Wha? So the fact that you _can_ play back DRM tracks makes the device inferior to one that just looks at it and goes "Sorry, no idea what the fuck that is; pass me an mp3" instead?
Let me guess, you're happy that your Linux install isn't 'infected' by the ability to play back HD-DVD, either...
That depends. Certainly, I think there will be some continued sales as more new PS3 owners buy a movie or two to try things out. But right now, without many actual games to play on their machine, some people are buying movies just to give their $600 investment something to do. Whether new owners six months from now, when there will hopefully be more games worth playing around this continues, is my question.
A lot of what you say is correct now - Blu-Ray is absolutely going to fall in pressing costs faster than HD-DVD, because HD-DVD won't fall very much at all - the whole mechanism isn't any different from 'normal' DVD; plants are making both formats on the same production line with the same equipment. It's a (fairly small) cost to convert an old pressing plant to be able to handle them, but new machines come with it as a free upgrade. Dual-layer Blu-Ray discs were costing Sony a fortune to press last I heard, and they were losing money hand over fist in their attempt to grab market share with them, hoping that the price would be more affordable soon.
Which doesn't directly affect me, no, just vaguely offends my sense of elegance.
The numbers I heard for up until the end of December in the US were ~170k Toshiba HD-DVD players to ~25k standalone Blu-Ray players counted all together. It's the mere ~150k Microsoft drives to ~600k PS3s that were killing them, and that number is well over a million now. Sadly I can't find the source right now, but I'm sure I got to it via Engadget.
There are myriad threads speculating why Blu-Ray is pulling ahead. Clearly it's a PS3-led effect. What remains to be seen is what will happen once some more decent PS3 games arrive. We saw an initial boost to UMD sales due to PSP owners wanting to get something for their shiny new device to do in the absence of games. It may be they'll decide they like it so much they'll keep going, it may be that once they have games to play the numbers will dive, and it may even be that the people I know with PS3s represent the majority of owners - i.e. they've bought it as a BD Movie Player, and don't really care for games.
It's all a horrible mess, really. I'd like a HD-DVD player just because it's the cheapest by a long margin, and the politics of Blu-Ray's existence annoy me. But mainly, I just can't believe how the other members of the Blu-Ray group have allowed themselves to be in a situation where all the standalone players are not just so much more expensive than the PS3, but crippled with incomplete BD-J implementations in comparison to it, too.
On the contrary - all those pictures online of unsold PS3s are the 60Gb model, not the 20Gb. People want to save themselves $100 and buy the machine that still does everything they want. Sony are only releasing limited numbers of 20Gb machines onto the market in the hope that people will be desperate enough for any machine to buy the more expensive model that sells for less of a loss.
There never will be what I consider a proper GT game, because the idiots have broken force-feedback for wheels as part of their "We won't pay Immersion any money" plan. Even under PS2 games.
If you play on pad and don't want rumble you're fine, but I'm waiting on Forza 2 for the 360 now, and playing GT4 in the meantime on a real PS2. Play a US copy and you can even run at 1080i.
Katzenberg just doesn't understand Park's humour at all (he spells it humor for a start), and is responsible for just about every missed note in both Chicken Run and particularly Flushed Away. It was nice to have their cash to play with, but if it means yet more painfully compromised films which make stupid decisions in a failed attempt to appeal to Americans, then good riddance.
Now Dreamworks can go back to concentrating on dire, 'hip' CG extravaganzas with all the lasting appeal of a rotten pear.
What remains to be seen with this, and we won't know until Summer at least, is what effect PS3 owners are really having on these figures.
Right now, a fair number of people are buying PS3s. Sure, the numbers are pretty bad when your competition are 360 and Wii, and terrible in comparison to the number of people who are still buying new PS2s because that's perfectly good enough for them. But something like 95% of the entire Blu-Ray player market, regardless.
But it's a fairly multipurpose device; who knows why people are buying them? It could be a repeat of the UMD fiasco; i.e. with so few games worth playing on the machine right now, people might be buying movies just so they don't feel like they've completely wasted $600. Conversely, others are buying them deliberately as movie players (it's the cheapest Blu-Ray player by a huge margin, and even has better image quality than the Samsung standalone), and don't particularly care about games.
So this may be a permanent lead. It equally might drop right off as soon as there are some games to play other than Resistance and the Gran Turismo demo.
The Toshiba X-A2 and X-E1 (they're basically the same player, but for US and European markets respectively) have 1080p output, as does the 360's add-on drive if you use VGA. 1st-gen Toshibas only did 1080i, as do the A2 and E1, because they have cheaper video chips. As others have noted, the discs themselves are all 1080p at 24fps.
But it's a meaningless bullet-point for film-based material anyway; most TVs do a perfectly good job of 3-2 pulldown. There isn't such a thing as a 1080i LCD display, but there are loads of TVs (the vast majority, in fact) that will only take a 1080i input, rather than 1080p.
"I'm no videophile or anything, so I don't really know how good of a transfer is, but the movie looks gorgeous on DVD."
Shit. Really, REALLY shit. The current Blu-Ray release is so badly encoded that the studio is already talking about re-releasing it with a better transfer. It was pretty much the first disc they ever made, and they did a terrible job.
Blu-Ray is a perfectly reasonable standard now, but in order to catch up HD-DVD they launched it a good six months too soon; don't go near any of the early discs, as most are pretty rubbish in comparison to new ones.
On PC games, demos are as much about making sure the thing runs OK on your machine as they are about seeing whether the thing is fun. So I'm glad I know for free if I'm going to hit a copy-protection problem, to be honest.
With an amazing 25,000 sales, I think we can safely say that Blu-Ray as a standalone-player format is in real danger. Don't get me wrong, I think it's currently looking like HD-DVD have a lot of work to do to survive (which is a pity, as I've got a few discs on my shelf, due to buying those dual-format ones rather than normal DVDs). But right now the standalone players are getting their backsides smacked around the park by the PS3 sales, while at the same time they don't seem to be doing as well as Sony hoped in comparison to other games consoles.
Which says to me that the margin between PS3 and standalone will stay that way for a while. Already "The Guardian" has been announced with special features that don't work on any standalone player; it's looking like the de facto machine to use. Pioneer and Panasonic can't be too happy...
Actually, Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire is available on HD-DVD, and looks absolutely outstanding.
However, I'm guessing from the $-sign you're based in North America; you'll have to go to Amazon UK if you want to watch it for now, as it hasn't been announced for US release (rumour suggests they're saving it until the new one comes out in the summer).
He went handheld. Kirby's Tilt'n'Tumble on the Gameboy Color was great - top-down Super Monkey Ball with a Wii-predating tilt-sensor. The DS game is pretty brilliant, too - you have to draw tracks for him with the stylus to avoid the bad guys.
The CSS license requires the players to be single-region, however
a) "Someone" (oh definitely not the manufacturer, oh no, they would never do such a thing) sends most retailers a disc or custom remote with the relevant engineer commands to make the player multi-region or "enable engineer mode" as they sometimes call it. Which is just as well for those manufacturers, because they all know just how much sales suffer if your player is particularly hard to mod.
b) A lot of those cheap players have reverse-engineered CSS with or without help from DVD Jon and don't pay the group a penny, anyway. When the whole player retails for £17, by the time you've taken out tax, retail markup, distribution costs and so on, a license would wipe out the entire manufacturing budget of the physical product.
I don't anticipate any PS3 I buy moving terribly far from my XBox 360, put it that way. So either they will both stay wired, or I'm going to need my wireless router to act as a wireless-to-wired station anyway.
Right now, the 20Gb drive in my XBox 360 works just fine (around 10Gb free, actually). If I need more in the PS3 over time, I very much doubt that 60Gb will be enough either, so I'm looking at upgrading the drive to a couple of hundred Gb either way.
The PS3 is an excellent media station, I agree. But one that works with network streaming, USB drives and files-on-a-DVD as well.
Oh, and it's very unlikely I'll ever find 10 PS1 games I want to download. PS1 games fall into two categories, really. Those I enjoyed playing enough to keep them and drag out for nostalgia fun, and those who I've no intention of ever playing again. There are a few 'classics' I missed, like Castlevania, but not very many.
As others have pointed out, it's because a band's music is licenses to a publisher in one country, but that publisher may not have rights elsewhere in the world. So they only sell distribution rights in turn to Apple for the relevant country's store, because they don't own them for worldwide distribution.
To even out the flamewar somewhat, this is exactly the same reason you Americans can download films from the XBox Live Marketplace, but I can't with a UK account. There are ways around that, too, although Microsoft keep making rumbles about dire consequences if you try.
Mind you, there's also the small issue that if I could buy music from the US iTunes Store, I'd be paying $0.99 a track, rather than the rather more expensive £0.79 for the exact same data file. I can't see Apple being too keen on that bit.
That's a BIG price. Really, realy big. Wii60 big (Premium XBox 360 plus a copy of PGR3 is £250, Wii is £180, but what's a fiver at that price?)
But we expected this. What I really don't understand is why Sony hate the 20Gb model so much? Many of us (most?) don't have any call for the extra features of the 60Gb (drives are swappable, 20Gb is big enough anyway, memory stick readers are about £15 in the unlikely event of us not already having one but needing it, and the wireless is a bit pointless if your Cable Box lives under the telly next to the PS3). Those ignored stockpiles you always hear about in US stores always seem to be 60Gb ones, too.
Have Sony made a mistake by making too many 60Gb ones at the expense of the 20Gb?
The Gameboy Advance itself played all Gameboy Colour and original mono Gameboy games. The GBA Micro, DS and DS Lite don't.
That wouldn't stop me saying that they play all GBA games.
Personally, the PS2 emulation doesn't really interest me on the PS3; the only games I play on my PS2 now are Guitar Hero (broken, because you can't use the guitar controllers), Gran Turismo 4 (broken, because my force-feedback wheel isn't supported) and SingStar (not broken, but if the PS2 is being kept for the others there's little point).
Personally, I'd have said that enough $600 PS3s to form anything that counts as a mountain (I've seen one pic with around 60 in!) doesn't count as a small fortune. $36,000 is bordering on medium, at least.
That number being one, and the reason being that Sony are including it as a loss-leading feature in the PS3. Exclude PS3 sales, and the remaining standalone players from all companies are being massively outsold by Toshiba's HD-DVD players. HD-DVDs are also a tiny fraction of the cost of Blu-Ray discs to make, because you just press them in a DVD pressing plant, rather than the long process of coating layers that BD-ROMs require.
Blu-Ray was designed as a system of blank discs to go in recording devices; it's only if you're making rewriteable discs that the costs start to even out, and where you start to want 50Gb of space. The hardware companies behind it believed that recording broadcast HD was going to be the future, not pre-recorded discs any more. I'm guessing they're wrong, and if you want to record from the TV then you'll use a hard-disc.
The unofficial price drop in Japan is the second one, though - even before launch they dropped the Japanese price for the 20Gb to the equivalent of $412. A drop in the US to around $429 isn't exactly out of the question, then.
Right now, PS3 prices are all about trying to build a Blu-Ray market; profit doesn't seem to be of too much concern to Sony until they've safely removed the far cheaper to make HD-DVD from the market.
My bicycle weighs a hell of a lot less than I do. Adding two more stabilising wheels to the thing doesn't strike me as a terribly dangerous thing to do, but I'd just be asking why they're bothering with them. Motorbikes are a much better form factor for light transport with plenty of equipment already designed to be (a) light and (b) cope with supplying plenty of power to the wheel.
Fortunately, many people who have that kind of cash to throw at a game console either know people in the US, or might be going over there some time soon, whether through business or holidays.
$830 will get you a 20Gb PS3 (the extras in the 60Gb we're forced to get in the US don't terribly interest most people), and leave you enough cash left over to buy a Wii and still have $80 left over to cover sales taxes. Or, if you don't want a Wii, put the money toward your airfare...
I'm sure we can all list games that we love that either don't have sequels yet (Rez would top my list), or the ones where there are sequels, but they break the purity of the original (Super Monkey Ball).
What I'd be interested is in taking games that were almost brilliant, but stuffed up by silly flaws that were usually the limitations of the original platform. Something like G-Police with a useable draw distance, more Dino Crisis but with a camera that didn't make me want to brutally beat the developers around the head with a rolling pin, or Midtown Madness with traffic in multiplayer and a car that handles better.
On the other hand, I would love a third Syndicate...
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Wha? So the fact that you _can_ play back DRM tracks makes the device inferior to one that just looks at it and goes "Sorry, no idea what the fuck that is; pass me an mp3" instead?
Let me guess, you're happy that your Linux install isn't 'infected' by the ability to play back HD-DVD, either...
That depends. Certainly, I think there will be some continued sales as more new PS3 owners buy a movie or two to try things out. But right now, without many actual games to play on their machine, some people are buying movies just to give their $600 investment something to do. Whether new owners six months from now, when there will hopefully be more games worth playing around this continues, is my question.
A lot of what you say is correct now - Blu-Ray is absolutely going to fall in pressing costs faster than HD-DVD, because HD-DVD won't fall very much at all - the whole mechanism isn't any different from 'normal' DVD; plants are making both formats on the same production line with the same equipment. It's a (fairly small) cost to convert an old pressing plant to be able to handle them, but new machines come with it as a free upgrade. Dual-layer Blu-Ray discs were costing Sony a fortune to press last I heard, and they were losing money hand over fist in their attempt to grab market share with them, hoping that the price would be more affordable soon.
Which doesn't directly affect me, no, just vaguely offends my sense of elegance.
The numbers I heard for up until the end of December in the US were ~170k Toshiba HD-DVD players to ~25k standalone Blu-Ray players counted all together. It's the mere ~150k Microsoft drives to ~600k PS3s that were killing them, and that number is well over a million now. Sadly I can't find the source right now, but I'm sure I got to it via Engadget.
There are myriad threads speculating why Blu-Ray is pulling ahead. Clearly it's a PS3-led effect. What remains to be seen is what will happen once some more decent PS3 games arrive. We saw an initial boost to UMD sales due to PSP owners wanting to get something for their shiny new device to do in the absence of games. It may be they'll decide they like it so much they'll keep going, it may be that once they have games to play the numbers will dive, and it may even be that the people I know with PS3s represent the majority of owners - i.e. they've bought it as a BD Movie Player, and don't really care for games.
It's all a horrible mess, really. I'd like a HD-DVD player just because it's the cheapest by a long margin, and the politics of Blu-Ray's existence annoy me. But mainly, I just can't believe how the other members of the Blu-Ray group have allowed themselves to be in a situation where all the standalone players are not just so much more expensive than the PS3, but crippled with incomplete BD-J implementations in comparison to it, too.
On the contrary - all those pictures online of unsold PS3s are the 60Gb model, not the 20Gb. People want to save themselves $100 and buy the machine that still does everything they want. Sony are only releasing limited numbers of 20Gb machines onto the market in the hope that people will be desperate enough for any machine to buy the more expensive model that sells for less of a loss.
There never will be what I consider a proper GT game, because the idiots have broken force-feedback for wheels as part of their "We won't pay Immersion any money" plan. Even under PS2 games.
If you play on pad and don't want rumble you're fine, but I'm waiting on Forza 2 for the 360 now, and playing GT4 in the meantime on a real PS2. Play a US copy and you can even run at 1080i.
Katzenberg just doesn't understand Park's humour at all (he spells it humor for a start), and is responsible for just about every missed note in both Chicken Run and particularly Flushed Away. It was nice to have their cash to play with, but if it means yet more painfully compromised films which make stupid decisions in a failed attempt to appeal to Americans, then good riddance.
Now Dreamworks can go back to concentrating on dire, 'hip' CG extravaganzas with all the lasting appeal of a rotten pear.
What remains to be seen with this, and we won't know until Summer at least, is what effect PS3 owners are really having on these figures.
Right now, a fair number of people are buying PS3s. Sure, the numbers are pretty bad when your competition are 360 and Wii, and terrible in comparison to the number of people who are still buying new PS2s because that's perfectly good enough for them. But something like 95% of the entire Blu-Ray player market, regardless.
But it's a fairly multipurpose device; who knows why people are buying them? It could be a repeat of the UMD fiasco; i.e. with so few games worth playing on the machine right now, people might be buying movies just so they don't feel like they've completely wasted $600. Conversely, others are buying them deliberately as movie players (it's the cheapest Blu-Ray player by a huge margin, and even has better image quality than the Samsung standalone), and don't particularly care about games.
So this may be a permanent lead. It equally might drop right off as soon as there are some games to play other than Resistance and the Gran Turismo demo.
The Toshiba X-A2 and X-E1 (they're basically the same player, but for US and European markets respectively) have 1080p output, as does the 360's add-on drive if you use VGA. 1st-gen Toshibas only did 1080i, as do the A2 and E1, because they have cheaper video chips. As others have noted, the discs themselves are all 1080p at 24fps.
But it's a meaningless bullet-point for film-based material anyway; most TVs do a perfectly good job of 3-2 pulldown. There isn't such a thing as a 1080i LCD display, but there are loads of TVs (the vast majority, in fact) that will only take a 1080i input, rather than 1080p.
"I'm no videophile or anything, so I don't really know how good of a transfer is, but the movie looks gorgeous on DVD."
Shit. Really, REALLY shit. The current Blu-Ray release is so badly encoded that the studio is already talking about re-releasing it with a better transfer. It was pretty much the first disc they ever made, and they did a terrible job.
Blu-Ray is a perfectly reasonable standard now, but in order to catch up HD-DVD they launched it a good six months too soon; don't go near any of the early discs, as most are pretty rubbish in comparison to new ones.
On PC games, demos are as much about making sure the thing runs OK on your machine as they are about seeing whether the thing is fun. So I'm glad I know for free if I'm going to hit a copy-protection problem, to be honest.
With an amazing 25,000 sales, I think we can safely say that Blu-Ray as a standalone-player format is in real danger. Don't get me wrong, I think it's currently looking like HD-DVD have a lot of work to do to survive (which is a pity, as I've got a few discs on my shelf, due to buying those dual-format ones rather than normal DVDs). But right now the standalone players are getting their backsides smacked around the park by the PS3 sales, while at the same time they don't seem to be doing as well as Sony hoped in comparison to other games consoles.
Which says to me that the margin between PS3 and standalone will stay that way for a while. Already "The Guardian" has been announced with special features that don't work on any standalone player; it's looking like the de facto machine to use. Pioneer and Panasonic can't be too happy...
Actually, Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire is available on HD-DVD, and looks absolutely outstanding.
However, I'm guessing from the $-sign you're based in North America; you'll have to go to Amazon UK if you want to watch it for now, as it hasn't been announced for US release (rumour suggests they're saving it until the new one comes out in the summer).
He went handheld. Kirby's Tilt'n'Tumble on the Gameboy Color was great - top-down Super Monkey Ball with a Wii-predating tilt-sensor. The DS game is pretty brilliant, too - you have to draw tracks for him with the stylus to avoid the bad guys.
The CSS license requires the players to be single-region, however
a) "Someone" (oh definitely not the manufacturer, oh no, they would never do such a thing) sends most retailers a disc or custom remote with the relevant engineer commands to make the player multi-region or "enable engineer mode" as they sometimes call it. Which is just as well for those manufacturers, because they all know just how much sales suffer if your player is particularly hard to mod.
b) A lot of those cheap players have reverse-engineered CSS with or without help from DVD Jon and don't pay the group a penny, anyway. When the whole player retails for £17, by the time you've taken out tax, retail markup, distribution costs and so on, a license would wipe out the entire manufacturing budget of the physical product.
I don't anticipate any PS3 I buy moving terribly far from my XBox 360, put it that way. So either they will both stay wired, or I'm going to need my wireless router to act as a wireless-to-wired station anyway.
Right now, the 20Gb drive in my XBox 360 works just fine (around 10Gb free, actually). If I need more in the PS3 over time, I very much doubt that 60Gb will be enough either, so I'm looking at upgrading the drive to a couple of hundred Gb either way.
The PS3 is an excellent media station, I agree. But one that works with network streaming, USB drives and files-on-a-DVD as well.
Oh, and it's very unlikely I'll ever find 10 PS1 games I want to download. PS1 games fall into two categories, really. Those I enjoyed playing enough to keep them and drag out for nostalgia fun, and those who I've no intention of ever playing again. There are a few 'classics' I missed, like Castlevania, but not very many.
As others have pointed out, it's because a band's music is licenses to a publisher in one country, but that publisher may not have rights elsewhere in the world. So they only sell distribution rights in turn to Apple for the relevant country's store, because they don't own them for worldwide distribution.
To even out the flamewar somewhat, this is exactly the same reason you Americans can download films from the XBox Live Marketplace, but I can't with a UK account. There are ways around that, too, although Microsoft keep making rumbles about dire consequences if you try.
Mind you, there's also the small issue that if I could buy music from the US iTunes Store, I'd be paying $0.99 a track, rather than the rather more expensive £0.79 for the exact same data file. I can't see Apple being too keen on that bit.
That's a BIG price. Really, realy big. Wii60 big (Premium XBox 360 plus a copy of PGR3 is £250, Wii is £180, but what's a fiver at that price?)
But we expected this. What I really don't understand is why Sony hate the 20Gb model so much? Many of us (most?) don't have any call for the extra features of the 60Gb (drives are swappable, 20Gb is big enough anyway, memory stick readers are about £15 in the unlikely event of us not already having one but needing it, and the wireless is a bit pointless if your Cable Box lives under the telly next to the PS3). Those ignored stockpiles you always hear about in US stores always seem to be 60Gb ones, too.
Have Sony made a mistake by making too many 60Gb ones at the expense of the 20Gb?
The Gameboy Advance itself played all Gameboy Colour and original mono Gameboy games. The GBA Micro, DS and DS Lite don't.
That wouldn't stop me saying that they play all GBA games.
Personally, the PS2 emulation doesn't really interest me on the PS3; the only games I play on my PS2 now are Guitar Hero (broken, because you can't use the guitar controllers), Gran Turismo 4 (broken, because my force-feedback wheel isn't supported) and SingStar (not broken, but if the PS2 is being kept for the others there's little point).
Personally, I'd have said that enough $600 PS3s to form anything that counts as a mountain (I've seen one pic with around 60 in!) doesn't count as a small fortune. $36,000 is bordering on medium, at least.
That number being one, and the reason being that Sony are including it as a loss-leading feature in the PS3. Exclude PS3 sales, and the remaining standalone players from all companies are being massively outsold by Toshiba's HD-DVD players. HD-DVDs are also a tiny fraction of the cost of Blu-Ray discs to make, because you just press them in a DVD pressing plant, rather than the long process of coating layers that BD-ROMs require.
Blu-Ray was designed as a system of blank discs to go in recording devices; it's only if you're making rewriteable discs that the costs start to even out, and where you start to want 50Gb of space. The hardware companies behind it believed that recording broadcast HD was going to be the future, not pre-recorded discs any more. I'm guessing they're wrong, and if you want to record from the TV then you'll use a hard-disc.
When you've found that, can you figure out how make force feedback work in Gran Turismo 4?
There's no bloody way I'm buying a PS3 for GT5 if I can't use a force feedback wheel.
The unofficial price drop in Japan is the second one, though - even before launch they dropped the Japanese price for the 20Gb to the equivalent of $412. A drop in the US to around $429 isn't exactly out of the question, then.
Right now, PS3 prices are all about trying to build a Blu-Ray market; profit doesn't seem to be of too much concern to Sony until they've safely removed the far cheaper to make HD-DVD from the market.
My bicycle weighs a hell of a lot less than I do. Adding two more stabilising wheels to the thing doesn't strike me as a terribly dangerous thing to do, but I'd just be asking why they're bothering with them. Motorbikes are a much better form factor for light transport with plenty of equipment already designed to be (a) light and (b) cope with supplying plenty of power to the wheel.
£425 is $830.
Fortunately, many people who have that kind of cash to throw at a game console either know people in the US, or might be going over there some time soon, whether through business or holidays.
$830 will get you a 20Gb PS3 (the extras in the 60Gb we're forced to get in the US don't terribly interest most people), and leave you enough cash left over to buy a Wii and still have $80 left over to cover sales taxes. Or, if you don't want a Wii, put the money toward your airfare...
Wow, that's a markup...
I'm sure we can all list games that we love that either don't have sequels yet (Rez would top my list), or the ones where there are sequels, but they break the purity of the original (Super Monkey Ball).
What I'd be interested is in taking games that were almost brilliant, but stuffed up by silly flaws that were usually the limitations of the original platform. Something like G-Police with a useable draw distance, more Dino Crisis but with a camera that didn't make me want to brutally beat the developers around the head with a rolling pin, or Midtown Madness with traffic in multiplayer and a car that handles better.
On the other hand, I would love a third Syndicate...