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Console Makers Scaling Back Their Push For HD
The big news about game consoles of late are the recent price drops and hardware changes. However, an editorial at GamesIndustry looks into one of the side effects of those updates: decisions by both Microsoft and Sony not to include HDMI cables with their HD-capable consoles, despite the companies' long-standing interest in high-definition gaming.
"From the perspectives of these companies, they want to include the cable which will be of most utility to the largest group of consumers possible, and it's clear that whatever research they have done suggests that the majority of consumers don't need — or rather, can't use — an HDMI cable. Neither firm wants to put an assortment of cables in the box 'just in case' — each additional cable erodes millions from the firm's profitability, after all. ... Supporting evidence that all is not well with the HD transition comes from Epic Games' Mark Rein, who told Eurogamer earlier this summer that 'over half the users who played Gears of War 2 so far do not have HDTVs.' Gears of War is a core gamer franchise, beloved of early adopters and the [so-called] hardcore. If less than half of those users are playing on HDTVs, what must the percentages be like for games like FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer — let alone Singstar and Buzz, or popular movie tie-in titles?"
As a an air-conditioning technician, I work in peoples homes, typically six or more a day. From my own admittedly anecdotal experience, the percentage of my customers who have an HDTV set in the livingroom is quite close to 100. That being said, the "hardcore" "core gamer" markets are often teenaged males who happen to have the family's old set in their bedroom with the console connected to it. I'd argue that the percentage of casual gamers that play using an HDTV is higher than that of the "Hardcore" Gamers.
We PC gamers have been asking that ever since we hit 1600x1200 and higher around 1999-2000, and you guys STILL have 200 less lines than us on your "full HD" resolution.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Well, people that have an air-conditioned home aren't exactly of average income...
He didn't say whether he works in Arizona or Alaska.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Yep, that's how it's worked for years. the family set is the nice one in the living room but the gaming machine, whether it be an Atari 2600 30 years ago or a PS3/Xbox360 today is hooked up to a second set that isn't as good. Some old cheapo 13" black and white in the old days or some cheapo 13 inch CRT set with RF inputs or composite (with mono sound) now.
Until relatively recently, you couldn't buy quality TV's for bedroom/playroom gaming, small sets were designed on the cheap so you had to do without niceties as stereo sound or s-video, let alone component inputs in the PS2 days (pretty much restricted to 25" sets and larger) Course nowadays you can buy relatively inexpensive 15-19" 1080i/720p sets with HDMI and component inputs that are basically monitors with a tuner.
I now have 3 consoles, all purchased or repaired in the last year.
An NES with Duck Hunt and Super Mario (and 8 other games) ($25).
A PS One with 5 games ($10)
And a PS2 with 2 games $40.
I play on a 13" colour TV, and a 20" Sony TV that I got for free this year when someone moved out and left it as trash.
And I don't have a wife to supplement my income. HD is for my 25" LCD computer monitor, not TVs. TV is for my friends to pay for, at their places.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Including cables is always a problematic waste. I happen to agree with the summary in that not everyone will use HDMI. But then again, not everyone will use component either. I think it is quite reasonable to not include any cables at all though they should provide the header devices that will allow people to connect ordinary, store-available cables. (So the component video cable should basically provide the female RCA connectors)
Almost no printer maker provides the cables unless they are USB. And even in those cases, the USB cables are typically wasted because they are usually too short. Many many moons ago, I once spent some time at CompUSA fielding that precise question "Why don't printer makers provide cables?" My simple answer was "Waste! It would be a waste to provide a cable that is too long or too short and the manufacturer has no way of knowing how a customer will set their device up."
I have seen the more expected installations of xboxes and ps3s where the unit is only inches away from the display unit, but there are also people who want to have the game unit great distances from the display. My brother, for instance, has an overhead projector unit and a drop-down screen with his AV gear in a 19" server rack. Should they waste a cable on him?
Over-all, I think it is better that they slap a big label on the box "Cables not included" and provide a short list of suggestions on how to make things work or something. This is really not much difference from "Batteries not included." I know, quite a few things still come with batteries... especially remote controls. But toys and other gear rarely do.
There is no question that providing the cables is a convenient thing. I bought the "Arcade" version of the 360 that came with HDMI output but without a cable... it didn't puzzle me a bit -- I just went to a local discount store and picked one up for cheap... like $8 or something like that. Works fine. I was quite excited that it even came with HDMI out since my first 360 didn't. I just don't think that "cables not included" is a bad thing if they do it right. Retailers just need to know that they should stock an assortment of cables close to their boxes and their sales staff trained to sell the right cables.
Yup, I been playing games at 1920x1200 for about 3 years now, with AA and with AF at 60+ fps.
Its not that much to have a PC that can do it, and it looks a whole lot better than anything a console spits out :)
...
The hardcore gaming crowd is well aware of the fact that many HDTVs exhibit a significant amount of input lag (delay caused processing and buffering of the video signal in HDTVs). It's the type of thing a casual gamer might not really be aware of until they play on a different TV because you tend to adjust to whatever you're playing on. Most TVs and monitors don't even publish it among the main specs even though it usually dwarfs response time. It really can have a serious effect on gameplay, particularly in fast-paced FPS games (though Gears is rather slow-paced). I didn't really notice the difference until I started playing on a smaller monitor instead of my larger HDTV.
CRTs are the still best choice for minimizing input lag, but most LCD monitors are decent as well. I'm not sure if this is mainly due to their smaller size or that they're designed for quick response to mouse movement (whereas TVs are designed for viewing, so a few tens of milliseconds extra lag is of no consequence).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_lag
My 25" widescreen computer monitor is my TV. My tuner card is an freebie my ex-roomie gave me so no HD. No big loss as far as I can tell. It's very rare that I'm watching something that I feel I would enjoy more if it had more pixels.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Surely you meant use their income. ;)
FanFictionRecs.net
This has nothing to do with "scaling back" high-def or not, its all about giving the retailers a freebie and saving a buck at the same time.
Retailers like Best Buy make huge bank on HDMI cables. They are always pushing $100+ Monster-brand cables on unsuspecting customers who buy DVD and BD players. But even if they can't sell a monster cable for a 5000% markup, they can still usually sell a "premium store brand" cable for 1000% mark-up. By leaving the cable out of the box, the console vendors are just bending their customers over so they are lubed, ready and eager to pay for an over-priced cable. Kind of a "you scratch my back, I'll open the guy's wallet for you" between the console maker and the retailer.
Do yourself and your friends a favor - buy 10 $3 HDMI cables from monoprice.com the next time you need just one cable. Then, whenever you hear about a friend or coworker buying anything HDTV related, offer them one of your monoprice cables for $6 - you'll double your money and your friend will save $20.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Was anyone really gaming at 1600x1200 back then? The top-end card of the time was the nVidia RIVA TNT2. The high-end units had 32MB of RAM, but most had 16. To get a 32bit double buffered framebuffer and a 16bit Z-buffer you'd need 18MB of memory; for a 16bit framebuffer you'd need 11MB. Although the hardware would have had just enough memory bandwidth to do 30fps at that resolution I doubt you'd have hit it with most games. Also, around that time most people were still stuck on 15" monitors with 17" considered the high end with the occasional crazy bastard with a 19" monitor. 1600x1200 wasn't really a sensible resolution unless you had a 19" monitor or larger.
No, back then I remember most people were still gaming at 640x800 or 800x600, with the higher end at 1024x768. (Of course, back then the majority of console gamers were still at 320x240 or something similar...)
In fact back then we were still making sure that our games still ran on the original Voodoo 1 cards (2MB framebuffer, 2MB Texture memory) - partly because there were still a significant number of people with that class of card and partly because we still all loved the Voodoo 1 dearly for having been the first really good 3D card...
The Xbox360 comes with component. Works great for, at least, 720p (as that's the kind of TV I use it with).
I have a a-few-years-old TV in my home, everything connected with Composite+SCART. Pretty good picture at PAL 60hz. This summer I finally got a chance to try out what Xbox 360 looks like on (someone else's) HDTV - and damn, the HD picture via HDMI connector looks just marginally bit better than Composite. You can actually tell the difference if you're sitting right next to the screen. (Barely so from the couch.)
(The TV also had the curious habit of having worse analog picture on 60hz than 50hz. Flat TV are weird. And in this experiment, I also found it infinitely weird that Xbox 360, a product from that famous proprietery software corporation, had a standards-compliant HDMI port that accepts not-fancy no-brand HDMI cables... and Wii still needs an adapter of some sort. Ghh.)
In short, right now, I don't think HD is all that relevant or remarkable. Maybe in 5 years.
It's easier for the console manufacturers to eat a $100 price drop when they can force a large percentage of consumers to shell out another $50+ for a set of cables.
But Sony and Microsoft aren't the only ones that make HDMI cables. Companies like Best Buy are probably going to try pushing the Monster or their house brand cables instead of first party cables if the first party cables have a marked up wholesale price to cover some of the price drop.
Gaming devices benefit more than anything else from higher quality inputs/connnections and displays. Trust me on this.
Lets go back to the Atari 2600 days. The machine was shipped with a tv/game switch with 300 ohm spade type connectors. You'd unscrew some terminals on the back of your TV and screwed it back on. This provided a display easily affected by loose connections and interference (herringbone patterns and the like).
Now you could go to Radio Shack and buy a TV/game switch with standard 75 ohm coaxial connectors. Use that instead 300 ohm one and that herringbone went away and everything looked better, and it was easier to hook up.
Nintendo's NES came with an automatic game switch with 75 ohm coaxial connection. If you still needed 300, you had to buy a separate thing that IIRC was called a balun. The NES also had composite connectors, which give much better output, if you were lucky enough to have a set or monitor (like one of those philips made commodore monitors) that could accept it back in the mid to late 80's.
By 1991 composite inputs on TV's were common enough that nintendo included a composite cable by default with the SNES, any RF connection was separate, but they still sold plenty of those since as I've mentioned in this discussion that many game machines are connected to a cheaper, less technically capable set than a family's main set. The SNES also supports S-Video ouput, though back in 1991 it was rarer to find it. I remember going to a TV dealer (back when there were such things) and askes which sets supported S-Video for the upcoming SNES. They said, none and said why would you need that, nothing uses it.
SNES games look really nice over S-video, good color that doesn't bleed, sharp text. It difference really does stick out.
The PS1 came with composite connections out of the box and the original version of the machine used actual composite, and S-video connectors on the machine itself, though again, sony sold a lot of RF connection gizmos. Later models switched to what became the standard Playstation multi-out jack. The PS1 is also the first game system I owned that had a few games that worked best with S-video connectors due to font/text issues. (Darkstone, I'm looking at you) S-video made everything look good.
The PS2 supports component connections, though since TV's with component weren't all that common, the cables themselves weren't ubiquitous. But they were required if you wanted to use certain games progressive scan modes. They also helped color clarity and whatnot on regular games.
I'm generally a pretty language-agnostic or even crass kind of guy. I curse like a sailor. But for the love of god can we please stop with the "bending over" and "lubing up" talk when discussing what are really very trivial matters such as retailer dishonesty? It's pretty lame to bilk your customers and nobody really deserves to be treated like that, but it's in no way close to being sodomized. It really isn't. This sort of hyperbole is bordering on a level of absurdity that nearly rivals Godwin's law.
Retailers try to make as much money as they can and a sucker is born every minute. Unscrupulous retail will continue indefinitely with or without the presence of KY jelly or callipygian pruriency. Save the buttfucking talk for big things like federal malfeasance, or I dunno sports fanaticism.
I think it is more about saving money, after all the cables aren't free and they are trying to get prices as low as they can on expensive hardware, and because people don't need or want a "one size fits all" cable. It is a waste of money and of resources to include a cable if people don't need it. What about the people who don't need HDMI, because their gear doesn't support it? There are a lot of TV and receivers without HDMI. What about people who need longer, or shorter, cables?
To me it seems that electronics should come only with the cables needed to operate and for any proprietary connections. Coming with standard cables is silly, because they probalby aren't that useful.
In the computer world, this seems to be the way of doing things. My NIC didn't come with a network cable, my soundcard came with a cable to hook up its external box, but didn't come with audio cables, my videocard didn't come with a DVI or VGA cable, and so on. It was left to me to purchase the cables in the length and of the type I required.
I see the same thing with most high end AV equipment too. It usually comes with power (if applicable) and nothing else. My speakers, amp, and receiver all included either no cables (in the case of speakers) or just power. They figured, correctly, that setups vary and the user could buy what they need. Heck in the case of the receiver I'd hate to get one with all cables included. I don't really want 10 s-video cables just because it happens to have 10 s-video inputs.
This is particularly true in this day and age of budget places like Monoprice. I could understand including cables back when they were harder to get, and maybe you didn't have any option other than a place that overcharged. Especially for things like the RF adapters that old consoles used. However now it is easy for anyone to get cheap cables of any kind they need. As such it makes sense to me that the equipment doesn't include a cable.
So I'm guessing cost/waste is more their motivation than making retailers happy.
By 'we', you mean yourself, comic book guy, and half a dozen other nerds. The typical PC has maybe 1024x768 and onboard graphics.
Mod this up. My parents, grandparents, and un-tech friends all run 1280x1024 right now (nevermind in 2000). I run 1920x1200 at home and 2560x1600 at work (27" LCD at home, 30" LCD at work). Most people complain of things being too small; they want the icons big enough where they can see them from 10 feet away. If all you're doing is email and a bit of web surfing, a high resolution isn't as much of a drive for you. Gamers might spend the majority of the $$$ that flows into the home PC business (or at least upgrade the most often) but the casual users account for the most number of sales.
-SaNo
Oh boy, a whole extra 120 lines!
... and then they built the supercollider.
Point out to me how many console games are rendered at 1080p with 8x AA and 16x AF?
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Please remember that HDMI is just a digital HD cable technology! The component (YPbPr) cables that still come with the consoles ARE also HD, just analog HD. It still looks great on a HDTV; the biggest difference is that you don't absolutely need a TV made in the last 4 years to benefit from it as CRTs and older LCD/Plasma TVs had the connectors too.
Case in point, my Xbox 360 is plugged to my 52" HDTV through component connectors and the picture is very sharp and vivid. It may not equal HDMI, but most consumers won't actually notice or mind.
Most of the HD resolutions from the consoles are fake anyways, as this article points out. http://insomnia.ac/hardware/the_fake-hd_era/
So they can sell you a $2.95 HDMI cable for $59.95.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
When people talk about 'gamers', it's best to remember that the biggest-selling games are things like the Sims and World of Warcraft. These people are as much gamers as people spending a thousand dollars to play Crysis with all the sliders turned up.
The price drop makes the console more competitive. Without an HDMI cable in the pakcage the customer will have to buy an HDMI cable (hopefully from the vendor); these are cheap to make but retail for about £10/$10 IIRC. Console maker and vendor both win.
Is this a rhetorical question?
Console game developer here.
I think "Fake" is too harsh a word for it. Keep in mind that all xbox 360 games MUST use some kind of full-screen antialiasing technique, because it is a certification requirement from Microsoft. Nearly all of them use the built-in 4x MSAA to satisfy this. So even with a rendertarget with only 600 lines in it, you're getting 2400 samples vertically. After posteffects and the hardware scaling, most games will not have any noticable aliasing artifacts ("jagged edges"). That is, after all, the purpose of that certification requirement--to make sure there are no jaggies.
The console lets you (the user) select the output resolution you want to send to your TV or other display device. (I use 720p myself, because I use a 1024x768 VGA projector to play games on my wall).
It then lets the game render at whatever resolution it wants, and the excellent built-in hardware upscaler converts the game's framebuffer into something that can be sent to the display. Most games use a fixed resolution for their framebuffer so that they will have predictable framerate and performance (you wouldn't want your 30fps shooter to drop down to 20fps just because you picked 1080p instead of 720p, would you??). The story on the PS3 is similar.