There are three factors which determine how ecconomical (and environmental) your transportation is:
1) What you drive 2) How much you drive 3) How you drive
Personally, I don't drive a Hummer nor do I drive a prius (I don't want to own either car because they do not suit my needs or wants) but I'm positive I have better "Fuel Ecconomy" than either car. My feet get me far greater mileage than any car and I use them far more than my car; I end up using transit a lot too.
I used to get a lot of negative comments about the truck I used to drive (15 year old F150) even though I filled it up every 6 weeks whereas most of the "environmental" civic drivers were filling up their cars 1 or 2 times a week.
Graphical power isn't the only measure of a game system, but you know, it is still important. The fact that developers are already complaining about the limits of the system means that in another year or two, when the novelty of the motion detector has worn off a bit, the wii's popularity will start to slide.
The only performance publishers (the people who pay for game development) care about is sales performance. Namco-Bandai has already stated that they are very unhappy with the poor sales of the PS3 and are going to develop (nearly) twice as many games for the Wii in the next year than the PS3. It really doesn't matter if the "novelty" wears off, when 75% of the games released in a given year are for the Wii the system will not need "novelty" to sell.
That's been a long time in coming. Halo 3 multi-player developers take note...
I don't think I'm particularly unique, but I have been thinking about this since Unreal Tournament was released...
If you designed a (very) large level with 4 or 8 seperate paths/areas then your level could be (somewhat) randomized or load balanced (depending on the number of players on the server) to maintain the fun. I could be wrong but I have always thought that when small levels become overcrowded, or large levels have too few players, the game is simply not fun...
How about you think like a consumer for a moment...
You want to buy a gaming machine to put under your TV and (shockingly) play videogames on; you don't care about multimedia functionality, or about "Linux". You can buy a $600 PS3, a $400 XBox 360 or a $250 Wii... The only games the PS3 has are (mostly) 1 year old ports of XBox 360 games, the graphics don't look any better than the XBox 360 games, and the games don't play any differently. At the same time the Wii may not be able to produce the graphics of the PS3/XBox 360 it provides a new gameplay experience which everyone describes as "Fun" (who would have thought "Fun" would be more important than "pretty" to some people?).
Basically the PS3 offers less value for more money... Not exactly the way you want people thinking of your product
Long-term vision is so rare these days that people are surprised when they see it.
Short-term Wall Street thinking wouldn't have allowed this. They'd say the XBox division was running a loss for 12 quarters straight and demand they stop the cash drain.
Long term vision is not what I would call the XBox or XBox 360... A vision does not take 7 years to finally break even on a yearly basis after you have lost $6 Billion. As far as a return on investmet, the XBox brand may finally break even as a whole after 10 years making their profit 0% after 10 years (a pretty awful return) so investors would be right to be angry at Microsoft.
Should it be news that a company is going to break even or start making money on a product line?
I understand the loss leader strategy, but it seems a little insane that a company has to wait several years before they can start making money on a product.
Everytime I tell someone I have a math degree they usually respond (proudly) "I Suck at Math!" On occasion they will go into a long conversation about how bad they were at math... I wonder whether it would be acceptable for someone to proclaim "I can't read" and then talk about how they couldn't even read a book to their 4 year old child at night.
Your earning potential in the modern world is largely dependant on your Math and Language skills; regardless on whether you think you are wasting your time because you "suck" at these subjects, you need to learn the material for your own good.
What should become obvious to anyone who has seen the prequels, Lucas set the original Star Wars as "Episode IV" mainly because it meant that he could drop people into an established setting without really explaining how it came to be; had Lucas made it "Episode 1" most of the movie would be an attempt to explain how the empire came to be. Claiming that it was supposed to be 9 films (probably knowing he couldn't produce more than 3) gave him the ability to leave a lot of loose strings at the end.
I honestly think the biggest mistake George Lucas made was he attempted to make his lies true; had he just left the movies as-is and claimed that it was too late to produce the prequels, and that it would be impossible to cast the sequels Star Wars would still be the greatest movie series ever created.
Sales rank is meaningless because Amazon.com sells far too few consoles to be considered a large sample; after watchin Amazon sales/sales rank for several weeks I noticed that (about) 20 sales in a day will put you close to #1 in the games section. NPD on the other hand is far more accurate and has sales for the month of March at:
Well there are complaints about the hardware but they are usually not about how limited the hardware is but are about how expensive the hardware is.
Back in the day, people bought the PS2 without any game that was nearly as good as Resistance and continued to buy the PS2 until games actually started to become available (roughly 6 to 9 months after the release of the PS2). Gamers are not buying the PS3 because at $600 most gamers realize that they can buy 10 to 20 games for a platform they already own, upgrade their PC, or buy the Wii or XBox 360 with several games; non-gamers are not buying the PS3 because you have to be pretty dedicated to a hobby to be willing to spend $600 up front on it.
It's a good thing they're not losing money on those consoles, cause they're certainly not making any on games. What's the only game 90% of the Wii owners are playing? Wii sports. And are they buying others? Nope, because the gimmick pretty much ends there. Oh, wait, some people got Wii Play. Oh, sorry, right, and some other people bought into the princess franchise, recycled elf adventure game #41.
Well, according to NPD the Wii has had 5,758,750 games sold to 2,107,500 systems in North America to the end of February which works out to 2.75 games per system above and beyond Wii sports; this (of course) doesn't include sales of Virtual Console games and (last time any data was reported) Wii points cards were one of the most popular accessories being sold.
"Nintendo makes games that are fun! I can get all these awesome things on virtual console!" All the Nintendo zealots are welcome to enjoy paying $10-$20 per title for games they already bought 20 years ago because they're "more fun" and "more creative", while all the while ragging on Microsoft and Sony for selling games that "look pretty but aren't fun".
Well, the price is $5 to $10 and a lot of the games are considered some of the best games ever created. Personally, I never owned a Turbo Graphics 16 or Sega Genesis so I'm happy to put down $5-$10 for a game I haven't played before which is considered to be amazing.
People will get tired of the Wii's one-trick-pony and Furby-inspired "marketing" campaign soon enough, about the same time they realize that plugging a system into their HDTV that actually looks good improves their enjoyment of rehashed game ideas more than a repetitive strain inducing controller.
I think you don't understand the Wii at all...
People are tired of the rehashed game idea regardless of whether it is in HD, SD or uses limited Wii functionality; the games people are excited about are the ones which are breaking new ground. There is a reason why Rayman Raving Rabids, Madden and Red Steel are the best selling third party games to date and that is because they offer gameplay that couldn't be done on the PS3 or XBox 360.
And you know what the BEST part of that will be? Not having to see 12 identical comments pop up on Slashdot with the exact same "ZOMG LOLOLOLOL I LOVE NINTENDO! ROFL MSONY SUX LOL!" remarks as soon as any article about platform differences shows up. Sure, it'll mean the two anti-Nintendo trolls like this will disappear, too, but at least these posts break the trend.
This would probably have more meaning if you weren't the same Anonymous Coward Sony Fanboy Troll that has been proclaiming the doom of the Wii since TGS 2005. Right now I think you're caught between the denile stage and rage stage on your way towards acceptance.
Blu-Ray jumped from (essentially) 0% marketshare to nearly 50% market share after 2 months because of the release of the PS3, since then it has only gained a couple of percentage points of market share. What this means is that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD have sold at very similar rates to eachother in the past couple of months.
Except (of course) that at the begining of february it was reported that HD-DVD had 52% market share as compared to Blu-Ray's 48%...
The newer numbers demonstrate that Blu-Ray has taken the lead but HD-DVD is keeping up at a decent pace considering that it is not included in (approximately) 200,000 PS3 system that are sold in a month.
The fact is that if you actually look at the total sales of both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies you will find that Blu-Ray is not leading by that much. link
But while abstract ratios and percentages like these have been bandied about for several months now, the Sony report goes one step further, providing the first public release of hard sales figures for HD DVD and Blu-ray discs from Nielsen VideoScan, the home entertainment industry's leading source for competitive sales data.
Among the numbers revealed: as of March 18, VideoScan put the cumulative number of Blu-ray titles sold since the format's inception at 844,000 units, versus HD DVD at 708,600.
What this means is that HD-DVD is unlikely to completely disapear for (at least) the next 2 or 3 years; the result of this is that most players sold in 2008 or 2009 will likely be dual format players. Samsung is just taking the opportunity to develop the dual format technology and then start selling it to other companies over the next several years.
One thing you haven't taken into consideration is that you can compress textures to reduce their size. Back in 2000 (when the PS2 was released) there was no hardware-supported texture formats so most developers simply put uncompressed textures on their disc; the Gamecube (in comparison) had texture compression supported in hardware which meant that their 1.5GB disc was not an issue for any single-layered DVD game that was released for the PS2. On a side note, texture compression is also one of the main reasons why loading times were so much lower on the Gamecube as compared to the PS2.
I'm pretty sure that both the XBox 360 and PS3 both support texture compression in hardware and that the compression algorithm they use is far superior to the one used on the Gamecube. Certainly, you will need more space for textures on the PS3 but it is not nearly as much space as you think it is.
Except for that DVD was initially available to consumers in 1997 and by the time the PS2 was released DVD players were not that expensive (~$400 for a name brand or $200 for Apex Digital), Blockbuster (and most rental places) were carying new DVD movies to rent, and consumer interest was very high for DVD movies. Right now Blu-Ray is brand new, most people don't own a HDTV to take advantage of the format, Blockbuster doesn't carry copies of movies at most of their stores, and most consuers don't know what a Blu-Ray disc is (I heard someone on the train yesterday claim that Blu-Ray was the format of movies in a PSP).
Blu-Ray is not DVD and will not have the same impact on PS3 sales that DVD had on PS2 sales.
One thing to consider is that soon after the release of the PS3 Blu-Ray took the lead yet in the past few months (even with the sales of the PS3) has not increased the lead:
http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/564 Among the numbers revealed: as of March 18, VideoScan put the cumulative number of Blu-ray titles sold since the format's inception at 844,000 units, versus HD DVD at 708,600.
Certainly, we don't know how things will go over the next couple of months but if the PS3 keeps up the poor sales that it has had so far in 2007 HD-DVD still has a lot of opportunities to catch up.
That (hardly) seems like a reasonable sample; people who are so desperate to buy a system that they're willing to enter a lottery for the opportunity to buy one. It is likely that the 20GB model would be far more attractive to someone who ended up playing Resistance or Motorstorm at their friends house and decided to buy a PS3; certainly (at the price) this is probably a small portion of the population but would grow as the price drops and more games come out to be the majority of the gaming population.
I love how they decided to drop the 20GB model because of the "overwhelming demand for the 60GB model from both retailers and consumers" when I can walk into any retailer and buy a 60GB PS3 whereas the 20GB model has never been in any store or online.
One of the things I find odd about this is that most of the people I know who are programmers, scripters or artists in game development were all excited about the Wii after the TGS 2005 showing and it was the marketing drones who thought it wouldn't be successful; at E3 2006 (after the marketing drones came across a 6 hour line-up at the Wii booth) companies started to be far more willing to devote resources to Wii games. In a way this is probably representative of what is wrong with so many publishers currently, they're so afraid to take a risk for fear of losing money that they end up missing out on the opportunity to make money.
For all of its innovation, Nintendo is ironically the biggest culprit when it comes to making tons of money off the same content as many times as it can (Team Ninja of DOA/NG fame being a close second in that respect)...
That having been said, I don't mind point-and-shoot controls for RE... that's great to hear. Though, since the Wii is backwards-compatible with Cube games, I don't really see this as all that exciting nor worth $30. I suppose this is similar to what Team Ninja did with Ninja Gaiden Black, hahaha (which I bought cause I'm a NG whore...).
When I get a Wii I'll probably pick up RE4 for it as well because that game rules. Except for the terrible mobility. It would have made more sense to me if Leon had a peg leg. Actually that would've been totaly awesome. They should've made him a peg legged pirate. Nothing about the controls or pacing would've needed to change, and it would've felt more natural, too.
Well, technically speaking this is Capcom's decision and not Nintendo... I agree that Nintendo does repackage a lot of stuff but it is usually for a different platform (say SNES games on the GBA) and with how many people buy it can you blame them? Hell, every week I consider rushing out to the store to buy Wii points cards because I really want to play certain N64/SNES games again.
Personally, I see this as being representative of what a lot of developers are trying to do right now; cash in on the popularity of the Wii while trying to show greater support for the platform. If this game sells well for what it is (say 250,000 copies world wide) I could see Capcom using it as reason enough to make a series of Resident Evil or Dino Crysis games specifically for the Wii...
I would say that he is probably correct in saying that no one wants a motion controller for the XBox 360... Developers don't want it because it would be an add on and practically no consumers would have it, and Consumers don't want it because so few game developers will support it at all.
Is twenty minutes enough play time to really determine whether a person has been impacted by the images and actions they have seen? Would you conclude that Smoking is not addictive after one smoke?
I don't think that videogames cause violence in passive people but I doubt this study shows anything except for the bias of the researcher.
After Microsoft announced an increase in the price of the price of the XBox 360, Sony decided to get into a price war with Microsoft so they're releasing a $679 Super-Duper PS3. Nintendo, obviously being the odd ball out of the three, refuses to get into this type of a price war.
So the PS3 looks amazing, up to 20 times faster then an average computer?
Well it could be 20 times as powerful as the average computer on folding at home...
I guess the question is how many PCs on this system are Pentium 2, Pentium 3, Pentium 4, Core Duo, and Core 2 Duo based PCs?
I could be wrong but I would suspect that the bulk of these PCs are University lab computers and people's obsolete home PCs (that is, not a gaming PC) so I wouldn't be surprised if most of the PCs are Pentium 2, Pentium 3 and slow Pentium 4 PCs.
I guess what I'm trying to say is the PS3 could be 20 times as powerful as the average computer on folding at home but is certainly not 20 times as powerful as the average new computer you can buy today...
Slashdot Mirror
What is with all the Hummer Hatred?
There are three factors which determine how ecconomical (and environmental) your transportation is:
1) What you drive
2) How much you drive
3) How you drive
Personally, I don't drive a Hummer nor do I drive a prius (I don't want to own either car because they do not suit my needs or wants) but I'm positive I have better "Fuel Ecconomy" than either car. My feet get me far greater mileage than any car and I use them far more than my car; I end up using transit a lot too.
I used to get a lot of negative comments about the truck I used to drive (15 year old F150) even though I filled it up every 6 weeks whereas most of the "environmental" civic drivers were filling up their cars 1 or 2 times a week.
The car matters far less than the driver
The only performance publishers (the people who pay for game development) care about is sales performance. Namco-Bandai has already stated that they are very unhappy with the poor sales of the PS3 and are going to develop (nearly) twice as many games for the Wii in the next year than the PS3. It really doesn't matter if the "novelty" wears off, when 75% of the games released in a given year are for the Wii the system will not need "novelty" to sell.
I don't think I'm particularly unique, but I have been thinking about this since Unreal Tournament was released
If you designed a (very) large level with 4 or 8 seperate paths/areas then your level could be (somewhat) randomized or load balanced (depending on the number of players on the server) to maintain the fun. I could be wrong but I have always thought that when small levels become overcrowded, or large levels have too few players, the game is simply not fun
How about you think like a consumer for a moment ...
... The only games the PS3 has are (mostly) 1 year old ports of XBox 360 games, the graphics don't look any better than the XBox 360 games, and the games don't play any differently. At the same time the Wii may not be able to produce the graphics of the PS3/XBox 360 it provides a new gameplay experience which everyone describes as "Fun" (who would have thought "Fun" would be more important than "pretty" to some people?).
... Not exactly the way you want people thinking of your product
You want to buy a gaming machine to put under your TV and (shockingly) play videogames on; you don't care about multimedia functionality, or about "Linux". You can buy a $600 PS3, a $400 XBox 360 or a $250 Wii
Basically the PS3 offers less value for more money
Long term vision is not what I would call the XBox or XBox 360
Should it be news that a company is going to break even or start making money on a product line?
I understand the loss leader strategy, but it seems a little insane that a company has to wait several years before they can start making money on a product.
Everytime I tell someone I have a math degree they usually respond (proudly) "I Suck at Math!" On occasion they will go into a long conversation about how bad they were at math ... I wonder whether it would be acceptable for someone to proclaim "I can't read" and then talk about how they couldn't even read a book to their 4 year old child at night.
Your earning potential in the modern world is largely dependant on your Math and Language skills; regardless on whether you think you are wasting your time because you "suck" at these subjects, you need to learn the material for your own good.
What should become obvious to anyone who has seen the prequels, Lucas set the original Star Wars as "Episode IV" mainly because it meant that he could drop people into an established setting without really explaining how it came to be; had Lucas made it "Episode 1" most of the movie would be an attempt to explain how the empire came to be. Claiming that it was supposed to be 9 films (probably knowing he couldn't produce more than 3) gave him the ability to leave a lot of loose strings at the end.
I honestly think the biggest mistake George Lucas made was he attempted to make his lies true; had he just left the movies as-is and claimed that it was too late to produce the prequels, and that it would be impossible to cast the sequels Star Wars would still be the greatest movie series ever created.
Sales rank is meaningless because Amazon.com sells far too few consoles to be considered a large sample; after watchin Amazon sales/sales rank for several weeks I noticed that (about) 20 sales in a day will put you close to #1 in the games section. NPD on the other hand is far more accurate and has sales for the month of March at:
Wii: 259,000
XBox 360: 199,000
PS3: 130,000
reuters link
Also, Japaneese numbers have been released pretty constantly and the year to date sales for the PS3 and Wii are:
Wii: 1,173,733
PS3: 397,991
The PS3 sales really are that bad!
Well there are complaints about the hardware but they are usually not about how limited the hardware is but are about how expensive the hardware is.
Back in the day, people bought the PS2 without any game that was nearly as good as Resistance and continued to buy the PS2 until games actually started to become available (roughly 6 to 9 months after the release of the PS2). Gamers are not buying the PS3 because at $600 most gamers realize that they can buy 10 to 20 games for a platform they already own, upgrade their PC, or buy the Wii or XBox 360 with several games; non-gamers are not buying the PS3 because you have to be pretty dedicated to a hobby to be willing to spend $600 up front on it.
Well, according to NPD the Wii has had 5,758,750 games sold to 2,107,500 systems in North America to the end of February which works out to 2.75 games per system above and beyond Wii sports; this (of course) doesn't include sales of Virtual Console games and (last time any data was reported) Wii points cards were one of the most popular accessories being sold.
Well, the price is $5 to $10 and a lot of the games are considered some of the best games ever created. Personally, I never owned a Turbo Graphics 16 or Sega Genesis so I'm happy to put down $5-$10 for a game I haven't played before which is considered to be amazing.
I think you don't understand the Wii at all
People are tired of the rehashed game idea regardless of whether it is in HD, SD or uses limited Wii functionality; the games people are excited about are the ones which are breaking new ground. There is a reason why Rayman Raving Rabids, Madden and Red Steel are the best selling third party games to date and that is because they offer gameplay that couldn't be done on the PS3 or XBox 360.
This would probably have more meaning if you weren't the same Anonymous Coward Sony Fanboy Troll that has been proclaiming the doom of the Wii since TGS 2005. Right now I think you're caught between the denile stage and rage stage on your way towards acceptance.
I think I should restate ...
Blu-Ray jumped from (essentially) 0% marketshare to nearly 50% market share after 2 months because of the release of the PS3, since then it has only gained a couple of percentage points of market share. What this means is that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD have sold at very similar rates to eachother in the past couple of months.
Except (of course) that at the begining of february it was reported that HD-DVD had 52% market share as compared to Blu-Ray's 48% ...
The newer numbers demonstrate that Blu-Ray has taken the lead but HD-DVD is keeping up at a decent pace considering that it is not included in (approximately) 200,000 PS3 system that are sold in a month.
What this means is that HD-DVD is unlikely to completely disapear for (at least) the next 2 or 3 years; the result of this is that most players sold in 2008 or 2009 will likely be dual format players. Samsung is just taking the opportunity to develop the dual format technology and then start selling it to other companies over the next several years.
One thing you haven't taken into consideration is that you can compress textures to reduce their size. Back in 2000 (when the PS2 was released) there was no hardware-supported texture formats so most developers simply put uncompressed textures on their disc; the Gamecube (in comparison) had texture compression supported in hardware which meant that their 1.5GB disc was not an issue for any single-layered DVD game that was released for the PS2. On a side note, texture compression is also one of the main reasons why loading times were so much lower on the Gamecube as compared to the PS2.
I'm pretty sure that both the XBox 360 and PS3 both support texture compression in hardware and that the compression algorithm they use is far superior to the one used on the Gamecube. Certainly, you will need more space for textures on the PS3 but it is not nearly as much space as you think it is.
Except for that DVD was initially available to consumers in 1997 and by the time the PS2 was released DVD players were not that expensive (~$400 for a name brand or $200 for Apex Digital), Blockbuster (and most rental places) were carying new DVD movies to rent, and consumer interest was very high for DVD movies. Right now Blu-Ray is brand new, most people don't own a HDTV to take advantage of the format, Blockbuster doesn't carry copies of movies at most of their stores, and most consuers don't know what a Blu-Ray disc is (I heard someone on the train yesterday claim that Blu-Ray was the format of movies in a PSP).
Blu-Ray is not DVD and will not have the same impact on PS3 sales that DVD had on PS2 sales.
Certainly, we don't know how things will go over the next couple of months but if the PS3 keeps up the poor sales that it has had so far in 2007 HD-DVD still has a lot of opportunities to catch up.
That (hardly) seems like a reasonable sample; people who are so desperate to buy a system that they're willing to enter a lottery for the opportunity to buy one. It is likely that the 20GB model would be far more attractive to someone who ended up playing Resistance or Motorstorm at their friends house and decided to buy a PS3; certainly (at the price) this is probably a small portion of the population but would grow as the price drops and more games come out to be the majority of the gaming population.
I love how they decided to drop the 20GB model because of the "overwhelming demand for the 60GB model from both retailers and consumers" when I can walk into any retailer and buy a 60GB PS3 whereas the 20GB model has never been in any store or online.
One of the things I find odd about this is that most of the people I know who are programmers, scripters or artists in game development were all excited about the Wii after the TGS 2005 showing and it was the marketing drones who thought it wouldn't be successful; at E3 2006 (after the marketing drones came across a 6 hour line-up at the Wii booth) companies started to be far more willing to devote resources to Wii games. In a way this is probably representative of what is wrong with so many publishers currently, they're so afraid to take a risk for fear of losing money that they end up missing out on the opportunity to make money.
Well, technically speaking this is Capcom's decision and not Nintendo
Personally, I see this as being representative of what a lot of developers are trying to do right now; cash in on the popularity of the Wii while trying to show greater support for the platform. If this game sells well for what it is (say 250,000 copies world wide) I could see Capcom using it as reason enough to make a series of Resident Evil or Dino Crysis games specifically for the Wii
I would say that he is probably correct in saying that no one wants a motion controller for the XBox 360... Developers don't want it because it would be an add on and practically no consumers would have it, and Consumers don't want it because so few game developers will support it at all.
Is twenty minutes enough play time to really determine whether a person has been impacted by the images and actions they have seen? Would you conclude that Smoking is not addictive after one smoke?
I don't think that videogames cause violence in passive people but I doubt this study shows anything except for the bias of the researcher.
Obviously ...
After Microsoft announced an increase in the price of the price of the XBox 360, Sony decided to get into a price war with Microsoft so they're releasing a $679 Super-Duper PS3. Nintendo, obviously being the odd ball out of the three, refuses to get into this type of a price war.
Well it could be 20 times as powerful as the average computer on folding at home
I guess the question is how many PCs on this system are Pentium 2, Pentium 3, Pentium 4, Core Duo, and Core 2 Duo based PCs?
I could be wrong but I would suspect that the bulk of these PCs are University lab computers and people's obsolete home PCs (that is, not a gaming PC) so I wouldn't be surprised if most of the PCs are Pentium 2, Pentium 3 and slow Pentium 4 PCs.
I guess what I'm trying to say is the PS3 could be 20 times as powerful as the average computer on folding at home but is certainly not 20 times as powerful as the average new computer you can buy today