely questioning your claim of degree. What more do you want.
In other words, I read your argument, and I still think you're wrong.