Analysts Foresee Another Banner Year For Videogame Industry

Analysts observing the videogame industry forsee 2008 being another blockbuster year in sales. Sales during the month of February were considerably up, according to the NPD group. Early in the year is historically a very slow time in the game sales calendar, making the 34% jump for the month highly significant. Grand Theft Auto IV is likely to be an engine for sales throughout the year: "The game, which will be available on the Xbox 360 and Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3, is expected to boost sales of both consoles. Pre-orders have been better than expected, according to its publisher, Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan, expects the game to sell about 9 million units during the company's fiscal year, which ends in October. Roughly 6 million of this, he added, will be to Xbox 360 owners."

Comments

NIGGERY NIGGER JIG COON PORCHMONKEYS

[Anonymous Coward]

mah fine fellow african americans (who never been to africa)

Re:NIGGERY NIGGER JIG COON PORCHMONKEYS

[Anonymous Coward]

speaking of which, i know what a penis is. i know what a bird is. but what the FUCK is this "penisbird" you ACs keep talkin about?

just think, a moderator with only five points or less will actually waste a point modding this down, because it's *GASP* OHHH NOOOO *oh dear* offensive! OMG OH NOES!! someone might not like it, quick we better cover it up!! it always gives me a smile to be sure that a fool and his mod points are soon parted.

Re:NIGGERY NIGGER JIG COON PORCHMONKEYS

[Anonymous Coward]

Per the moderator guidelines nobody should be wasting their points dishing out negative mods. They're to focus on positive mods and let the full-time administrators with unlimited mod points handle you types. Btw, this is penisbird.

Re:NIGGERY NIGGER JIG COON PORCHMONKEYS

[Anonymous Coward]

The latest Gestapo take over of the slashdot forums makes score -1 pretty useless. It might as well just be from 0 to 5. Especially with the direct link to -1 on the front page gone, it hides some of the most interesting and insightful posts from being seen by anyone.

mgs4 and brawl must also be an engine

[OrochimaruVoldemort]

they were both hyped and sold well for their consoles

Re:mgs4 and brawl must also be an engine

[junner518]

I believe Brawl will be one of the best games of the year. Nintendo has consistently had blowout sales on its super smash bros. franchise, and Brawl is definitely the best yet. It's way better than melee(no wavedashing, etc.) and brings a gameplay more similar to the first one. The characters are well balanced, but lend themselves to certain styles of playing. The graphics, although not what an Xbox 360 or PS3 fan would consider good, are still impressive. It is definitely evident that nintendo took some time to make this one perfect, even if it meant months of delays. And as far as I can tell, its pretty much everything I hoped for and more.

Re:mgs4 and brawl must also be an engine

[wicka]

An engine, I believe, is a game that further drives sales. I don't think there is any way to drive Wii sales higher, considering they are selling them as fast as they can make them.

I don't want to be viewed as a fanboy, it's just that unless Nintendo invests in another factory (which they won't), their sales really have nowhere to go but down.

Re:mgs4 and brawl must also be an engine

[friedmud]

As someone who has been playing Brawl for the last week... I gotta say that it is definitely going to help sell Wiis. It is a spectacular game in every way...

A friend of mine with only a PS3 (for the Blu-Ray and media center more than anything) is definitely picking up a Wii now that he's seen Brawl (and Mario Kart Wii is supposedly right around the corner as well). We played a bunch of Melee during college... and now that he's confirmed that it's better than Melee and has online support... it's an easy sell.

BTW - The online play is great. It's not without its hitches... but it works beautifully most of the time. It is quite fun to beat on one of my friends from several states away...

Friedmud

Re:mgs4 and brawl must also be an engine

[mog007]

I don't think Nintendo has to use Brawl to sell Wiis, the last time I saw one available in a store was the day I bought mine.

Re:mgs4 and brawl must also be an engine

[Dersaidin]

I don't have a console atm. But I'm thinking of getting a Wii just for SB Brawl.
Mario Galaxy etc are pretty cool too, but SB Brawl will be awesome (I hope).

Re:mgs4 and brawl must also be an engine

[ShadowsHawk]

I stopped playing Metroid Prime 3 when Mario Galaxy came out. I stopped playing MG when Zack & Wiki came out. I'll probably pick up SSBB eventually, but Zack & Wiki is simply too good to put down.

Re:mgs4 and brawl must also be an engine

[aqualeasing]

Will be getting this on the Wii as soon as its available in the UK ...seems we're a little behind :(

Re:mgs4 and brawl must also be an engine

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard somewhere that Wii sales in Japan had slowed some.

The reason: Everyone already had one.

Wiis are going to keep selling until they reach full market saturation.
Because of the low costs, the only way to theoretically help wii sales would be
to continue to expand the market. Use in old folk's homes and as physical
therapy or in rehab is one way they've been doing that.

Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[LostCluster]

From the article:
Going strong since its launch in 2000, Sony's PlayStation 2 continued to outpace its successor. The PS2 sold 351,800 units compared with 280,800 for the PS3.

Somehow, this indicates that the HDTV conversion isn't going according to plan.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[Daniel Phillips]

From the article:

Going strong since its launch in 2000, Sony's PlayStation 2 continued to outpace its successor. The PS2 sold 351,800 units compared with 280,800 for the PS3.

Somehow, this indicates that the HDTV conversion isn't going according to plan. Not necessarily a correct conclusion. Standard def tends to look great on an HD set, probably much better than standard def on a legacy standard def set.

This is really more about the quality of PS2 games. Lately I have been playing mostly PS2 games on my PS3 in fact. Some of them are simply amazing. For example, Shadow of the Colossus has to be seen to be believed. I only hope that games of that quality start appearing on next-gen consoles, tricked out with next-gen poly counts and physics. Kind of incredible the level of sophistication of the game engines that PS2 developers were able to put together. I rather expect history to repeat itself with the cell chip. I would be surprised if the cell has reached as much as 1/4 capacity in terms of graphics and physics resolution.

The Xbox 360 sold 254,600 units... compared with 280,800 for the PS3.

This is the important statistic from the article. Second month running. Quite unlikely for the XBox to every outsell the PS3 again, unfortunately for Microsoft's designs on the console market.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[Khaed]

I'm not surprised the PS3 has surpassed it in monthly sales. I'll be surprised, however, when the PS3 surpasses it in total sales. Right now, the PS3 is doing well for a variety of reasons; price drops, more games, and the 360 has really taken a beating over the hardware issues (in my 360-owning opinion). But Microsoft is somewhat of a vast evil empire, and I won't be surprised if they come up with a way to keep second place.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[Khaed]

I should clarify that by "more games" I mean "more available than at launch" not "more available than the 360." I'm not sure of the exact count but I'm pretty sure the 360 is still ahead here.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[Daniel Phillips]

I'm not surprised the PS3 has surpassed it in monthly sales. I'll be surprised, however, when the PS3 surpasses it in total sales. Why should you be? In January the PS3 just squeaked the 360, in February the PS3 widened its lead by over 20,000. If the gap continues to widen, and with Blu-ray ruling the hi def world there is no reason to doubt it will, then the 360's lead will be a million or three smaller by the end of the year. And 360 only leads by 6 or 7 million right now.

Then there are some significant PS3 exclusives coming out for holiday season. Microsoft has no obvious counter at this point. Then there is the noise issue, the heat issue, the failure rate issue, the lower color resolution issue, the lower processing power issue, the bungee defection issue, the older technology issue, the lack of hd player issue, the entertainment division attrition issue, the continuing losses issue, the morale issue... many issues that together bode ill for XBox 360 prospects from now on.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[AKAImBatman]

Then there are some significant PS3 exclusives coming out for holiday season. Microsoft has no obvious counter at this point.

I'm not a fan of either the 360 or the PS3, but I feel it's worth noting that the XBox has Gears of War 2 in the pipeline, and has exclusive downloadable episodes announced for GTA4. Those may or may not be enough to counter Sony's push, but they do exist and do provide an answering salvo to some degree.

There's also the E3 to be concerned about. While Nintendo is outright saying that they're holding their cards close, the other competitors haven't said anything either way. I'm fairly certain that Sony has already played their cards and are in it for the long haul, but the possibility exists that Microsoft could produce a big announcement at the show. Again, I'm not sure of the likelihood of Microsoft coming up with something big enough to stop Sony in their tracks, but the possibility definitely exists there.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[Namarrgon]

If the gap continues to widen, and with Blu-ray ruling the hi def world there is no reason to doubt it will

Ah, you see there is the fallacy. Xbox 360 is not an HD-DVD player, it's a games player. Many PS3 owners fail to appreciate this distinction, but almost every single person who bought a 360 did so for the games, not for the movies.

Counter exclusives; there's GTS IV's episodic content, Too Human, Gears 2, Ninja Gaiden 2, Halo Wars (& Halo: Chronicles?), Fable 2... but perhaps they're not "obvious" to you.

And as for your list of "issues" (color resolution? You're kidding, right?), the only significant issue to the games market is the failure rate, which is no longer a problem for new sales. The rest only seem to matter to the occasional troll like yourself.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[rastoboy29]

Or it could be people are converting their old tv's into little game systems.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[Daniel Phillips]

Ah, you see there is the fallacy. Xbox 360 is not an HD-DVD player, it's a games player. Indeed, I do see. And who would not want to get a decent hi def player "for free"? Now that HDDVD is no more, Microsoft has no answer, even as an accessory. Then there is the problem that XBox 360's DVD player is seen by many as just too small.

No doubt about it, Microsoft took a serious blow when Blu-ray won the hidef war. By coincidence, or perhaps not, the month that HD-DVD lost the format war was the first month that PS3 outsold XBox 360 in the US.

as for your list of "issues" (color resolution? You're kidding, right?) Not at all. XBox 360 uses hdmi 1.2, which has only 8 bit color. PS3 has hdmi 1.3, giving 10 bit and higher color resolution, which is supported by recent HD displays like the Samsung ln5281. The difference is very obvious, just look at the washed out black and saturated regions on an 8 bit display. Once you notice the difference you will never be ignore it again, sorry :-)

the only significant issue to the games market is the failure rate, which is no longer a problem for new sales. Once burned, twice shy. I expect Microsoft still has high failure rates even with new production. The noise out there about it has certainly not died down.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[Admiral Ag]

Oddly enough, I bought my 360 for the DVD drive as much as for the games. You see, I needed a DVD player, and a game console on its own has extremely low WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor), but if it plays DVDs the WAF manages to increase into merely "disapproving glare" territory.

Waited until she was out of the country before I bought a PS3, though. :)

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[KDR_11k]

I don't think owning a HDTV precludes anyone from buying a PS2 or not owning one from buying a PS3...

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[KDR_11k]

The 360 got a pricedrop too, at least in Europe. It's now 200€ for the Arcade (forgot the other prices).

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[elrous0]

Yeah, but the even bigger question is "Are people buying it as a game machine or just as a blu-ray player?" I own both a 360 and PS3, and I use my PS3 almost exclusively for blu-ray movies. Good news for blu-ray, bad news for game developers doing PS3 exclusives.

The PS3 has to do more than just sell hardware. It has to start selling games. And, right now, the 360 is absolutely crushing it on game sales (Guitar Hero 3, for example sold almost 8 times as many 360 copies as PS3 copies).

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[poot_rootbeer]

Sony's PlayStation 2 continued to outpace its successor. The PS2 sold 351,800 units compared with 280,800 for the PS3.

It's the economy (, stupid).

Retail price of a PlayStation 2: $130
Retail price of a PlayStation 3: $400 and up

Is the new console 2-3 times as much fun as the old one?

And then there's the killer app: Guitar Hero. The game that all my non-gamer friends are addicted to.

If you want to own the game, you can either spend $400 or more for a bundle that includes a 360 or a PS3, or about $220 for a PS2 bundle. Casual gamers are much more likely to justify the purchase price when it's that low.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[geminidomino]

I don't think owning a HDTV precludes anyone from buying a PS2 or not owning one from buying a PS3... If the game designers for the PS3 are anything like the ones for the 360, then the latter is decidedly incorrect. The "next-gen" developers seem to like to assume that NO ONE will play on an SDTV, so there is no allowance made for things that would make a game unplayable (try playing Dead Rising on a 40" SDTV and reading the fonts at 3 feet).

That's what stopped me from buying a 360 (and prompted me to get an HDTV when my brothers bought me one for Xmas anyway)

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[Cornflake917]

As a current XBox 360 owner....

the heat issue Not issue for me. I can play all day and not have problems.

the failure rate issue It's not a problem for potential buyers anymore, the new version's failure rate is significantly decreased. If the off chance it does fail, that's what warranties are for.

the lower color resolution issue Same game comparisons show very similar picture quality between XBox 360 and PS3.

the lower processing power issue Same game comparisons show very similar picture quality between XBox 360 and PS3. By the way, having less processing power (than what? a PS3?) is an issue? Give me a break. I hope you don't have Wii.

the bungee defection issue Even if bungee didn't defect, we wouldn't be seeing another Halo for at least 3 years anyways. Not really a problem for this year.

the older technology issue Stupid argument, not completely true, same game comparisons show very similar picture quality between XBox 360 and PS3.

the lack of hd player issue First people say 360 sales are hurting because lack of HD adoption. Now they're sales are hurting because not enough HD support? Which is it?

division attrition issue, the continuing losses issue MS was expecting to start with losses. They said they expect to turn a profit this year. So these aren't issues yet.

the morale issue Wtf are you talking about?

In summary, you are making up issues that the 360 doesn't have, and you are obviously a PS3 fanboy. I think the 360 is a great console, and I think the PS3 and Wii are great consoles as well. I don't see what the point of the obvious attempt at trash talking the 360 (or any console). I want all three companies to be in stiff competition so they can keep churning out some great games.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[Moonpie Madness]

" to some degree "

Gears was a great game, but it really didn't get the kind of following MGS, Gran Turismo, or Final Fantasy have, nor has the game really garnered much attention yet. Too early to tell, but I guarantee you that the enormous length of games like MGS, GT5, and FF13 are going to make a value proposition that Gears will never answer. Gears is practically demo lengthed.

And the eclusive content on GTA4 is a nice argument, except that GTA isn't about the missions's it's about the sandbox. Relatively nobody bought the PC editions of those games, despite enormous content advantages.

And GTA players are used to a dualshock

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[Namarrgon]

Just FYI, I've been working as a programmer in the film/video graphics industry for the last 12 years, so I'm very familiar with the difference between 8bit/component and deeper colours. "Washed out black and saturated regions" are actually symptoms of poor colour mapping, usually NTSC (16-235) video being displayed on a non-NTSC (0-255) monitor, and have nothing to do with 8bit's low dynamic range (which can manifest as visible banding in certain colour ranges).

While it's certainly true that HDMI 1.3 can support >8bits, that is of course no guarantee that all video passed along it is >8bits. The PS3 uses nVidia's RSX chip, which is based on the GeForce 7900, and like all nVidia chips of that era it uses a max 8bit per channel framebuffer (textures may be deeper, but not the framebuffer). Even potentially deep-colour Blu-Ray movies must be decoded and rendered into this 8bit framebuffer, so the PS3's output is bottlenecked at 8 bits. That's why you've never seen any articles actually confirming real deep-colour, only marketing literature and misleading online screenshots with "washed out blacks".

I always get a chuckle when PS3 fans bring up their beloved "HDMI 1.3" bullet point, because the fact is, it's only good for passing through TrueHD and DTS-HD audio. Oh, whoops...

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[drinkypoo]

Indeed, I do see. And who would not want to get a decent hi def player "for free"?

If the system plays the games I want to play, then I will buy it.

Okay, I won't buy a system from either Sony or Microsoft, at least not new. And I won't buy games new, either. I don't feel like providing either with licensing revenue. I have both PS2 and Xbox; the Xbox boots to XBMC and I will use it to watch a movie shortly. I intend to do the same with an Xbox 360 when the copy protection issues settle out a bit (probably long after it's a hot new system.) Sony can go piss up a rope, their system isn't as potentially useful as the Xbox 360 for "homebrew" software.

I realize that most people don't care about the evil of video game manufacturers. But anyway.

Not at all. XBox 360 uses hdmi 1.2, which has only 8 bit color. PS3 has hdmi 1.3, giving 10 bit and higher color resolution, which is supported by recent HD displays like the Samsung ln5281. The difference is very obvious, just look at the washed out black and saturated regions on an 8 bit display. Once you notice the difference you will never be ignore it again, sorry :-)

The difference, while noticeable, is not that amazing.

You also need a very expensive TV to even notice.

Once burned, twice shy. I expect Microsoft still has high failure rates even with new production. The noise out there about it has certainly not died down.

Mostly because of Sony fans, not actual Xbox 360 owners.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[Daniel Phillips]

Just FYI, I've been working as a programmer in the film/video graphics industry for the last 12 years, so I'm very familiar with the difference between 8bit/component and deeper colours. "Washed out black and saturated regions" are actually symptoms of poor colour mapping, usually NTSC (16-235) video being displayed on a non-NTSC (0-255) monitor, and have nothing to do with 8bit's low dynamic range (which can manifest as visible banding in certain colour ranges). It is surprising that in 12 years you did not learn how to verify your facts before posting.

While it's certainly true that HDMI 1.3 can support >8bits, that is of course no guarantee that all video passed along it is >8bits. The PS3 uses nVidia's RSX chip, which is based on the GeForce 7900, and like all nVidia chips of that era it uses a max 8bit per channel framebuffer (textures may be deeper, but not the framebuffer). Flat wrong. The NV40 and G70 include hardware support for texture filtering and blending of color values in a frame buffer using high-precision floating-point math. This capability is key to achieving really solid performance with those gorgeous high-dynamic-range (HDR) lighting effects that are all the rage with the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 kids these days. The NV40/G70 will do texture filtering and blending using 16 bits of floating-point precision per color channel, or 64 bits per pixel. (In fact, the color format is compatible with Pixar's OpenEXR standard.)

Even potentially deep-colour Blu-Ray movies must be decoded and rendered into this 8bit framebuffer, so the PS3's output is bottlenecked at 8 bits. That's why you've never seen any articles actually confirming real deep-colour, only marketing literature and misleading online screenshots with "washed out blacks". But do not let the fact that I can see it easily with my own eyes get in the way of a good rant.

I always get a chuckle when PS3 fans bring up their beloved "HDMI 1.3" bullet point, because the fact is, it's only good for passing through TrueHD and DTS-HD audio. Oh, whoops... Too bad about your discredited troll link, hmm? "Please, do some research before you post something like this. The PS3 can decode TrueHD into PCM now, and is expected to do so for DTS:MA as well. It's right there in the article you linked to."

Face it, PS3 blows away XBox 360 technologically, and now in sales too. I guess our good old efficient market managed to figure out the difference between good tech and rushed out junk, hmm? Here is some advice for Microsofties: stick to your knitting. You do not understand the consumer electronics market. Just go back to peddling software, ok, and maybe concentrate more on quality control?

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[Daniel Phillips]

Yeah, but the even bigger question is "Are people buying it as a game machine or just as a blu-ray player?" I own both a 360 and PS3, and I use my PS3 almost exclusively for blu-ray movies. I use it mostly for both :-)

Actually, the last couple months I have mostly been playing PS2 games on the machine, because I never had a PS2 and there are a lot of really amazing titles out there. For the first couple months of its life, this PS3 was basically an Oblivion machine. I haven't seen an exclusive title yet to get really excited about, some good ones but no blockbusters. Looking forward to Final Fantasy, though after Oblivion every RPG gets judged by a higher standard.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[grumbel]

Microsoft has no obvious counter at this point. Actually Microsoft has one: a price drop. In Germany the XBox360 Arcade is currently at 200EUR, thats 50EUR less then the Wii and half as much as a PS3. That makes the console look quite attractive. On the other side you are of course right that the XBox360 has plenty of issues. If it wouldn't be for Microsofts own stupidity the XBox360 could have been a great product, but crappy hardware design and totally overprices accessories (WiFi, harddisk, ...) steal quite a lot of its attractiveness.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[Daniel Phillips]

Microsoft has no obvious counter at this point. Actually Microsoft has one: a price drop. How well did that work for HD DVD? And it will certainly exacerbate one of Microsoft's other issues: losing money in the division. I think Sony knows how to ramp down manufacturing costs but I am highly skeptical about Microsoft's talents in that area. Sure, Microsoft can drop the price but only by losing more money. And a price drop will not be enough if gamers just perceive the unit as sunset technology, a clear and present danger.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[knails]

By the way, having less processing power (than what? a PS3?) is an issue? Give me a break.

Yes, having less processing power than the ps3 is an issue, as this generation of video games will show a significant increase in picture quality, poly count, and texture and color resolution that will require maximum processing power for best picture, and by the midpoint of this generation, the difference in quality between ps3 and xb360 should be quite noticeable.

I hope you don't have Wii.

The wii wasn't made to be the most technologically advanced system, or to have the best picture quality, or the most processing power, or any other technological marvel. Nintendo always has and always will win by the sheer strength of their games alone, and their great appeal to casual gamers.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[Anonymous Coward]

Kids ... don't try this at home ....

There is a medical procedure by which your testicles can be encouraged to exit your body cavity and return to your scrotum. It is simple and effective. Slam your butt on the ground really hard.

Better yet, just defend your right to buy a few toys. I am sure your wife buys things which you consider frivolous. She may spew and sputter when you bring this up, but this is all about point of view. Her silly stuff is precious and necessary to her and your silly stuff is precious and necessary to you.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[Namarrgon]

You're not a gfx programmer yourself, are you? Otherwise you'd be linking to nVidia specifications, not consumer reviews. The relevent OpenGL extension is GL_ARB_color_buffer_float, which was indeed implemented for G70-class hardware as of R75 drivers (actually, GL_NV_float_buffer.txt was implemented even earlier).

Yes, you can use this for offscreen framebuffer objects and pbuffers, which is all you need when float texture blending for HDR rendering, but this is then tone-mapped to the 32bit displayable framebuffer for output. It's still not possible to get more than 8bit RGB actually out of the chip. Apart from SGI (who patented float rasterisation), I've only heard of an old Matrox card claiming to do real 10bit integer RGBA output (under quite specific conditions, apparently). Even nVidia's current high-end Quadros can't do it (well, unless you count 10bit 4:2:2 YUV from the SDI connector on some models). I'd welcome any comments showing real evidence to the contrary (preferably from someone who hasn't been repeatedly modded down as a troll), but I've never seen it done.

I can see it easily with my own eyes

As I said earlier, the "washed out blacks" you say you're seeing is poor colour mapping, not lack of deep colour.

The PS3 can decode TrueHD into PCM

There it is right there. Yes, the PS3 player supports TrueHD, but it does notpass it over the HDMI link - it gets decoded to good ol' HDMI 1.0-standard multichannel PCM first. Read the rest of the article - a Sony rep has confirmed this. And AFAIK the PS3 still does not yet support DTS-HD; it only passes through the DTS component. Incidentally, I found it ironic that you're accusing me of trolling :-)

You don't have to convince me that the PS3 is good hardware. It certainly has the edge in CPU power, and the Blu-Ray player is a valuable addition (though it's also the primary reason Sony released late and expensive, throwing away their lead from the PS2). Its graphics are debatable though, and most unbiased people consider PS3 and Xbox 360 GPU power to be roughly equivalent. More on topic, the PS3's HDMI port is more capable than the 360's (which can't even pass multichannel PCM) - but the HDMI 1.3 output is pure marketing, nothing more. Most TV sets (even those that accept deep colour) still can't actually display it, only use it for cleaner tweaking. Certainly no plasma or consumer LCD panel that I'm aware of is capable.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[KDR_11k]

I really think Dead Rising was the only game with that issue. Besides, a text that needs an HDTV to read is probably too small at average TV distances anyway.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[brkello]

I can't help but chuckle at your reply. These systems are more complex than "processing power". There are so many things that go in to the overall output of a system that a bottleneck in a bus or memory or gpu can negate any difference in processing speed. Maybe as time goes on, people can find ways to get more out of the Cell and bypass other bottlenecks, but I don't think the difference will be very significant. It is just stupid fanboy arguments at this point since people like me will end up buying all three eventually.

Now the next statement you make is just dumb. You can't say processing power and graphics quality is so important and then say it doesn't matter for the Wii because they are somehow special and always outsell everything. It was just last gen when Nintendo was battling to stay out of third. They had the same sort of games, but didn't compete as well. They really lucked out with this strategy this round by basically upgrading the gamecube, giving it a new controller, and making it much cheaper than their competitors. Nintendo has done their share of stupid and evil things as well. I really don't get this sort of attitude about consoles though. It is fine to have your favorite, but realize that competition is good and hope for all of them to do well.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[Moonpie Madness]

Nothing at all wrong with your comments, but it's worth noting that you can get excellent surround sound in full quality from a PS3... so long as you have a decent (such cost as low as $120 today) sound system to take the Toslink.

Is this lame? Kinda, but there has to be something to differentiate the expensive blu-ray players from the PS3, and the big thing is the PS3 must rely on a different system. But you need that anyway, so I don't know that this is a huge problem (and if anyone out there is gaming on the PS3 in stereo... trust me, it's worth the upgrade to a surround system).

Also, it's worth noting that GPU power is not closely related to graphics quality in many respects. And the only parity between the system's graphics is that the games are being ported from 360 to PS3 and Microsoft seems to have a huge problem with a company releasing a mutliplatform that isn't equal, as we all heard with Capcom and their Bionic game. Many PS3 exclusives are simply wildly superior graphically than anything the xbox 360 has, and the graphical superiority has been proven. I still prefer my 360 because I love good FPSs like Bioshock and GoW, and the 360 has such a great selection and online support, but the PS3 is the better console in terms of potential (like the XBOX 1.0 was to the PS2, and we all know which of those was more fun to own).

As far as the deep colour issues go, you're right, but the difference is still visible if not accurately described in marketing or fully realized.

But a lot of this stuff simply doesn't matter. When I saw Gran Turismo 4 on display, I was sure there was a powerful PC with a great graphics card running it or it was prerendered (as a programmer, you probably realize that it's just a lot easier to run a racing sim with so many things you can leave out, but it takes a powerful PC to run a game that looks that good). A lot of this talk of power is not necessarily going to have the kind of impact that dedication in programming has. And surely, the extent and mapping of colors is not going to have the impact that painstaking details and huge texture maps will have (though I don't know that this favors the blu-ray drive if it reads too slowly). I think great graphics matter a hell of a lot in games, but I don't think the things discussed here matter much at all.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[geminidomino]

No, it's not. Blue Dragon and Eternal Sonata do also.

I hate to nitpick...

[Viceroy Potatohead]

..but: "forsee"? Shouldn't the title be "foresee"? Apologies for spelling Nazism, usually, I don't care about that sort of thing, but it's the title, for God's sake, put in a little effort...

Re:I hate to nitpick...

[causality]

By expecting something more than piss-poor quality, you have harmed the Sacred Cow (tm). You wil now be modded into oblivion, despite the fact that you are absolutely right. I'm not sure if they will use "Offtopic" or "Flamebait". Maybe I should flip a coin, although I'm guessing the fact that you are commenting ABOUT THE ARTICLE won't stop them from using "Offtopic".

Mediocrity has become the norm, and the many people who don't understand that excellence is its own reward, or that doing something at all means you should make an effort to do it well shall vent their rage at you for pointing this out. Since they lack any real power or influence, and certainly can't use reason to support their viewpoint, they will mod you down! Mwa hahaha, that'll teach you.

Re:I hate to nitpick...

[dreamchaser]

If something is worth doing then it is worth doing correctly. Sadly that fact is lost on most of the unwashed masses that populate the Internet.

Re:I hate to nitpick...

[Anonymous Coward]

I just used my last mod point to mod him up - just to prove you wrong. There you have it. Go and cry. :-D

Re:I hate to nitpick...

[xstonedogx]

Is the article the topic or does the article discuss the topic?

I would rather see more spelling errors and less people complaining. It hurts my brain a little to see a spelling error, but once I have seen it no amount of complaining is going to save me from it. If complaining in the forums was effective, the problem would have been solved many times over. So how about complaining to the people who can directly fix the problem? Email the editor, who can fix the problem now and hopefully do better in the future. Email the submitter, who can do better in the future. If neither action is effective, you might just have to learn to accept it. Either way, complaining about it in the forums is neither original nor effective.

Re:I hate to nitpick...

[sheriff_cahill]

The system works!

Re:I hate to nitpick...

[Divebus]

If something is worth doing then it is worth doing correctly. Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess. That's my motto and I'm sticking with it.

Re:I hate to nitpick...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Mediocrity has become the norm, and the many people who don't understand that excellence is its own reward"

Have you considered that they're intelligent enough to know that spelling mistakes happen frequently and they can easily decode what the other person meant because they have sufficient brainpower to do so? Have you considered that on a website such as slashdot that people shouldnt' be 'expectd to perform' because they get that shit all day at work and school and just want to relax? Slashdot may have its perfectionists but it's got a lot of people with a lot of life experience who know what to look for and what to mod up or down, and they're not going to discriminate like their nazi professors if it adds value to the discussion.

As you get older there is a point where you lose your substance for those who worship at the altar of aesthetics. I see basic, trivial, spelling mistakes as petty when we know what they meant. There's not a person on this earth who doesn't make mistakes ALL the time, to be irked by something so trivial on a site that exists in the real world (tm) and not in unrealistic fantasy classroom.

Can we not leave the status bullshit at work and the university and just get on with the substance of the discussion?

Re:I hate to nitpick...

[feepness]

Mwa hahaha, that'll teach you. Mwahahaha does not have a space.

Re:I hate to nitpick...

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't mediocrity the norm by definition?

Re:I hate to nitpick...

[elrous0]

People hate nitpickers like you for a very good reason. You divert the discussion away from the significant (the meat and substance of the argument) to the trivial (the incidentals of language use, spelling, trivial and often debatable grammatical points, etc.). People like you waste time and effort MUCH better spent on debating the actual content of a post. You're an annoying distraction, with little if anything to contribute to the actual discussion.

Re:I hate to nitpick...

[Anonymous Coward]

Good. In a few years when you're a raging alcoholic the only people who will have to listen to you are your fellow homeless.

Re:I hate to nitpick...

[causality]

I will preface this by saying that I am not expecting a constructive response to this at all. My purpose here is not to get you to agree with me, for I sincerely don't give a damn whether you do or not. My intention is to give you an alternative viewpoint, something to consider.

People hate nitpickers like you for a very good reason. You divert the discussion away from the significant (the meat and substance of the argument) to the trivial (the incidentals of language use, spelling, trivial and often debatable grammatical points, etc.). People like you waste time and effort MUCH better spent on debating the actual content of a post. You're an annoying distraction, with little if anything to contribute to the actual discussion.

You are confusing cause with effect. If not for glaring and uncorrected spelling/grammatical errors from "editors" you would have no complaints about ... the glaring and uncorrected spelling/grammatical errors. To put this another way, it's far simpler to get one paragraph right than it is to convince many thousands of people to accept mediocrity without complaint in order to spare you a little annoyance that you voluntarily experienced.

If you presume to talk to me about what is significant, you should first get a good handle on that yourself. Nothing that is or was or could have been in this discussion should be as significant to you as your personal time and whether you enjoy what you are doing with it. Getting annoyed at something you never had to read, certainly never had to take seriously, and never had to respond to illustrates your failure to understand this. Complaining to me about this because you have such a deep victim mentality that you think my post is responsible for the irritation brought about by such a character flaw is adding failure to failure.

Try taking some control of your own experience; you'll find it much more satisfying than having your emotions at the mercy of whether random strangers express themselves the way you think they should. Don't be so voluntarily helpless and then expect anyone to be concerned that the result was not to your liking. It's pathetic. There is nothing to prevent you from disregarding any comment you don't like; you could have skipped over it and moved on to those more in line with your tastes. No one forced anyone to read it. No one forced the moderators to mod my post up. Both of these were people doing what they wanted to do.

I hope you are not really this petty. If you are, you should know that people like you are very dangerous when they acquire political power since they tend to think that government is a means of forcing their personal tastes on others. The "people like you waste time and effort..." portion of your comment shows this type of arrogance. I mean really, how kind of you to look out for whether my efforts are well-spent -- I'm sure your intentions are pure! I can decide what is or isn't a waste of my time and effort without your assistance. There is a place where you can make those decisions, and that place is in your own life. Try concerning yourself with that sometime, it will make you feel much better than trying to tell me what I should be doing.

I'll buy that...

[7Prime]

However, GTA4 won't do it alone. I'm not sure why the article hinges on GTA4s success. GTA is a huge franchise, I'm not going to argue that, but no GTA game has outsold the Halo or Smash Bros franchises (which produced the #1 and #2 best selling games of last generation). Halo 3 saw release last year to enormous success, and so far Smash has been exceeding sales expectations this year. Combine Smash Brawl with GTA4, Mario Kart Wii, MGS4, and the remote possibility of a 2008 Final Fantasy US release (unlikely, but possible), and you have a good solid framework for 2008 sales. 2007 saw many huge things though, so I'm not sure it's as cut and dry as the article suggests, but there's a good possibility. And I'm not even going to dig into the huge Nintendo DS sales that simply defy all conventional explanation.

Re:I'll buy that...

[rsmith-mac]

I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers from, but they don't jive with what VGChartz has. The top series from the last generation:

- Grand Theft Auto: 41.16m units (SA: 15.36, VC: 14.20, GTA3:11.60)

- Gran Turismo: 23.75m units(GT3:14.87, GT4:8.88)

- Halo: 14.88m units (H1: 6.43, H2: 8.45)

- Super Smash Bros Melee: 7.08mil

And the list goes on and on and on. GTA was huge, followed by Gran Turismo, and then finally you get Halo. A lot of this has to do with the PS2 being the top selling console of the generation, but when a GTA game was the biggest selling game of a whole generation and the series by far the biggest of the generation, it's pretty rational to expect a ton of sales based on the name alone.

Re:I'll buy that...

[p0tat03]

Actually... I think the top franchise of the last generation is still The Sims... sadly. This is also somewhat hilarious, given how badly the *rest* of the PC gaming industry is doing...

Re:I'll buy that...

[7Prime]

Maybe all combined, but I was talking single games. Halo 2 and Smash Bros Mele were the best selling games of last generation.

Re:I'll buy that...

[donscarletti]

no GTA game has outsold the Halo or Smash Bros franchises

Except for GTA:San Andreas (15.36M), GTA:Vice City (14.20M) and GTA:III (11.60M) of course, which ALL sold better than either Halo I (6.43M), Halo II(8.45M), Halo III (7.41M), Super Smash Brothers (5.55M) or Smash Brothers Melee (7.08M) Smash Brothers Brawl (1.50M so far). Unless you're comparing single GTA games to whole franchises in which case GTA:SA and GTA:VC beat every smash brothers game put together.

My references of course are here. I know a lot of people here like Nintendo at the moment and a lot of people like plugging the XBox as a covert way to rubbish Sony, but could people at least check the facts before hitting the mod button? The parent was just blatantly wrong and a little check on google could have fixed it. I mean, how many people even HAD a gamecube for Melee? And how many people would buy an XBox without GTA:San Andreas? I mean, the statement was just obviously wrong.

So, if I may digress from parent bashing and say something constructive about a game series I love. They sold better because they are simply better games. I've played a fair bit of SSB and Halo and they are both good fun, but in GTA you get to run, drive, shoot, jump, ride, fly, parachute, play game consoles, shop and play a huge variety of novel and challenging missions. Halo and SSB is pretty much the same the whole way through. Sure, you've got some vehicles in Halo and you've got different characters in SSB. But it doesn't just give you the world of potential adventures like GTA does. SSB you hurt players and then hit them off the edge, that's more or less the game. In Halo you shoot up bad guys, with GTA you might be racing ATVs through the country in one mission, shooting up a drug lords house the next. Maybe after that you can steal a flightless plane and drive it through a tunnel, then use some explosive scale models to sabotage some rival interests. How about a stealth mission, using a dagger to kill guards and go undetected through a Rapper's mansion. Maybe then you can go on a boat race over golf courses, race around town in a clunky van picking up "avant guard" literature then maybe you can sneak into a military base and steal a jetpack. GTA is always different, always fresh, always quirky, and THAT is why so many people love it.

Re:I'll buy that...

[pthor1231]

They already have had a Final Fantasy release, it's just not called Final Fantasy, its Lost Odyssey. It's created by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the same one who made the original Final Fantasy and every single one since, plus a boatload of other awesome games (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hironobu_Sakaguchi). It even has Nobuo Uematsu doing the music as well. Frickin awesome is all I can say.

Re:I'll buy that...

[SuiteSisterMary]

Seconded; Lost Odyssey really is a Final Fantasy game. It's done in the 7/8/9 style; random battles, materia links, and so on, but with more modern sensabilities; no level grinding, for example.

Also, not to spoil anything, as you figure it out pretty damn quickly, as in the opening cutscene, but the main character is Immortal. And he's lost quite a bit of his memory. So, as you go through the game, he recalls memories, in the form of dreams.

If you choose to view the dream that he's just remembered (or later at an inn), you're presented with a text story. The text fades in on the screen in interesting ways, while the background is a gently animated still shot. A dream in a forest, for example, will have a subtle background with shaded hints of trees swaying in the breeze. There's music, and small sound effects, but no voice. This is in contrast to the cutscenes, which in proper modern Final Fantasy style, are prerendered movies with full sound and voice. It's a really nice throwback to the roots of the JRPG.

Re:I'll buy that...

[SuiteSisterMary]

Just point out that Halo was released on a single console, while GTA3 and derivitives were released on at least three (PS2, Xbox, PC).

Re:I'll buy that...

[squidguy]

Anyone know if GTA 4 is coming to PC after the console release?

Re:I'll buy that...

[7Prime]

I'm playing it now... loving it.

However, the fact that it doesn't have the Final Fantasy moniker means about a fifth of the sales and not as much leeway by critics (give me a break... 7.5 scores as apposed to FF12s 9.5... that's just not right). Lost Odyssey may be a Final Fantasy in all but title, however, it doesn't sell systems the way FF does.

Re:I'll buy that...

[pthor1231]

Thats alright by me. I generally don't give a flip about what critics say, and lets be honest. I hardly think a figure as prominent as Hironobu Sakaguchi will ever be in danger of not being able to produce any more games.

Re:I'll buy that...

[drinkypoo]

Just point out that Halo was released on a single console, while GTA3 and derivitives were released on at least three (PS2, Xbox, PC).

Halo: Combat Evolved for Windows 2000 / 98 / Me / XP * Halo 2 For Vista

You were saying?

Anyway, you can not complain when a game is released on more platforms and sells more. That's the whole point, and it's what Halo would have done if Bungie were independent of Microsoft.

Better luck next time.

Re:I'll buy that...

[rsmith-mac]

Those numbers are just for the PS2 versions. The Xbox and PC versions are listed separately on the charts. GTA didn't actually sell all that well on other platforms compared to the PS2, it was some 4.2m units on the Xbox(GTA3+VC: 2.2m, SA: 2m) and none of the PC titles even cracked a million AFAIK.

Re:I'll buy that...

[SuiteSisterMary]

Ah. I stand corrected, or at least clarified, and the numbers, then, are as impressive as they look.

Could be

[7Prime]

Could be... or it could mean the 360 is just hacking into Sony's former mindshare. I think it's probably a combination of both, actually. The continued success of the Wii is probably the #1 indication that HDTV adoption (or should I say, SDTV abandonment) isn't going as planned.

Re:Could be

[timmarhy]

it's just taking longer. your on crack if you think sdtv is as good as hdtv

Re:Could be

[Anonymous Coward]

my "on crack if you think sdtv" is indeed as good as hdtv.

Re:Could be

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm.. which kind of nazi should i be here?

grammar: check
spelling: check
yuppie: check
offensive: check.

Please continue to represent your demographic, there are better saps around, but few so consistent.

Re:Could be

[Anonymous Coward]

Please.

HDTV loses out on:
1. Cost.
2. Standard definition picture quality.
3. Cost of content.
4. Amount of content.
5. Cost of accessories.
6. The fact that I already own an SDTV.

Re:Could be

[RockModeNick]

It's not a matter of if it's better(It is, I've examined them), it's a matter if its enough for most people to care. I personally don't really care much, I can see the difference, and the margin of difference in price is simply not worth the cost to replace the units. I think many, like me, will not buy an HDTV until their current set becomes useless.

Re:Could be

[AuMatar]

Its better for me- its cheaper. I really don't care about the improved picture, so if I need to buy a new TV, I'd go with the one that costs the least for the size I want.

Re:Could be

[loganrapp]

SDTV Loses Out On: 1) Sucking.

Re:Could be

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but it isn't better. Most SDTVs are cheap CRTs, while most HDTVs are expensive LCD or plasmas.

LCD and plasma create a better picture: LCD is simply sharper, and plasma has a better contrast ratio.

Compare an LCD SDTV with an HDTV when both are showing actual movement and you'll only be able to see one difference: the HDTV display size is 16:9 compared to the SDTV's 4:3.

HDTV looks better if you're looking at stills and comparing it to worse display technology. Otherwise, you're blowing $1500 on pixels you can't notice.

So don't worry about having a fancy new HDTV: you're not missing a thing, and you're saving money.

Re:Could be

[Solra Bizna]

Compare an LCD SDTV with an HDTV when both are showing actual movement and you'll only be able to see one difference: the HDTV display size is 16:9 compared to the SDTV's 4:3.

Sitting five meters away from my parents' 50" DLP, I can see pixels at 1080i. (And they bug me, during the few moments we have >480p media playing on that thing.)

-:sigma.SB

Disclaimer: I have 20/13 vision.

Re:Could be

[pdusen]

Don't you mean it actually wins on 1) Sucking, meaning that it sucks the most?

Re:Could be

[KDR_11k]

My parents have a 16:9 SDTV (and at 100Hz), that format isn't HDTV exclusive (but IMO really stupid as cinema is 2.sumthin:1).

Re:Could be

[MBGMorden]

My parents have a 16:9 SDTV (and at 100Hz), that format isn't HDTV exclusive (but IMO really stupid as cinema is 2.sumthin:1). Absolutely. It bugs me to no end that I finally sprang for a widescreen HDTV and all my movies (well, most of them) STILL have the little black bars at the top/bottom of the screen. Broadcast content looks great since it's created with 16:9 in mind, but most films are disappointing. The only one I've found that's widescreen and fits the 16:9 frame correctly is "Lady in the Water", and they may have even did some chopping on that to get it to fit right like they do "fullscreen" releases on DVD's (which are now even more annoying than before now that I have HDTV - I can have a full picture with bars on the top/bottom or I can have black bars on the sides with the sides actually having been chopped off . . .).

Oh well. Rant off.

Re:Could be

[HalAtWork]

Wii still looks good on an HDTV. Mario Galaxy, Smash Bros Brawl, Metroid Prime 3 Corruption, all these games and more have details that are difficult to make out on an SDTV but that pop off the screen on an HDTV just due to the fact that it's in progressive scan and that the details aren't blurred together due to the use of an RCA connection or similar. The combination of interlacing and blurring really make it difficult to see even the full quality of the Wii's picture. In Mario Galaxy it's the easiest to tell, because most textures in that game have a dot pattern on them with subtle colour changes that you don't really get to appreciate or even see on a 480i CRT.

Re:Could be

[JeTmAn81]

Educate yourself. The 16x9 ratio breaks down to roughly 1.85:1, which is the same ratio at which many theatrical films are released. True, many other films are released in 2.35:1, but if you had to pick one to standardize on, the 16x9 ratio is as good as any. All widescreen TV shows are shot in 16x9. If they'd made your TV to fit a 2.35:1 ratio, you'd still have gotten black bars on a LOT of widescreen content, only they'd be on the sides instead of the top and bottom.

Re:Could be

[MBGMorden]

2.35:1 seems far more common for films than 16:9 does. The fact that most broadcast HDTV shows are sent in 16:9 seems to be just a result of the TV's being 16:9 - if the standard would have debuted at 2.35:1 then that's what the TV shows would be filmed and sent out in, making their current ratio kinda moot.

OR, the other option is to just have most of the new stuff for film start being filmed at 16:9 instead. In any event, it just doesn't make sense to keep them different and waste that screen real estate.

Re:Could be

[JeTmAn81]

As far as I know, 1.85:1 is actually more common for films, but it's typically used more for comedies that don't need that "epic" scope as opposed to action films. The 16x9 ratio (I'll amend my earlier comment to mention it is actually not quite 1.85:1, though it's close) was chosen as a compromise between the US and British 35mm standard ratio (1.85:1) and Europe's 1.66:1 ratio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1.85:1#16:9_standard

In any event, I think it's best to let filmmakers decide what kind of frame they want to shoot on. Frame composition is essential to filmmaking and unique to the individual, and having the liberty to choose that wider palette is important.

Also, they're just black bars. Who cares? Being genuinely bothered by the black bars seems as silly to me as being bothered by the walls of the movie house around you when you take in a theatrical viewing. If it really bugs you that much, you could just get a projector and stretch the image out a little more when it's not big enough for you.

Re:Could be

[Moonpie Madness]

There's a reason people stick with old versions of Windows, VHS, DVD, etc.

But stores stop stocking nice SDTVs. Broadcasts require either a new TV or one of those receivers, and some folks are dummies about that stuff.

You're right though, I prefer my SDTVs to my HDTV when watching SD broadcasts over U-Verse. It just looks a lot better. Still, nice HD TVs are the way of the future. No getting around it. And they do have many benefits.

Re:Could be

[twistedsymphony]

1. Cost.

On a size for size comparison, meaning 32" SD vs 32" HD HDTVs really arn't any more expensive than good quality SDTVs were about 5-10 years ago, it's just that SDTV prices have dropped to help get them off the shelves and most people look at much larger screens when looking at HDTV.

2. Standard definition picture quality.

That all depends on if you know what you're doing/what you're buying. While I'll conceed that joe consumer doesn't really understand the technology if you buy an HDTV with a Faroudja DCDi processor, or a stand alone up converter, (Oppo also makes DVD players with this processor) then your SDTV content will never have looked better. Most people don't factor that in when looking for a TV though.

3. Cost of content.

That all depends on what kind of content you're viewing. All current generation games cost exactly the same whether you view them in SD or HD, and even the Wii can benifit from HDTV since it supports progressive scan and widescreen. Similarly most DVD content is also progressive scan and widescreen and with a good scaler like the aforementioned Faroudja in either your player or your TV will create a better picture than your SDTV tube is capable of. While the prices of Blu-Ray movies is a bit more than DVDs, you can usually find them for the same price if you shop around, it also doesn't usually cost any more to rent one over the other, at least not at any of the places I've seen.

4. Amount of content.

with the exception of the Wii all new video game content is HD, and as stated before with the right processor you'll get a better picture for SD broadcasts, DVDs, and other SD content. There are thousands of DVDs and last generation games that suppored EDTV (progressive scan/widescreen) that were not able to reach their full graphical potential on SD sets but CAN be fully realized on an HDTV. Becides most new movies and popular older movies are arriving on Blu-Ray and available through numerous download on-demand services, not to mention most of the popular TV stations (NBC, ABC, CBS, etc.) as well as most of the premium stations (HBO Stars, Cinemax, etc.) are broadcasting in HD now too, and it's only getting better as time goes on.

5. Cost of accessories.

like what exactly? the rental fee for a DVR from my cable provider is the same if it's SD or HD, as far as cables go the difference between RCA interconnects and HDMI is inconsequential as long as you're comparing similar quality products and not cheapo RCAs to rip-off Monster HDMIs. Go hit up monoprice if you don't believe me

6. The fact that I already own an SDTV.

You got me there, but I've yet to find any new technology that I was able to own without buying it.

Ultimately, not everyone is you, and not everyone has the same needs as you. I'm sure there are quite a few people who don't need or want an HDTV or HD content, but I know I personally don't watch TV but instead play video games, and I have over 400 DVD movies in my collection all supporting progressive scan and widescreen. My display is a projector in a home theater room and when I made the jump from an ED projector to an HD projector the difference was night and day... the HD projector I bought didn't cost any more than the ED projector when I bought it 3 years before, all of my old content looked far and wide better (because I specifically bought a projector that uses a Faroudja DCDi) and the Xbox 360 and Wii games that I had been playing already looked much better. I don't have a Blu-Ray player, but I do rent HD movies through the Xbox Live marketplace... Of course I also place a high value on the fidelity of my picture and sound.

Re:Could be

[KDR_11k]

The problem with black bars is that larger TVs are more expensive and it's annoying to waste money on TV area that doesn't get used. It's also annoying to switch to a really annoying widescreen TV (telling those things how to display the image is really annoying) and not even getting black-bar less movies for all that effort. Really, IMO it should have been 2.35:1 or 4:3, 16:9 just pisses me off.

In the short term, yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

In the short term, odds are gamers will still have enough disposable income to make that record season a reality. Come post-summer though, few people, or at least few Americans, will have been unaffected by the recent severe downturn in the U.S. economy.

This only means that the Wii will come out on top later on, followed by the 360 Arcade, due to both being the cheapest home console systems available. If gamers in the US decide to buy American, maybe more the 360 Arcade, but I don't see that particularly happening.

Not really.

[Killerchronic]

I don't quite see how that has anything directly related to HDTV, it could just be that people whe have invested in such TV's are buying 360's instead.

Re:Not really.

[AuMatar]

More like buying Wii's- Wii has a 44% marketshare, with a 5 million unit lead on 360 and 12 million on PS3

Not shocking..

[moogied]

The only time the gaming industry doesn't have a "banner" year is usually right before the new platforms launch. Right now there are 3 "current-gen" platforms selling big, with big games coming out, that charge big bucks. Wii will keep being a mega-hit, Xbox360 will continue to dominate PS3 because of Xbox Live, and sony will keep its share with PSP/Blu-Ray(/PS3). PS2's hugest edge over orginal Xbox was game selection, with that gone Xbox is showing some of its strenghts.

Re:Not shocking..

[Dutch Gun]

Well, in recent years (or perhaps in your lifetime, if you're under 30). But a few of us geezers remember not only the lack of banner years in video gaming, but outright crashes of the market. I'm being pedantic, though, I suppose. I'll presume you implied "in recent years"...

You're correct, though. It's likely we may see a downturn as near the end of this generation's lifetime, as gamers are less enthusiastic about investing in last-generation's games. However, we shouldn't have to worry about this for another few years. We're probably not even at the half-mark of this generation's life-cycle. The console makers will probably take care not to oversaturate the market by iterating too soon with hardware generations, or they may alienate consumers by devaluing existing game libraries and systems too quickly.

I've postulated that Microsoft paid a hefty price in its rush to early market in its hardware failures (to the tune of a billion dollars). Still, it may consider it's current position in the market worth the price. Sony used its console to push its HD-media standard, and I wonder how much this hurt its newest console sales. This left Nintendo to clean up with a low-cost, quirky offering of the Wii.

To be honest, although people keep seeming to want one of these competitors to break away and dominate the market, I think it's actually healthier to keep the three-way competition going strong. The ultimate winner is consumers when companies must compete fiercely for your business. The only obvious downside is having to either choose among consoles to get exclusive titles, or pony up for multiple consoles. Still, I think this is a much healthier market than when a particular company dominates the market.

Re:Not shocking..

[Zeussy]

The thing that I find a lot of people don't seem to see with the console wars (which you do seem to see), is that Microsoft is in it for the long haul to crush Sony and have the pockets to do so. Even though Sony are a massive firm, with a huge revenue their profits are not all the much. Sony of course are not going anywhere anytime soon, and have the home Japanese market that is almost impenetrable to outside companies. Microsoft wants a firm grip on NA and EU and they currently have a pretty strong one.
With the only thing separating the 2 major consoles are basically exclusives and personal preference it is a boom time to consumers apart from the fixed high pricing of games. I fear there could be another video game crash (more like recession) not as bad the 82/83 crash but still quite painful.

Re:Not shocking..

[Belial6]

I don't remember the 82/83 crash. All I remember was that everybody was shifting platforms from the Atari to the C64. If there is a game crash, it my be far worse than what you saw in 82/83, as it is unlikely to just be a platform switch for gaming. Maybe people would go back to the PC, but I think that would be recognized as a platform shift this time around.

Re:Not shocking..

[blahplusplus]

"I think it's actually healthier to keep the three-way competition going strong"

In video games market economics does not necessarily apply. Consider some of the best era's of video gaming were the NES and SNES era, and the snes era in terms of quality games, when PS1 came around with the CD rom, the library just moved between platforms (what was previous on Nintendo now was on playstation), if you follow the long standing game series on different systems the library and franchises just move from platform to platform. Consider games like Final fantasy 12 and FF13, that's THIRTEEN games in a single franchise that spans multiple platforms and console generations. Consider that even in the PS2 era Exclusivity was one of the primary means of dominating your opponents (PS2 gets Final fantasy, and Xbox and GC get nothing).

Gamers buy consoles for the games, so using franchises to 'ward off' competitors is a mainstay. One of the main reasons Rare was bought by Microsoft was to help take a few less hot exclusives from library of the GC.

Competition in the game industry is more of a pro vs con game, then it is as 'competition is always better'. Many games are arguably more dumbed down and mediocre due to massification of the gaming industry where glitz takes over gameplay, this is especially apparent in the MMO space.

Re:Not shocking..

[AKAImBatman]

I don't remember the 82/83 crash.

Obviously. The crash was around the holiday season of '83, thus making it the Great Video Game Crash of '83/'84. ;-)

All I remember was that everybody was shifting platforms from the Atari to the C64

The C64, actually. And it was mostly Jack Tramiel's fault for turning a simple recession into a full-out crash: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Game_Crash#Price_war

If there is a game crash, it my be far worse than what you saw in 82/83, as it is unlikely to just be a platform switch for gaming.

Nonsense. The market forces that existed then don't exist today. The market of 1983 was HUGELY oversaturated with knock-off games from companies attempting to cash in. Frustratingly, some of those companies were the first party game producers. After the whole Pacman and ET fiascos, the market simply didn't trust Atari or anyone else to make a good game. The resulting loss of consumer confidence combined with the oversupply lead to a decline of video game sales. Tramiel's price war then caused retailers to dump* their stock of console systems in favor of cheap Commodore computers.

Because of these issues, modern console makers hold absolute control over their consoles. No one creates a game for their console without express approval from the console manufacturer. In addition, the console makers produce high-quality first-party titles and seek out desirable third-party exclusives in an effort to keep consumer confidence high. This careful control of the market ensures that the market conditions of the 1980's are not repeated.

Maybe people would go back to the PC, but I think that would be recognized as a platform shift this time around.

Unlikely. The PC platform is effectively dead as a gaming platform. There are some holdouts, but there just isn't enough incentive to play games on PCs anymore. Driver issues, constant hardware upgrades, installation problems, DRM, and other headaches just don't make the minor quality difference worth it. Which is a very different situation from the 90's when computers were capable of producing expansive worlds and 3D graphics that consoles were (for the most part) unable to replicate. Now that the difference is just some minor differences in rendering quality, there is no real incentive to use the PC platform for gaming. Better to use it for web surfing and business uses. Especially when most games released today are available on both the PC and console platforms.

* When I say dump, I mean that in a fairly literal sense. $30 game cartridges were being sold for 99 cents. Retailers were willing to take the loss because they felt that there was no hope of selling the stock in time to make a profit off of the holiday season. So they freed up the shelf space for stuff that they felt they *could* sell. Like the $199 Commodore 64 and the $99 VIC-20.

Re:Not shocking..

[feepness]

Xbox360 will continue to dominate PS3 because of Xbox Live Xbox has already peaked and is on its way down. PS3 has pulled ahead in sales everywhere.

Re:Not shocking..

[Dutch Gun]

I think you're contradicting yourself. You claim that "in video games market economics does not necessarily apply", yet you then claim that with the PS1, the library just moved between platforms. Nintendo didn't go away. So... exactly *why* did the games jump ship? Answer: the Sony PlayStation offered a more attractive platform to developers. How exactly is that not competition?

I may have a slightly different perspective on this, as I'm a developer in the games industry. Consumers don't necessarily see the entire picture, but when a console company gets extremely successful, the tendency has been to start crapping on the developers. Ultimately, this tends to diminish the quality of games produced for that console, and the only thing that keeps this in check is a competing company.

This is *exactly* what happened when Sony usurped Nintendo. It's odd to think of it now, but Nintendo was the 800lb gorilla in the market, and Sony the upstart. After all, Nintendo was synonymous with console gaming. And unfortunately, as a company, they got way too damn arrogant. This showed both in the way they treated developers AND in the lack of innovation in their hardware (refusal to abandon cartridges, overly restrictive, high licensing fees, etc). As a result, the market corrects itself, and Sony rises to the top.

Fast-forward a few years later, and Sony has monster hits with the PS one and two. At this point, they're so arrogant, they're telling *us* (third party devs) how to change our game (it was cross-platform), with the implied threat that if we don't change it, it won't get published on the PS2. And no, this wasn't just Technical Requirement Checklist compliance, it was look and feel of the game, and gameplay features. Exactly the same kind of crap Nintendo was pulling a few years ago.

You really need to take a closer look when you say that competition isn't necessarily required for the health of the video game industry (hell, competition is necessary for the health of *any* industry). The fact that you're seeing a lot of pretty slick titles (they're not all glitz over gameplay) should be a pretty good indicator. And NES era being the pinnacle of gaming? Please... I grew up on a NES (and earlier stuff). The simple fact of the matter is that gaming today is every bit as innovative as yesteryear's games, and then some.

Yes, there were some gems, but then, as today, there's a lot of crap as well, and you just have to be a bit careful in sniffing out those gems. Sure, I like popping in an old NES game (although today it's with the Wii virtual console or my DS), but after a few minutes of nostalgia, I quickly crave something a bit more substantial. And whether that's jamming with friends on Rock Band, shooting it out with Call of Duty 4 online, getting in some platforming fun with Super Mario Galaxy, or playing a quiet game of chess against my Xbox... You have to admit we have it pretty good as gamers these days.

Re:Not shocking..

[Belial6]

Wow. That is some serious revisionist history. The first and biggest problem with the recounts of "The video game crash" is the redefining of a video game. A game console IS a computer. The C64 was a gaming platform. The revisionists stories always refer to the C64 as being a pull away from video games. It wasn't. It was simply the gaming platform that helped bury the Atari 2600. Saying that price drops on a next gen gaming system that lead to huge sales was what turned a recession into a full-out crash is kind of silly.

As for knock off games on the 2600 compared to today... I don't know if you saw some of the crap that has been released on the NES, SNES, Genesis, PS1, PS2, XBOX, and GameCube, but crap did not end with the 2600. (I don't own any of the current gen system so I can only speculate that they have games that are crap just like the previous generation.)

"Because of these issues, modern console makers hold absolute control over their consoles. No one creates a game for their console without express approval from the console manufacturer. In addition, the console makers produce high-quality first-party titles and seek out desirable third-party exclusives in an effort to keep consumer confidence high. This careful control of the market ensures that the market conditions of the 1980's are not repeated"

This is simply not true. In fact, prior to Atari 2600, it wasn't even considered that third party games would even exists. It was when developers from Activision left Atari to form the worlds first third party game publisher, that Atari sued, thinking that they could retain control of the platform. It was because sueing did not work in keeping a monopoly that the following systems have included technical lock-out systems. Looking at the crap that was available for virtually every system, shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that "quality" was not the reason for the monopoly practices of the system manufacturers. It also does not make sure that the market conditions of the 80 do not exist. The Pacman and ET problems certainly did not kill video games. At best they help put the 2600 out of its misery. Remember, Pitfall came out the same year as Pacman and ET on the 2600. It was the best selling game the 2600 ever had. Again. It wasn't gaming that went away. It was just a shift to the next gen system, the C64.

I'm not counting on people going back to the PC for gaming. I'm just saying that if the console systems went under, people would likely keep gaming by moving to the PC.

I also don't know what kind of computers you thought existed in 83, but 3D graphics is really a questionable claim. Yes there were things like Bards Tale and Ultima's dungeons, but the same effects had been done on the 2600. The C64 did have much better graphics and sound quality, and certainly had more storage space, but 3D graphics were not the driving force to move people off of the 2600 and on to the C64. There are also benefits to PC gaming beyond it's superior graphics. One is it's dramatically lower cost. Partly due to the fact that you already have a computer for other purposes. PC gaming is far from dead, and is unlikely to ever go away. It just doesn't draw the revenue that the consoles draw. In fact, Solitaire on windows, may be the most played video game ever.

Again, as you even note, there wasn't a crash. There was just a shift to a new platform. Maybe we should just rename "the video game crash" to "the Atari 2600 crash", as that would be far more accurate.

Re:Not shocking..

[blahplusplus]

Sony usurped nintendo because nintendo made a dire mistake (didn't understand technology), in this "competition" it was quite artificial. I should have qualified the comment "Market economics does not necessarily apply", with 'it is more complex then 'simple' economics'.

Human beings have a tendency to see their ideas in everything and backwards rationalize it, any perceived called 'improvement' as a 'force of the market', rather then 1) Supply being available from amount of time worked, oversight, error, etc, and then spin it off as 'competition' rather then simply a self-fulfilling prophecy of a) Passionate people wanting to make games 2) people willing to pay for games and 3) the improvement simply being a state of the environment one is put in and the feedback cycle it creates. i.e. you have people who need to eat, survive and earn a wage, therefore necessitating one continues to work, etc, feeding back into the cycle.

We could argue that piracy is healthy competition for the gaming industry after all they are adding value by giving customers what they want, at a price they want. See now wasn't that easy?? and I could spin it as 'piracy as competition is healthy for any industry'. After all that segment of the market is being served wonderfully and not being served very well by the gaming industry.

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees, in every object, only the traits that favor that theory. ~ Thomas Jefferson

In the case of Nintendo and PS1, it was quite obvious that N64 failed because they lost their library. Libary and Platform exclusivity was the road to #1 success, the PS1 broke down Nintendo significantly with the PS1. I wasn't meaning to make the NES era some panacea of gaming, just that there was more variety in the games and experimentation since costs were lower, as production costs go up, the range of experimentation one can do goes down.

All the sequels to previous games from the SNES era were now on PS1 by and large, where exactly was the gamer to go? It wasn't exactly competition, it was rather a migration of gamers from platform to platform to play the games they wanted to play, someone would always be there to pickup the slack as long as money was being made.

Re:Not shocking..

[ShadowMarth]

The PC is dead as a gaming platform? Lies. If you don't have the know-how to deal with an occasional driver issue, you should just chuck your PC now and go buy a Mac. Constant hardware upgrades? Once or twice in a period of 4 years, at most, to keep your PC FAR above the abilities of any console. PC has been "dying" for about two generations according to folks like you. Just let it play out, so you don't look like a moron when it keeps on ticking.

Re:Not shocking..

[SuiteSisterMary]

Sony usurped nintendo because nintendo made a dire mistake (didn't understand technology), in this "competition" it was quite artificial. I should have qualified the comment "Market economics does not necessarily apply", with 'it is more complex then 'simple' economics'.

No. Sony usurped Nintendo for exactly one reason: they remembered how the market and the business model works.

To make a long story short, the Nintendo model had these main points:

1. Games come on cartridges
2. We, Nintendo, make the cartridges
3. You, the developer, beg us to make cartridges for your games
4. Minimum order of X hundred thousand. Three to six month turn around time. And you can only have five games a year. Oh, and we, Nintendo, approve those games.

What this meant was that, for example, if your game did better than you thought, there'd be a three to six month lag before you could get more product on the shelf. If you wern't sure how a game was going to do, you couldn't test the waters with a small run.

In other words, Nintendo was being a fairly typical market big boy.

So Sony comes along, builds the Playstation, and says 'Hey, let's use CDs. More space, sure, but mainly, a) it's $.50/copy to press rather than $20 just to build the cart, b) you can crank out a few hundred thousand over a weekend, and c) lets ask the devs what they want!

It's the most amusing of irony that PS1 beat Nintendo, the PS2 turned Sony *into* Nintendo, and the PS3 was beaten by Microsoft in pretty much exactly the same way that Sony beat Nintendo. The Xbox is, and always has been, about the developers. The 360's capabilities were decided, in part, by screenshots of Gears of War at various processor/memory/gpu combinations beside cost figures.

It's actually all quite fascinating; if you're interested, read Game Over by David Scheff (I think that's the name spelling), Revolutionaries at Sony, and Opening the Xbox, and Inside the Xbox 360. In that order. I think those are the two Xbox titles; they're both by Dean Takahashi, so you should be able to find them. I think that's how you spell his name. You'll have to excuse me, the Lysdexia is strong with me today.

Re:Not shocking..

[drsquare]

You can't argue with the numbers, PC games sales are in an all-time slump. People are sick of upgrading three hundred different parts of their PC every couple of years to play the latest re-hashed tired FPS. All the crap that Vista's causing is the final nail in the PC gaming coffin I think.

Don't worry, PC gaming will still have its niche, casual games like the Sims, Runescape, Bejewelled, Minesweeper.

Re:Not shocking..

[nuzak]

> Don't worry, PC gaming will still have its niche, casual games like the Sims, Runescape, Bejewelled, Minesweeper.

Buh .. what? No, that's a niche that's rapidly draining out of the PC market onto consoles. The latest incarnation of Bejewelled is called Puzzle Quest, and it's a runaway hit on consoles. Sure it's available for PC, but I generously give it maybe a fifth of the total sales (any less and the port just wouldn't have been done).

There's a "flagship FPS" that commands the PC market every year, plus an assortment of strategy titles... And then there's the MMO's. World of Warcraft is still a license to print money, and no console ports to be seen (Final Fantasy XI is sort of an aberration, and required people to basically turn their consoles into PC's anyway)

Re:Not shocking..

[drinkypoo]

I don't know if you saw some of the crap that has been released on the NES, SNES, Genesis, PS1, PS2, XBOX, and GameCube, but crap did not end with the 2600.

I'd argue that the Genesis did pretty well. There were some stinkers (especially, in retrospect, altered beast) but they also had two of the best conversions of all time, Strider and Forgotten Worlds (even if the latter did drop two excellent levels - the gameplay was fantastic.)

There are also benefits to PC gaming beyond it's superior graphics. One is it's dramatically lower cost. Partly due to the fact that you already have a computer for other purposes.

It costs as much to have a video card capable of doing justice to the latest greatest games as it does to buy a game console (except from Sony on launch day) :D I would argue that PC gaming is horribly more expensive, if you compare the lifespan and cost of video cards and consoles. The Playstation 2, for example, is an amazing value.

Now, I don't play launch games any more, I just don't care. I wait until games run on Linux and play them under wine or whatever. Don't run, I don't play them. I have a PS2 and an Xbox, but I may never have a PS3 and the Xbox 360 can wait. I could have bought a Wii one day, but I had other places to spend the money. But if you do care, I maintain that PC gaming is more expensive.

Re:Not shocking..

[Belial6]

Your confusion is in not counting all games, but only the kind of games that are on consoles. My son is running on a 6 year old hand me down PC, and he has literally thousands of games on the system. Here is an example of where you can find them. The cost of gaming on a PC in near $0 per game. This is the same situation that my mother and father are in. The PC is the only platform that is virtually free. So, while you CAN spend thousands of dollars to game on a PC, you CAN also spend nothing to have access to more games than you will ever have time to play.

Re:Not shocking..

[drinkypoo]

Uh, confusion? I think what we have here is a difference of opinion. Most console games are at least playable. I've had compatibility issues with various versions of windows with even the simplest games (and other software.) The advantage of the console is that you don't have to screw with those sorts of things. Anyway, 95% of the games on the PC are garbage that won't run properly /on even the next version of windows. Even Microsoft can't get it right! Mechwarrior III, for example, selects non-supported video modes on Windows XP (at least, it did on two different machines of mine) which cannot be selected from display properties. And Crimson Skies, a Windows 98 game, has "issues" (but mostly runs) on Windows XP. Today, Microsoft is pushing Vista hard, and you need it to play Halo 2 on PC. It's actually cheaper to buy an Xbox 360 than it is to get a decent version of Vista. So where is the value? In being able to MAYBE play a bunch of crap games?

I play some games on PC; first person shooters and RTSes are it, though. Everything else is just easier to deal with on a console. I have had too many occasions where I tried to play a game and some update had scragged it, and I had to remove it or get a newer, better update. I am done with that crap.

The simple fact is that PC games are mostly on Windows and Windows is a gigantic piece of shit.

Re:Not shocking..

[Belial6]

You just restated your confusion. Most PC games are NOT Windows specific. In fact most PC games run in Flash, and work just as well on Mac, Linux and Windows. If they do not work properly for you, then you have done something seriously wrong to your computer, and you cannot legitimately blame it on MS. Your confusion seems to be that you either don't know what a game is, you are unaware of the vast number of games available, or you think that any game that isn't available on a console doesn't count. My son plays hundreds of different games on a PC that I bought 6 years ago. It plays them just fine. In fact, I think you would be hard pressed to find a PC for sale that won't play most games that have been written in the last 3 years.

3D and Commercial is not the definition of 'Game'. It really is a shame that the FPS players have successfully usurped the title of 'gamer', as it seems to have caused a lot of confusion as to what a game is.

Economic Conditions

[NuclearError]

It's interesting how high sales are despite a stalled economy. Maybe it's cheaper to sit at home and play video games instead of going out, given the price of gas.

Re:Economic Conditions

[7Prime]

interesting point. Watch as movie theater revenues plummit and game sales sky rocket. Average movie length: 2 hours. Average game length: 30-50 hours. Which is the more ecconomical entertainment medium? Games, by a long shot. Less trips to Blockbuster or the Cinemaplex means less money wasted on gas.

Re:Economic Conditions

[Anonymous Coward]

I always find the cost-per-unit-time argument somewhat curious. You can pick up a copy of Ulysses from a used book store for something around $2. It will keep you occupied for 40-50 hours. Yet more people will probably play GTA4 or see Indiana Jones this year than the total number of Americans who have ever read Ulysses in their lives. U. p. up. What kind of perfume does your wife use.

Re:Economic Conditions

[The Analog Kid]

If you don't like reading, then the cost of reading Ulysses is higher than $2.

Re:Economic Conditions

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to spend like £80 on a night out about 3 times a week here in the UK a few years back. Then I went back to playing Ultima Online followed by Dark Age of Camelot and suddenly my entertainment costs dropped to like £9.95 a month or whatever it was for subs, life certainly got a whole lot cheaper that's for sure ;)

£900+ a month down to £9.95 was quite the jump and I didn't even have to lose friends because I got them hooked too! ;)

Expenditure has gone back up for me nowadays as I'm playing Wii/360 games and buy about 5 a month at around £30 a peice so around £150 a month but that's still a whole lot less than in my clubbing and pubbing days. For me it wasn't the cost of fuel but the cost of beer, taxis, club entrance fees and a meat feast pizza or kebab to soak it all up before bed!

Some might call it sad that I gave up going out all the time to play games, but I found it a lot nicer not suffering hangovers, having vast amounts of savings available and still finding time amongst gaming to do productive stuff.

Re:Economic Conditions

[DeepZenPill]

While this generation has been full of great games already, with even more on the way, you have to wonder how far this boom will go on given the dismal picture of the economy that some economists paint. The Fed just used a Depression-era rule to bail out a non-member investment bank, Bear Stearns, on Friday and just oversaw a fire sale of the bank today for $2 a share down from it's 52 week high of $159. That's a bank failure of colossal proportions and likely not the last major crisis we'll see in the financial world. The dollar is going to continue taking big hits with news like that, which combined with rising prices of fuel and food is going to take a lot of steam out of entertainment markets like video games.

Re:Economic Conditions

[Gideon Fubar]

but conversely, there are very few popular games that have no words in them.. ;P

Re:Economic Conditions

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct... and if you don't like playing games, but like watching movies, the cost of a video game "per occupied hour" is equally meaningless.

Re:Economic Conditions

[__aaclcg7560]

Unless there's a new Rambo video game in the pipeline. The last movie only had two pages of dialogue.

Re:Economic Conditions

[mobby_6kl]

> Watch as movie theater revenues plummit and game sales sky rocket.

You mean, like this?

Re:Economic Conditions

[Anonymous Coward]

You can seriously get through Ulysses in only 40 hours? I mean not just parse the words but actually derive some meaning from them?

Re:Economic Conditions

[Leviance]

Not to mention you get to drive way cooler (or greater variety of) vehicles in GTA4.

gas prices = training a whole new generation of delinquents.

Re:Economic Conditions

[grumbel]

Average game length: 30-50 hours. More like 10-20 hours, sometimes even less. The only thing that goes into the 30h are RPGs, everything with a bit of action can be happy to make it past the 10h mark.

Re:Economic Conditions

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope-- but I wanted to lowball to make the argument more realistic to those who haven't tried.

Re:Economic Conditions

[vertinox]

It's interesting how high sales are despite a stalled economy. Maybe it's cheaper to sit at home and play video games instead of going out, given the price of gas.

I think Buffet said when there is a recession is to pick recession proof stocks like food and alcohol companies. Perhaps video games are also a recession proof industry due to the fact unemployed people tend to scrounge up enough to buy them since they are sitting at home anyways.

Re:Economic Conditions

[drsquare]

Even if you do like reading, trying to read Ulysses is enough to send you running back to gaming.

Re:Economic Conditions

[demongp]

It also means more people sitting on their asses doing nothing and getting fatter.

(like that will help the reputation that the Americans have... :P )

Re:Economic Conditions

[7Prime]

You're kidding right? Most adventure games (which is the vast majority of action games these days, even most FPSs) are into the 40-60 hour mark. Hell, even the last Zelda was around 60 hours in length. Even Smash Bros single player mode took me 12 hours to complete on easy, and that's by-in-large a game centered around multiplayer.

Re:Economic Conditions

[KDR_11k]

You mean Contra?

Re:Economic Conditions

[KDR_11k]

On the upside, since the revenue is measured in USD, the fall of the currency won't hurt it much, in fact it'll grow as foreign currencies are worth more and more.

Re:Economic Conditions

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes that and the fact that the average movie ticket is about 10 dollars (where I live anyways) and the average game for a nextgen console about 50 dollars, so its about $5/hr for a movie and $1-$2/hr for a game. If for some reason the theatres actually dropped their prices like they should, or stopped charging ridiculous amounts for a soda, it might be a closer race.

Re:Economic Conditions

[Das Modell]

In what parallel universe do you live in? 40-60 hours is very uncommon, and the adventure game genre is practically dead.

VG's are an interesting phenomenon

[jasonmanley]

I think that it is interesting that although we are more 'connected' electronically speaking, we are chosing to spend more time isolated - physically speaking - in front of consoles in our lounges and studies. Typing messages over a keyboeard to a pseudonym we'll never meet. Yes I do know that there are gamers who have in-house organised gaming sessions - but I think that the typical player would be a - in my house - alone - type player.
And then there is the content of the games. Just like some of the more successful movies I guess, we seem to crave the idea of pain, mayhem, slaughter, rebellion etc
Sure they are challenging but I wonder if there is something deeper going on here.
I guess (nearly?) all sports are built around the same psychology (defeat, crush, destroy, out perform) it's just that more people can vent the same energy without the physical restriction.
Hmmm I wonder if other art forms would be as successful if they catered more to this spirit?
Peotry, Art, Sculpting and such

Re:VG's are an interesting phenomenon

[Forrest Kyle]

Heavy Metal is the testosterone soaked "Action Movie" of the music industry.

no spore?

[Pvt. Cthulhu]

article doesnt even mention spore. from the demos i have seen, it will likely be the last game i ever play.

Re:no spore?

[Evangelion]

Why? Do you plan on mangling your fingers and eyes out of boredom?

Re:no spore?

[Pvt. Cthulhu]

what? no, there will be no need for any more games. it will be that good

Re:no spore?

[RuBLed]

I plan on mangling the creature's fingers and eyes out of boredom. Well heck, if what Will's saying is true, expect the whole Spore meta-verse to be subdued by goatse guy.. oops.. I mean chickens...

Blizzard will also be dropping big games

[Sithdemon]

With Wrath of the lich king and everyone praying Starcraft 2 comes out this year, that might over shadow alot of these big console games. Lich king especially will move big numbers, since it's just a expansion, so it's hard to screw up, and if it is, Blizzard can easily fix it, being a MMO and all. Also with "10 million players" it'll be hard not to capaitalize on even half those people. However Starcraft 2, "IF" it delivers the magic that the first one had, a few people might put down the controller and pick up that mouse and keyboard again. Sure it's a different era in the interactive media world, lots of top teir RTSs right now look much more advanced then Starcraft 2 (Compay of heroes, Supreme commander, world in conflict, Total war, and more) However as a multi player game, and blizzards balance and polish obsession the quality might outshine these other games. Lastly Blizzard tends to make the requirements EXTREMELY LOW, for the Minimum specifications, so there's a good chance most desktops and even laptops might be able to run it.

Re:Blizzard will also be dropping big games

[Myrcutio]

I think many people are underestimating just how much demand there is for starcraft 2. Almost every gamer 10 years ago played starcraft, and most of them are older with jobs and money now. Not to mention that blizzard has NEVER made a pc game that didn't sell millions. Take a look at some of the gameplay videos for SC2 sometime, it will definately give a much needed boost to PC game sales. Oh, and don't forget Spore!

Re:Blizzard will also be dropping big games

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Lastly Blizzard tends to make the requirements EXTREMELY LOW...

Sure you used all capitals, but even that does not emphasize this point enough. Starcraft is hugely popular overseas because of this. In fact, I used to play it on a 66Mhz Mac, back in the day (with a monitor that kept dropping the R and B from RGB until you hit it enough). It played solidly, without a hitch except for garbling the audio for the cut scenes (which was actually kind of cool I thought, nothing like playing on a system that that changes to all green tints occasionally and spews slowed down gibberish between stages to get that sci-fi grunge sort of feel to come through).

Re:Blizzard will also be dropping big games

[ShadowsHawk]

The funny thing is that I loved SC to death and played online for more hours than I care to remember. Having said that, I have no plans to pick up SC2. The demands of my family, job, house, etc have become too great for kind of commitment that a RTS requires. I put quite a bit more time into my DS now since I'm able to drop it at a moments notice.

Re:Blizzard will also be dropping big games

[rkanodia]

You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code. All I see is Goliath, carrier, zerg rush...

Re:Blizzard will also be dropping big games

[Nightspirit]

I know, I picked up Sins of a Solar Empire two weeks ago and haven't even played it yet as I know it will suck the life right out of me. WoW I have no problem with, as I can just log out whenever I want, but with a RTS I'll be playing all night watching the sun rise in the morning.

block banner years

[weighn]

generally speaking, I don't like banner years. This may be helpful...

Re:block banner years

[Xtravar]

Ha-ha, I get it! It's a pun.

Re:block banner years

[Anonymous Coward]

I once blocked out a whole decade ... and then I went back and relived the one before

Good sales? Not likely with a depression around.

[boomka]

It is very likely that economy is sliding into depression. No record sales in such environment, sorry. Wall Street has been convulsing in a crisis for 6 month now, and things are getting worse by the day. We just had one of the largest investment banks collapse on Friday. Events of such significance have not happened since the Great Depression, and don't for a second assume this will not pull the broader economy down.

Consoles are social gaming machines

[tepples]

I think that it is interesting that although we are more 'connected' electronically speaking, we are chosing to spend more time isolated - physically speaking - in front of consoles in our lounges and studies. You must be confusing consoles with PCs. It's the PCs that isolate, as their typical multiplayer scenario is one player per machine over a dormitory LAN or over the Internet. Lockout-chipped consoles, on the other hand, typically have dozens of major titles with shared-screen multiplayer. Some console titles, such as the Smash Bros. and Bomberman series, are great fun for four players.

Re:Consoles are social gaming machines

[morari]

Funny, all of my computers are sitting in the same room. In fact, the office area of my house is set up so as to allow LAN gaming very easily. No one can see anyone else's monitor, but everyone can easily communicate both verbally and visually. Shared screen multiplayer works great for stuff like Bomberman and Super Smash Brothers, but then again, those games don't require the dread split-screen.

Re:Consoles are social gaming machines

[7Prime]

But you have to realize that BOTH of you guys are outliers. Most households don't even have more than one computer, and those that do are a desktop/laptop setup, and only use one for gaming. Relatively few people actually have gaming LANs setup in their homes. We may know of quite a few people who do (I actually don't right now), but for the population at large, that's quite rare.

Conversely, MOST console games are still single player, the vast majority anyway. That's starting to change with the Wii, but I have a feeling that gaming will continue to be, by and large, a single-player endevour for quite a few years to come. Online multiplayer sorta bridges the gap between social and single-player (though I think it's actually far less social than single player, in many ways).

I think that if you were to poll americans, you'd find that about 90% of them are playing with only one person gaming in the room at the time. Smash, Mario Kart, and Halo start to errode those figures, but even then, many hours are spent unlocking things in single player modes. Think of all the GTA, Final Fantasy, Half Life, MGS and Zelda fans out there.

Re:Consoles are social gaming machines

[ShadowMarth]

Myself and three friends get together every weekend and play video games. Yes, we play consoles games, sitting around in front of a TV, but we more often play LAN on our laptops. Sins of a Solar Empire, Starcraft, Age of Mythology, and more. The PC multiplayer experice doesn't have to be that way, you just choose to make it that way.

Re:Consoles are social gaming machines

[tepples]

but we more often play LAN on our laptops. Which requires each player to buy a laptop. That can get more expensive if several gamers live in the same household, especially if some of them are children.

Re:Consoles are social gaming machines

[morari]

Your statements are perfectly valid for the majority of course. Usually one or two good multiplayer games will last the life of dozens of singleplayer games however, so perhaps that could factor in. Multiplayer gaming has been around since the very beginning in arcades (which was a social element in itself). I don't think that it has gone anywhere, just that the demographic has changed to become more skewed toward socially isolated persons (by and large).

And to be fair, I wouldn't call my network a "gaming LAN" by any means. It is there so that everyone can utilize the internet at the same time from their respective machines. Furthermore, none of the computers are wildly expensive "gaming computers" either, but the relatively cheaply built good-enough sort. Also, Half-Life has multiplayer, and so did two of the Grand Theft Auto games that I'm aware of (at least, on the PC).

Re:Consoles are social gaming machines

[KDR_11k]

The console used to require meeting in person but they're increasingly going online now. Even Smash Bros is online when you're lucky.

Re:Consoles are social gaming machines

[tepples]

The console used to require meeting in person but they're increasingly going online now. But at least console games have meeting in person and sharing a single console as an option, as opposed to PC games that require one PC per person rather than per household.

Even Smash Bros is online when you're lucky.

But you still have to meet in person in order to exchange friend codes.[1] As far as I can tell from the Brawl manual, the mode against random opponents is nothing more than a glorified vs. CPU that needs an Internet connection.

[1] It is also possible to exchange friend codes over telephone, e-mail, or instant messaging, but you still have to meet in person to exchange phone numbers, e-mail addresses, or IM nicks.

Re:Consoles are social gaming machines

[7Prime]

Usually one or two good multiplayer games will last the life of dozens of singleplayer games however, so perhaps that could factor in.

I couldn't dissagree more. In my experience, I tend to get bored with multiplayer games a lot faster than solo endevours, due to their typically repeatitive nature. The one exception is Smash Bros. But I'd say that a single Final Fantasy has lasted me more than most multiplayer games combined that I've played, Smash not withstanding. Basically what I'm saying is that while what you're saying is possible, it's very rare in my experience, and in the experience of most of my friends as well. Even my friends who are heavily into multiplayer games seem to jump around from one to another quite frequently. Where-as I'm basically assured around 70 hours for a typical solo RPG or adventure game.

Re:Consoles are social gaming machines

[morari]

I can certainly see how one might find the opposite to be true. For me however, I can always go back to Quake III Arena and have a good time in deathmatch. Likewise, up until last week I was still playing Super Smash Bros. Melee and Mario Kart: Double Dash fairly frequently. Now I'm just playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl on a daily basis instead.

Don't get me wrong though, I love singeplayer games and probably own or have played many more than their multiplayer counterparts. The problem with singleplayer games however is that there is often little point to return after playing through once or twice, which isn't too dissimilar to watching films. I'll go back and play Metal Gear Solid or Resident Evil every several years (or the GameCube remakes nowadays, despite some flaws in the Twin Snakes), but other than that they just collect dust. Except in the case of older, more arcade styled games such as Super Mario, singleplayer games simply become too predictable to play often.

There are literally about five multiplayer-centric games that I consistently play, and I think that is what I'm trying to convey. Whereas I feel the need to get a new singleplayer game immediately upon finishing the previous, a good multiplayer game can last years past its contemporaries. They may not be as memorable as a good narrative, but they do offer more significant replay value on average.

Re:Consoles are social gaming machines

[KDR_11k]

Try internet forums BTW. You could even exchange your codes on Slashdot.

Re:Good sales? Not likely with a depression around

[Cadallin]

Yet the Republican party (especially Bush himself) is running around claiming the economy is "Fundamentally Sound." Sorry, we've heard that song and dance before, Herbert Hoover spouted the same bullshit after Black Thursday, and for the next several years http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5063/.

It is astonishing just how fast Laissez-Faire and deregulation causes unrestrained capitalism to self destruct. We'll have gone from reasonably well-regulated, stable Social democracy with an acceptably egalitarian income distribution in 1970 (Life wasn't perfect, but it arguably better in many ways than it is now), to ground zero triggering of a full blown world economic crisis in less than 40 years.

Re:Good sales? Not likely with a depression around

[AuMatar]

Except that games are cheap. People need entertainment, even in recessions. If money is tight, expect high prices entertainment like trips to a movie theater to go down, and spending on games where you can get hundreds of hours of entertainment for your purchase to go up.

Slashdot mindset

[93 Escort Wagon]

The sales figures surpassed what many analysts were expecting. Game hardware sales rose 19 percent during the month to $480 million, NPD said late Thursday. Of this, the portable Nintendo DS was the best-seller with 587,600 units, followed by the Wii at 432,000. The Xbox 360 sold 254,600 units even amid supply constraints.

Going strong since its launch in 2000, Sony's PlayStation 2 continued to outpace its successor. The PS2 sold 351,800 units compared with 280,800 for the PS3. It's so funny to read the comments on here sometimes. How do so many people miss that the two best selling platforms, by far, are the Nintendo DS and the Nintendo Wii? Even the Playstation 2 is outselling the XBox 360 and PS3!

I'm sure the next GTA will be a popular game, as will Metal Gear. But c'mon, the 360 and PS3 aren't driving this train - and it's not even close.

Re:Slashdot mindset

[the brown guy]

"How do so many people miss that the two best selling platforms, by far, are the Nintendo DS and the Nintendo Wii?" So what? In South Korea there were 800 000 NDS lite consoles sold, and only 500 000 games in the first year. That's because of flashcarts like the R4DS etc, plus don't forget that the relatively few games that are sold are much cheaper than xbox 360 or ps3 games..

Re:Slashdot mindset

[bendodge]

Why are consoles the only thing that count? I don't even have a console, but I dropped $40 for CNC3. Red Alert 3 is supposed to be coming out this year, and it looks awesome. Won't that generate a lot of sales? Are PC games really such a minority?

Re:Slashdot mindset

[peskypescado]

They focus on the Xbox 360 and the PS3 because they account for so much revenue. According to NPD the Xbox 360 had six out of the top ten selling games last month. Also according to NPD, 60% of all console game revenues have been spent on the Xbox 360 since it launched. Who cares (in the business world) if people are buying PS2s now and only buy used games? The PS2 isn't driving anything. It doesn't even have a single game in the top ten for the last year. In the end, console gaming is about selling games, and the attach rate on the PS2 is ridiculous.

Re:Slashdot mindset

[JackAxe]

So...

Games on the Wii and DS cost significantly less to develop. They have a larger user base than the PS3 and 360, so publishers make back their investment faster. And it's a sad truth, but shovelware, which is quite abundant on the WIi right now -- because of its huge popularity -- generally earns more money for the publisher than higher budget games. The Wii is basically on track to replace the PS2 -- the current shovelware king -- in this area.

I have a R4DS, but I still buy DS games -- I use it for SCummVM/Hombrew. Here in the states -- the biggest game market -- flash carts owners are a minority. Most households won't know where buy one, know how to use one, let alone be able to find "pirated" games for it.

The Wii and DS are decimating the 360 and PS3. Developers are jumping ship to the Wii,since overall sells for the PS3 and 360 aren't good enough. MS's 360 isn't even doing as well as its original Xbox, which had sold more units in the same period of time.

<]=)

Re:Slashdot mindset

[JackAxe]

Because of the higher development cost, publishers/developers need to sell way more units on the 360 and PS3, than they do on the Wii, in order to see a profit.

From what I've read, it takes about 165,000 units for a dev to make a profit on a Wii game, where as it takes 500,000 on the PS3/360 before they sees a return.

<]=)

Re:Slashdot mindset

[denton420]

What you have said is true. I feel that it is important to note that this signals an important shift in the gaming industry that is happening faster than ever. These numbers support the fact that gaming is heading more towards the mainstream market (As it has been doing since its inception, has it not?) where price is king and most video game purchases are made at wal-mart by people who dont know what a polygon is or what quality textures add to a game. It is nice to see the masses making video games a little bit less nerdy one step at a time!

Re:Slashdot mindset

[p0tat03]

Significantly less to develop? Care to back that up? I would say *marginally* less - the level of content required is the same, the level of code support also... SDKs also cost an arm and leg... Licensing fees are comparable to industry averages. You might get away with a bit less cost since you don't have to care about purty graphics so much, but I don't think it's really THAT much cheaper. We know that game dev costs are going up, and this is true for all consoles.

Here in the states -- the biggest game market -- flash carts owners are a minority.

Hee. Maybe because I'm a young 20-something, but EVERY SINGLE PERSON I know with a DS has a flash cart. The problem is so serious that Nintendo has actively gone after R4 - not even Sony targeted a single modchip in their quest to stop pirates.

The Wii and DS are decimating the 360 and PS3.

Again, hee. In terms of hardware sales the Wii and DS are owning the hell out of 360/PS3, but in terms of software sales it doesn't even come close. Developers are still on the 360/PS3 train because the attach rates ($ spent on games per console) is MUCH higher on the 360/PS3 than it is on the Wii. People buy the Wii, play Wii Sports, and basically nothing else. Now that we have Brawl we might see some adoption on that - but the vast majority of Wii owners I know have maybe 2-3 games they play... As compared to the average PS3/360 owner, who has a shelf full.

What the 360/PS3 lack in user base, they MORE than make up for in the fact that hardcore gamers spend MANY times more money on games and accessories than casual gamers.

Re:Slashdot mindset

[Zelos]

I can't find any exact figures now, but the console market is many times the size of the PC market these days. I've seen interviews with people from companies like Epic saying "the PC market is basically World of Warcraft and the Sims", hence their increased focus on console platforms.

Re:Slashdot mindset

[grumbel]

Wii is basically last-gen hardware, meaning you can recycle the engines from the Gamecube and thus save a lot of cost on the coding side. Due to the much less powerful hardware you can also make the textures and models much less detailed then you would on the PS3 or XBox360, thus again you save a lot of cost. Research of course also is much cheaper for the Wii, since most of research in how to use the hardware was already done on the Gamecube, the only thing new is the controller, but other then a bit of waggling there really hasn't been much interesting on that side, so that can't have been very expensive.

Re:Slashdot mindset

[ShadowMarth]

Of course, by "companies like Epic", you mean idiots like Cliffy B. Valve exists. Blizzard is bigger than just WoW. If you like strategy games, there is no reason to go to consoles whatsoever. TBS games are best on handhelds, RTS games on the PC.

Re:Slashdot mindset

[JackAxe]

Google it my friend, It's not hard. Here's a quick search. Would you care to back up why being lazy is acceptable... ;) http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Wii+%2B+development+cost&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Read this article about how the Wii costs about half the price of the other toys to develop for, it's fun:
http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/features/cost-of-development-greatly-favors-wii-say-publishers/69714/

There's nothing marginal about 50%+ less for Wii dev cost.

And $2000 for a SDK is not an arm an a leg. Here's another link to save you the aggravation of searching:
http://www.warioworld.com/apply/wii.html

As noted by the other response to your post, the Wii shares many similarities to its predecessor, which make it easier and cheaper to develop for, especially for the studios that put their time in on the Cube. And just to clear something up, there's nothing last-gen about a Wii's performance or the tech it uses, which is 6 years more advanced.

A publisher doesn't need to sell nearly as many units on a Wii as it does on the PS3 or 360 in order to see a return on their investment. This this is do to the lower development cost and simpler hardware configuration. **Namco stated that it needs to sell 500,000 PS3 games to make a profit as an example. Compare this to 165,000, which is what I've read is needed for the Wii.
** http://www.gamespot.com/news/6162509.html

So just because a game sells more units on a 360 as an example, that doesn't mean it has made a profit for its publisher/developer. With the Wii's HUGE user base for its relatively short life on the market along with its "significantly" lower development cost, publishers/developers have a better chance of seeing a profit on a Wii game than the PS3 or 360.

OMG!! I'm using this 12 year old kid term, because you used HARDCORN -- now I must rant. First off, let me present you with a link that disproves your myth that kids that like to aim with their thumb and deem blood as mature, buy more games. The supposed hardcore gamer is a joke. I've been gaming since the age of pong. There's nothing hardcore about most console gamers, since they're used to games that have generally been dumbed down do to the limiting nature of a gamepad. Compared to the games I played in the eighties and ninteies, games now days are a walk in the park. Sure, they look way better, but they're way less sophisticated... I loved the complexity that is SYSTEM SHOCK, I hated the simpleton that is BioShock.

Anway, here's the link, read fact number "4."
http://www.theesa.com/facts/top_10_facts.php
The average age of the most frequent game buyer is 38 years old. In 2007, 92 percent of computer game buyers and 80 percent of console game buyers were over the age of 18.

Also notice that the average gamer is age 33, not the teenage kid publishers have been marketing to for the past 8 years, so guys hat are in their twenties now. ;) :p

Kids won't have access to a flash cart -- unless they have parents like my friends. Guys my age buy our games and on that note, buy your DS games you pirate! :p

<]=)

Re:Slashdot mindset

[the brown guy]

All valid points, but about the R4DS, at my university here in Vancouver I have yet to see one person using an original game in their NDS, probably because of the huge Chinese population (>50%).

Re:Slashdot mindset

[DeepZenPill]

I want to know who is actually buying these PS2s. The only people I know who have bought a PS2 in the past 2 years is because the one they already owned died on them.

Re:Slashdot mindset

[KDR_11k]

You might get away with a bit less cost since you don't have to care about purty graphics so much, but I don't think it's really THAT much cheaper. We know that game dev costs are going up, and this is true for all consoles.

Dev costs are going up because hardware gets more powerful and the work needed to saturate that hardware with content increases greatly. If the hardware doesn't grow then costs don't go up, they might even go down due to more efficient middleware and other tools. Yes, the level of content DOES go up, it takes MUCH longer to create a PS3 spec character than a DS spec because you got about 100x as many polygons to worry about, much larger textures and the big time-eater normalmaps. With today's tools a DS spec game can be feasibly made by 3-4 people (can go lower if you really want to but someone who can do every job of game development well is not that easy to find) in a pretty short time, a PS3 spec game would take that team forever to make.

Re:Slashdot mindset

[brkello]

Do you not read this site at all? If anything, the "Slashdot mindset" is to be fanatical about the Wii. Every article you can comment on about on a different console has to have people saying how their Wii is better and how their Grandma is able to walk again because of their Wii. Besides, Nintendo said it wasn't looking to compete in the same space as MS and Sony. So it is interesting to note how well a previous generation machine is doing against next gen. No one is missing the Wii and the DS and I think you are either trolling or extremely clueless to say that. We all know about them...but we can talk about other platforms sometimes too.

Re:Slashdot mindset

[Arccot]

Why are consoles the only thing that count? I don't even have a console, but I dropped $40 for CNC3. Red Alert 3 is supposed to be coming out this year, and it looks awesome. Won't that generate a lot of sales? Are PC games really such a minority? I'm also primarily a PC gamer. The problem is there are no good metrics for measuring PC game downloads or subscriptions yet. So it looks like there is a large slump in PC games sales, when in fact they're doing pretty well with things like Steam, WoW, and GameTap in the figures.

No worries, though. They've been predicting the death of PC gaming for years, and it's still quite strong. MS consolidating the look of on-the-shelf PC Games under the "Games For Windows" standardization will help with sales, too, even if it's a poor long term solution.

I'm hoping within the next couple of console generations there will be a conversion to a PC style gaming model with standardized hardware. Meaning mouse and keyboard support included for all/most games, game modding capable and encouraged, and with the ability to download and pay for (or get free) games independent of the hardware developer's network.

Re:Slashdot mindset

[bendodge]

I'd rather not have standardized anything that smells like Microsoft.

Re:Good sales? Not likely with a depression around

[Anonymous Coward]

Booze and prisons also do well during economic downturns.

(Last year I put together a "disaster portfolio" of stocks to buy this year.. booze, prison operators, video games, debt collectors, consumer staples, gold, foreign currency, etc).

People gotta do something when faced with the bleak reality around them.

Movie theaters did great during the Depression for instance. Like you say, I doubt they'll do as well this time around, with so many other choices.

(I guess I should start saying "the *first* Depression" now huh?)

Not just the price of gas

[Sycraft-fu]

Going out all the time isn't cheap. One of my friends got hooked on World of Warcraft and commented about how much money it had saved him. Why? Well prior to that, his normal weekend was occupied by going out to things like a movie, a bar and so on. Real easy for a single weekend to add up to $50 without doing anything extravagant. However when he started playing WoW, his typical weekend was holed up at home playing games. Despite the monthly charge, he was saving money, and not a small amount.

Re:Not just the price of gas

[MaWeiTao]

Maybe so, but I'd argue the quality of his entertainment has suffered. World of Warcraft is a fun game but it's nothing compared to having a good time with friends, in person.

Re:Good sales? Not likely with a depression around

[Sycraft-fu]

Well that and the analysts predicting the good game year are probably using some real forecasting, rather than doomsday crap. I'm sure you've noticed by now that Slashdot, like many web forums, is inhabited by a bunch of people who are real "The world is coming to and end!" types. They look for and believe news that everything is going downhill in whatever their chosen doomsday scenario is, and the economy is not surprisingly one of them.

I'm going to guess the industry analysts are a little more grounded in reality and realise that an economic slowdown isn't the same thing is nobody having any money.

Blood sports

[justthinkit]

Video games have become blood sports. In a society that decries the carnage of a bull ring, the hunting of a whale or the clubbing of a baby seal, children are encouraged to play "Grand Theft Auto", "Super Smash Bros" and some kind of "Brawl". In fact, grown people are told that these titles will be a big force in gaming in 2008 and everyone proceeds to debate not the content, but the relative chance of success of these titles.

It is like we are talking about which grenade or anti-personnel mine will help drive the arms industry, without stopping to consider if we should be talking with such enthusiasm about weapons designed to end lives. What on Earth are we doing, encouraging people to play such games? I don't get, yet I've played all kinds of games for 45+ years of my life.

Answer: "Grand Theft Auto".
Question: What are three words to describe a major crime, Alex.

I typed "What is Grand Theft Auto?" into Google and the original meaning of this criminal act was nowhere to be found. But I did learn that there is a video involving both GTA and LEGO that I'm sure parents will be thrilled to watch with their kids.

How did this transference of violence from one unacceptable form to another get legitimized? What happened to hand-eye coordination? Solving a puzzle. Juggling. Dribbling. Passing. It is not that these things can't be achieved in video, console or wii-style games. It is that they aren't encouraged at any level. Why? When did we turn our minds off to video game butchery?

Oh well, at least I can count on the group think to vote as one on my post.

Re:Blood sports

[RichardX]

Oh please.
I'm a grade-A long-haired sandal-wearing granola-eating pacifist hippy, and even I don't think you have a leg to stand on here.
GTA is not presently, nor ever has been marketed at children. The video you linked to was made and uploaded by Joe Random and has nothing official whatsoever to do with GTA or Lego. I suspect that the uploader of that video is more likely to be sued than endorsed by the respective owners of the properties involved.

What happened to hand eye coordination? As far as I can see it's alive and well and making record profits on the Wii.

What happened to puzzle games? Not sure.. perhaps they've undergone something of a record resurgence of late, with web based 'casual games' for the PC, various offerings on Xbox Live, and the usual 'classic game' compilations for all major consoles, not to mention the DS and titles like Puzzle Quest..

As for dribbling and passing.. I'm not much of one for sports games myself, but unless basketball and football have changed very dramatically since last I checked then I'm pretty sure those are still available in whatever the latest seasonal update to the big sports franchises is (is the FIFA series even still going?). In fact, I hear there's also some kind of crazy high tech virtual reality system where you can go to a store, buy a REAL ball, and pass or dribble it outside with your friends - and it doesn't even need a network connection!

When did we turn our minds off to videogame butchery? You're a bit late getting on this bandwagon my friend. Apparently you totally missed Mortal Kombat, Bloodstorm, Robocop*, Hitman, Carmageddon, all of the previous GTA games, and a million other titles which temporarily escape my mind.

There's a simple solution to this - if you don't like the games, don't play them. And if you're letting underage kids play games like GTA then you're downright irresponsible.

I don't mean to sound all smug and glib about this, even though I know I probably do sound that way. Personally I have a similar issue with movies - I find the torture-porn genre which has become so popular of late (Saw, Hostel, Captivity, etc) to be utterly repulsive on just about every possible level. I can't understand for the life of me why anyone would want to watch movies like that, let alone make them.. but at the same time I wouldn't try and take away other people's right to watch that kind of thing if that's what they're into, so long as they're mentally capable of dealing with it in a mature way (i.e. they're an adult, for one thing)

*Yes, the Robocop game (from the 8/16 bit days) caused a minor storm, in the UK at least. "The movie is 18-rated! How dare you let children play this!", the daily mail readers screamed...

Re:Blood sports

[PopeGumby]

Why? When did we turn our minds off to video game butchery?

When we decided butchery was more entertaining and exciting than solving puzzles? When we decided that our leisure time would be better spent fulfilling inner fantasies rather than solving puzzles?

Re:Blood sports

[snowraver1]

Answer: " A goddamn communist"
Question: "What do you call someone who wants to run every part of your life and only do what is "best" for society"

Why don't you take your judgement and go to some communist state where the government tells you how to live. I prefer to live in a society where I can make decisions about what is best for me.

Re:Blood sports

[pandrijeczko]

*IF* kids suffer behavioural problems because of (so-called) "violent video games", then the blame for that can be laid at the feet of those irresponsible parents who use video games consoles and/or PCs as electronic baby-sitters in order to relinquish their own duties of spending quality time with their kids.

A kid that comes from a loving home built around caring parents who provide positive emotional reinforcement to counteract any negative emotions experienced by the kid will simply end up being a well-balanced individual that is entirely capable of separating fact from fiction.

Unfortunately, your entire shallow viewpoint can only be derived from our fearmongering media who's only goal is to increase the viewing figures and sell more newspapers. The fact is, if the news was filled with stories about the majority of well-behaved, sensible kids who don't binge-drink and don't have a criminal record, it would be pretty boring stuff and nobody would be in the slightest bit interested.

If you are one of these "liberal lefties" that blames every problem on some external factor with a total denial of any personal responsibility and a demand that the authorities create some false, protective, nanny-state cocoon around you, then that is your choice. However, in such a case, can I thus suggest that you and any like-but-weak-minded individuals go find an uninhabited island somewhere, emigrate to it, elect your own set of dictatorial politicians to govern you as you wish, and leave those of us who to take personal responsibility for ourselves behind?

I really get sick-and-tired of the minority of lilly-livered idiots like you who believe it is their task in life to inflict their personality disorders upon the rest of us by imposing more stupid laws and an ever-increasing blame-culture on me and people like me.

And as for the dribbling, the only dribbling going on around here is the accumulation of spittle in the corner of your mouth as a result of your manic ranting...

Re:Blood sports

[Taulin]

Funny you mentioned Carmageddon. Man, that game had to change the people to Aliens and Robots for other countries to sell it, because it was so violent. Manhunt 2 only had to blur the screen a little. People think times are rough now, and how things are controlled by this or that, and change content, but that is only because of the internets and pipes we have now to comunicate. Things have ALWAYS been rough.

Re:Good sales? Not likely with a depression around

[Dunbal]

Entertainment always does well in a recession/depression. Perhaps a little historical revision is due. People stop putting gas in their cars, stop paying their mortgages/rents/credit cards, stop buying clothes, but yet they still manage to find a few dollars for "escapism". It used to be Hollywood films - the box offices did quite well in the "Great Depression", but now I think you could add computer games to that category.

And yes, I'm a day trader, I follow the news, I know about the 25 basis point cut and JP Morgan buying Bear Sterns for 1/10th of what it's worth, and the 20 B "guarantee" by the fed , etc. The economy is in the shitter, and I keep making money every day. Mostly shorting stock, but sometimes I buy at the bottom too.

I sure wish I had had some TTWO before EA threatened a takeover though. $7 a share is very nice indeed. Oh well. I'll keep making my money 5 cents at a time.

green screen

[rice_burners_suck]

I think what the video game industry needs right now is to reintroduce the text adventure game, a la ADVENT. I really think that this is what serious gamers, with overclocked machines, huge CPU fans, high end graphics cards, and all kinds of other nonsense hardware, want. In green text on a black background, like in the good ol' days.

Starcraft 2

[BountyX]

As former posters mentioned, lets not forget the vapochill powered pc platform. Starcraft 2 screen shots are brining back some good feelings...

-1 Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a HDTV so that I didn't have to play Wii Tennis on my small ass standard set. Don't forget it has a component cable and does 480p. Shitty in comparison, but it's wide and looks a hell of a lot better than standard def.

Credibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it not strike anyone that the company which is publishing such optimistic numbers is defending itself from a hostile takeover?

US TV Writers Strike

[EDinNY]

My guess is that there are so many sales in what are usually slow months because this year there is LESS than "nothing" on TV. The writers were on strike, so we don't even get the usual faire of bad TV. New episodes might start in April.

The looming actors strike might mean more game sales, then my analog TVs stop working next year.

TV popularity might never recover.

Or maybe it's simpler

[Moraelin]

Or maybe it's even simpler than that. Remember that we're talking only February sales here, not year long.

Traditionally almost all games were released for Christmas or Easter, with almost nothing released in between. February was probably the worst hit, because anything that couldn't make it for a Christmas release (meaning usually it couldn't even make it to the main menu, because otherwise it would have been released anyway for that all-important Christmas buying season) was delayed all the way until Easter. So, you know, sales peaked at Christmas, gradually slid downwards all through January, and February was when us addicts started getting shaky hands and glazed eyes because of withdrawal syndrome, as nothing was released at all in that month.

And then after Easter another drought came, with maybe 1 or 2 games released in all the months until Christmas, if at all.

And for a while the situation got only worse each year.

That seems to have changed in the last year, as some publishers either (A) rushed to fill that void where millions of gamers were just begging for something to blow their money on, or (B) rushed to have their console released before the other guys' consoles, or god knows what other reasons. At any rate, there have actually been new games released in between those two sacrosanct dates.

So comparing only February can paint a highly misleading picture. It's comparing what used to be the low tide point, to a situation which is a lot more averaged. It doesn't necessarily mean that the whole year's total will rise proportionally. It can just as well mean that the peaks for Easter and Christmas will also be lower. (And a bunch of self-styled pundits will rush to proclaim a new video game market crash, illustrated by their comparing only December to the previous year's December.)

Blu-Ray and GTA IV made me buy a PS3

[Control-Z]

I originally wanted an XBox360 over a PS3, GTA IV is coming out for both. But with Blu-Ray winning and the PS3's backward compatability with PS2 games (well the 60GB and 20GB anyway), I picked up a 60GB PS3 on eBay for a decent price. I'm very happy with it overall, except it won't play all my video files. Wireless controllers and HD rule. Motorstorm is a blast. Pieced together a Rock Band set for about $50, drums, mic, game. Will get a guitar later, I mostly wanted to drum.

A bit backwrds?

[maglor_83]

Early in the year is historically a very slow time in the game sales calendar, making the 34% jump for the month highly significant.

If early in the year generally has poor sales, doesn't that make a 34% jump less significant? Certainly a smaller physical sales rise, making it easier to achieve.

Re:Good sales? Not likely with a depression around

[boomka]

If reducing your standard of living by 20% seems like a doomsday to you then you are spoiled.
You will still be living better than you deserve after this depression is over.

not exactly

[snuf23]

"A game console IS a computer. The C64 was a gaming platform. The revisionists stories always refer to the C64 as being a pull away from video games. It wasn't. It was simply the gaming platform that helped bury the Atari 2600."

There was a fundamental difference in perception. A computer could be justified as a purchase for your kid because they could use it for school. At the time of the video game "crash" anything branded as a video game did not sell. As an avid video gaming kid I recall Toys R Us actually dropping the word video games from their commercial jingle.
It sure wasn't just the Atari that got hit. There were numerous systems on the market (over saturation in fact). Prior to the shift in interest by the public the Colecovision was doing well as a next gen "killer" system. I recall vast dumping into bargain bins of ANY console or console games. Atari 2600, 5200, Colecovision, Intellivision and lots of small players like the Vectrex, Odyssey and Arcadia systems. Not to mention many 3rd party companies that didn't make the shift to computers.
Yes electronic gaming moved to computers until Nintendo reclaimed public opinion about video games but for many people of my generation (I was born in 72) video gaming stopped after Atari lost popularity.

Re:not exactly

[Belial6]

'71 here. The fact that a marketing term became unpopular still does not make it a crash. Go back and look at many of the old consoles. Like the Atari 2600, many of them even said "Computer" right on the box. While many a kid conned their parents by saying that they could use their C64 to do their homework, the fact remains that it's #1 use was as a game system. It even took cartridges. Many of the early "Home Computers" took cartridges. Heck, look at the Odyssey that you are calling a console. It had a keyboard and said computer right on the box. No, the difference between computer and console was made up to rationalize certain companies losing money by making up an imagined crash.

Friend code exchange?

[tepples]

[To exchange friend codes for Nintendo WFC games,] Try internet forums BTW. Nintendo sponsors no such forum, nor does it endorse any fan forum.

You could even exchange your codes on Slashdot.

I don't see how. Like Freenet in darknet mode, Nintendo WFC games require mutual friendship. So there needs to be a way for someone who posts a friend code to know who has added him so that he can add them in return and so that they can schedule a time to meet in-game. On a board running phpBB or vBulletin software, this is typically done through private messaging. But as far as I can tell, SLASH software has no private messaging system (or if it does, Slashdot turns it off), and journal discussions expire after 14 days.

And you still have to buy a console and TV per player.

Re:Good sales? Not likely with a depression around

[j-pimp]

You will still be living better than you deserve after this depression is over.

And how well do I deserve to live by your estimation? Yes I could survive and thrive on much less. Yes if I ate a vegetarian diet and didn't drive it would take much less land to feed me and I'd use less dinosaur corpses. But exactly how well do I deserve to live, and why do I deserve that much or little?

Re:Good sales? Not likely with a depression around

[boomka]

Everyone on Earth deserves to live exactly the same.
You will be living better.