Microsoft didn't always suck... Neither did Sony...
There are two problems that large companies tend to face which make them evil, the grow too big and one hand of the company doesn't know what the other hand is doing, and they get success too quickly which leads to hubris. The interesting thing is that the companies that survive the eventual fall (Nintendo, IBM) tend to recover and don't make the same mistakes again...
You seem to have a lot more anger in the tone of your postings lately then you used to...
I used to read your overly optimistic posts about how the Wii only apealed to "Slashdot nerds" and how the PS3 was going to "Dominate"... Now you seem to spend all your time senselessly bashing the Wii.
Anyways, back to the topic at hand...
It doesn't really matter that games (like guitar hero) have appeared on other platforms, what matters is third parties are all starting to look at the Wii as a viable platform and are bringing their games to it; unlike other systems I could name, developers see that they can have a good ROI off of producing/porting a game for the Wii.
I would say anticipate disapointment... Consoles do not get replaced based on their technology they get replaced based on sales.
The XBox lasted 4 years, the Gamecube lasted 5 years and the PS2 (has) lasted 6/7 years (so far); the XBox 360 was released in order to get the "First Mover Advantage", the Wii was released because the Gamecube stopped selling and developers were no longer developing games for it, and the PS3 was released because Sony worried about the distruption in their control on the North American and European markets that the XBox 360 could provide.
If the Wii sells well in 2007 and 2008 I wouldn't expect to see any movement (from Nintendo) to replace the Wii until it was at least 5 years old...
Most analysts and (unfortunately) executives look at golden plated requirements as a good thing, even though (in many cases) they really aren't... An all flash iPod with tons of flashy features sounds great on paper until you see the price tag at $800; the price tag is never seen as that bad by many of these people because their six figure salary is (way) above their average customers income level.
Honesly, on the current generation of consoles the focus on 1080p is excessive...
From my (very limited) understanding, only in the past 2 years have 1080p TVs come on the market and the vast majority of new HDTVs are still 720p/1080i TVs; seriously, how does targeting the 1% of the population who owns 1080p TVs benefit anyone else?
Look at Japan, in 2005 the total number of software units sold was 39 Million in 2006 this total jumped to 69 Million... This jump is mosty attributed to Nintendo's success in attracting Casual gamers because in 2005 Nintendo sold 15 Million software untis and they sold 33 Million software units in 2006.
I (personally) don't think Japan is unique in having a lot of people who don't play games that would play videogames if the correct videogame came along.
Look at voting paterns... Compare the voter turn out of people over the age of 50 to that of people under the age of 35. The fact is that the reason why many of the "violent videogame crusaders" are elected is that people above a certain age believe the world is getting more violent, and that youths are more violent, than they used to be; is this true? No!
Largely because of the influence of mass communication, people now learn about violent acts that occur around the world immediately after (or as) they happen; the images that are beamed into people's homes make people feel a connection to these people who are (essentially) on the other side of the world.
Honestly, I think presentation matters far more than most people would ever let on...
If you only looked at the XFL you'd probably assume that there was no market for professional football in North America...
I think (know) you could make 'professional' videogame playing a spectator event but the important part is that the type of game you play must be understandable by the majority of people who have very limited understanding of games, must be fair, and must remain fast paced. I could be wrong, but I suspect that if Blizzard had the option that a person could be a spectator to the Battlegrounds you would see quite a few people watching for reasons other than cheating/
In many places in the world paying for sex is not illegal if it is between two adults; what is illegal is the act of buying/selling sex in a public place is illegal. This is what makes escorts completely legal and street walking is illegal.
It is questionable as to whether this system is completely fair but the main goals from a system like this is to limit the "Social Damage" from prostitution; in general, prevent people's housing values from dropping because their community is full of prostitutes.
I have to argue that EA does not (typically) produce 'Crapy' games as much as they produce generic games with an adequate level of creative and technical skill; with many obvious exceptions, you know that you can buy an EA game and it will be an above average game, it will play as you would expect and will not require heroics in order to get it to run on your system.
As much as EA is starting to throw heavy support behind the Wii you can see their lack of focus on the platform. Many of their sports games (boxing, football, baseball, hockey, soccer, rugby, etc.) could easily have been ported from the XBox/Gamecube around August of 2005, they could have done minor upgrades to their graphical assets and engine and focused on new controls for a fraction of the cost of producing a PS3/XBox 360 version of these games; how many of these games will be released in the first 9 months of the Wii's life? They missed a year's iteration on many of these titles because they didn't see the value in producing these games; how many people after playing Wii Sports: Boxing wanted to try a Simulation Boxing game?
I could be 100% wrong but could this decision be (at least in part) that EA and Valve are waiting for the userbase of the XBox 360 and PS3 to hit a point where it would be worthwile?
An article I saw on google news earlier today was titled EA: Microsoft, Sony, We Have a Problem argued that EA's bottom line was being hurt mainly because they banked on massive success for the PS3 and XBox 360; it is debateable as to whether this is true or not. My thought is that if you were anticipating releasing a game to a combined console userbase of 20-25 Million users worldwide, or 10+ million users in North America the latest forcasts in sales of the PS3 and XBox 360 would likely mean that you'd want to delay your game by 3-6 months.
First off the Gamecube has antialiasing and anisotropic filtering supported in hardware and most games actually used both; they were not all that noticeable on a 480i display but if you spent the money and bought component cables it was very noticeable at 480p. Secondly, I'm positive that the PC I mentioned could not produce similar quality graphics being that (after every PC focused developer I knew claimed the "Spaceworld 2000 Starwars demo" was pre-rendered because PCs could not produce graphics like that) Factor 5 demonstrated Rogue Squadren 2 at E3 2001 people ran to play this game and watch it in motion.
Certainly, the advantage Gamecube and XBox had was soon eclipsed by PCs as the Pentium 4 processors broke the 2GHz mark and the Geforce 4 was released; at this point the console's continued to have a Performance/Dollar advantage for (pretty much) the rest of their life.
Consider how many people make a profit on a good component for a PC compared to a console... A BFG card will allow Nvidia, BFG and the retailer all to make a decent profit on every card, a Console will have Nvidia/ATI to make a minor profit (made up for in volume) and then the retailer will make a minor profit.
Consoles outperform a similar aged PCs because the game can be tuned to the exact hardware (it is impossible to optimize a game for a Geforce 6, Geforce 7, Geforce 8, Radeon X800, Radeon X1800 and also cover Pentium 4, Pentum Core Duo, AMD X2, and PowerPC. On top of that console's have historically had a massive advantage in that they have 'no' OS to run and have a much lower resolution.
Just look at the Gamecube's best looking games Star Wars: Rogue Squadren 2 and the Resident evil games... do you think a Pentium 4 in the 1GHz range with a Geforce 3 graphics card would be able to run Windows and a game like this?
How many trade shows has there been since the Wii was released?
That's correct, zero! Now, how many games does Nintendo announce months before a major tradeshow like E3? That's right very few... This is a patern for a large portion of the industry because it is easier to get the attention of a lot of press outlets at E3 than it is to announce a game on a random day in January.
The Wii was released in Q4 which represents over half of all game sales, we are now in Q1 which is the slowest quarter in the year; the reason there are no Wii games being released is the same reason there are no PS2, Nintendo DS, PSP, XBox 360 and PS3 games being released.
Finally, there were other consoles that became a 'Third Party Dumping Grounds'... The ones I can think of are the Playstation, PS2, Gameboy, and Gameboy Advance...
Honestly, why does it have to be Nintendo's job to save the adventure game?
Why did Sierra (Leisure Suit Larry, Kings Quest, Police Quest, Space Quest) and Lucasarts (The Dig) ever give up on the Adventure game in the first place, and why can't they save it?
Obviously Blu-Ray has started to sell well after 1,000,000+ Blu-Ray enabled PS3 units... The question I have is if Blu-Ray will continue to sell well over the next few months...
I really don't know, but I suspect that a lot of people who bought a PS3 to play games might have bought 1 or 2 Blu-Ray movies simply because they wanted to try the drive out; being that there are few places that currently rent Blu-Ray/HD-DVD movies buying them is the only option for a lot of people. In contrast, I suspect that anyone who has bought any HD-DVD player is likely a movie collector and will buy 1-2 movies every week (or two) for the next couple of years. The question is how big of an impact 1 PS3 will make towards sales as compared to one stand alone HD-DVD player.
I could just be paranoid but what I would be afraid of is people posting 'images' of games that actually bricked your system...
You really only have to be successful with a couple hundred/thousand systems before word gets out and the average consumer will be afraid to install a mod-chip and download games.
Well, maybe you don't understand but the one of the major selling points of the Wii to developers is they could continue to use the same technology and their development costs would not increase...
With the Wii you get to produce an Unreal 2 Engine game with some graphical enhancements over a Gamecube game but costs don't explode; in contrast to make a PS3/XBox 360 game your budget will probably explode to being 3-4 times what a PS2/XBox game cost. Now, what I hope happens is that the Wii demonstrates that pushing graphical limits is not necessary so that in the next generation developers produce games which focus on gameplay and have graphics on the level the developer can afford.
I thought this was known back in August/September?
I swear I saw an interview saying that Red-Steel was an Unreal 2 Engine game and it was unlikely the Wii could support an Unreal 3 Engine game...
The fact is that the Unreal 3 Engine was designed with a reasonably powerful GPU (probably in the Geforce 6800 range) and a reasonably powerful CPU (AMD X2 3800+ as a guess) in mind and the Wii simply isn't in the same league. The Wii should be able to handle the Doom 3, Unreal 2 and (maybe) the Source engine which are all solid game engines which should be good for several years.
Regardless of whether you like the XBox or not, Microsoft has prroduced a platform which is viable for game development which is more than can be said about most companies which have entered the market.
Now if you look at how expensive it was for Microsoft to enter the market, and how Sony survived mainly because of Nintendo's and Sega's massive screw-ups, it should be obvious why it is foolish to try to enter the market on your own. Now, it would eliminate the purpose for Nokia to enter the market (to get access to licencing fees) but I suspect the best approach would be to combine efforts with Sony/Nintendo to produce a gaming system/phone; if you had a GBA/DS/PSP phone there would (probably) be far greater consumer interest in the product than a nokia game/phone.
"It's all well and good to believe that, but just because some random guy on Slashdot says it doesn't mean it is (or isn't) true.
I was almost convinced until you said something about passing the savings on to the customer. Obviously you don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about!"
I admit that it is an old fashioned concept but it is not (entirely) dead...
Consider Walmart, an entire empire was built because Walmart found a way to reduce costs and pass the savings onto the customer; had Walmart tried to reduce costs and increase their ROI on every product sold they would probably have never grown into what they are today.
Now I could be wrong but I believe that if music on iTunes (or any music store) was dramatically less expensive (say $0.25 per song) you would see a lot more money spent on music and few people would be willing to admit that they stole an album; at $4 per album I could see most parents buying their children a $20 iTunes card a month, and everyone would (possibly) download the entire album of an artist when they liked one song they heard. At $15-$20 per album the cost almost justifies the effort required to download the album for free.
I have no understanding of German Law but (in most countries) wouldn't hacking into secretly someone's computer be the same as an illegal search?
I could be wrong, but as I see it tracking someone's activity online is similar to watching someone in a public space which is (somewhat) reasonable; and it could (hypothetically) be argued that any data being sent via the internet was like yelling across the field. Someone's computer (on the other hand) is private property and they have the right to believe that it is a private space (much like your house).
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft didn't always suck ... ...
...
Neither did Sony
There are two problems that large companies tend to face which make them evil, the grow too big and one hand of the company doesn't know what the other hand is doing, and they get success too quickly which leads to hubris. The interesting thing is that the companies that survive the eventual fall (Nintendo, IBM) tend to recover and don't make the same mistakes again
Anonymous Coward Sony Fanboy Troll,
...
... Now you seem to spend all your time senselessly bashing the Wii.
...
You seem to have a lot more anger in the tone of your postings lately then you used to
I used to read your overly optimistic posts about how the Wii only apealed to "Slashdot nerds" and how the PS3 was going to "Dominate"
Anyways, back to the topic at hand
It doesn't really matter that games (like guitar hero) have appeared on other platforms, what matters is third parties are all starting to look at the Wii as a viable platform and are bringing their games to it; unlike other systems I could name, developers see that they can have a good ROI off of producing/porting a game for the Wii.
I would say anticipate disapointment ... Consoles do not get replaced based on their technology they get replaced based on sales.
...
The XBox lasted 4 years, the Gamecube lasted 5 years and the PS2 (has) lasted 6/7 years (so far); the XBox 360 was released in order to get the "First Mover Advantage", the Wii was released because the Gamecube stopped selling and developers were no longer developing games for it, and the PS3 was released because Sony worried about the distruption in their control on the North American and European markets that the XBox 360 could provide.
If the Wii sells well in 2007 and 2008 I wouldn't expect to see any movement (from Nintendo) to replace the Wii until it was at least 5 years old
Most analysts and (unfortunately) executives look at golden plated requirements as a good thing, even though (in many cases) they really aren't ... An all flash iPod with tons of flashy features sounds great on paper until you see the price tag at $800; the price tag is never seen as that bad by many of these people because their six figure salary is (way) above their average customers income level.
By 2009 'more' people will obviously own 1080p TVs but most people will still own 1080i/720p TVs or worse ...
Also in 2009/2010 we will be hearing about the PS4, XBox 720 and (probably) the Wii 2 which will be released in 2010/2011.
Honesly, on the current generation of consoles the focus on 1080p is excessive ...
From my (very limited) understanding, only in the past 2 years have 1080p TVs come on the market and the vast majority of new HDTVs are still 720p/1080i TVs; seriously, how does targeting the 1% of the population who owns 1080p TVs benefit anyone else?
Look at Japan, in 2005 the total number of software units sold was 39 Million in 2006 this total jumped to 69 Million ... This jump is mosty attributed to Nintendo's success in attracting Casual gamers because in 2005 Nintendo sold 15 Million software untis and they sold 33 Million software units in 2006.
I (personally) don't think Japan is unique in having a lot of people who don't play games that would play videogames if the correct videogame came along.
Since when?
... Compare the voter turn out of people over the age of 50 to that of people under the age of 35. The fact is that the reason why many of the "violent videogame crusaders" are elected is that people above a certain age believe the world is getting more violent, and that youths are more violent, than they used to be; is this true? No!
Look at voting paterns
Largely because of the influence of mass communication, people now learn about violent acts that occur around the world immediately after (or as) they happen; the images that are beamed into people's homes make people feel a connection to these people who are (essentially) on the other side of the world.
Honestly, I think presentation matters far more than most people would ever let on ...
...
If you only looked at the XFL you'd probably assume that there was no market for professional football in North America
I think (know) you could make 'professional' videogame playing a spectator event but the important part is that the type of game you play must be understandable by the majority of people who have very limited understanding of games, must be fair, and must remain fast paced. I could be wrong, but I suspect that if Blizzard had the option that a person could be a spectator to the Battlegrounds you would see quite a few people watching for reasons other than cheating/
In many places in the world paying for sex is not illegal if it is between two adults; what is illegal is the act of buying/selling sex in a public place is illegal. This is what makes escorts completely legal and street walking is illegal.
It is questionable as to whether this system is completely fair but the main goals from a system like this is to limit the "Social Damage" from prostitution; in general, prevent people's housing values from dropping because their community is full of prostitutes.
I have to argue that EA does not (typically) produce 'Crapy' games as much as they produce generic games with an adequate level of creative and technical skill; with many obvious exceptions, you know that you can buy an EA game and it will be an above average game, it will play as you would expect and will not require heroics in order to get it to run on your system.
As much as EA is starting to throw heavy support behind the Wii you can see their lack of focus on the platform. Many of their sports games (boxing, football, baseball, hockey, soccer, rugby, etc.) could easily have been ported from the XBox/Gamecube around August of 2005, they could have done minor upgrades to their graphical assets and engine and focused on new controls for a fraction of the cost of producing a PS3/XBox 360 version of these games; how many of these games will be released in the first 9 months of the Wii's life? They missed a year's iteration on many of these titles because they didn't see the value in producing these games; how many people after playing Wii Sports: Boxing wanted to try a Simulation Boxing game?
I could be 100% wrong but could this decision be (at least in part) that EA and Valve are waiting for the userbase of the XBox 360 and PS3 to hit a point where it would be worthwile?
...
An article I saw on google news earlier today was titled EA: Microsoft, Sony, We Have a Problem argued that EA's bottom line was being hurt mainly because they banked on massive success for the PS3 and XBox 360; it is debateable as to whether this is true or not. My thought is that if you were anticipating releasing a game to a combined console userbase of 20-25 Million users worldwide, or 10+ million users in North America the latest forcasts in sales of the PS3 and XBox 360 would likely mean that you'd want to delay your game by 3-6 months.
Just a thought though
First off the Gamecube has antialiasing and anisotropic filtering supported in hardware and most games actually used both; they were not all that noticeable on a 480i display but if you spent the money and bought component cables it was very noticeable at 480p. Secondly, I'm positive that the PC I mentioned could not produce similar quality graphics being that (after every PC focused developer I knew claimed the "Spaceworld 2000 Starwars demo" was pre-rendered because PCs could not produce graphics like that) Factor 5 demonstrated Rogue Squadren 2 at E3 2001 people ran to play this game and watch it in motion.
Certainly, the advantage Gamecube and XBox had was soon eclipsed by PCs as the Pentium 4 processors broke the 2GHz mark and the Geforce 4 was released; at this point the console's continued to have a Performance/Dollar advantage for (pretty much) the rest of their life.
Consider how many people make a profit on a good component for a PC compared to a console ... A BFG card will allow Nvidia, BFG and the retailer all to make a decent profit on every card, a Console will have Nvidia/ATI to make a minor profit (made up for in volume) and then the retailer will make a minor profit.
This is not true ...
... do you think a Pentium 4 in the 1GHz range with a Geforce 3 graphics card would be able to run Windows and a game like this?
Consoles outperform a similar aged PCs because the game can be tuned to the exact hardware (it is impossible to optimize a game for a Geforce 6, Geforce 7, Geforce 8, Radeon X800, Radeon X1800 and also cover Pentium 4, Pentum Core Duo, AMD X2, and PowerPC. On top of that console's have historically had a massive advantage in that they have 'no' OS to run and have a much lower resolution.
Just look at the Gamecube's best looking games Star Wars: Rogue Squadren 2 and the Resident evil games
Sometimes a product, typically in entertainment, is greater than the sum of their parts ...
...
Personally speaking, I thought The Legend of Zelda had an attention to detail and was very entertaining in its long single player campaign.
At the same time a product, typically in entertainment, can be less than the sum of their parts
FEAR was a beautiful game, with an interesting story, but seemed stale from the moment I started playing it.
How many trade shows has there been since the Wii was released?
... This is a patern for a large portion of the industry because it is easier to get the attention of a lot of press outlets at E3 than it is to announce a game on a random day in January.
... The ones I can think of are the Playstation, PS2, Gameboy, and Gameboy Advance ...
That's correct, zero! Now, how many games does Nintendo announce months before a major tradeshow like E3? That's right very few
The Wii was released in Q4 which represents over half of all game sales, we are now in Q1 which is the slowest quarter in the year; the reason there are no Wii games being released is the same reason there are no PS2, Nintendo DS, PSP, XBox 360 and PS3 games being released.
Finally, there were other consoles that became a 'Third Party Dumping Grounds'
Honestly, why does it have to be Nintendo's job to save the adventure game?
Why did Sierra (Leisure Suit Larry, Kings Quest, Police Quest, Space Quest) and Lucasarts (The Dig) ever give up on the Adventure game in the first place, and why can't they save it?
Obviously Blu-Ray has started to sell well after 1,000,000+ Blu-Ray enabled PS3 units ... The question I have is if Blu-Ray will continue to sell well over the next few months ...
I really don't know, but I suspect that a lot of people who bought a PS3 to play games might have bought 1 or 2 Blu-Ray movies simply because they wanted to try the drive out; being that there are few places that currently rent Blu-Ray/HD-DVD movies buying them is the only option for a lot of people. In contrast, I suspect that anyone who has bought any HD-DVD player is likely a movie collector and will buy 1-2 movies every week (or two) for the next couple of years. The question is how big of an impact 1 PS3 will make towards sales as compared to one stand alone HD-DVD player.
I could just be paranoid but what I would be afraid of is people posting 'images' of games that actually bricked your system...
You really only have to be successful with a couple hundred/thousand systems before word gets out and the average consumer will be afraid to install a mod-chip and download games.
Well, maybe you don't understand but the one of the major selling points of the Wii to developers is they could continue to use the same technology and their development costs would not increase ...
With the Wii you get to produce an Unreal 2 Engine game with some graphical enhancements over a Gamecube game but costs don't explode; in contrast to make a PS3/XBox 360 game your budget will probably explode to being 3-4 times what a PS2/XBox game cost. Now, what I hope happens is that the Wii demonstrates that pushing graphical limits is not necessary so that in the next generation developers produce games which focus on gameplay and have graphics on the level the developer can afford.
I thought this was known back in August/September?
...
I swear I saw an interview saying that Red-Steel was an Unreal 2 Engine game and it was unlikely the Wii could support an Unreal 3 Engine game
The fact is that the Unreal 3 Engine was designed with a reasonably powerful GPU (probably in the Geforce 6800 range) and a reasonably powerful CPU (AMD X2 3800+ as a guess) in mind and the Wii simply isn't in the same league. The Wii should be able to handle the Doom 3, Unreal 2 and (maybe) the Source engine which are all solid game engines which should be good for several years.
Regardless of whether you like the XBox or not, Microsoft has prroduced a platform which is viable for game development which is more than can be said about most companies which have entered the market.
Now if you look at how expensive it was for Microsoft to enter the market, and how Sony survived mainly because of Nintendo's and Sega's massive screw-ups, it should be obvious why it is foolish to try to enter the market on your own. Now, it would eliminate the purpose for Nokia to enter the market (to get access to licencing fees) but I suspect the best approach would be to combine efforts with Sony/Nintendo to produce a gaming system/phone; if you had a GBA/DS/PSP phone there would (probably) be far greater consumer interest in the product than a nokia game/phone.
"It's all well and good to believe that, but just because some random guy on Slashdot says it doesn't mean it is (or isn't) true.
...
I was almost convinced until you said something about passing the savings on to the customer. Obviously you don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about!"
I admit that it is an old fashioned concept but it is not (entirely) dead
Consider Walmart, an entire empire was built because Walmart found a way to reduce costs and pass the savings onto the customer; had Walmart tried to reduce costs and increase their ROI on every product sold they would probably have never grown into what they are today.
Now I could be wrong but I believe that if music on iTunes (or any music store) was dramatically less expensive (say $0.25 per song) you would see a lot more money spent on music and few people would be willing to admit that they stole an album; at $4 per album I could see most parents buying their children a $20 iTunes card a month, and everyone would (possibly) download the entire album of an artist when they liked one song they heard. At $15-$20 per album the cost almost justifies the effort required to download the album for free.
I have no understanding of German Law but (in most countries) wouldn't hacking into secretly someone's computer be the same as an illegal search?
I could be wrong, but as I see it tracking someone's activity online is similar to watching someone in a public space which is (somewhat) reasonable; and it could (hypothetically) be argued that any data being sent via the internet was like yelling across the field. Someone's computer (on the other hand) is private property and they have the right to believe that it is a private space (much like your house).