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The Making of the PlayStation
Edge Online has an in-depth look at the beginnings of the first PlayStation console. It starts at Sony's partnership with Nintendo, the purpose of which was to integrate a CD-ROM drive into the SNES. A falling out between the companies led Sony to stubbornly pursue a market dominated by Nintendo and Sega. The console's technology and Sony's unusual position in the industry quickly attracted the interest of many developers and publishers, eventually leading to sales that emphatically won that round of the console wars.
"'There was a huge resistance inside the company to actually being in the videogames business at all,' explains Harrison. 'The main reason why the Sony brand wasn't really used in the early marketing of PlayStation was not necessarily out of choice, but it was because Sony's old guard was scared that it was going to destroy this wonderful, venerable, 50-year old brand. They saw Nintendo and Sega as toys, so why on Earth would they join the toy business? That changed a bit after we delivered 90 per cent of the company's profit for a few years.'"
mnem
Where's the BetaMax?
"One of the crucial points in the campaign to win hearts and minds came when Sony offered a solution to the problem that Japanese game publishers had no production capacity or supply infrastructure themselves. After all, under the Nintendo model, Nintendo would make and distribute their software for them ... One of the crucial points in the campaign to win hearts and minds came when Sony offered a solution to the problem that Japanese game publishers had no production capacity or supply infrastructure themselves. After all, under the Nintendo model, Nintendo would make and distribute their software for them"
This was the real force behind the success. It brought a massive amount of Japanese-culture into game design. Game developers didn't have to make everything "culture agnostic" if they didn't want to, and this was a big turning point.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Consider drugs, pornography, video games, etc.
Most of us have known people who play video games for hours. Their obsession drives them to buy new graphics cards, new games, etc. They simply cannot stop themselves. Their whole lives revolve around creating the best video-gaming experience in the world.
You forgot to add that Sony has now lost more on the PS3 than it made on the PS2 and PS1 combined, and still loses money on each console sold. All for third place.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
If you look at the manufacturing costs, the real problem was the Blu-Ray drives. They were so desperate to win that format war (and that was truly a phyrric victory), that they upped the PS3's manufacturing costs through the stratosphere. DVD would have been more than enough, and the Cell's price has gone down, as all architectures eventually do. The reason the price is still this high is that the combination of the Cell *and* BR drives is simply too much.
Imagine having access to PSN with a sub-$200 console. They would dominate by this point, if they just had their priorities straight.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
It wasn't just for 3rd place. It was to get Blu-Ray into as many homes as possible and win the format war which they did and, as far as 3rd place positions go, they're not doing that bad compared to MS who even had a year lead.
Had they launched at the same time I would put money on Sony beating the 360 even if each system had the same games libraries.
A lot of this is due to the fact no one outside of the US really likes the 360. Sony is beating them in Japan and MS has only about a million units lead over Sony. So it wouldn't take much to make MS lose their position.
It will be interesting if they'll rush out and try to be on first on the market knowing they don't have what it takes to beat Nintendo, they can't really afford another red-ring scenario and Sony knows they have to play smarter the next time around.
At least one laptop manufacturer is including a chip with 4 Cell SPUs and IBM is selling Cell blades, so some people are using them. Unfortunately, because they aimed for the graphics market they only included single-precision floating point which meant that a lot of their potential market in high-performance computing ignored the chip (they all believe they need double-precision floating point, even the ones that are mainly running integer-only FORTRAN code).
There is still a lot of potential for the Cell. Toshiba, for example, are considering using it in HDTVs to decode all of the available MPEG-2 digital TV channels in parallel so there is no delay switching channels on digital DV and you can see channel previews easily. A lot of the early failures of the Cell were due to poor compiler support, but now LLVM has a Cell SPU back end this may change - it matches up very closely, for example, with OpenCL. Now that modern GPUs are adopting very similar designs to the Cell (i.e no fixed-function pipeline, just lots of SIMD units), it may start to be competitive in other areas.
The Cell hasn't exactly taken the world by storm, but it's probably premature to claim it's dead.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
According to MS (and Sony to be fair), Nintendo is a completely different market. :P
I don't buy it either and that wouldn't explain MS ripping off Miis.
Umm, 14 years? The Fairchild VES in 1976, buddy. You're too young to even speak on this subject.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Apparently it was good enough to have a full re-release of the original series created (Dragonball Kai) plus it still outgrosses most animes and mangas in sales.
Since you're so poorly educated on the game, let me break the good stuff down for you. On the PS2, most everything is a massive wear and tear on your thumbs and the analog joysticks. Using and boosting blast attacks on the PS2 is much harder compared to the Wii - the Wii has a more intuitive control system. You want to throw a Kamehameha? On the Wii, you actually throw a Kamehameha. Should two power beams collide, on the PS2 you're bound to either break the analog sticks or give yourself thumb cramps battling to overpower, on the Wii you simply alternate the back and forth movement of the nunchuk and wiimote, same for the physical power struggles.
Maybe you shouldn't give a shit - but what you said is completely untrue and I dare you to find a better game that makes the Wiimote not a gimmick. I've got most Wii games out there (even Cooking Mama, which IS a gimmick) and DBZ BT3 is THE BEST in Wiimote usage. If they could port it over to other systems and you had a network battle between a Wii and PS3 or XBox, I'd stomp everyone not using a Wii.
In fact I'm so good the matchup system can't even find players online for me to battle any longer. In two weeks I eliminated all competition in the USA.
Gimmick, my ass.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.