Was this story predictable or what? Poor Zonk could not bear some positive press about the PS3 having tremendous demand at launch.
Tremendous Demand?
Tremendous Demand would be selling more than 1 Million units in a day because so many people want to play your system they rush out and buy it; when you ship 400,000 (or less) units and the vast majority of people are buying it because they assume there will be a long term (supply based) shortage and they can make a decent profit selling it on eBay. If the rumors are right (which I'm not saying they are) Sony shipped about half of the 400,000 units they planned on shipping so this can not be associated with demand.
All we saw today was a company that had months to prepare for a launch and didn't come even close to producing a decent number of systems for it.
A reasonable person would argue that the PS3 is a more cost effective performance set up... Many Sony fanboys argue that it simply isn't possible (which isn't true)
Just as an observation, you see several PS3 fans say that you can't buy a PC that outperforms the PS3...
In this review (practically) every system has FEAR running at 2560x1600 with AA and AF at nearly 60fps...
The Recording industry lobbied the government to introduce a tax on recordable CDs (and MP3 players IIRC) which was then paid out to the recording industry; later the recording industry wanted to sue individuals in Canada for downloading music and it was ruled that people had already paid for the music through this tax.
There is nothing wrong with that but I'm reasonably sure you're going to be confused by how popular the Wii ends up being.
Of the 100,000,000+ consoles that are sold in the world the vast majority of them are sold to casual gamers and "non-gamers." Graphics don't really matter to these people, HD doesn't matter to these people, and amazing sound doesn't matter to these people because if it did the Playstation 2 would have lost out to either the Gamecube or the XBox. You're probably all about the Photo-realistic graphics but most people only want a game that is fun to play for a little while.
The main thing about the Wii is that it is a major advancement in an area where so little advancement has happened. No one disputes that current user interfaces are lacking; consider how poorly First person shooters control on a controller, how poorly fighting games work on a keyboard, and how many buttons you'd need to perform any act in WoW. The Wiimote may not be perfect, and may end up being lacking and used in gimicky ways, but the same could be said about the early 3D games; no advancement can happen until someone takes the first step and the Wiimote seems to be a reasonable step in the right direction.
The fact of the matter is the vast,vast,vast majority of console developers don't post online - it's simply not in our culture to do so. Never have and probably never will.
An AC pretending to be a vidogame developer... how original...
So Mr Game Developer why do you need a 4 dimentional matrix to store transformations in a 3 dimentional game? What size of matrix do you need for a 2 dimentional game?
The vast,vast,vast majority of of console developers are buying PS3s. Especially with the whole Linux development stuff to go with the amazingly powerful hardware
Not to be blunt, why would any developer spend $600 to have a linux system whey you can do (pretty much) exactly the same thing with a $200 PC?
Most of us make very good money and have very good home media equipment and are already starting to pickup BluRay movies.
100% proof that you are not a game developer... I used to be one, now make about three times as much money as a independant contracting web developer; game developers are paid poorly, and have little time to watch movies because they are worked to death...
Developers also probably like the Wii from a financial sense. I R not a game programmer, but it's got to be easier and cheaper to develop for. Madden on the Wii is going to be a completely new experience with extremely low dev costs. All they do is port the gamecube version, polish it up, and add in the new controls. Madden on the PS3 and 360 is also somewhat new, but mainly on account of spending lots of money to make perty new graphics.
It really has very little to do with game programmers and when someone starts saying that development costs are effected by the "difficulty of programming for the Cell" or what not you can tell they don't really know what they're talking about; I know you didn't do this, but it is a pet peeve of mine.
The fact is that state of the art computer graphics (almost always) involve increasing the ammount of data (usually through adding a texture) on top of a surface in order to emulate a physical property; for example Normal Maps are just textures full of surface normals that are used to emulate small geometry on a surface, and BDRFs can be used to emulate material properties or micro-geometry of a surface. All of this data that is added to the surface has to be generated by a person (either through texturing or writing a shader) and applied to the surface by a person (usally a texture artist).
What this means is that in order to create a Next Generation game you have to hire many more artists which causes the development costs to skyrocket (currently the FIFA team at EA is larger than 100 people). The Wii allows developers to produce upgraded versions of previous generation graphics which means that development costs are pretty stable. The end result is that Next Generation games on the PS3/Xbox 360 cost 3 to 4 times as much to produce than a Wii game.
That's because, in theory, there are plenty of Wiis to go around. Nintendo is manufacturing millions. It shouldn't be hard to get one within the first week or so. At least that's what I'm banking on and from what I've read I don't seem to be alone. With the PS3 everyone knew they didn't make enough to meet demand...
Yeah, I pretty much feel the same way as you (and I think most people do aswell)...
The fact is that with how many units Nintendo is producing, and how quickly they should be able to restock, there is little chance of a long term shortage; what this leads to is that there is little opportunity for profit so less scalpers are interested in the system. With scalpers not camping out for days (or weeks) to get a system it is more likely that you will be able to get one on launch day without camping out yourself.
Ultimately this means that the Wii will have a (successful) launch that is very orderly; there aren't going to be riots or muggings, all that is going to happen is most people who want a Wii on launch day are going to get one with (potentially) some having to wait a week or two. This means that there is little that is news worthy so it gets less press.
I have wondered for a while what would happen if the press put a different slant on the stories that they release if you would see companies react differently; if the PS3 launch was reported as "Sony was incompetent and released far too few systems which caused massive riots at Best-Buy" rather than "The PS3 is the hot item to have, and its launch caused riots" would Sony try to ensure that the PS4 launch was orderly? If the Wii launch went well and news agencies reported it as "Nintendo had a successful system launch this weekend selling 950,000 systems; that is over twice as many systems as the XBox 360 or PS3 were able to sell in their opening days" would there be a greater focus on producing enough units to meet demand?
It seems to me that because news agencies focus on negative things that a lot of companies will produce negative things (shortages) in order to get coverage on the news; I'm not saying that Sony went out of their way to produce too few systems, just that if they only got news coverage for a good launch they would ensure that production was on schedule.
But that said, I found it funny all those articles on Slashdot about how expensive the PS3 is, and then seeing the PS3 sold for 3000 USD. Kinda sets the 'OMG the PS3 is so expensive' campaign right, it was NOT (too) expensive.
I'm not so sure a small percentage of people who are willing to pay more than a product is worth demonstrates the product is not overpriced (especially in the case of a gaming system), even if you saw dozens of bids at $100,000 for the PS3 it still can be overpriced. The reason for this is simple, the PS3 is only a decent product (as a gaming system) if it sells enough systems in order to get strong support from developers; this support is necessary to get exclusive games and (enhanced) ports of other games. A gaming system can not be very successful and be a luxury item beyond the means of the average gamer (for very long). Whether $500/$600 is too much has yet to be seen, but I suspect we won't know until January 2008 at the earliest.
I'm actually reasonably disturbed by the Chaos that has been created by greed...
How is reselling a PS3 greed? To label this greed you need to know what financial situation these people are in.
Are they standing in line to afford a luxury item or is this a rare opportunity to make 2 months rent in a day?
Ticket/Event/Product Scalping ( reselling ) is not always illegal and many legitimate business do it. Tickmaster at least at one point aunctioned tickets to popular events.
Finally, who is being hurt by the PS3 resellers? The gamers who have to wait an extra week to get their hands on a PS3?
I (personally) see nothing wrong with the act of scalping a product in order to make a decent profit; I do however see a problem with trampling people to get a product in order to sell it online for a decent profit. Regardless of whether your use of your windfall is a noble cause or not, when you callously disregard the wellbeing of your fellow person in order to make the money it becomes an immoral act.
What moral cost? It's called supply and demand. It's not like this is a necessary purchase for survival.
I wasn't talking about the product having any moral implications, more about how people's actions were reasonably disgusting (Riots, Mobs, fights, etc.). The thing that makes this so much worse is (most of) this could have been prevented by Managers being reasonably intelligent on how they handled it. How difficult would it have been to create a basic "lottery" system where everyone who was at your store 15 minutes before it opened up could enter; the winners get the right to purchase a system and you do not allow them to transfer their "sales ticket".
I'm actually reasonably disturbed by the Chaos that has been created by greed...
In practically every interview I have seen the reporter is talking to someone who intends to sell the PS3 for massive profit; in one case a man was talking about how he was going to make $2000 in one days work. I could be wrong but it seems like the PS3 launch has brought out everyone who is desperate to make a little money regardless of the moral cost.
Halo spawned countless imitators, and the market is awash with the corpses of space-marine-shoots-aliens games which simply didn't resonate with the gaming audience in the same way.
Wait, Halo didn't create the first marine-shoots-aliens games they have existed for a very long time; you could argue that Halo was mostly a rip-off of the delivery method produced by Half-life (1998) and similar content and style of Doom (1994) [replace Demons with Aliens]. All Halo did was introduce console gamers to the modern (story based) PC first person shooter; at the time most of the First Person shooters released to consoles were still level based (think of Goldeneye/Perfect Dark).
The parking lot likely has security cameras, the store itself is private property, and most places have people called "police officers." If the store suddenly decides they don't like you camping on their sidewalk, you will, to say the least, lose your place in line.
I'm actually surprised that we don't see more of this...
As a customer I really hate having to "brush" through a crowd of local teengers who decide to hang out at the doors of my local 7-11; I understand why they do it (I'm not that old) but it is not something I enjoy. Anyways, I can't imagine that the average person who is 30+ wants to walk into Target when they have a shanty town that is full of mostly 18-22 year olds.
Final Fantasy X sold 7.93 Million units world wide on the PS2 and Metal Gear Solid 2 sold 5.59 units world wide on the PS2 (the two games everyone uses for this argument); even if you assume that no one who owned Final Fantasy X bought Metal Gear Solid 2, and that people who bought these games bought the PS2 for these games, that would mean that 13.5 Million PS2s were sold for these games. To put this in perspective, both the XBox and Gamecube sold over 20 Million units and the PS2 sold over 100 Million units.
The fact is that even if Sony can maintain exclusivity over Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Tekken and Soul Calibur their sales are not ensured to be greater than about 15-20 Million units; Sony doesn't make these games and they are likely to show up on other consoles in one form or another. If Sony really starts to trail the Wii (as an example) it is quite possible for Square Enix to make a (real) Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest game for the Wii, exactly like they have for the Nintendo DS.
No publishers are loyal to a particular console, they are loyal to their stockholders; if they can make more money by producing a Final Fantasy game for the Wii then they could by making it for the PS3 the game will be produced for the Wii.
One thing that all MMO games need is self-generating content regardless of whether that content is procedural or combinatorial; procedural is where content is created through an algorithm, combinatorial is where you have content that is split into a bunch of independant sections where the final product is a combination of all of the sections. This is so important because it would free up resources to produce more "crafted" experiences.
Exitetruck is awsome as a time killer. It didn't feel like a full "I must play through all of this" tpe game (then again racing games never feel like that to me), it DID feel like somethign that you could easily enjoy when you have 10 mins to kill (or as a party game). I will probably be picking up a copy of it.
A lot of the more negative reviews I have read for Excitetruck (and other games) seem to focus on the lack of a few features and then justify destroying the game in its score; basically they can be summarised as "Excite truck is an amazingly fun game when playing by yourself or with a friend, but being that it doesn't have online multiplayer or 4 player splitscreen 6/10." Now I understand why people want to point that out but it seems like it isn't being scored for the game it is, it is being reviewed for the game it isn't. I think I can explain this better...
Since about 1999, when I was playing Zelda:MM and Unreal Tournament at the same time, I have thought that you could make an amazing Online Multiplayer (Deathmatch or CTF) game using Zelda as a base; you could make several classes of characters which had different items and health levels or what not. Personally, I think that this is an obvious extention to The Legend of Zelda and I'm disapointed that no one has made a Zelda Clone that has included this. What I was saying about reviewing a game for what it isn't is, would it make sense for someone to give The Legend of Zelda:TP a 6/10 because it didn't include Online Multiplayer?
What I've been waiting for is more reviews to come in so we can see how well the games are matching up with people's expectations. Its all good to say that Game A looks so great, or Game B is so inovative, but until there is a final product it is hard to judge. So far it sounds like Zelda is Awsome, and Resistance is Excellent, but there are still a lot of titles that have yet to be reviewed (Red Steel) and some that have remarkably varied Reviews (ExciteTruck).
Ultimately the important thing is the games, the question is whether many of the games have lived up to the hype
In my opinion these comercials represent the PS3 pretty well...
There is a massive focus on becoming cool with little interest in why something is cool in the first place. People loved the Playstation (and PS2) because it was affordable and had the largest line-up of games, there really is no 'magic' about it. What Sony seems focused on is technology (cell), media (Blu-Ray) and cool-ness when they should be producing a low cost system and ensuring they have the most (and the best) games released exclusively for it.
If they had 5 high quality exclusive games at launch, the best advertizing strategy would be to show all these games and have a big ass sign that said (ONLY ON PS3).
Bullshit. Unless you expect the whole life of the console to be what's available at launch. It is absolutely retarded.
Especially when you are comparing it to the 360 launch...
First off, I never referenced the XBox 360...
Secondly, the reality of all next (new) generation systems is that they are the most expensive when they have the least ammount of content; essentially you pay a priemium in order to play the launch line-up when it is released. Certainly there will be better games released through the life of the system but there is nothing saying these games will be released before there is a price drop, or that your console will survive to see them (consider how many people replaced their system 12-24 months after they bought it because it broke).
The fact is that you're spending $500/$600 to play Resistance or Genji... You could spend $400 to play most of the other games on the XBox 360 or you could wait to spend $300-$500 on a PS3 when MGS4 (or whatever game you really want) comes out.
The only 2 games on that list that are not readily availabe for other systems are Genji 2: Days of the Blade (which is currently rated at 59% based on 4 reviews on Gamerankings.com) and Resistance: Fall of Man (which is currently rated at 90.3% based on 3 reviews on Gamerankings.com)
It will take some time before the scores become more solid...
The question is can you justify spending $500/$600 for 1 good game?
People have been camping out a week ahead of time for PS3s here in the States.
Because they know how limited the supply is...
The PS2 launch was absolutely crazy, but nothing like the PS3 launch is turning out to be.
Because of how limited the supply is...
The Wii hype seems to have fallen off a bit but appears to be still pretty strong. Good thing Nintendo fucked over GameCube owners wanting to play the new Zelda or the Wii launch lineup would be pretty pathetic. Lack of online play for almost all games until next year and many of the big games other than Zelda aren't appearing until March or so.
How are Gamecube owners fucked over by having to wait 2 weeks for a game? And how is the Wii launch lineup pretty pathetic without Zelda? And what big games other than Zelda aren't appearing until March or so?
Wii hype has "died down" only so far as people are a little hyped out... Most people have spent the past 6-12 months talking about "When the Revolution/Wii will be released" that they're mostly conserned with going out and buying one now...
Seems like the gaming press has forgotten the 360 is still around.
That could be because everyone who owns an XBox 360 is playing the videogame that is currently ranked #1 among games released in 2006 by gamerankings.com...
I won't quite agree that more people are required to produce larger and more detailed enviroments. You only have to carefully craft the parts that are important to gameplay. Even that isn't that important given the open nature of many of today's games. Most of the expanded maps and certain ranges of objects can be produced algorithmicly. A lot of things such as textures, sounds, and object primitives can be copied from title to title. A little work on world-generation and source materials such as textures and developers can let game worlds largely create themselves if they have the processing power and disc capacity needed. The fun thing about such worlds is that you can end up with unexpected twists that developers may not expect and which gives players that explore the worlds chances for a lot of alternative ways to play the game.
It's harder and more expensive to develop in a limited system than it is when you can just throw more work at the processing power of the system and not worry about storage capacity
You're correct that you can produce content using an algorithm, but developing the algorithms is very expensive. At several universities the graphics programs are focused on procedural content generation of plants and trees; at one well known University they have been working on this problem for 10 years with several PHD researchers (and their students) and have yet to perfect the method. In the near future procedural content generation is (mostly) going to be very limited in scope.
Now, you could use greater power and greater resources to reduce the cost of game development (say if you continued to produce 2D games on the PS3 using SVG rather than pixelmaps) but that never happens. There is a reason why it is so much less expensive to produce a DS game compared to a PSP game, and why people are reporting that Wii games are so much cheaper than PS3 games, and that is mostly that you can say "it can't be done" when a marketing manager "asks" you to include into your game. When you have a limited scope, and limited requirements, in anything you produce you will usually have a much less expensive (much higher quality) product; greater resources tends to increase the scop and increase the requirements of any product and thus makes it much more difficut to produce.
Slashdot Mirror
Was this story predictable or what? Poor Zonk could not bear some positive press about the PS3 having tremendous demand at launch.
Tremendous Demand?
Tremendous Demand would be selling more than 1 Million units in a day because so many people want to play your system they rush out and buy it; when you ship 400,000 (or less) units and the vast majority of people are buying it because they assume there will be a long term (supply based) shortage and they can make a decent profit selling it on eBay. If the rumors are right (which I'm not saying they are) Sony shipped about half of the 400,000 units they planned on shipping so this can not be associated with demand.
All we saw today was a company that had months to prepare for a launch and didn't come even close to producing a decent number of systems for it.
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=204055&c id=16677399c id=16517957
... Many Sony fanboys argue that it simply isn't possible (which isn't true)
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=201751&
A reasonable person would argue that the PS3 is a more cost effective performance set up
Just as an observation, you see several PS3 fans say that you can't buy a PC that outperforms the PS3 ...
In this review (practically) every system has FEAR running at 2560x1600 with AA and AF at nearly 60fps ...
Essentially that is what happened in Canada ...
The Recording industry lobbied the government to introduce a tax on recordable CDs (and MP3 players IIRC) which was then paid out to the recording industry; later the recording industry wanted to sue individuals in Canada for downloading music and it was ruled that people had already paid for the music through this tax.
I honestly don't think you get it ...
There is nothing wrong with that but I'm reasonably sure you're going to be confused by how popular the Wii ends up being.
Of the 100,000,000+ consoles that are sold in the world the vast majority of them are sold to casual gamers and "non-gamers." Graphics don't really matter to these people, HD doesn't matter to these people, and amazing sound doesn't matter to these people because if it did the Playstation 2 would have lost out to either the Gamecube or the XBox. You're probably all about the Photo-realistic graphics but most people only want a game that is fun to play for a little while.
The main thing about the Wii is that it is a major advancement in an area where so little advancement has happened. No one disputes that current user interfaces are lacking; consider how poorly First person shooters control on a controller, how poorly fighting games work on a keyboard, and how many buttons you'd need to perform any act in WoW. The Wiimote may not be perfect, and may end up being lacking and used in gimicky ways, but the same could be said about the early 3D games; no advancement can happen until someone takes the first step and the Wiimote seems to be a reasonable step in the right direction.
The fact of the matter is the vast,vast,vast majority of console developers don't post online - it's simply not in our culture to do so. Never have and probably never will.
... how original ...
... ...
An AC pretending to be a vidogame developer
So Mr Game Developer why do you need a 4 dimentional matrix to store transformations in a 3 dimentional game? What size of matrix do you need for a 2 dimentional game?
The vast,vast,vast majority of of console developers are buying PS3s. Especially with the whole Linux development stuff to go with the amazingly powerful hardware
Not to be blunt, why would any developer spend $600 to have a linux system whey you can do (pretty much) exactly the same thing with a $200 PC?
Most of us make very good money and have very good home media equipment and are already starting to pickup BluRay movies.
100% proof that you are not a game developer
I used to be one, now make about three times as much money as a independant contracting web developer; game developers are paid poorly, and have little time to watch movies because they are worked to death
Developers also probably like the Wii from a financial sense. I R not a game programmer, but it's got to be easier and cheaper to develop for. Madden on the Wii is going to be a completely new experience with extremely low dev costs. All they do is port the gamecube version, polish it up, and add in the new controls. Madden on the PS3 and 360 is also somewhat new, but mainly on account of spending lots of money to make perty new graphics.
It really has very little to do with game programmers and when someone starts saying that development costs are effected by the "difficulty of programming for the Cell" or what not you can tell they don't really know what they're talking about; I know you didn't do this, but it is a pet peeve of mine.
The fact is that state of the art computer graphics (almost always) involve increasing the ammount of data (usually through adding a texture) on top of a surface in order to emulate a physical property; for example Normal Maps are just textures full of surface normals that are used to emulate small geometry on a surface, and BDRFs can be used to emulate material properties or micro-geometry of a surface. All of this data that is added to the surface has to be generated by a person (either through texturing or writing a shader) and applied to the surface by a person (usally a texture artist).
What this means is that in order to create a Next Generation game you have to hire many more artists which causes the development costs to skyrocket (currently the FIFA team at EA is larger than 100 people). The Wii allows developers to produce upgraded versions of previous generation graphics which means that development costs are pretty stable. The end result is that Next Generation games on the PS3/Xbox 360 cost 3 to 4 times as much to produce than a Wii game.
That's because, in theory, there are plenty of Wiis to go around. Nintendo is manufacturing millions. It shouldn't be hard to get one within the first week or so. At least that's what I'm banking on and from what I've read I don't seem to be alone. With the PS3 everyone knew they didn't make enough to meet demand...
...
Yeah, I pretty much feel the same way as you (and I think most people do aswell)
The fact is that with how many units Nintendo is producing, and how quickly they should be able to restock, there is little chance of a long term shortage; what this leads to is that there is little opportunity for profit so less scalpers are interested in the system. With scalpers not camping out for days (or weeks) to get a system it is more likely that you will be able to get one on launch day without camping out yourself.
Ultimately this means that the Wii will have a (successful) launch that is very orderly; there aren't going to be riots or muggings, all that is going to happen is most people who want a Wii on launch day are going to get one with (potentially) some having to wait a week or two. This means that there is little that is news worthy so it gets less press.
I have wondered for a while what would happen if the press put a different slant on the stories that they release if you would see companies react differently; if the PS3 launch was reported as "Sony was incompetent and released far too few systems which caused massive riots at Best-Buy" rather than "The PS3 is the hot item to have, and its launch caused riots" would Sony try to ensure that the PS4 launch was orderly? If the Wii launch went well and news agencies reported it as "Nintendo had a successful system launch this weekend selling 950,000 systems; that is over twice as many systems as the XBox 360 or PS3 were able to sell in their opening days" would there be a greater focus on producing enough units to meet demand?
It seems to me that because news agencies focus on negative things that a lot of companies will produce negative things (shortages) in order to get coverage on the news; I'm not saying that Sony went out of their way to produce too few systems, just that if they only got news coverage for a good launch they would ensure that production was on schedule.
But that said, I found it funny all those articles on Slashdot about how expensive the PS3 is, and then seeing the PS3 sold for 3000 USD. Kinda sets the 'OMG the PS3 is so expensive' campaign right, it was NOT (too) expensive.
I'm not so sure a small percentage of people who are willing to pay more than a product is worth demonstrates the product is not overpriced (especially in the case of a gaming system), even if you saw dozens of bids at $100,000 for the PS3 it still can be overpriced. The reason for this is simple, the PS3 is only a decent product (as a gaming system) if it sells enough systems in order to get strong support from developers; this support is necessary to get exclusive games and (enhanced) ports of other games. A gaming system can not be very successful and be a luxury item beyond the means of the average gamer (for very long). Whether $500/$600 is too much has yet to be seen, but I suspect we won't know until January 2008 at the earliest.
I'm actually reasonably disturbed by the Chaos that has been created by greed ...
How is reselling a PS3 greed? To label this greed you need to know what financial situation these people are in.
Are they standing in line to afford a luxury item or is this a rare opportunity to make 2 months rent in a day?
Ticket/Event/Product Scalping ( reselling ) is not always illegal and many legitimate business do it. Tickmaster at least at one point aunctioned tickets to popular events.
Finally, who is being hurt by the PS3 resellers? The gamers who have to wait an extra week to get their hands on a PS3?
I (personally) see nothing wrong with the act of scalping a product in order to make a decent profit; I do however see a problem with trampling people to get a product in order to sell it online for a decent profit. Regardless of whether your use of your windfall is a noble cause or not, when you callously disregard the wellbeing of your fellow person in order to make the money it becomes an immoral act.
What moral cost? It's called supply and demand. It's not like this is a necessary purchase for survival.
I wasn't talking about the product having any moral implications, more about how people's actions were reasonably disgusting (Riots, Mobs, fights, etc.). The thing that makes this so much worse is (most of) this could have been prevented by Managers being reasonably intelligent on how they handled it. How difficult would it have been to create a basic "lottery" system where everyone who was at your store 15 minutes before it opened up could enter; the winners get the right to purchase a system and you do not allow them to transfer their "sales ticket".
I'm actually reasonably disturbed by the Chaos that has been created by greed ...
In practically every interview I have seen the reporter is talking to someone who intends to sell the PS3 for massive profit; in one case a man was talking about how he was going to make $2000 in one days work. I could be wrong but it seems like the PS3 launch has brought out everyone who is desperate to make a little money regardless of the moral cost.
Halo spawned countless imitators, and the market is awash with the corpses of space-marine-shoots-aliens games which simply didn't resonate with the gaming audience in the same way.
Wait, Halo didn't create the first marine-shoots-aliens games they have existed for a very long time; you could argue that Halo was mostly a rip-off of the delivery method produced by Half-life (1998) and similar content and style of Doom (1994) [replace Demons with Aliens]. All Halo did was introduce console gamers to the modern (story based) PC first person shooter; at the time most of the First Person shooters released to consoles were still level based (think of Goldeneye/Perfect Dark).
The parking lot likely has security cameras, the store itself is private property, and most places have people called "police officers." If the store suddenly decides they don't like you camping on their sidewalk, you will, to say the least, lose your place in line.
...
I'm actually surprised that we don't see more of this
As a customer I really hate having to "brush" through a crowd of local teengers who decide to hang out at the doors of my local 7-11; I understand why they do it (I'm not that old) but it is not something I enjoy. Anyways, I can't imagine that the average person who is 30+ wants to walk into Target when they have a shanty town that is full of mostly 18-22 year olds.
Final Fantasy X sold 7.93 Million units world wide on the PS2 and Metal Gear Solid 2 sold 5.59 units world wide on the PS2 (the two games everyone uses for this argument); even if you assume that no one who owned Final Fantasy X bought Metal Gear Solid 2, and that people who bought these games bought the PS2 for these games, that would mean that 13.5 Million PS2s were sold for these games. To put this in perspective, both the XBox and Gamecube sold over 20 Million units and the PS2 sold over 100 Million units.
The fact is that even if Sony can maintain exclusivity over Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Tekken and Soul Calibur their sales are not ensured to be greater than about 15-20 Million units; Sony doesn't make these games and they are likely to show up on other consoles in one form or another. If Sony really starts to trail the Wii (as an example) it is quite possible for Square Enix to make a (real) Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest game for the Wii, exactly like they have for the Nintendo DS.
No publishers are loyal to a particular console, they are loyal to their stockholders; if they can make more money by producing a Final Fantasy game for the Wii then they could by making it for the PS3 the game will be produced for the Wii.
One thing that all MMO games need is self-generating content regardless of whether that content is procedural or combinatorial; procedural is where content is created through an algorithm, combinatorial is where you have content that is split into a bunch of independant sections where the final product is a combination of all of the sections. This is so important because it would free up resources to produce more "crafted" experiences.
Exitetruck is awsome as a time killer. It didn't feel like a full "I must play through all of this" tpe game (then again racing games never feel like that to me), it DID feel like somethign that you could easily enjoy when you have 10 mins to kill (or as a party game). I will probably be picking up a copy of it.
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A lot of the more negative reviews I have read for Excitetruck (and other games) seem to focus on the lack of a few features and then justify destroying the game in its score; basically they can be summarised as "Excite truck is an amazingly fun game when playing by yourself or with a friend, but being that it doesn't have online multiplayer or 4 player splitscreen 6/10." Now I understand why people want to point that out but it seems like it isn't being scored for the game it is, it is being reviewed for the game it isn't. I think I can explain this better
Since about 1999, when I was playing Zelda:MM and Unreal Tournament at the same time, I have thought that you could make an amazing Online Multiplayer (Deathmatch or CTF) game using Zelda as a base; you could make several classes of characters which had different items and health levels or what not. Personally, I think that this is an obvious extention to The Legend of Zelda and I'm disapointed that no one has made a Zelda Clone that has included this. What I was saying about reviewing a game for what it isn't is, would it make sense for someone to give The Legend of Zelda:TP a 6/10 because it didn't include Online Multiplayer?
What I've been waiting for is more reviews to come in so we can see how well the games are matching up with people's expectations. Its all good to say that Game A looks so great, or Game B is so inovative, but until there is a final product it is hard to judge. So far it sounds like Zelda is Awsome, and Resistance is Excellent, but there are still a lot of titles that have yet to be reviewed (Red Steel) and some that have remarkably varied Reviews (ExciteTruck).
Ultimately the important thing is the games, the question is whether many of the games have lived up to the hype
In my opinion these comercials represent the PS3 pretty well ...
There is a massive focus on becoming cool with little interest in why something is cool in the first place. People loved the Playstation (and PS2) because it was affordable and had the largest line-up of games, there really is no 'magic' about it. What Sony seems focused on is technology (cell), media (Blu-Ray) and cool-ness when they should be producing a low cost system and ensuring they have the most (and the best) games released exclusively for it.
If they had 5 high quality exclusive games at launch, the best advertizing strategy would be to show all these games and have a big ass sign that said (ONLY ON PS3).
Bullshit. Unless you expect the whole life of the console to be what's available at launch. It is absolutely retarded.
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... You could spend $400 to play most of the other games on the XBox 360 or you could wait to spend $300-$500 on a PS3 when MGS4 (or whatever game you really want) comes out.
Especially when you are comparing it to the 360 launch...
First off, I never referenced the XBox 360
Secondly, the reality of all next (new) generation systems is that they are the most expensive when they have the least ammount of content; essentially you pay a priemium in order to play the launch line-up when it is released. Certainly there will be better games released through the life of the system but there is nothing saying these games will be released before there is a price drop, or that your console will survive to see them (consider how many people replaced their system 12-24 months after they bought it because it broke).
The fact is that you're spending $500/$600 to play Resistance or Genji
Technically speaking Eiji Aonuma is now in charge of all things Zelda (and has been since 2001) ...
The only 2 games on that list that are not readily availabe for other systems are Genji 2: Days of the Blade (which is currently rated at 59% based on 4 reviews on Gamerankings.com) and Resistance: Fall of Man (which is currently rated at 90.3% based on 3 reviews on Gamerankings.com)
It will take some time before the scores become more solid...
The question is can you justify spending $500/$600 for 1 good game?
People have been camping out a week ahead of time for PS3s here in the States.
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Because they know how limited the supply is
The PS2 launch was absolutely crazy, but nothing like the PS3 launch is turning out to be.
Because of how limited the supply is
The Wii hype seems to have fallen off a bit but appears to be still pretty strong. Good thing Nintendo fucked over GameCube owners wanting to play the new Zelda or the Wii launch lineup would be pretty pathetic. Lack of online play for almost all games until next year and many of the big games other than Zelda aren't appearing until March or so.
How are Gamecube owners fucked over by having to wait 2 weeks for a game? And how is the Wii launch lineup pretty pathetic without Zelda? And what big games other than Zelda aren't appearing until March or so?
Wii hype has "died down" only so far as people are a little hyped out
Most people have spent the past 6-12 months talking about "When the Revolution/Wii will be released" that they're mostly conserned with going out and buying one now
Seems like the gaming press has forgotten the 360 is still around.
That could be because everyone who owns an XBox 360 is playing the videogame that is currently ranked #1 among games released in 2006 by gamerankings.com
Don't be silly,
You only have to declare the announcement of and statement if that statement is referring to a game that has been delayed.
N00b
I won't quite agree that more people are required to produce larger and more detailed enviroments. You only have to carefully craft the parts that are important to gameplay. Even that isn't that important given the open nature of many of today's games. Most of the expanded maps and certain ranges of objects can be produced algorithmicly. A lot of things such as textures, sounds, and object primitives can be copied from title to title. A little work on world-generation and source materials such as textures and developers can let game worlds largely create themselves if they have the processing power and disc capacity needed. The fun thing about such worlds is that you can end up with unexpected twists that developers may not expect and which gives players that explore the worlds chances for a lot of alternative ways to play the game.
It's harder and more expensive to develop in a limited system than it is when you can just throw more work at the processing power of the system and not worry about storage capacity
You're correct that you can produce content using an algorithm, but developing the algorithms is very expensive. At several universities the graphics programs are focused on procedural content generation of plants and trees; at one well known University they have been working on this problem for 10 years with several PHD researchers (and their students) and have yet to perfect the method. In the near future procedural content generation is (mostly) going to be very limited in scope.
Now, you could use greater power and greater resources to reduce the cost of game development (say if you continued to produce 2D games on the PS3 using SVG rather than pixelmaps) but that never happens. There is a reason why it is so much less expensive to produce a DS game compared to a PSP game, and why people are reporting that Wii games are so much cheaper than PS3 games, and that is mostly that you can say "it can't be done" when a marketing manager "asks" you to include into your game. When you have a limited scope, and limited requirements, in anything you produce you will usually have a much less expensive (much higher quality) product; greater resources tends to increase the scop and increase the requirements of any product and thus makes it much more difficut to produce.