For ages I've been coming here purely for the discussion. Slashdotters seemed to generally have a more open mind and the average maturity level seemed to be that much higher than the people over within the digg community. So I read the comments of this to find out the Slashdot reaction, and a majority of you are "Wow, way to copy Nintendo, screw off Sony." and "So it's Sims and Second Life? Give me a break", all while being modded up to +5 insightful or +5 interesting. No Slashdot, you give me a break.
I guess it's obvious that Sony can't win here anymore. They integrate what Nintendo did with the Mii system (which was widely praised) and the community of XBox Live (also widely praised) and put their own personal spin on it and take it that much farther, and all you can say is "Fuck Sony". What if they just made a system that mimics XBox Live? "Looks like all Sony can do is copy Microsoft, fuck Sony." What if they just made a system with Mii's like Nintendo? "Looks like all Sony can do is copy Nintendo, fuck Sony." They put their own spin on what they think next-gen console connectivity should be, but obviously it must still be inferior. Why? They're Sony.
That's not even all they're offering. Is no one excited by LittleBigPlanet other than me? Is that not one of the coolest game concepts ever? Hell, Zonk knows it, and he's the one that's supposedly biased against Sony. But no, screw LittleBigPlanet, let's just make remarks like "this all sucks, where are the games?". Let alone when games coming out for the PS3 ARE mentioned, XBox supporters come out of the woodwork saying "Yeah well online will suck they don't have XBox Live". I guess games only matter when Sony doesn't present a ton of games? This is GDC. You'll see games at E3. Give them a break.
Honestly Slashdot, you've let me down. The Digg community has largely kept an open mind about Sony. Finally some good news, and for the most part, there's some good (but skeptical, understandably) reception. I'm not saying Playstation Home is the savior of the PS3, nor am I saying that LittleBigPlanet is the only game that will matter. I'm saying they've demoed some really cool stuff, and yet still they get blasted. Why? Because it's not the same? Because they're not exactly like the 360 or the Wii? I don't get it guys. I really don't./rant, awaiting the "you must be new here" and 360 fanboy flames.
I could be wrong, but half of the reason people get mad at Sony is not what they do but how they do it...
"The Revolution sucks! Motion Sensing is a Gimick!"... "Hey look, our new SIXAXIS controller has motion control in it" "Microsoft are Retards for using software emulation for backwards compatibility"... "Hey look, the PS3 uses software emulation for backwards compatibility" "Achievements are pointless"... "Hey look, or Playstation Home has Achievements"
It is one thing to take a good idea, it is another to be a complete douche bag while doing it...
I'm not defending this... [b]but[/b] to play devils advocate
For various reasons, Ranchers have been put into the situation where they have to have as many cattle as they can possibly have on a ranch in order to make a decent living; this means that a large portion of the livestock we will consume has been raised in an environment which has a high risk of disease. If we don't find and use better anti-biotics there will (eventually) be an outbreak of a new disease from people having consumed bad meat; much like BSE this disease may start to apear years after the initial consumption and (because it wasn't recognised in time) affect a massive portion of the population.
There is no good solution to this... You can eliminate the overcrowding in ranches but the price of your meat products will increase dramatically and foreign supplied meat (could) push your producers out of the market... You can continue to use the same anti-biotics and hope that new threats are not produced... And you can use the new anti-biotics and hope that nothing becomes resistant to them...
I wouldn't say that my stance has ever been "Anti-Global Warming" as much as asking people to question what they're being told and the motivation behind it...
I think that (regardless of your stance on the science) it is clear that Global Warming has been promoted mainly for political purposes. The argument has stopped being about what the science says, how strong the science is, or whether we can trust computer climate models (when we are really in the infancy of the technology) and moved to being a political debate.
I suspect that if we had the voice of God come out of the sky and say "Man Made Global Warming is a myth" or "Man Made Global Warming is happening" it wouldn't have any impact on the debate today...
I'm going to start by saying I know very little about robotics...
I could see how something like this could be useful because (much like the inner ear for humans) a device like this could be used to aid in the balance of robots. I could be wrong but it seems like most robots are currently designed to "walk perfectly" a feat which escapes most people; how often have you stubbed your toe or tripped on a stair? If a robot knew that its "body" was no longer in balance it might be able to correct for the "mistake" before it falls and (in essence) no longer be required to "walk perfectly" in order to walk effectively.
Not everyone rushes to buy a new videogame system in its first 2 years...
For third party publishers backwards compatibility is a huge feature because it means that it is safe for them to begin working on a title for the previous generation system even after the next generation hardware has been released. If you were 3 of 24 months into the development of a PS2 title today you'd be very upset if you found out that Sony's PS2 Backwards compatibility strategy was not going to allow your game to run perfectly on a PS3.
I don't know much (well anything) about Warhammer but I could see how it might make sense to create two MMO games, that were based off of similar systems, which are seperated by many months of development...
If I was Blizzard, and was considering making a World of Starcraft (or world of Diablo) I would try to use as much of the server side code from World of warcraft as possible (obviously, focusing on improving everything over the next 24 months of development) and focus technical development on creating a new client. The result of this would be that most of the features people want (chat, mail, grouping and battle system) would have already been built and tested (all of your competition will spend 2 years of development trying to get to this position).
Well, as I see it, advertizing "[some amazing benchmark] in a box" is reasonably foolish because I could produce a system with amazing theoritical performance that doesn't really perform that much better than a system that is a fraction of the cost... It wasn't that long ago where you could (easily) buy motherboards that supported 2 or 4 seperate processors, and people have generated Quad-SLi setups; what this means is you could create a 4 processor Core 2 Duo system with a Quad SLi Geforce 8800 GTx which (in most applications) would not perform much better than a single processor Core 2 Duo system with a single Geforce 8800GTx.
Some people would make a similar argument about a Porsche in comparison to a Honda Civic yet most people (even among those who have the money for a Porsche) would end up buying the Honda Civic rather than the Porsche; the reality is that most people are looking for a reasonably nice way to get from point A to point B and the 'Extra Value' of the Porsche is meaningless.
If you're only interested in the PS3 as a videogame machine the Wii or XBox 360 are (effectively) the same product at a much lower price; if you are looking for a 'videogame machine' you are looking for a fun way to spend your time, not necessarily the prettiest graphics.
Market Share is a very easy thing to lose and an amazingly difficult thing to gain. As long as they are selling approximately as many systems as the XBox 360, and selling less systems than the Wii, they will be the system with the lowest market share and are (essentially) digging themselves into a hole.
The reason why this is important is that (as I have said before) the only type of performance that third party developers care about is sales performance. The PS3 is currently selling at a rate similar to what the Gamecube and Dreamcast sold at (in both Japan and North America) meaning third party developers will (possibly) start treating the PS3 like they treated the Dreamcast and Gamecube; if you don't remember, both systems only had a handful of third party exclusive games from (very) close companies.
Now, I would say that Sony is correct in not rushing and dropping the price of the PS3... most of the damage that could be done from a high price has been done (hurting reputation, producing slow sales, etc.). Right now Sony needs to know whether their 'big' game releases will improve sales or whether the PS3 actually needs a price drop to even compete.
On an individual model basis, it isn't any more expensive to create a model for a PS3/XBox 360 game and a similar model for a movie.
Where the problem comes in is if you're producing a movie of the Wizard of Oz you can have very limited environments, with tons of cut and paste content for wider shots and no one will notice. In a game, if the Castle at the end is not fully modeled (and full of *mostly* original content) people will notice.
For the longest time I have tought that Nintendo was very clever in how they handled this problem...
They have Mario Party, Mario Kart, Mario Soccer/Baseball/Tennis/Golf, Super Smash Bros, etc. which all use very similar assets; this means that Nintendo can build a massive (in house) library of assets which end up getting a lot of reuse.
In North America I agree with you but in Japan it is a different story...
Currently (in Japan) there have been (roughly) 700,000 PS3 systems sold and (roughly) 725,000 games sold; being that many gamers would buy (at least) 2 games with a system, and have bought (at least) one aditional game in the past couple of months, I think a reasonable assumption is that a lot of PS3 systems have only been used to watch movies.
"Tools Improving" is not what would lead to a large enough reduction in development costs to offset the massive quantities of content that now have to be produced for a game... The likely cost reduction will be a massive investment in content development in developing nations.
Basically, a company like EA can take a similar ammount of money as it would take to develop a few games (say $50 Million) and invest it to train and pay artists in a country like Columbia to produce their 3D models (and other game assets) for them; being that a computer necessary to produce individual assets isn't that expensive (and neither are the tools) you could pay about 5 to 10 times as many people in Columbia to create your assets for the cost of 1 developer in the western world.
I (generally speaking) agree with you but I would say there has to be rules in place that ensure that protects your privacy. I would say that these cameras can not be placed in an area where someone can assume a certain level of privacy, and the footage a camera catches of (what can be assumed is) a private space (say a camera that has some view into your house) can not be used against you.
Regardless of where you shop the company will spend a similar ammount of money locally paying for rent, utilities, and labour and the rest of the money will go to paying for the goods you sell and investments; the local shop owner is as likely to invest in foreign (or multi-national) companies as they are to invest in local companies. Money is always flows from one place to another and never (actually) pools anywhere.
I'm going to go out on a wild-limb and assume that what Microsoft means is they're re-allocating their development money and focusing on less graphically intensive games. As a (rough) estimate Halo 3 will probably end up costing Microsoft $20 Million to develop, this means that they could probably develop 5 to 20 simple 'fun' games for the same cost as one big budget game. From a business perspective this makes a lot of sense because the risk per game is much smaller and you're far more likely to find a couple of games that really connect with consumers when you develop 20 games rather than 1.
Personally, I refuse to 'support' any store... If a company wants my money they have to offer me something that has value to me.
Now, this doesn't mean I refuse to shop at smaller stores but the smaller shops I use tend to have better customer service, wider selection, or are more convienient; I'm not going to go out of my way to pay more for Sponge-bob (a gift for my Niece) to have to deal with an over-weight college drop out (who smells like a dead moose) with an attitude.
I could be wrong, but "temperature" is not the only problem that could be caused by the energy output of these systems. As an example, what happens to a hard-drive if it has a large temperature variation from one side of the hard-drive to the other? Being that a hard-drive is such a precise device I would anticipate that the expansion/contraction caused by a 20 or 30 degree variation could have serious impacts.
No one says that you have to hate Sony, in fact if you have rational arguments most people will read your post and respond appropriately. If you actually read my post I never claimed that there were a large number of failures of either the PS3 or XBox 360 and just speculated that any failures were probably due to the heat of these systems; 200 Watts is a lot of energy which is being directly converted to heat and when it is in such a confined space it can do harm to most electronic components.
Another thing to consider is that if you want to be taken seriously you should probably get an account; anytime an anonymous coward makes a claim which is not directly backed up with a link to a reputable source it is automatically assumed that it is a troll. If you build a strong enough reputation people will (likely) take your word on what you say because you have been correct far more times than you have been wrong.
The combination of the ammount of heat being produced by the XBox 360 (and PS3) is probably the #1 reason these systems fail...
Everyone knows how hot a 100w light-bulb gets (because we've all been foolish enough to touch one) and both the XBox 360 and PS3 have the equivilant of 2 of these bulbs running in a very tight space; this heat can not be particularly good for any of the components and (probably) rapidly ages everything.
I do come from a game development background, and I do understand that it is possible to support multiple resolutions, but even PC games do not do this well... A lot of PC games only have one font size included so if the game was designed/tested around 800 x 600 when you play the game at 1600 x 1200 (or higher) the text becomes unreadable.
The real problem is that the PAL and NTSC signals have different heights so if you use the same font (as an example) in both regions one will look stretched; you can do automatic scaling but with many drawn assets this produces an undesireable effect.
Oh sorry, I thought we were talking about the PS3.
You joke but it is actually a pretty similar problem.
Most people are used to spending $0-$200 for a phone on contract and buy it because of how it is styled and its color; most of the features of the phone are not important because it is "Just a Phone." To most people spending $500 on a phone seems insane because they realize that they have no use for most of the features.
Now there is an important difference between an iPhone and a PS3...
If Sony only sold 5,000,000 PS3 systems in its first year third party developers would abandon their projects and the PS3 would die; if Apple sells 500,000 iPones in its first year they can continue to sell them the following year without any lost value for the system (and the iPhone will eventually become an affordable product).
Rememeber the tale of how MS won the desktop from IBM and Apple and the homecomputers? Not because MS was so brilliant but because IBM and Apple and the homecomputers all made really stupid decisions?
I have argued (several times) that Sony was successful with the Playstation mainly because Sega and Nintendo made some massive mistakes; Sega had released several (unnecessary) upgrades (Sega-CD, 32x) and released the Saturn with no games, Nintendo offended third parties, used cartridges and gave Sony an 18 month head start. You can argue that (in a lot of ways) the PS2 was also successful because of similar mistakes made by Sega, Nintendo and Microsoft.
Way back in the day (when I was a game developer, before I 'burnt out') I used to argue that it would make more sense to build a rough prototype of every level in the game (using assets that wouldn't even look good for a Playstation game) and then to work in short iterations to improve the overall quality of the game. I argued that, although early versions of the game would not be useful for public consumption, the overall quality of the game should be better in the end...
I don't know if I was correct, but I have been hearing that the basic principles of my idea are being used by more and more development houses because it allows for far more parallel development (meaning you can have a larger team rather than a longer development cycle).
The reason it is difficult to produce a region free console (as compared to a region free handheld) is the NTSC/PAL standards are not compatible. 4:3 PAL has a resolution of 720 x 576 pixels and a refresh rate of 25/50Hz whereas 4:3 NTSC has a resolution of 720 x 480 pixels and a refresh rate of 30/60Hz. The end result is that some things (like HUD and Text) have to be redone in order to actually be useable on both an NTSC and PAL display.
The PS3/XBox 360 don't have to worry about this as much because (IIRC) the HD standards 720p/1080i/1080p are universal
Slashdot Mirror
I could be wrong, but half of the reason people get mad at Sony is not what they do but how they do it
"The Revolution sucks! Motion Sensing is a Gimick!"
"Microsoft are Retards for using software emulation for backwards compatibility"
"Achievements are pointless"
It is one thing to take a good idea, it is another to be a complete douche bag while doing it
I'm not defending this ... [b]but[/b] to play devils advocate
... ... ... ...
For various reasons, Ranchers have been put into the situation where they have to have as many cattle as they can possibly have on a ranch in order to make a decent living; this means that a large portion of the livestock we will consume has been raised in an environment which has a high risk of disease. If we don't find and use better anti-biotics there will (eventually) be an outbreak of a new disease from people having consumed bad meat; much like BSE this disease may start to apear years after the initial consumption and (because it wasn't recognised in time) affect a massive portion of the population.
There is no good solution to this
You can eliminate the overcrowding in ranches but the price of your meat products will increase dramatically and foreign supplied meat (could) push your producers out of the market
You can continue to use the same anti-biotics and hope that new threats are not produced
And you can use the new anti-biotics and hope that nothing becomes resistant to them
I wouldn't say that my stance has ever been "Anti-Global Warming" as much as asking people to question what they're being told and the motivation behind it ...
...
I think that (regardless of your stance on the science) it is clear that Global Warming has been promoted mainly for political purposes. The argument has stopped being about what the science says, how strong the science is, or whether we can trust computer climate models (when we are really in the infancy of the technology) and moved to being a political debate.
I suspect that if we had the voice of God come out of the sky and say "Man Made Global Warming is a myth" or "Man Made Global Warming is happening" it wouldn't have any impact on the debate today
I'm going to start by saying I know very little about robotics ...
I could see how something like this could be useful because (much like the inner ear for humans) a device like this could be used to aid in the balance of robots. I could be wrong but it seems like most robots are currently designed to "walk perfectly" a feat which escapes most people; how often have you stubbed your toe or tripped on a stair? If a robot knew that its "body" was no longer in balance it might be able to correct for the "mistake" before it falls and (in essence) no longer be required to "walk perfectly" in order to walk effectively.
Not everyone rushes to buy a new videogame system in its first 2 years ...
For third party publishers backwards compatibility is a huge feature because it means that it is safe for them to begin working on a title for the previous generation system even after the next generation hardware has been released. If you were 3 of 24 months into the development of a PS2 title today you'd be very upset if you found out that Sony's PS2 Backwards compatibility strategy was not going to allow your game to run perfectly on a PS3.
I don't know much (well anything) about Warhammer but I could see how it might make sense to create two MMO games, that were based off of similar systems, which are seperated by many months of development ...
If I was Blizzard, and was considering making a World of Starcraft (or world of Diablo) I would try to use as much of the server side code from World of warcraft as possible (obviously, focusing on improving everything over the next 24 months of development) and focus technical development on creating a new client. The result of this would be that most of the features people want (chat, mail, grouping and battle system) would have already been built and tested (all of your competition will spend 2 years of development trying to get to this position).
Well, as I see it, advertizing "[some amazing benchmark] in a box" is reasonably foolish because I could produce a system with amazing theoritical performance that doesn't really perform that much better than a system that is a fraction of the cost ... It wasn't that long ago where you could (easily) buy motherboards that supported 2 or 4 seperate processors, and people have generated Quad-SLi setups; what this means is you could create a 4 processor Core 2 Duo system with a Quad SLi Geforce 8800 GTx which (in most applications) would not perform much better than a single processor Core 2 Duo system with a single Geforce 8800GTx.
Some people would make a similar argument about a Porsche in comparison to a Honda Civic yet most people (even among those who have the money for a Porsche) would end up buying the Honda Civic rather than the Porsche; the reality is that most people are looking for a reasonably nice way to get from point A to point B and the 'Extra Value' of the Porsche is meaningless.
If you're only interested in the PS3 as a videogame machine the Wii or XBox 360 are (effectively) the same product at a much lower price; if you are looking for a 'videogame machine' you are looking for a fun way to spend your time, not necessarily the prettiest graphics.
The problem is market share ...
... most of the damage that could be done from a high price has been done (hurting reputation, producing slow sales, etc.). Right now Sony needs to know whether their 'big' game releases will improve sales or whether the PS3 actually needs a price drop to even compete.
Market Share is a very easy thing to lose and an amazingly difficult thing to gain. As long as they are selling approximately as many systems as the XBox 360, and selling less systems than the Wii, they will be the system with the lowest market share and are (essentially) digging themselves into a hole.
The reason why this is important is that (as I have said before) the only type of performance that third party developers care about is sales performance. The PS3 is currently selling at a rate similar to what the Gamecube and Dreamcast sold at (in both Japan and North America) meaning third party developers will (possibly) start treating the PS3 like they treated the Dreamcast and Gamecube; if you don't remember, both systems only had a handful of third party exclusive games from (very) close companies.
Now, I would say that Sony is correct in not rushing and dropping the price of the PS3
Yes/No ...
...
On an individual model basis, it isn't any more expensive to create a model for a PS3/XBox 360 game and a similar model for a movie.
Where the problem comes in is if you're producing a movie of the Wizard of Oz you can have very limited environments, with tons of cut and paste content for wider shots and no one will notice. In a game, if the Castle at the end is not fully modeled (and full of *mostly* original content) people will notice.
For the longest time I have tought that Nintendo was very clever in how they handled this problem
They have Mario Party, Mario Kart, Mario Soccer/Baseball/Tennis/Golf, Super Smash Bros, etc. which all use very similar assets; this means that Nintendo can build a massive (in house) library of assets which end up getting a lot of reuse.
In North America I agree with you but in Japan it is a different story ...
Currently (in Japan) there have been (roughly) 700,000 PS3 systems sold and (roughly) 725,000 games sold; being that many gamers would buy (at least) 2 games with a system, and have bought (at least) one aditional game in the past couple of months, I think a reasonable assumption is that a lot of PS3 systems have only been used to watch movies.
"Tools Improving" is not what would lead to a large enough reduction in development costs to offset the massive quantities of content that now have to be produced for a game ... The likely cost reduction will be a massive investment in content development in developing nations.
Basically, a company like EA can take a similar ammount of money as it would take to develop a few games (say $50 Million) and invest it to train and pay artists in a country like Columbia to produce their 3D models (and other game assets) for them; being that a computer necessary to produce individual assets isn't that expensive (and neither are the tools) you could pay about 5 to 10 times as many people in Columbia to create your assets for the cost of 1 developer in the western world.
I (generally speaking) agree with you but I would say there has to be rules in place that ensure that protects your privacy. I would say that these cameras can not be placed in an area where someone can assume a certain level of privacy, and the footage a camera catches of (what can be assumed is) a private space (say a camera that has some view into your house) can not be used against you.
Local Economy?
...
There is no such thing
Regardless of where you shop the company will spend a similar ammount of money locally paying for rent, utilities, and labour and the rest of the money will go to paying for the goods you sell and investments; the local shop owner is as likely to invest in foreign (or multi-national) companies as they are to invest in local companies. Money is always flows from one place to another and never (actually) pools anywhere.
I'm going to go out on a wild-limb and assume that what Microsoft means is they're re-allocating their development money and focusing on less graphically intensive games. As a (rough) estimate Halo 3 will probably end up costing Microsoft $20 Million to develop, this means that they could probably develop 5 to 20 simple 'fun' games for the same cost as one big budget game. From a business perspective this makes a lot of sense because the risk per game is much smaller and you're far more likely to find a couple of games that really connect with consumers when you develop 20 games rather than 1.
Personally, I refuse to 'support' any store ... If a company wants my money they have to offer me something that has value to me.
Now, this doesn't mean I refuse to shop at smaller stores but the smaller shops I use tend to have better customer service, wider selection, or are more convienient; I'm not going to go out of my way to pay more for Sponge-bob (a gift for my Niece) to have to deal with an over-weight college drop out (who smells like a dead moose) with an attitude.
I could be wrong, but "temperature" is not the only problem that could be caused by the energy output of these systems. As an example, what happens to a hard-drive if it has a large temperature variation from one side of the hard-drive to the other? Being that a hard-drive is such a precise device I would anticipate that the expansion/contraction caused by a 20 or 30 degree variation could have serious impacts.
Anonymous Coward Sony Fanboy Troll,
No one says that you have to hate Sony, in fact if you have rational arguments most people will read your post and respond appropriately. If you actually read my post I never claimed that there were a large number of failures of either the PS3 or XBox 360 and just speculated that any failures were probably due to the heat of these systems; 200 Watts is a lot of energy which is being directly converted to heat and when it is in such a confined space it can do harm to most electronic components.
Another thing to consider is that if you want to be taken seriously you should probably get an account; anytime an anonymous coward makes a claim which is not directly backed up with a link to a reputable source it is automatically assumed that it is a troll. If you build a strong enough reputation people will (likely) take your word on what you say because you have been correct far more times than you have been wrong.
And how do you tell if someone actually owns an XBox 360?
I'm certain that many (if not most) of the "Broken" responses would be from PS3 fanboys
The combination of the ammount of heat being produced by the XBox 360 (and PS3) is probably the #1 reason these systems fail ...
Everyone knows how hot a 100w light-bulb gets (because we've all been foolish enough to touch one) and both the XBox 360 and PS3 have the equivilant of 2 of these bulbs running in a very tight space; this heat can not be particularly good for any of the components and (probably) rapidly ages everything.
I do come from a game development background, and I do understand that it is possible to support multiple resolutions, but even PC games do not do this well ... A lot of PC games only have one font size included so if the game was designed/tested around 800 x 600 when you play the game at 1600 x 1200 (or higher) the text becomes unreadable.
The real problem is that the PAL and NTSC signals have different heights so if you use the same font (as an example) in both regions one will look stretched; you can do automatic scaling but with many drawn assets this produces an undesireable effect.
You joke but it is actually a pretty similar problem.
Most people are used to spending $0-$200 for a phone on contract and buy it because of how it is styled and its color; most of the features of the phone are not important because it is "Just a Phone." To most people spending $500 on a phone seems insane because they realize that they have no use for most of the features.
Now there is an important difference between an iPhone and a PS3
If Sony only sold 5,000,000 PS3 systems in its first year third party developers would abandon their projects and the PS3 would die; if Apple sells 500,000 iPones in its first year they can continue to sell them the following year without any lost value for the system (and the iPhone will eventually become an affordable product).
I have argued (several times) that Sony was successful with the Playstation mainly because Sega and Nintendo made some massive mistakes; Sega had released several (unnecessary) upgrades (Sega-CD, 32x) and released the Saturn with no games, Nintendo offended third parties, used cartridges and gave Sony an 18 month head start. You can argue that (in a lot of ways) the PS2 was also successful because of similar mistakes made by Sega, Nintendo and Microsoft.
Way back in the day (when I was a game developer, before I 'burnt out') I used to argue that it would make more sense to build a rough prototype of every level in the game (using assets that wouldn't even look good for a Playstation game) and then to work in short iterations to improve the overall quality of the game. I argued that, although early versions of the game would not be useful for public consumption, the overall quality of the game should be better in the end ...
I don't know if I was correct, but I have been hearing that the basic principles of my idea are being used by more and more development houses because it allows for far more parallel development (meaning you can have a larger team rather than a longer development cycle).
The games on the Wii are pseudo-region free ...
The reason it is difficult to produce a region free console (as compared to a region free handheld) is the NTSC/PAL standards are not compatible. 4:3 PAL has a resolution of 720 x 576 pixels and a refresh rate of 25/50Hz whereas 4:3 NTSC has a resolution of 720 x 480 pixels and a refresh rate of 30/60Hz. The end result is that some things (like HUD and Text) have to be redone in order to actually be useable on both an NTSC and PAL display.
The PS3/XBox 360 don't have to worry about this as much because (IIRC) the HD standards 720p/1080i/1080p are universal