And all those obsolete TVs will be dumped in the third world for scrap prices. Going digital might be nice as long as it doesn't destroy the environment and set the third world further back.
Actually, many of those TVs will probably have people buying a digital-to-analogue reciever for $25-$50 because (as CRT tvs become harder and harder to find) it will be cheaper than upgrading your TV to a reasonable sized LCD/Plasma TV (as a guess, $250-$500 for a 25-30 inch LCD TV).
There are millions of people who live on less than $25,000 per year in North America and they are probably not going to rush out to spend hundreds of dollars on a new TV.
There's a little bit more to that aswell...
Square lost a lot of money on Final Fantasy the movie and Iwata approached Square about how inexpensive game development was for the GBA and how (with Nintendo's help) they could make cheap games for the Gamecube; Final Fantasy: Chrystal Cronicles was a game made by a joint venture between Square that was funded by Fund Q (the new studio fund produced by Yamauchi when he steped down).
Not over 90, sure. But your comparison is one-sided. Here is the data from metacritic:
Actually, if you noticed I was pretty balanced and looked at both game sales and game ratings; the fact is that game reviews are largely subjective and represent how well a game apeals to the core-gamer demographic, game sales represent how a game apeals to to the masses. I also have been trying not to directly compare the PSP to the Nintendo DS, mainly because the Nintendo DS is one of the fastest selling consoles in the history of videogames (because of it's performance in Japan).
I also (initially) made sure I referenced that the PSP was lacking in good "portable" games which (for the most part) was not understood by you. The fact is that the vast majority of handheld owners play games in a very different fashion to people who play games at home; traditionally they play in shorter bursts, and they also really like 2d content (most of the people I know who are big portable gamers became so after 2D games were abandoned on home consoles).
Oh yeah and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is a movie...
Come on. Mario Kart is not a port? Castlevania, not a port? Again I'm not slamming the DS, I like the DS, but the games have limited appeal for me. The PSP seems to have limited appeal for you. Subjective. The DS 'wins' in pure sales, if you care about that.
I'll give you Mario Kart, but the difference between the DS and the PSP is the PSP is similar enough to the PS2 that it has recieved (more or less) direct ports from the PS2; most DS games are drastically different than their Gamecube (or other system) counter parts.
The Xbox has never been successful financially, perhaps the quarter that Halo 2 was released, but thats it. The GameCube was a 'failure' by your own definition! There are more PSPs in the world than GameCubes!
You keep jumping around on what you claim my definition of 'failure' is. My definition is essentially that the Gamecube/XBox were successful because they had several critically acclaimed software titles, and sold a reasonable ammount of software per console which imply that they were good systems to own; the PSP has not gotten to this point yet (it would be debatable to say whether the DS has either) and I think it would be foolish to argue otherwise.
If Nintendo or Apple did this, it would be called genius. Instead, it's a total marketing scam because it was done by Sony, who most likely just paid the company to market it and said you guys are the smart ones, you figure out the campaign. This article smacks of teenage journalism, completely down to the Liar, Liar DVD cover. Are these guys just realizing now that marketing companies play dirty to get you to buy their product? Welcome to reality, children.
I would have to disagree with you on this because, as far as I can tell, Nintendo is loved (in part) because of how classy of a company they are; in other words, people like them because they don't do stuff like this and had Nintendo produced this marketing campaign it would have hurt them far more than Sony. Basically, Nintendo doesn't pay artists to grafitti on walls, they don't produce ads in European countries focusing on "race" to promote the new color of thier system, and they don't make fake blogs to talk about how great their system is and this is why some people like them.
Look at the Wii comercials, no matter how crappy you think they are the main message is "look, the Wii is fun to play"... How original, showing people playing games in your comercials rather than creepy babies or ravens or self solving rubics-cubes.
When Nintendo comes in 3rd place (GameCube), we rightly point to their streamlined operation and say this is fine, one need not dominate the entire marketplace to 'win' (which is an illusion anyway) as far as gamers are concerned; we like that they continue to produce great products and don't vanish in a sea of debt. To turn that around now and crow about the DS outselling the PSP by a wide margin is just a little two-faced. And we aren't even talking about PS2s, which clobber everything. See how this works? Don't give in to the fanboy one-upsmanship. Its pointless. I'm sure there are plenty of happy PSP owners out there, who the hell are you to tell them that they really don't like their game unit?
You don't need to be the best selling videogame product to be considered a success, but you do need to have a lot of good videogames which the PSP really doesn't; the PSP has been on the market for almost 2 years and only has 1 game (Lumines) ranked at over 90% on gamerankings.com and only has 3 games to break a million sales worldwide (Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, Ridge Racers, Everybodys Golf Portable) http://www.vgcharts.org/worldtotals.php?name=&cons ole=PSP&publisher=&sort=Total . [To put this in perspective, the XBox 360 in half the time has 4 games about 90% on Gamerankings.com, and 3 games to break a million sales worldwide]
The point I was trying to get at was the PSP is trying to be cool by pushing the non-gaming functions rather than make a solid gaming machine; Sony started with "Look it plays UMD movies and is a MP3 player", now that UMD failed I see far more comercials about the picture/move playback related to memorystick than game comercials. Had Sony focused on making good games, and encouraging developers to make games (that aren't Playstation/PS2 ports) for the PSP the system would be selling better because it was a better gaming machine.
The Gamecube/XBox were successful gaming platforms with small userbases because people who bought those systems where happy with their purchase and played (a lot of) games on the; many (if not most) PSP owners are unhappy because they own an expensive paperweight.
Is it my imagination or is Sony's strategy for their playstation line to attempt to make their product 'cool' rather than to make it a good product for gamers. Over the life of the PSP it has been outsold by both the GBA and Nintendo DS and has failed to make a larger impact largely because it is not a particularly good portable videogame machine. Had Sony put the effort into it the PSP would have a larger library of good games, and in particular a library of unique 'portable gaming' content for the PSP, which would make the system sell far better.
Intelligent people or not, the population does demand a certain amount of traditional news. Some things can easily be covered in the future by freelancers or bloggers (like concerts and local events), but a blogger has nothing riding on being wrong. Journalists, at least, have their credibility--and whole career--on the line with big stories. If they are grossly factually incorrect, their career (at least in the big, large-pay markets) will be completely destroyed.
This is how it should work but unfortunately this is not how the system actually does work. The fact is that more and more people are looking at blogs as a way to find information because the main news channels tend to editorialize rather than inform, and misrepresnet the news to further their agenda; most people recognize that bloggers editorialize and misrepresent information but the bloggers are more open about it and you have a choice about the slant you get.
Seriously, obectively watch/read the news and you will find that the news is never giving the whole story they are just giving the side of the story they want you to know.
I know far too little about quantum physics to comment on the plausability of any claims related to it but I also wouldn't be too surprised if this theory was true. My reasoning is quite simple, being that the classification of substances, objects and other animals has made the difference between life and death and evolution should (over millions of years) provide mechanisms to differentiate these items; if you need to be able to tell the difference between two gasses which are similar in all ways not related to quantium physics then a method related to quantium physics will have to be generated in order to survive.
Basically, what I'm saying is that if a mutation to tolerate a dangerous substance doesn't apear over time it is likely that a mutation to detect a dangerous substance will apear
Although I believe there will be a continued need to hold terabytes of data (mostly for multimedia file storage), I think that a small (say 50GB) high speed storage device is desperately needed in most computers. Think of it this way, if you can get data onto and off of your "hard-drive" dramatically faster then booting your system will become dramatically faster and every application that has disc speed as a bottleneck (any game or database application) will run much faster.
Um, according to first TFA, the DS sold 918k. Maybe only 641k of those were Lites, but there's no sign of that 641k number in either link provided. Also unmentioned in the blurb is that the PSP did 412k. Since these are US numbers, it makes me wonder where all the "The PSP is neck-and-neck with the DS in North America!" comments are coming from. Unless Canadians bought a half-million PSPs while totally ignoring the DS during November, it looks like the DS has the PSP by over 2:1.
The "PSP is neck-and-neck with the DS" comments come from this:
The DS was released 4 months before the PSP so if you do the adjustment you'd find that the PSP + Nintendo DS were at the same level until June 2006 when the DS lite was launched; from that point on Nintendo has sold (approximately) 2 Million more units than Sony has. The depressing thing is that Sony's delay in Europe and Nintendo's dominance in Japan meant that the only region it was even close in was North America. The sad thing is that in North America ( http://www.vgcharts.org/usaconscomps.php?name1=PSP &name2=DS&type=3http://www.vgcharts.org/usaconscomps.php?name1=PSP &name2=DS&type=1 ) interest in PSP software has dropped off recently and it is likely that Developers will begin to abandon it in 2007.
Some Wii sales were probably Christmas presents and being that it came with a game (Wii sports) many of the people buying the system may not have picked up an extra game; even if they did grab a game they may not have picked up Zelda.
So, Sony says they'll have 200k units in North America for launch. NPD doesn't track all types of retailers or online sales. Their number is 197k.
Somehow the poster decides to say Sony *only* sold 197k as if that had anything at all to do with demand. They essentially sold exactly the number of PS3's they had available.
What is most telling is that demand for next generation systems is high this holiday season. The Wii and PS3, more or less sold out based on the supply they could get.
May 9, 2006
Kutaragi also took the time to comment on Sony's shipping targets for the system. SCE plans to have two million units available at launch (the Japanese press reports this as the initial shipment figure for the system, and not a number that will be gradually released over a launch window), with another two million by the end of the year and two million more before the end of March 2007.
After that Sony changed their estimates to 400,000 in North America at launch (100,000 in Japan) with 2 Million shipped worldwide by the end of the year...
After that Sony changed their estimates to 400,000 in North America at launch (100,000 in Japan) with 1 Million shipped to North America by the end of the year...
If they shipped 200,000 in North America (80,000 in Japan) they are so far off of their targets that it isn't even funny anymore...
Acutally, I could be wrong but I suspect that not including Walmart would skew the results...
Years ago I heard that Nintendo was far more successful at selling their product in Walmart than they were at Bestbuy/EBgames whereas Sony was far more successful in Bestbuy/EBGames as compared to Walmart; this was because the Gamecube was a less expensive system that targeted families (which fit Walmart like a glove) and the PS2 was more expensive and targeted single males (which suited Bestbuy/EBgames). If this is true, this would mean that Nintendo would lose more "sales" by not including Walmart in your study than Sony would.
By the way... I'm saying Nintendo sold a greater percentage of there consoles at Walmart, not that Nintendo outsold Sony at Walmart
Before saying that "The PS3 only shipped 197k" or that "Nintendo only shipped 476k Wii" you have to realize that NPD has never been a perfectly accurate survey of the number of system sales; they produce statistics that are valid and useful as a comparison to other NPD numbers. For years NPD didn't include Walmart's numbers and currently doesn't include online sales and sales from smaller retailers; this likely doesn't change the ratios of the numbers but it means that Sony could have sold 250k and Nintendo could have sold 600k.
My point was that installing Linux on a PS3 is like putting a square peg into a round hole; if the hole is large enough and the peg is small enough it will "work" but it is not a good fit. With $400 you could buy a cheap PC that can do everything the PS3 does (except play Blu-Ray movies) and has legacy support for (practically) every piece of hardware you already own; for $500/$600 you can buy a PS3 which can not do everything a PC does, and if you want to make use of hardware you already own you'll have to find adapters or print servers or whatever.
There's been a lot of talk on the net and on TV about supplies not being sufficient to even fulfil preorders let alone allow non-preorders to buy. I enquired at a few of the big name stores (HMV, Virgin and Game) and was told no chance.
The only question I would have is was this a problem caused by Nintendo (shipping less units than they planned on) or caused by the Stores (by taking pre-orders without knowing they would be getting a system). From my very limited understanding, most problems caused by people not recieving their pre-orders of PS3/Wii in North America were caused by stores that took pre-orders without knowing the number of systems that they would recieve.
Moral of the story: its worth trying local and less well known places, they're often a safer bet!
My advice (after recieving my Wii with only waiting an hour) would be to go to large chains that no one thinks of as a gaming store; I arrived at the Real-Canadian Superstore 1 hour before opening after I noticed long lines in front of Futureshop, Bestbuy and Walmart and I was 11th in line at the Superstore (they recieved 15 units).
In a way I agree with you though, if I wound up buying one itd probably be after the cost goes down a bit..
But can it burn CDs/DVDs? Can you install any OS besides linux on it? Does it have a PS/2 Keybord/mouse port or a printer port?
These may not seem like big things, but they're just to demonstrate that you're probably going to spend more money on a PS3 and (as a PC) it will function on a much worse level.
" article features Insomniac Games, who developed the PS3 launch title Resistance: Fall of Man."
Which is a game that is published by Sony developed by a company that is owned by Sony...
What's next "Bungie, the Developers of the XBox 360's highly anticipated shooter Halo 3, have announced that the XBox 360 is Super Powerful and that Sony Rapes Babies!"
I want to hear from EA, Ubisoft, Activision and Sega (ie. companies which have little interest in the platform) on which is easy/hard to develop for; so far EA has said that next-gen development is insanely expensive.
I don't even use the strap and have yet to come close to doing something which would require a strap to prevent from throwing the Wiimote. You would have to be doing something pretty stupid ( http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/11/29 ) to put enough force behind the Wiimote to throw it, break the strap and break your TV.
I honestly don't think that everyone in the music industry is as greedy or stupid as we would assume. I am willing to bet that there are dozens of executives who (like the majority of slashdotters) believe that the recording industry would be far better off if it reduced the cost of downloaded music to make stealing music not worth the time involved; if you're spending $0.25 per song (to pick a number) most people aren't going to bother with looking for torrents of new albums. They also realize that there are people (like me) who would then pay for an album they normally wouldn't associate with if it was inexpensive enough; terrible dance music is pretty good to run to.
I suspect the problem is that people who see things the same way most of us do are the 20/early-30 something iPod owning executives who do not have that much weight with the companies; I expect that in 15 years most record companies will catch up to today's reality...
With Nintendo, you pay $250 to get $200 worth of machine With Sony, you pay $600 to get $1000 worth of machine With Microsoft, you pay $400 to get $700 worth of machine
With Nintendo, you pay $250 on a $200 machine and Nintendo invests $300 into game development With Sony, you pay $600 to get a $900 machine With Microsoft, you pay $400 to get a $700 machine
Being that I could care less about Blu-Ray and am only buying this for games I wonder which I should buy... I can buy one machine for $250 which has the highest rated game of the year, and looks to have dozens of interesting and unique titles comming out for it in the next couple of months. I could also pay $400 to get a pretty powerful machine that has a few pretty cool exclusive games already out for it with a few more comming out soon, it also seems to have every multiplatform game available for it. Or I could spend $600 on a Blu-Ray player that has 1 worthwile exclusive game on it and tons of inferior ports from a less expensive system.
Hmmmm... What am I (a videogame player) going to do?
Profit matters, every dollar that was "invested" in hardware is a dollar that isn't going to software development...
My point was that if the PS3 is going to catch up they will have to be selling more systems in all regions and that they couldn't count on Japan to recover their lead on their own.
Personally (going back to my original point) I think that it will be remarkably difficult for the PS3 to become the worldwide leader because they will have to sell about 333,000 units per month more than the XBox 360; and I think it will be impossible for the PS3 to outsell the XBox 360 in North America/Europe because most of those 333,000 units per month would have to come in these regions and the XBox 360 isn't selling that poorly in either region. The fact is that (as a guess until may) the PS3 can't even produce as many units as the XBox 360 is selling so they are going to continue to lose ground; even when the supply issues are eliminated the XBox 360 will likely get an unanswered price drop that will give it a $200 advantage. The only way any system is going to pass the XBox 360 in sales in North America is if the system has DS lite level sales which I think is impossible for a system that is over $200.
Why you don't want Random people's Miis is because you'll have a parade full of 'HoBag', 'Slutty', 'RottenCrotch', and whatever other nasty names I... um I mean random people will think up of...
Slashdot Mirror
And all those obsolete TVs will be dumped in the third world for scrap prices. Going digital might be nice as long as it doesn't destroy the environment and set the third world further back.
Actually, many of those TVs will probably have people buying a digital-to-analogue reciever for $25-$50 because (as CRT tvs become harder and harder to find) it will be cheaper than upgrading your TV to a reasonable sized LCD/Plasma TV (as a guess, $250-$500 for a 25-30 inch LCD TV).
There are millions of people who live on less than $25,000 per year in North America and they are probably not going to rush out to spend hundreds of dollars on a new TV.
There's a little bit more to that aswell ...
Square lost a lot of money on Final Fantasy the movie and Iwata approached Square about how inexpensive game development was for the GBA and how (with Nintendo's help) they could make cheap games for the Gamecube; Final Fantasy: Chrystal Cronicles was a game made by a joint venture between Square that was funded by Fund Q (the new studio fund produced by Yamauchi when he steped down).
Not over 90, sure. But your comparison is one-sided. Here is the data from metacritic:
...
Actually, if you noticed I was pretty balanced and looked at both game sales and game ratings; the fact is that game reviews are largely subjective and represent how well a game apeals to the core-gamer demographic, game sales represent how a game apeals to to the masses. I also have been trying not to directly compare the PSP to the Nintendo DS, mainly because the Nintendo DS is one of the fastest selling consoles in the history of videogames (because of it's performance in Japan).
I also (initially) made sure I referenced that the PSP was lacking in good "portable" games which (for the most part) was not understood by you. The fact is that the vast majority of handheld owners play games in a very different fashion to people who play games at home; traditionally they play in shorter bursts, and they also really like 2d content (most of the people I know who are big portable gamers became so after 2D games were abandoned on home consoles).
Oh yeah and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is a movie
Come on. Mario Kart is not a port? Castlevania, not a port? Again I'm not slamming the DS, I like the DS, but the games have limited appeal for me. The PSP seems to have limited appeal for you. Subjective. The DS 'wins' in pure sales, if you care about that.
I'll give you Mario Kart, but the difference between the DS and the PSP is the PSP is similar enough to the PS2 that it has recieved (more or less) direct ports from the PS2; most DS games are drastically different than their Gamecube (or other system) counter parts.
The Xbox has never been successful financially, perhaps the quarter that Halo 2 was released, but thats it. The GameCube was a 'failure' by your own definition! There are more PSPs in the world than GameCubes!
You keep jumping around on what you claim my definition of 'failure' is. My definition is essentially that the Gamecube/XBox were successful because they had several critically acclaimed software titles, and sold a reasonable ammount of software per console which imply that they were good systems to own; the PSP has not gotten to this point yet (it would be debatable to say whether the DS has either) and I think it would be foolish to argue otherwise.
If Nintendo or Apple did this, it would be called genius. Instead, it's a total marketing scam because it was done by Sony, who most likely just paid the company to market it and said you guys are the smart ones, you figure out the campaign. This article smacks of teenage journalism, completely down to the Liar, Liar DVD cover. Are these guys just realizing now that marketing companies play dirty to get you to buy their product? Welcome to reality, children.
... How original, showing people playing games in your comercials rather than creepy babies or ravens or self solving rubics-cubes.
I would have to disagree with you on this because, as far as I can tell, Nintendo is loved (in part) because of how classy of a company they are; in other words, people like them because they don't do stuff like this and had Nintendo produced this marketing campaign it would have hurt them far more than Sony. Basically, Nintendo doesn't pay artists to grafitti on walls, they don't produce ads in European countries focusing on "race" to promote the new color of thier system, and they don't make fake blogs to talk about how great their system is and this is why some people like them.
Look at the Wii comercials, no matter how crappy you think they are the main message is "look, the Wii is fun to play"
When Nintendo comes in 3rd place (GameCube), we rightly point to their streamlined operation and say this is fine, one need not dominate the entire marketplace to 'win' (which is an illusion anyway) as far as gamers are concerned; we like that they continue to produce great products and don't vanish in a sea of debt. To turn that around now and crow about the DS outselling the PSP by a wide margin is just a little two-faced. And we aren't even talking about PS2s, which clobber everything. See how this works? Don't give in to the fanboy one-upsmanship. Its pointless. I'm sure there are plenty of happy PSP owners out there, who the hell are you to tell them that they really don't like their game unit?
s ole=PSP&publisher=&sort=Total . [To put this in perspective, the XBox 360 in half the time has 4 games about 90% on Gamerankings.com, and 3 games to break a million sales worldwide]
You don't need to be the best selling videogame product to be considered a success, but you do need to have a lot of good videogames which the PSP really doesn't; the PSP has been on the market for almost 2 years and only has 1 game (Lumines) ranked at over 90% on gamerankings.com and only has 3 games to break a million sales worldwide (Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, Ridge Racers, Everybodys Golf Portable) http://www.vgcharts.org/worldtotals.php?name=&con
The point I was trying to get at was the PSP is trying to be cool by pushing the non-gaming functions rather than make a solid gaming machine; Sony started with "Look it plays UMD movies and is a MP3 player", now that UMD failed I see far more comercials about the picture/move playback related to memorystick than game comercials. Had Sony focused on making good games, and encouraging developers to make games (that aren't Playstation/PS2 ports) for the PSP the system would be selling better because it was a better gaming machine.
The Gamecube/XBox were successful gaming platforms with small userbases because people who bought those systems where happy with their purchase and played (a lot of) games on the; many (if not most) PSP owners are unhappy because they own an expensive paperweight.
Is it my imagination or is Sony's strategy for their playstation line to attempt to make their product 'cool' rather than to make it a good product for gamers. Over the life of the PSP it has been outsold by both the GBA and Nintendo DS and has failed to make a larger impact largely because it is not a particularly good portable videogame machine. Had Sony put the effort into it the PSP would have a larger library of good games, and in particular a library of unique 'portable gaming' content for the PSP, which would make the system sell far better.
Intelligent people or not, the population does demand a certain amount of traditional news. Some things can easily be covered in the future by freelancers or bloggers (like concerts and local events), but a blogger has nothing riding on being wrong. Journalists, at least, have their credibility--and whole career--on the line with big stories. If they are grossly factually incorrect, their career (at least in the big, large-pay markets) will be completely destroyed.
This is how it should work but unfortunately this is not how the system actually does work. The fact is that more and more people are looking at blogs as a way to find information because the main news channels tend to editorialize rather than inform, and misrepresnet the news to further their agenda; most people recognize that bloggers editorialize and misrepresent information but the bloggers are more open about it and you have a choice about the slant you get.
Seriously, obectively watch/read the news and you will find that the news is never giving the whole story they are just giving the side of the story they want you to know.
I know far too little about quantum physics to comment on the plausability of any claims related to it but I also wouldn't be too surprised if this theory was true. My reasoning is quite simple, being that the classification of substances, objects and other animals has made the difference between life and death and evolution should (over millions of years) provide mechanisms to differentiate these items; if you need to be able to tell the difference between two gasses which are similar in all ways not related to quantium physics then a method related to quantium physics will have to be generated in order to survive.
Basically, what I'm saying is that if a mutation to tolerate a dangerous substance doesn't apear over time it is likely that a mutation to detect a dangerous substance will apear
Although I believe there will be a continued need to hold terabytes of data (mostly for multimedia file storage), I think that a small (say 50GB) high speed storage device is desperately needed in most computers. Think of it this way, if you can get data onto and off of your "hard-drive" dramatically faster then booting your system will become dramatically faster and every application that has disc speed as a bottleneck (any game or database application) will run much faster.
Well, I didn't read the article, but why wouldn't the SNES sholder buttons be considered Prior art?
Um, according to first TFA, the DS sold 918k. Maybe only 641k of those were Lites, but there's no sign of that 641k number in either link provided. Also unmentioned in the blurb is that the PSP did 412k. Since these are US numbers, it makes me wonder where all the "The PSP is neck-and-neck with the DS in North America!" comments are coming from. Unless Canadians bought a half-million PSPs while totally ignoring the DS during November, it looks like the DS has the PSP by over 2:1.
P &name2=DS&type=2
P &name2=DS&type=3 http://www.vgcharts.org/usaconscomps.php?name1=PSP &name2=DS&type=1 ) interest in PSP software has dropped off recently and it is likely that Developers will begin to abandon it in 2007.
The "PSP is neck-and-neck with the DS" comments come from this:
http://www.vgcharts.org/usaconscomps.php?name1=PS
The DS was released 4 months before the PSP so if you do the adjustment you'd find that the PSP + Nintendo DS were at the same level until June 2006 when the DS lite was launched; from that point on Nintendo has sold (approximately) 2 Million more units than Sony has. The depressing thing is that Sony's delay in Europe and Nintendo's dominance in Japan meant that the only region it was even close in was North America. The sad thing is that in North America ( http://www.vgcharts.org/usaconscomps.php?name1=PS
Some Wii sales were probably Christmas presents and being that it came with a game (Wii sports) many of the people buying the system may not have picked up an extra game; even if they did grab a game they may not have picked up Zelda.
So, Sony says they'll have 200k units in North America for launch. NPD doesn't track all types of retailers or online sales. Their number is 197k.
...
...
...
Somehow the poster decides to say Sony *only* sold 197k as if that had anything at all to do with demand. They essentially sold exactly the number of PS3's they had available.
What is most telling is that demand for next generation systems is high this holiday season. The Wii and PS3, more or less sold out based on the supply they could get.
May 9, 2006
Kutaragi also took the time to comment on Sony's shipping targets for the system. SCE plans to have two million units available at launch (the Japanese press reports this as the initial shipment figure for the system, and not a number that will be gradually released over a launch window), with another two million by the end of the year and two million more before the end of March 2007.
http://ps3.ign.com/articles/706/706133p1.html
After that Sony changed their estimates to 400,000 in North America at launch (100,000 in Japan) with 2 Million shipped worldwide by the end of the year
After that Sony changed their estimates to 400,000 in North America at launch (100,000 in Japan) with 1 Million shipped to North America by the end of the year
If they shipped 200,000 in North America (80,000 in Japan) they are so far off of their targets that it isn't even funny anymore
Acutally, I could be wrong but I suspect that not including Walmart would skew the results ...
... I'm saying Nintendo sold a greater percentage of there consoles at Walmart, not that Nintendo outsold Sony at Walmart
Years ago I heard that Nintendo was far more successful at selling their product in Walmart than they were at Bestbuy/EBgames whereas Sony was far more successful in Bestbuy/EBGames as compared to Walmart; this was because the Gamecube was a less expensive system that targeted families (which fit Walmart like a glove) and the PS2 was more expensive and targeted single males (which suited Bestbuy/EBgames). If this is true, this would mean that Nintendo would lose more "sales" by not including Walmart in your study than Sony would.
By the way
Before saying that "The PS3 only shipped 197k" or that "Nintendo only shipped 476k Wii" you have to realize that NPD has never been a perfectly accurate survey of the number of system sales; they produce statistics that are valid and useful as a comparison to other NPD numbers. For years NPD didn't include Walmart's numbers and currently doesn't include online sales and sales from smaller retailers; this likely doesn't change the ratios of the numbers but it means that Sony could have sold 250k and Nintendo could have sold 600k.
My point was that installing Linux on a PS3 is like putting a square peg into a round hole; if the hole is large enough and the peg is small enough it will "work" but it is not a good fit. With $400 you could buy a cheap PC that can do everything the PS3 does (except play Blu-Ray movies) and has legacy support for (practically) every piece of hardware you already own; for $500/$600 you can buy a PS3 which can not do everything a PC does, and if you want to make use of hardware you already own you'll have to find adapters or print servers or whatever.
There's been a lot of talk on the net and on TV about supplies not being sufficient to even fulfil preorders let alone allow non-preorders to buy. I enquired at a few of the big name stores (HMV, Virgin and Game) and was told no chance.
The only question I would have is was this a problem caused by Nintendo (shipping less units than they planned on) or caused by the Stores (by taking pre-orders without knowing they would be getting a system). From my very limited understanding, most problems caused by people not recieving their pre-orders of PS3/Wii in North America were caused by stores that took pre-orders without knowing the number of systems that they would recieve.
Moral of the story: its worth trying local and less well known places, they're often a safer bet!
My advice (after recieving my Wii with only waiting an hour) would be to go to large chains that no one thinks of as a gaming store; I arrived at the Real-Canadian Superstore 1 hour before opening after I noticed long lines in front of Futureshop, Bestbuy and Walmart and I was 11th in line at the Superstore (they recieved 15 units).
$600 isnt a bad price for a high end media PC.
Plus it can play games and bluray media.
In a way I agree with you though, if I wound up buying one itd probably be after the cost goes down a bit..
But can it burn CDs/DVDs?
Can you install any OS besides linux on it?
Does it have a PS/2 Keybord/mouse port or a printer port?
These may not seem like big things, but they're just to demonstrate that you're probably going to spend more money on a PS3 and (as a PC) it will function on a much worse level.
Beyond the geek factor, what is the point of Linux on the PS3?
...
Does it do anything that you couldn't do with a much less expensive PC that you can install Linux on? I just don't get it
" article features Insomniac Games, who developed the PS3 launch title Resistance: Fall of Man."
...
Which is a game that is published by Sony developed by a company that is owned by Sony
What's next "Bungie, the Developers of the XBox 360's highly anticipated shooter Halo 3, have announced that the XBox 360 is Super Powerful and that Sony Rapes Babies!"
I want to hear from EA, Ubisoft, Activision and Sega (ie. companies which have little interest in the platform) on which is easy/hard to develop for; so far EA has said that next-gen development is insanely expensive.
Honestly, I don't see the problem ...
I don't even use the strap and have yet to come close to doing something which would require a strap to prevent from throwing the Wiimote. You would have to be doing something pretty stupid ( http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/11/29 ) to put enough force behind the Wiimote to throw it, break the strap and break your TV.
I honestly don't think that everyone in the music industry is as greedy or stupid as we would assume. I am willing to bet that there are dozens of executives who (like the majority of slashdotters) believe that the recording industry would be far better off if it reduced the cost of downloaded music to make stealing music not worth the time involved; if you're spending $0.25 per song (to pick a number) most people aren't going to bother with looking for torrents of new albums. They also realize that there are people (like me) who would then pay for an album they normally wouldn't associate with if it was inexpensive enough; terrible dance music is pretty good to run to.
...
I suspect the problem is that people who see things the same way most of us do are the 20/early-30 something iPod owning executives who do not have that much weight with the companies; I expect that in 15 years most record companies will catch up to today's reality
With Nintendo, you pay $250 to get $200 worth of machine
... I can buy one machine for $250 which has the highest rated game of the year, and looks to have dozens of interesting and unique titles comming out for it in the next couple of months. I could also pay $400 to get a pretty powerful machine that has a few pretty cool exclusive games already out for it with a few more comming out soon, it also seems to have every multiplatform game available for it. Or I could spend $600 on a Blu-Ray player that has 1 worthwile exclusive game on it and tons of inferior ports from a less expensive system.
... What am I (a videogame player) going to do?
...
With Sony, you pay $600 to get $1000 worth of machine
With Microsoft, you pay $400 to get $700 worth of machine
With Nintendo, you pay $250 on a $200 machine and Nintendo invests $300 into game development
With Sony, you pay $600 to get a $900 machine
With Microsoft, you pay $400 to get a $700 machine
Being that I could care less about Blu-Ray and am only buying this for games I wonder which I should buy
Hmmmm
Profit matters, every dollar that was "invested" in hardware is a dollar that isn't going to software development
My point was that if the PS3 is going to catch up they will have to be selling more systems in all regions and that they couldn't count on Japan to recover their lead on their own.
Personally (going back to my original point) I think that it will be remarkably difficult for the PS3 to become the worldwide leader because they will have to sell about 333,000 units per month more than the XBox 360; and I think it will be impossible for the PS3 to outsell the XBox 360 in North America/Europe because most of those 333,000 units per month would have to come in these regions and the XBox 360 isn't selling that poorly in either region. The fact is that (as a guess until may) the PS3 can't even produce as many units as the XBox 360 is selling so they are going to continue to lose ground; even when the supply issues are eliminated the XBox 360 will likely get an unanswered price drop that will give it a $200 advantage. The only way any system is going to pass the XBox 360 in sales in North America is if the system has DS lite level sales which I think is impossible for a system that is over $200.
Why you don't want Random people's Miis is because you'll have a parade full of 'HoBag', 'Slutty', 'RottenCrotch', and whatever other nasty names I ... um I mean random people will think up of ...