1. Blu-Ray is technically a better technology than HD-DVD.
How do you define a "better" technology? It can be argued that the lower costs of the discs and players of HD-DVD make it a "better" technology. Regardless, I don't see the relevance of this point in what I said because it would have been a mistake to include HD-DVD on the PS3 as well; it would have increased the cost (to a lesser extent), reduced supply and provided little content which would sell more PS3s.
2. The market is different than it was back in the Betamax/VHS days.
How do you mean that? Do you mean that both DVD formats will survive? Do you mean that people will now pay extra for a format? Or do you mean that Sony now has the power to force a format on us?
3. Including Blu-Ray in the PS3 (let's just call it the PS123 while we're at it since it plays games from all three platforms) is one of the BEST decisions Sony could have made. It sets them apart from the XBOX that has no HD style player at $400. For just $100 more you get a HUGE catalog of games, 1080p HD games (something the 360 will never have), and a DVD/blu-ray player for around $300 LESS than what's for sell in the market for stand-alone players...
For people who have a 1080p HDTV, want a Next-Generation gaming system, desire a Next-Generation Movie Format, believe that Blu-Ray will be successful over HD-DVD, and can justify $500/$600 on a glorified toy Blu-Ray movie playback was a great decision; for the other 99% of the population it is questionable.
"The Blu-ray Disc Association unveiled their plans for a May 23, 2006 release date at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January 2006. Since then, Blu-ray Disc was delayed, but eventually shipped in the U.S. on June 20, 2006"
The Blu-Ray specifications were not finalized in 2003 so how could they have released a Blu-Ray recorder?
My point was that the first DVD movie player (that played movies) was released in March 1997 with the PS3 being released in Q4 2000, the first Blu-Ray movie player was released in June 2007 with the PS3 being released in Q4 2007.
The difference between the PS2's DVD drive and the PS3's Blu-Ray drive is that when the PS2 was released DVD players had been on the market for a full 3 years.
I could be wrong, but it seems like including Blu-Ray may be the biggest mistake that Sony made on the PS3; it will increase the cost of the PS3, reduce the supply, and has so little content for it that it probably will not increase sales. If the PS3 was to be released in Q4 of 2008 Blu-Ray would have probably been an amazing addition, but in Q4 of 2006 it seems like a massive disaster.
Paul Anderson produces awful movies but, in my opinion, they are mostly awful because he stays true to the original source material which is (mostly) stupid. Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat were really bad movies but they were pretty decent adaptations of the videogames which spawned the movies.
I've said this before and no one listens... Videogame movies suck mainly because the stories in videogames are awful; most games are written with the main focus being on getting a "hook" that will look good in a 200 word review.
Should the Department of Defence in every Non-American country in the world develop their own operating system rather than use Windows or Unix because those systems are (mostly) developed in the USA?
The answer is probably not...
The fact is that in the modern world Corporations have no interest in Nationality and are (excusively) profit motivated. The US DoD pays really well compared to most other clients in the world and their main requirement is security. It really doesn't matter if a Coporation is based in the USA, Canada, India or Pakistan because they will heavily screen everyone who will work in the company for fear of killing the golden goose; imagine if you're a CEO who just got a $20,000,000 contract for a piece of software from the US DoD, do you think you'd let anyone near this software which the US DoD would not approve of?
The answer is probably not...
The fact is that if there were obvious signals that someone would produce an insecure product for the DoD no company in the world would hire them to work on a DoD contract; on the other hand, if there were no obvious signs that they would produce and insecure product they could (probably) move to the US and get a job with the an American DoD contractor. You may claim that the DoD should not allow contractors to hire immagrants then, but this wouldn't work because before 9/11 the largest terrorist attack in the US was done by an American Citizen.
By "Reasonable Supply" I was not saying that Sony needed to supply enough for every potential PS3 owner on day one...
How I would define "Reasonable Supply" is enough units to (nearly) satisfy everyone who wants to pre-order, and a steady stream that (roughly) matches demand following the launch. Now it may not be a popular opinion, but there is no reason why there should be massive shortages of a console at launch; from past system launches it should be clear to everyone that if you don't have 500,000 - 1,000,000 systems available at launch and about 100,000 - 200,000 systems available per week (all per region) your supply can not come close to meeting demand.
Yeah I knew that EBgames was trying to scam me the second I saw that $600 price tag... No one in their right mind would think a gaming console cost that much money...
Seriously though, a lot of scams would be less effective if there was a reasonable supply of consoles.
But I just don't see "power" as our big problem right now; we've got so much to spare that we can make grass wave realistically and make water sparkle and all kinds of other things that are nowhere near as important as the amount of development time they consume would seem to indicate.
Personally, I see that "Power" could be the biggest problem in the upcomming generation but in the complete opposite way that some people predict. In order to get the "Next Generation Graphics" (that the PS3 and XBox 360 offer) you will spend several times as much on content then you did in the previous generation. Now assuming similar game sales for your game how do you justify the expense?
There lies the problem, the cost was only justified because it was the only option because previous generation graphics were no longer useable. With the Wii (if it becomes popular) you have the option of producing a game at 1/2 or 1/3 the cost and selling similar numbers; in other words, less power may attract more development which in turn could attract more users.
I don't care much about what a system's floating point performance is, I only care what it can do. There has been far too much discussion on how powerful the Wii is with very little focus on what it means for games.
The Cell has about 20x the processing power as a Core Duo with a high-end graphics card combined. Add nVidia's RSX.. you're looking at a system which has stayed within the budget (even less) for systems of today.
Wow... that is either the dumbest or funniest thing I have read in a long time...
The simple fact is that the Cell processor is (probably) very similar in performance to most processors that are similar in size and use a similar manufacturing process; the variations in design will allow for certain trade-offs in performance to be made, but the end result is bound to the same laws of physics as the other processors are.
Certainly, the Cell will (in the long run) outperform most mid-level PCs that are being released today (2GHz Core-Duo 2 and Geforce 7950GTX) but that is mainly because there will be a greater ammount of optimization for the PS3 than there will be for a PC (being that there are so many combinations of hardware for PCs). If you think the PS3 will outperform a high level PC though (think Quad-SLi) I've got a bridge to sell you.
I don't want to sound like a Mel-Gibson-style conspiracy nut, but it's hard not to reach for the tinfoil when you read anecdotal reports like this. It would take such a small shift of votes to change an election... I dunno, can the party in power resist that temptation? Given that they can't resist any other temptations?
One problem with anecdotal reports is that they can easily be abused by the media to skew people's opinions of what is happening. Suppose, for a moment, that these voting machines are buggy and that you have similar numbers of Republicans and Democrats that have problems voting for their candidates. Now with past voting irregularities in Florida there is an increased sensitivity in Democrat voters to problems like this; this means that these people are more likely to report these problems to the media, and the media are far more likely to report these occurances.
I'm not saying this is what is happening, it is just a possibility.
As much as I'm a supporter of the VC and plan to buy games off of there, I do understand why people have objections to paying for the same old games again...
If you have objections you realize that you don't have to buy the games...
If you own the games and a system then feel free to play those games on that system...
If you don't own the game, or the system, buy it online from ebay; you'll probably be able to get a NES/SNES/N64 game for about $10 (plus shipping) and you'll be able to buy a system for about $20 (plus shipping).
Personally, I agree with the argument for getting "Abandonware" for free being that there are no longer many legal ways to pay for those games; when companies like Nintendo and Gametap start making legal ways to gain access to their old libraries it is not reasonable to continue to steal those games.
And to think, I've really been wanting Goldeneye 64.
Trust me, you probably don't want Goldeneye 64. There are some games that have aged very well (mainly because the Genre has not improved that much since they were released) like Banjo Kazooie and The Legend of Zelda: OoT, but Goldeneye 64 (and Perfect Dark) really show their age.
People who aren't into video games are not going to buy a system for $250, a controller for $60 and games at $50 a pop
People said the same thing about the Nintendo DS when it began this strategy; the gaming industry in Japan has grown by over 50% in one year, and the North American gaming industry has grown by 11%, and analysts have claimed that this is because the DS has been successful at expanding the market.
Sony has decided to make games on the PLAYSTATION 3 console region-free.
And at the same time decided to put the #1 exporter of Japaneese games/systems out of buisness (Lik-Sang). So essentially you could play import Japaneese games on your PS3, unfortunately it will be difficult to actually import games.
The initial poster's point still stands; if you're only going to release 100,000 systems then (because most game sales are made within the first 6 weeks of the game being released) the best you can do is sell 100,000 games. In order to break even on a PS3 which cost $10 Million to produce (inexpensive for a PS3 game) you'd need to charge $100 (plus the retailers price, manufacturing cost, distribution costs, marketing costs and licencing fees) just to break even.
I could be wrong, but I expect there will be a lot of angry japaneese developers in November.
What he was suggesting was remarkably foolish, but with 3D games you can support higher resolutions in a newer version without causing compatibility issues; if you tripled the power of the GPU and made the frame-buffer 6 times as large, I'm pretty sure that you could run any Wii game at 1080p without any extra development or any performance hit. I personally suspect that Nintendo would only do this if (in 12-18 months) a large portion of potential users do not buy the system because it does not support HD.
Anyone who truely finds this offensive should be considered a bigot.
I'm personally going to disagree with you mainly because I think the type of statement you're making undermines the freedom of speech (and religion) that western society is based on; it is the type of statement that prevents open (and honest) discussion on any subject and is just as damaging as "Anyone who rejects this videogame violence bill condones child abuse" or "If you oppose our participation in Afganistan you don't support our troops.".
Personally I don't find the content in the game offensive but saying that someone who does is a bigot is pretty extreme. Maybe my education was poor, but I was always lead to believe that biggotry had to do with someone being intolerant towards another group. Now Tolerance (inspite of some people's opinion) does not mean to embrace something, it means to put up with; if your parents said they would tolerate the person you choose to marry you'd probably get very angry.
I will try to make what I'm saying more clear...
Suppose you started working in a cubical next to someone who came from the gym every morning and dried their work-out gear in the open; being that they only wash this gear on the weekend by wednesday it smells pretty funky and on friday it smells like a dead animal. Now if your boss told you to "tolerate" it does that mean that you have to stop being offended by the smell of the sweaty workout stuff?
In a similar fashion, someone who disagrees with (or is offended by) Homosexuality is not necessarily a bigot; it depends on how they act on it that would define whether they were a bigot or not.
"Funny, this is, in my opinion, precisely the problem with Linux. Programmers are spending too much time designing shnuggly-wuggly GUI's and spend less time on drivers and other necessities for the OS."
I thought I should highlight the problem that you so adequately put in your post.
There is no reason why a Programmer should be designing a user interface because they (usually) lack the knowledge or experience to make a good one. Often a programmer will develop a user interface which is ugly and confusing which is barely useable to someone who doesn't have the same understanding of the program as they have.
The reason Windows remains popular on home desktops is that Microsoft has spent Millions (if not billions) attempting to ensure that their system is far more useable than any other system on the market.
It should be interesting to see how this plays out because videogame content is under attack from both extremes of the political spectrum and on each side you should see the complete opposite reaction; on the socially progressive side the argument will be that anyone who doesn't support this is a caveman and the socially conservative side will see this as a continued destruction of the moral core of America.
In general you could have infighting and loss of respect between these two groups and it should be interesting to see how this plays out.
Sony just confirmed that they are on target to get 6 million units out by March
Last I heard (on October 20th), Sony announced that they may not make their PS3 Shipment targets of 2 Million units Worldwide by January 2007 (which in itself had been a reduction of the 4 Million worldwide for January 2007 that they claimed at E3).
Nintendo's launch partner is Toys R Us, and just today (Sunday Oct 29th 2006), most Toys R Us announced that they will only be taking 20 or so Wii pre-orders. GameStop and EB games actually took around the same number of Wii pre-orders as PS3's. So it looks like Nintendo "may" be having some manufacturing issues. If they were not having any issues, companies like Toys R Us should have around 50 to 100 pre-orders of Wii's.
Well, Gamespot recently (October 6th) claimed that Wii manufacturing had been going better than expected and Nintendo may be able to ship 7 Million to 9 Million Wii by January 2007; Nintendo has only claimed they would sell 4 Million worldwide by January 1st 2007 and will likely make it.
The reason why so many retailers have been limiting their Wii preorders is because they don't want a repeat of the XBox 360 disaster (where people who pre-purchased their XBox 360 didn't get one) so they have been waiting on Nintendo to give them exact numbers on how many units they will recieve; Nintendo has not been willing to give any exact numbers until the units are about to be shipped so retailers that are doing pre-orders are being very conservative. I know for a fact that Futureshop isn't doing pre-orders in Canada because they were told (by both Sony and Nintendo) they would not be given any exact numbers on shipments until 2 weeks before the systems were launched.
So what is the largest issue that prevents most people from wanting a PS3. The price, and Sony has shown that they will lower that when needed (Japan PS3 price is ~$430). It isn't inconceivable that Sony won't offer some "Gold" pack with a game in the summer of 2007 for the same price as the current PS3's now and then lower the price by next Christmas for a basic console.
Price is a major issue with the PS3 both for consumers and for developers; it is a problem for consumers because it will be (at least) 2 years (probably closer to 3) before any model of the PS3 is under $300 (a typical price for the majority of gamers to buy a system); it is a problem for developers because generating game assets for a PS3 game is expensive and thus game development cost have skyrocketed. Certainly both development cost and the purchase price of the PS3 may be reduced over time, but at the current point in time they are beyond the means of most consumers and developers.
Now there is the whole BlueRay, HD-DVD thing. There isn't even 50k units of HD-DVD players out on the market and it looks like the manufacturing of BluRay will be helped out considerably by 6 million units being produced, not to mention that there will be 6 million BlueRay players out there. If you were a content provider which one would you produce for? It is also not a mistake that Sony is going to include a BlueRay movie with the first 500k PS3's. They want people to try it as a movie player.
You bring up this 6 Million number, which may or may not happen in the near future (it's taken the XBox 11 months to break 6 Million units sold). Beyond that consumers as a whole have been staying away from High Definition Movie formats:
Don't get me wrong... I realize that these things were not necessarily true but it is how people precieve them; personally I went looking for a TV that supported 480p and ended up with a 34 inch widescreen 720p CRT HDTV for $500. Most people think "60 inch widescreen plazma/lcd flat pannel display" when they think of HDTVs, in fact I have noticed that many people assume that all LCD TVs are HDTVs and all CRT TVs are standard definition.
The ps2 was expensive when it came out. They have DVD manufactuing problems, so the first games that came out were on CDROM. They weren't really that great either. It took many years for the gamecube and the dreamcast to just dissappear.
My point is the war isn't won at launch. Its won when the system has lots of GOOD games for it, and they become cheap. When production becomes cheap so the manufacturer makes a profit off it. When the console becomes cheap enough to be able to buy another one, just as a backup. When developers are able to program for the blasted thing, without spending a billion dollars over 3 years.
We've got years of this to come. I don't think I can stand any more of the speculation. I just wanna play some games!
You're correct in saying that the PS2 was expensive, it was $300 which was $100 more than the Dreamcast and the same price as the XBox; and it sold well to a lot of people because DVD was already being adopted at an amazing rate and a cheap DVD player cost the same as the PS2. The PS3 is $500 or $600, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are being adopted at a slower than expected rate, and a cheap HD-DVD player is less than the PS3.
A videogame system "wins" very early on in its life (say 18 to 24 months into it) when they have sold enough to pressure third party developers to focus on their system rather than the competition. If you have a 5 Million unit lead in all three regions it is pretty easy to encourage developers that they should make games exclusively for you.
Also, modern Development Costs have very little to do with programming because you're programming team (including all scripters) is probably about 15% of the size of your entire development team; the real costs in game development are in the texture artists, modelers and animators and they will probably have to do more work as the generation progresses. What people don't get is that most of these fancy new material effects require data (normal maps, BDRF, etc) to be applied to the model as a texture which requires extra man hours; also things like facial animation (and animation in general) requires far more tweeking as you aproach more realistic avatars in order to make it look good (being slightly off on a very real looking person makes them look really creepy; being slightly off on mario isn't such a big deal).
Neither of those games are first party games, and it is likely that one or both of those
games will be delayed into 2008. What this means is that if the PS3 doesn't sell well there is no reason that these games could not be ported to the XBox 360. I'm not saying this will happen, it is just a possibility being that neither Square nor Konami have any loyalty to Sony and the XBox 360 is similar enough in capabilities to make it happen...
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1. Blu-Ray is technically a better technology than HD-DVD.
How do you define a "better" technology? It can be argued that the lower costs of the discs and players of HD-DVD make it a "better" technology. Regardless, I don't see the relevance of this point in what I said because it would have been a mistake to include HD-DVD on the PS3 as well; it would have increased the cost (to a lesser extent), reduced supply and provided little content which would sell more PS3s.
2. The market is different than it was back in the Betamax/VHS days.
How do you mean that? Do you mean that both DVD formats will survive? Do you mean that people will now pay extra for a format? Or do you mean that Sony now has the power to force a format on us?
3. Including Blu-Ray in the PS3 (let's just call it the PS123 while we're at it since it plays games from all three platforms) is one of the BEST decisions Sony could have made.
It sets them apart from the XBOX that has no HD style player at $400. For just $100 more you get a HUGE catalog of games, 1080p HD games (something the 360 will never have), and a DVD/blu-ray player for around $300 LESS than what's for sell in the market for stand-alone players...
For people who have a 1080p HDTV, want a Next-Generation gaming system, desire a Next-Generation Movie Format, believe that Blu-Ray will be successful over HD-DVD, and can justify $500/$600 on a glorified toy Blu-Ray movie playback was a great decision; for the other 99% of the population it is questionable.
The specifications for the single layer (25 GB) and dual layer (50 GB) Blu-ray discs were approved by the BDA on January 2, 2006
http://www.blureporter.com/blu-ray/news/117
How can you have a Blu-Ray drive before you have a finalized Blu-Ray disc spec?
"The Blu-ray Disc Association unveiled their plans for a May 23, 2006 release date at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January 2006. Since then, Blu-ray Disc was delayed, but eventually shipped in the U.S. on June 20, 2006"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-Ray_Disc
The Blu-Ray specifications were not finalized in 2003 so how could they have released a Blu-Ray recorder?
My point was that the first DVD movie player (that played movies) was released in March 1997 with the PS3 being released in Q4 2000, the first Blu-Ray movie player was released in June 2007 with the PS3 being released in Q4 2007.
The difference between the PS2's DVD drive and the PS3's Blu-Ray drive is that when the PS2 was released DVD players had been on the market for a full 3 years.
I could be wrong, but it seems like including Blu-Ray may be the biggest mistake that Sony made on the PS3; it will increase the cost of the PS3, reduce the supply, and has so little content for it that it probably will not increase sales. If the PS3 was to be released in Q4 of 2008 Blu-Ray would have probably been an amazing addition, but in Q4 of 2006 it seems like a massive disaster.
Paul Anderson produces awful movies but, in my opinion, they are mostly awful because he stays true to the original source material which is (mostly) stupid. Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat were really bad movies but they were pretty decent adaptations of the videogames which spawned the movies.
... Videogame movies suck mainly because the stories in videogames are awful; most games are written with the main focus being on getting a "hook" that will look good in a 200 word review.
I've said this before and no one listens
Wow, you're paranoid ...
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Should the Department of Defence in every Non-American country in the world develop their own operating system rather than use Windows or Unix because those systems are (mostly) developed in the USA?
The answer is probably not
The fact is that in the modern world Corporations have no interest in Nationality and are (excusively) profit motivated. The US DoD pays really well compared to most other clients in the world and their main requirement is security. It really doesn't matter if a Coporation is based in the USA, Canada, India or Pakistan because they will heavily screen everyone who will work in the company for fear of killing the golden goose; imagine if you're a CEO who just got a $20,000,000 contract for a piece of software from the US DoD, do you think you'd let anyone near this software which the US DoD would not approve of?
The answer is probably not
The fact is that if there were obvious signals that someone would produce an insecure product for the DoD no company in the world would hire them to work on a DoD contract; on the other hand, if there were no obvious signs that they would produce and insecure product they could (probably) move to the US and get a job with the an American DoD contractor. You may claim that the DoD should not allow contractors to hire immagrants then, but this wouldn't work because before 9/11 the largest terrorist attack in the US was done by an American Citizen.
By "Reasonable Supply" I was not saying that Sony needed to supply enough for every potential PS3 owner on day one ...
How I would define "Reasonable Supply" is enough units to (nearly) satisfy everyone who wants to pre-order, and a steady stream that (roughly) matches demand following the launch. Now it may not be a popular opinion, but there is no reason why there should be massive shortages of a console at launch; from past system launches it should be clear to everyone that if you don't have 500,000 - 1,000,000 systems available at launch and about 100,000 - 200,000 systems available per week (all per region) your supply can not come close to meeting demand.
Yeah I knew that EBgames was trying to scam me the second I saw that $600 price tag ... ...
No one in their right mind would think a gaming console cost that much money
Seriously though, a lot of scams would be less effective if there was a reasonable supply of consoles.
But I just don't see "power" as our big problem right now; we've got so much to spare that we can make grass wave realistically and make water sparkle and all kinds of other things that are nowhere near as important as the amount of development time they consume would seem to indicate.
Personally, I see that "Power" could be the biggest problem in the upcomming generation but in the complete opposite way that some people predict. In order to get the "Next Generation Graphics" (that the PS3 and XBox 360 offer) you will spend several times as much on content then you did in the previous generation. Now assuming similar game sales for your game how do you justify the expense?
There lies the problem, the cost was only justified because it was the only option because previous generation graphics were no longer useable. With the Wii (if it becomes popular) you have the option of producing a game at 1/2 or 1/3 the cost and selling similar numbers; in other words, less power may attract more development which in turn could attract more users.
Seriously ...
I don't care much about what a system's floating point performance is, I only care what it can do. There has been far too much discussion on how powerful the Wii is with very little focus on what it means for games.
The Cell has about 20x the processing power as a Core Duo with a high-end graphics card combined. Add nVidia's RSX.. you're looking at a system which has stayed within the budget (even less) for systems of today.
... that is either the dumbest or funniest thing I have read in a long time ...
Wow
The simple fact is that the Cell processor is (probably) very similar in performance to most processors that are similar in size and use a similar manufacturing process; the variations in design will allow for certain trade-offs in performance to be made, but the end result is bound to the same laws of physics as the other processors are.
Certainly, the Cell will (in the long run) outperform most mid-level PCs that are being released today (2GHz Core-Duo 2 and Geforce 7950GTX) but that is mainly because there will be a greater ammount of optimization for the PS3 than there will be for a PC (being that there are so many combinations of hardware for PCs). If you think the PS3 will outperform a high level PC though (think Quad-SLi) I've got a bridge to sell you.
I don't want to sound like a Mel-Gibson-style conspiracy nut, but it's hard not to reach for the tinfoil when you read anecdotal reports like this. It would take such a small shift of votes to change an election ... I dunno, can the party in power resist that temptation? Given that they can't resist any other temptations?
One problem with anecdotal reports is that they can easily be abused by the media to skew people's opinions of what is happening. Suppose, for a moment, that these voting machines are buggy and that you have similar numbers of Republicans and Democrats that have problems voting for their candidates. Now with past voting irregularities in Florida there is an increased sensitivity in Democrat voters to problems like this; this means that these people are more likely to report these problems to the media, and the media are far more likely to report these occurances.
I'm not saying this is what is happening, it is just a possibility.
As much as I'm a supporter of the VC and plan to buy games off of there, I do understand why people have objections to paying for the same old games again...
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If you have objections you realize that you don't have to buy the games
If you own the games and a system then feel free to play those games on that system
If you don't own the game, or the system, buy it online from ebay; you'll probably be able to get a NES/SNES/N64 game for about $10 (plus shipping) and you'll be able to buy a system for about $20 (plus shipping).
Personally, I agree with the argument for getting "Abandonware" for free being that there are no longer many legal ways to pay for those games; when companies like Nintendo and Gametap start making legal ways to gain access to their old libraries it is not reasonable to continue to steal those games.
And to think, I've really been wanting Goldeneye 64.
Trust me, you probably don't want Goldeneye 64. There are some games that have aged very well (mainly because the Genre has not improved that much since they were released) like Banjo Kazooie and The Legend of Zelda: OoT, but Goldeneye 64 (and Perfect Dark) really show their age.
People who aren't into video games are not going to buy a system for $250, a controller for $60 and games at $50 a pop
People said the same thing about the Nintendo DS when it began this strategy; the gaming industry in Japan has grown by over 50% in one year, and the North American gaming industry has grown by 11%, and analysts have claimed that this is because the DS has been successful at expanding the market.
Sony has decided to make games on the PLAYSTATION 3 console region-free.
And at the same time decided to put the #1 exporter of Japaneese games/systems out of buisness (Lik-Sang). So essentially you could play import Japaneese games on your PS3, unfortunately it will be difficult to actually import games.
The initial poster's point still stands; if you're only going to release 100,000 systems then (because most game sales are made within the first 6 weeks of the game being released) the best you can do is sell 100,000 games. In order to break even on a PS3 which cost $10 Million to produce (inexpensive for a PS3 game) you'd need to charge $100 (plus the retailers price, manufacturing cost, distribution costs, marketing costs and licencing fees) just to break even.
I could be wrong, but I expect there will be a lot of angry japaneese developers in November.
If you've seen a bachelor "Appartment" in a major city in Japan(picture a walk in closet) you'd understand why this might be an issue for some people.
What he was suggesting was remarkably foolish, but with 3D games you can support higher resolutions in a newer version without causing compatibility issues; if you tripled the power of the GPU and made the frame-buffer 6 times as large, I'm pretty sure that you could run any Wii game at 1080p without any extra development or any performance hit. I personally suspect that Nintendo would only do this if (in 12-18 months) a large portion of potential users do not buy the system because it does not support HD.
Anyone who truely finds this offensive should be considered a bigot.
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I'm personally going to disagree with you mainly because I think the type of statement you're making undermines the freedom of speech (and religion) that western society is based on; it is the type of statement that prevents open (and honest) discussion on any subject and is just as damaging as "Anyone who rejects this videogame violence bill condones child abuse" or "If you oppose our participation in Afganistan you don't support our troops.".
Personally I don't find the content in the game offensive but saying that someone who does is a bigot is pretty extreme. Maybe my education was poor, but I was always lead to believe that biggotry had to do with someone being intolerant towards another group. Now Tolerance (inspite of some people's opinion) does not mean to embrace something, it means to put up with; if your parents said they would tolerate the person you choose to marry you'd probably get very angry.
I will try to make what I'm saying more clear
Suppose you started working in a cubical next to someone who came from the gym every morning and dried their work-out gear in the open; being that they only wash this gear on the weekend by wednesday it smells pretty funky and on friday it smells like a dead animal. Now if your boss told you to "tolerate" it does that mean that you have to stop being offended by the smell of the sweaty workout stuff?
In a similar fashion, someone who disagrees with (or is offended by) Homosexuality is not necessarily a bigot; it depends on how they act on it that would define whether they were a bigot or not.
"Funny, this is, in my opinion, precisely the problem with Linux. Programmers are spending too much time designing shnuggly-wuggly GUI's and spend less time on drivers and other necessities for the OS."
I thought I should highlight the problem that you so adequately put in your post.
There is no reason why a Programmer should be designing a user interface because they (usually) lack the knowledge or experience to make a good one. Often a programmer will develop a user interface which is ugly and confusing which is barely useable to someone who doesn't have the same understanding of the program as they have.
The reason Windows remains popular on home desktops is that Microsoft has spent Millions (if not billions) attempting to ensure that their system is far more useable than any other system on the market.
It should be interesting to see how this plays out because videogame content is under attack from both extremes of the political spectrum and on each side you should see the complete opposite reaction; on the socially progressive side the argument will be that anyone who doesn't support this is a caveman and the socially conservative side will see this as a continued destruction of the moral core of America.
In general you could have infighting and loss of respect between these two groups and it should be interesting to see how this plays out.
Sony just confirmed that they are on target to get 6 million units out by March
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Last I heard (on October 20th), Sony announced that they may not make their PS3 Shipment targets of 2 Million units Worldwide by January 2007 (which in itself had been a reduction of the 4 Million worldwide for January 2007 that they claimed at E3).
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/20
Nintendo's launch partner is Toys R Us, and just today (Sunday Oct 29th 2006), most Toys R Us announced that they will only be taking 20 or so Wii pre-orders. GameStop and EB games actually took around the same number of Wii pre-orders as PS3's. So it looks like Nintendo "may" be having some manufacturing issues. If they were not having any issues, companies like Toys R Us should have around 50 to 100 pre-orders of Wii's.
Well, Gamespot recently (October 6th) claimed that Wii manufacturing had been going better than expected and Nintendo may be able to ship 7 Million to 9 Million Wii by January 2007; Nintendo has only claimed they would sell 4 Million worldwide by January 1st 2007 and will likely make it.
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/06
The reason why so many retailers have been limiting their Wii preorders is because they don't want a repeat of the XBox 360 disaster (where people who pre-purchased their XBox 360 didn't get one) so they have been waiting on Nintendo to give them exact numbers on how many units they will recieve; Nintendo has not been willing to give any exact numbers until the units are about to be shipped so retailers that are doing pre-orders are being very conservative. I know for a fact that Futureshop isn't doing pre-orders in Canada because they were told (by both Sony and Nintendo) they would not be given any exact numbers on shipments until 2 weeks before the systems were launched.
So what is the largest issue that prevents most people from wanting a PS3. The price, and Sony has shown that they will lower that when needed (Japan PS3 price is ~$430). It isn't inconceivable that Sony won't offer some "Gold" pack with a game in the summer of 2007 for the same price as the current PS3's now and then lower the price by next Christmas for a basic console.
Price is a major issue with the PS3 both for consumers and for developers; it is a problem for consumers because it will be (at least) 2 years (probably closer to 3) before any model of the PS3 is under $300 (a typical price for the majority of gamers to buy a system); it is a problem for developers because generating game assets for a PS3 game is expensive and thus game development cost have skyrocketed. Certainly both development cost and the purchase price of the PS3 may be reduced over time, but at the current point in time they are beyond the means of most consumers and developers.
Now there is the whole BlueRay, HD-DVD thing. There isn't even 50k units of HD-DVD players out on the market and it looks like the manufacturing of BluRay will be helped out considerably by 6 million units being produced, not to mention that there will be 6 million BlueRay players out there. If you were a content provider which one would you produce for? It is also not a mistake that Sony is going to include a BlueRay movie with the first 500k PS3's. They want people to try it as a movie player.
You bring up this 6 Million number, which may or may not happen in the near future (it's taken the XBox 11 months to break 6 Million units sold). Beyond that consumers as a whole have been staying away from High Definition Movie formats:
http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/mld/myrtlebeacho
Everything else in your post is just incoherent gibberish
Don't get me wrong ... I realize that these things were not necessarily true but it is how people precieve them; personally I went looking for a TV that supported 480p and ended up with a 34 inch widescreen 720p CRT HDTV for $500. Most people think "60 inch widescreen plazma/lcd flat pannel display" when they think of HDTVs, in fact I have noticed that many people assume that all LCD TVs are HDTVs and all CRT TVs are standard definition.
The ps2 was expensive when it came out. They have DVD manufactuing problems, so the first games that came out were on CDROM. They weren't really that great either. It took many years for the gamecube and the dreamcast to just dissappear.
My point is the war isn't won at launch. Its won when the system has lots of GOOD games for it, and they become cheap. When production becomes cheap so the manufacturer makes a profit off it. When the console becomes cheap enough to be able to buy another one, just as a backup. When developers are able to program for the blasted thing, without spending a billion dollars over 3 years.
We've got years of this to come. I don't think I can stand any more of the speculation. I just wanna play some games!
You're correct in saying that the PS2 was expensive, it was $300 which was $100 more than the Dreamcast and the same price as the XBox; and it sold well to a lot of people because DVD was already being adopted at an amazing rate and a cheap DVD player cost the same as the PS2. The PS3 is $500 or $600, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are being adopted at a slower than expected rate, and a cheap HD-DVD player is less than the PS3.
A videogame system "wins" very early on in its life (say 18 to 24 months into it) when they have sold enough to pressure third party developers to focus on their system rather than the competition. If you have a 5 Million unit lead in all three regions it is pretty easy to encourage developers that they should make games exclusively for you.
Also, modern Development Costs have very little to do with programming because you're programming team (including all scripters) is probably about 15% of the size of your entire development team; the real costs in game development are in the texture artists, modelers and animators and they will probably have to do more work as the generation progresses. What people don't get is that most of these fancy new material effects require data (normal maps, BDRF, etc) to be applied to the model as a texture which requires extra man hours; also things like facial animation (and animation in general) requires far more tweeking as you aproach more realistic avatars in order to make it look good (being slightly off on a very real looking person makes them look really creepy; being slightly off on mario isn't such a big deal).
Neither of those games are first party games, and it is likely that one or both of those games will be delayed into 2008. What this means is that if the PS3 doesn't sell well there is no reason that these games could not be ported to the XBox 360. I'm not saying this will happen, it is just a possibility being that neither Square nor Konami have any loyalty to Sony and the XBox 360 is similar enough in capabilities to make it happen ...