Actually, the released figures make like rather more complicated. The Departed leaps out for selling around 10,000 more on Blu-Ray than HD-DVD. But when you look at every other title, the two formats are either neck and neck or with a slight lead to Toshiba's format for the titles on both.
I'm not denying that Blu-Ray is easily outselling HD-DVD overall, but the detailed figures suggest that this is because the studio support is better. I strongly suspect that The Departed's figures are due to the fact that the HD-DVD is more expensive due to having the SD on the other side.
Right now, the formats seem to be getting sold to two camps. Firstly, there are PS3 owners looking to give their box some work. How many of these people go back to cheap DVDs when they have more games to give their expensive new toy some work has yet to be seen.
Secondly, there are the A/V nutters (myself included). A lot of them have both formats already, and so buy the cheaper one. There are some really painful numbers in the release for Universal, particularly the Bourne and Kong ones, but both Universal and Warner are seeing catalogue sales much better for individual titles on HD-DVD than the crap that Fox is shovelling out the door by the bucketload.
So while I think I've got the wrong horse with my HD-DVD player, there's no reason to switch until 2008 for me, and I don't think Universal will go multiformat until the end of the year at the earliest.
I'll absolutely confess that I don't like Monopoly. But that's because people make poor choices over the auctioning and mortgaging of properties, and most of all get into exchanges at silly vlaues cause the endgame to last ages.
In most games of Monopoly, it only takes two or three trips round the board for one person to be obviously in the lead, largely due to the luck of their landing. Then the next hour is just playing out that ineviatable result; usually quite some time after the first person got eliminated, too.
What I really found interesting, however, is how this is all talked about as a brand new development. The Lord Of The Rings Monopoly altered this a good couple of years ago, by introducing the movement of the Ring round the board. That gives a defining endpoint, and a count-up of the relative profits of each player, well before most people have been sitting around bored, waiting for the luckiest loser to hit the killer hotels.
Further digging reveals that many HD-DVD add-ons for the 360 do indeed play it - the problem is an authoring cock-up, and so the problem seems semi-random. Which is an arse.
By the way, last time I saw figures, the 360 drives were only about 60% of the HD-DVD market; Toshiba have been vastly outselling standalone BD players, largely due to the sensible pricing.
The fact that the PS3 is a much better player than any of the $1000 standalone players doesn't exactly help, either.
That depends, though, on whether they plan on selling games next year to PS3 owners who would not buy them on any other platform. Judging from the upcoming Tomb Raider: Anniversary, all they're actually doing is saying that the PS2 has plenty of life in it. And if PS3 owners can play those PS2 games as well, then so much the better.
If anyone wants to buy a shiny graphics version, then there are a lot more 360s out there at the moment.
If you've got the 360 add-on that has a problem with playing the disc, then you've got an external USB HD-DVD drive for the PC already. So that's that sorted.
Personally, it sounds like a software problem with the 360 player; I'd expect an update over Live just as soon as they figure it out.
I've just checked. Oblivion takes up 6.4Gb of the DVD's 8Gb capacity. There's actually another gig and a half left for textures, if they really wanted them.
I think the GP's arguments make perfect sense. Both companies can add all the bells and whistles they want for value-added stuff. But at the end of the day, they're game consoles, and if you want to play Motorstorm you buy a PS3, and if you want to play Crackdown you buy a 360.
I bought a PS2 because I really wanted to play GTAIII (at that point there was no sign of it going multiplatform). I bought an XBox because I really wanted to play Orta. Cube for Monkey Ball, 360 for Dead Rising. And so on. When there's a PS3 WipEout I'll probably fold on that, too.
Even with your current machine, whichever account purchased the games has got that purchase registered against them. If you lost your drive in a hideous malfunction, accidentally deleted the data or whatever other circumstance might cause you to lose it, like just being desperate for space, you can download it all over again without paying a second time, apparently.
I think we're all being rather a bit too paranoid about the reasoning here.
The drive in the 360 is a 16x DVD ROM drive. The drive in the HD-DVD add-on can only do 8x DVD ROM reading, judging from the spec sheets for Toshiba's equivalent PC drive.
360 games are designed to play from the 360's drive, and so can assume that read speeds will be as per the 16x drive. Switching to a slower drive is bound to introduce problems. So they've not done it.
Sure, I'd like a HD-DVD drive in there instead if it still played games at full speed. But if we can't have it, then we can't have it.
Really? With most films I hadn't noticed, but the dynamic range on M:i:III the other night was compressed to hell and back, and sounded pretty awful. So that's great news.
I agree that DD generally seems to be more efficient than DTS, but in my experience it's not _that_ superior that good old 1.5Mb DTS won't be an improvement.
I've heard a few 360s, and yes - some are quieter than mine. It's a right pain, but I've heard easily enough horror stories to warn me off invalidating the warranty to do anything about it so far.
By the way, have you heard anything more on when we might expect such updates? The last I heard the HD-DVD one had been seperated from the main Spring update (which I'm guessing for sometime in March, based on when the last two came), and presumably that means its coming sooner, but how much sooner I've no idea. Before my Potter 4 disc arrives would be amazing.
Not only is the Premium bundle actually £279, but it can quite easily be found in Blockbuster for £249, and bundled with a whole load of good stuff for something more akin to the £279 normal price if you want it.
Hopefully, the difference in sound quality should even out a fair bit with the Spring Update - it's changing the audio side of the HD-DVD player so it downmixes DD+ and TrueHD to 1536kb/s DTS like the Toshiba standalone players use on their optical output, rather than the much-lower-bitrate DD it currently does.
It's not lossless, but as anyone who bought into laserdisc knows, full-bitrate DTS is pretty darn spiffy. And I certainly defy you to tell the difference with the racket that is the 360's fan going in the background. If I could afford a whole new amp with HDMI in I could afford the extra few hundred for a standalone HD-DVD player, too.
My 360 is horizontal anyway; it's in an equipment rack and I've heard too many horror stories about what happens to discs that are running when it ineviatably gets knocked over by my 2-year-old. But I used to use my PS2 vertically without any problems - doesn't the 360 also have the little bits that hold the disc in the tray in vertical mode?
I've got a white iPod and PSP too, so you're not the only one there. I'd also get a white DS over the black one, if I actually could face the idea of upgrading my blue Big Fat DS to the lite.
But this isn't (for the most part) about getting 360 owners to upgrade. New add-ons will be coming out in black at the same time, and they'd just expect you to buy those instead.
Sort of. It's my understanding that this console needs a new scaler over the 'normal' one, but digital scalers aren't difficult to find - there's one in every HDMI-capable DVD player, for instance. It's just that they cost a couple of dollars, and Sony didn't think it was worth it, when they can just ask developers to render directly to the different resolution. But that was when they just assumed that the PS3 was so monumentally powerful that everyone would be able to do 1920x1080 at 60fps without breaking a sweat.
Really? Admittedly my 360 is six months old, but even today I'd buy a normal white one instead of this device. The extra storage space is of no real use to me, and HDMI doesn't look any better than VGA on my TV (judging from having used them with my PC, anyway). I even think the white looks better, but then I got excited about the limited-edition white releases of the other consoles where black was the norm.
Why do you want a slot-loader? I saw a post from someone in the last XBox thread about wanting a slot-loader, too. Personally, I've always found greater reliability from tray-loading drives, with the added advantage of not having to take the whole drive mechanism to bits if anything goes wrong.
Is there an advantage to slot-loading drives I'm not aware of, then?
Phew, I thought it was just me that did that. Braben dropped some hints about Elite 4 about a year ago, but he's far too busy with that DC-set game at the mo.
European and Japanese releases with extra tracks are very simple, really. Your US-release albums have historically cost a hell of a lot less than our ones, and sometimes even come out earlier. Chucking a couple of tracks not deemed worthy of being used for the 'proper' album, or even single b-sides, is a way of trying to persuade fans to pay the markup. You're not the ones being screwed, we are.
The mark-up isn't much of one at all, really. If you know what the shop pays wholesale for albums, the ratio to what you pay is about what the top up the retail price of the import copy by. And they have to buy those imports retail, because they can't get them wholesale for export without the RIAA, BPI etc. throwing dolls out of their prams and claiming that selling imports is effectively the same as selling pirates, since those discs weren't licensed for sale abroad.
Apart from VF5 (debuting right down at number 14 on the weekend's all-format chart), Motorstorm (rather respectable at number 2 below Resistance, and pretty much THE reason to get one if you ask me, a guy who doesn't like FPS games) and the new F1 game (9ish, I think from memory) most of those other releases are multi-platform titles like Virtua Tennis 3. So not a massively tempting reason to blow £425 on the console, particularly to the early-adopter market who may well have a 360 already.
Also, a few titles like Oblivion have slipped here (which is odd, given that it made its US deadline) so the list wasn't the full 30 in the end.
Actually, Chart-track, who compile the official charts used by most retailers and the whole game industry, have reported the same figures. Sony really have had the biggest home console launch. Also, they've only sold around 60% of their supply. Spin to fanboy taste, basically.
It's all down to how you want to read the figures. Queues to buy the machine have been much smaller, but the number sold was higher because Sony actually managed to supply stock to meet demand (and more - there are almost as many sitting on shelves as in homes).
Well done Sony, I say - massive queues make for great PR buzz, but cash from sales is better. Not having to rush to grab one is nice as a consumer, too.
Not that I can afford one until 2008's inevitable price cut. And I want a US model anyway; it will complement my local PS2 nicely.
Me too. When I saw this originally, I was a bit surprised, as I've bought quite a few albums recently. The new ones from Aereogramme, Explosions In The Sky, The Good The Bad & The Queen and Grinderman have all been worth every penny. Mind you, they're not 'teenager music'.
Of course, by that logic, given that films on crappy VHS tapes were $70 each in the 80s, a 1080p copy on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray must be worth at least a few hundred bucks, surely?
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I bought a 2m HDMI cable with my upscaling player from the local supermarket for £1.99. It works just fine, thanks.
Actually, the released figures make like rather more complicated. The Departed leaps out for selling around 10,000 more on Blu-Ray than HD-DVD. But when you look at every other title, the two formats are either neck and neck or with a slight lead to Toshiba's format for the titles on both.
I'm not denying that Blu-Ray is easily outselling HD-DVD overall, but the detailed figures suggest that this is because the studio support is better. I strongly suspect that The Departed's figures are due to the fact that the HD-DVD is more expensive due to having the SD on the other side.
Right now, the formats seem to be getting sold to two camps. Firstly, there are PS3 owners looking to give their box some work. How many of these people go back to cheap DVDs when they have more games to give their expensive new toy some work has yet to be seen.
Secondly, there are the A/V nutters (myself included). A lot of them have both formats already, and so buy the cheaper one. There are some really painful numbers in the release for Universal, particularly the Bourne and Kong ones, but both Universal and Warner are seeing catalogue sales much better for individual titles on HD-DVD than the crap that Fox is shovelling out the door by the bucketload.
So while I think I've got the wrong horse with my HD-DVD player, there's no reason to switch until 2008 for me, and I don't think Universal will go multiformat until the end of the year at the earliest.
I'll absolutely confess that I don't like Monopoly. But that's because people make poor choices over the auctioning and mortgaging of properties, and most of all get into exchanges at silly vlaues cause the endgame to last ages.
In most games of Monopoly, it only takes two or three trips round the board for one person to be obviously in the lead, largely due to the luck of their landing. Then the next hour is just playing out that ineviatable result; usually quite some time after the first person got eliminated, too.
What I really found interesting, however, is how this is all talked about as a brand new development. The Lord Of The Rings Monopoly altered this a good couple of years ago, by introducing the movement of the Ring round the board. That gives a defining endpoint, and a count-up of the relative profits of each player, well before most people have been sitting around bored, waiting for the luckiest loser to hit the killer hotels.
But there you go.
Further digging reveals that many HD-DVD add-ons for the 360 do indeed play it - the problem is an authoring cock-up, and so the problem seems semi-random. Which is an arse.
By the way, last time I saw figures, the 360 drives were only about 60% of the HD-DVD market; Toshiba have been vastly outselling standalone BD players, largely due to the sensible pricing.
The fact that the PS3 is a much better player than any of the $1000 standalone players doesn't exactly help, either.
That depends, though, on whether they plan on selling games next year to PS3 owners who would not buy them on any other platform. Judging from the upcoming Tomb Raider: Anniversary, all they're actually doing is saying that the PS2 has plenty of life in it. And if PS3 owners can play those PS2 games as well, then so much the better.
If anyone wants to buy a shiny graphics version, then there are a lot more 360s out there at the moment.
If you've got the 360 add-on that has a problem with playing the disc, then you've got an external USB HD-DVD drive for the PC already. So that's that sorted.
Personally, it sounds like a software problem with the 360 player; I'd expect an update over Live just as soon as they figure it out.
Oops for you.
I've just checked. Oblivion takes up 6.4Gb of the DVD's 8Gb capacity. There's actually another gig and a half left for textures, if they really wanted them.
I think the GP's arguments make perfect sense. Both companies can add all the bells and whistles they want for value-added stuff. But at the end of the day, they're game consoles, and if you want to play Motorstorm you buy a PS3, and if you want to play Crackdown you buy a 360.
I bought a PS2 because I really wanted to play GTAIII (at that point there was no sign of it going multiplatform). I bought an XBox because I really wanted to play Orta. Cube for Monkey Ball, 360 for Dead Rising. And so on. When there's a PS3 WipEout I'll probably fold on that, too.
Even with your current machine, whichever account purchased the games has got that purchase registered against them. If you lost your drive in a hideous malfunction, accidentally deleted the data or whatever other circumstance might cause you to lose it, like just being desperate for space, you can download it all over again without paying a second time, apparently.
I think we're all being rather a bit too paranoid about the reasoning here.
The drive in the 360 is a 16x DVD ROM drive. The drive in the HD-DVD add-on can only do 8x DVD ROM reading, judging from the spec sheets for Toshiba's equivalent PC drive.
360 games are designed to play from the 360's drive, and so can assume that read speeds will be as per the 16x drive. Switching to a slower drive is bound to introduce problems. So they've not done it.
Sure, I'd like a HD-DVD drive in there instead if it still played games at full speed. But if we can't have it, then we can't have it.
Really? With most films I hadn't noticed, but the dynamic range on M:i:III the other night was compressed to hell and back, and sounded pretty awful. So that's great news.
I agree that DD generally seems to be more efficient than DTS, but in my experience it's not _that_ superior that good old 1.5Mb DTS won't be an improvement.
I've heard a few 360s, and yes - some are quieter than mine. It's a right pain, but I've heard easily enough horror stories to warn me off invalidating the warranty to do anything about it so far.
By the way, have you heard anything more on when we might expect such updates? The last I heard the HD-DVD one had been seperated from the main Spring update (which I'm guessing for sometime in March, based on when the last two came), and presumably that means its coming sooner, but how much sooner I've no idea. Before my Potter 4 disc arrives would be amazing.
Not only is the Premium bundle actually £279, but it can quite easily be found in Blockbuster for £249, and bundled with a whole load of good stuff for something more akin to the £279 normal price if you want it.
Hopefully, the difference in sound quality should even out a fair bit with the Spring Update - it's changing the audio side of the HD-DVD player so it downmixes DD+ and TrueHD to 1536kb/s DTS like the Toshiba standalone players use on their optical output, rather than the much-lower-bitrate DD it currently does.
It's not lossless, but as anyone who bought into laserdisc knows, full-bitrate DTS is pretty darn spiffy. And I certainly defy you to tell the difference with the racket that is the 360's fan going in the background. If I could afford a whole new amp with HDMI in I could afford the extra few hundred for a standalone HD-DVD player, too.
My 360 is horizontal anyway; it's in an equipment rack and I've heard too many horror stories about what happens to discs that are running when it ineviatably gets knocked over by my 2-year-old. But I used to use my PS2 vertically without any problems - doesn't the 360 also have the little bits that hold the disc in the tray in vertical mode?
I've got a white iPod and PSP too, so you're not the only one there. I'd also get a white DS over the black one, if I actually could face the idea of upgrading my blue Big Fat DS to the lite.
But this isn't (for the most part) about getting 360 owners to upgrade. New add-ons will be coming out in black at the same time, and they'd just expect you to buy those instead.
Sort of. It's my understanding that this console needs a new scaler over the 'normal' one, but digital scalers aren't difficult to find - there's one in every HDMI-capable DVD player, for instance. It's just that they cost a couple of dollars, and Sony didn't think it was worth it, when they can just ask developers to render directly to the different resolution. But that was when they just assumed that the PS3 was so monumentally powerful that everyone would be able to do 1920x1080 at 60fps without breaking a sweat.
Really? Admittedly my 360 is six months old, but even today I'd buy a normal white one instead of this device. The extra storage space is of no real use to me, and HDMI doesn't look any better than VGA on my TV (judging from having used them with my PC, anyway). I even think the white looks better, but then I got excited about the limited-edition white releases of the other consoles where black was the norm.
Why do you want a slot-loader? I saw a post from someone in the last XBox thread about wanting a slot-loader, too. Personally, I've always found greater reliability from tray-loading drives, with the added advantage of not having to take the whole drive mechanism to bits if anything goes wrong.
Is there an advantage to slot-loading drives I'm not aware of, then?
Phew, I thought it was just me that did that. Braben dropped some hints about Elite 4 about a year ago, but he's far too busy with that DC-set game at the mo.
European and Japanese releases with extra tracks are very simple, really. Your US-release albums have historically cost a hell of a lot less than our ones, and sometimes even come out earlier. Chucking a couple of tracks not deemed worthy of being used for the 'proper' album, or even single b-sides, is a way of trying to persuade fans to pay the markup. You're not the ones being screwed, we are.
The mark-up isn't much of one at all, really. If you know what the shop pays wholesale for albums, the ratio to what you pay is about what the top up the retail price of the import copy by. And they have to buy those imports retail, because they can't get them wholesale for export without the RIAA, BPI etc. throwing dolls out of their prams and claiming that selling imports is effectively the same as selling pirates, since those discs weren't licensed for sale abroad.
Apart from VF5 (debuting right down at number 14 on the weekend's all-format chart), Motorstorm (rather respectable at number 2 below Resistance, and pretty much THE reason to get one if you ask me, a guy who doesn't like FPS games) and the new F1 game (9ish, I think from memory) most of those other releases are multi-platform titles like Virtua Tennis 3. So not a massively tempting reason to blow £425 on the console, particularly to the early-adopter market who may well have a 360 already.
Also, a few titles like Oblivion have slipped here (which is odd, given that it made its US deadline) so the list wasn't the full 30 in the end.
Actually, Chart-track, who compile the official charts used by most retailers and the whole game industry, have reported the same figures. Sony really have had the biggest home console launch. Also, they've only sold around 60% of their supply. Spin to fanboy taste, basically.
It's all down to how you want to read the figures. Queues to buy the machine have been much smaller, but the number sold was higher because Sony actually managed to supply stock to meet demand (and more - there are almost as many sitting on shelves as in homes).
Well done Sony, I say - massive queues make for great PR buzz, but cash from sales is better. Not having to rush to grab one is nice as a consumer, too.
Not that I can afford one until 2008's inevitable price cut. And I want a US model anyway; it will complement my local PS2 nicely.
Me too. When I saw this originally, I was a bit surprised, as I've bought quite a few albums recently. The new ones from Aereogramme, Explosions In The Sky, The Good The Bad & The Queen and Grinderman have all been worth every penny. Mind you, they're not 'teenager music'.
Of course, by that logic, given that films on crappy VHS tapes were $70 each in the 80s, a 1080p copy on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray must be worth at least a few hundred bucks, surely?