Yeah, it sounds like that was probably one of the first goals they set for themselves when designing the console - i.e.: Make a revolutionary console that will sell for $200. While operating on a different technical level than its competitors, it will no doubt appeal to a much, much wider audience (due both to price and games), so it will be very interesting to see how things pan out in this new generation of consoles.
Considering what (little) I've seen so far of Nintendo's marketing for the Wii, it would almost be hypocritical for them to only include one controller. I guess wii'll find out though.
Ah, you're right - please excuse my ignorance, I thought the XBox 360 launched higher than that for some reason. Definitely Nintendo will want to launch the Wii at at least $50 under whatever the street price of the XBox 360 is at that time. I don't see it falling too far under $200 for a while though, as I doubt Nintendo would make enough of a profit at those prices.
Microsoft and Sony have given Nintendo some wiggle room on price here, so I think $199 will be the minimum price for the console through the end of the launch year. I wouldn't be surprised to see it go for as much as $299 at launch, or even $350 if it comes with a strong bundle.
You're the one that brought up the car analogy, and I knew I shouldn't have run with it but didn't go with my gut. I'll try to steer things back on track:
The main difference here -- which is why I had to set up hypothetical situations with the car analogy -- is that while there is a large amount of competition in the car industry, there is currently very little in the sound hardware market. With cars there is healthy, diverse competition: companies compete on multiple levels such as product quality, product features, marketing, and so on. Creative, on the other hand, is a lone juggernaut in the sound card market, and there have been many documented ways in which it has used that position to stifle competition (and, as a side-effect, innovation).
The crux of the issue here is that instead of fighting to bring a better, more affordable product to consumers, Creative is undermining comptetitive efforts in any way it can in order to maintain market dominance. Of course this makes good business sense, but as a consumer rather than a shareholder I find this frustrating, because it means that their quest to stay on top is causing the market to remain technologically and monetarily stale.
And, indeed, that's the way Creative wants it. All they have to do is to continue to release a new product every 6-12 months that adds barely any new features and market the crap out of it, all while underhandedly undermining its competition in any way it can to prevent them from developing and successfully marketing anything better. Any company that actually manages to slip past them long enough to gain a foothold will either be bought out (Ensoniq/E-mu/Sensaura) or litigated out of existence (Aureal).
A very valid point, although you have to admit that ATI and nVidia are on fairly even footing in the video accelerator market while Creative no longer has any competitors in the sound card market.
Dude, let's just put it like this: if you can't hear the difference between some 20-30 dB signal-to-noise on the average Realtek board and over 100 dB SNR on an Audigy 2 (or "only" 96 on an Audigy 1), both actually _measured_... well, then you're deaf. You have my sincere compassion for whatever horrible thing destroyed your ears to that extent. I was originally tempted to make some fun, but it would be mean of me to make fun of someone that crippled.
Show me some data from current Realtek and Creative hardware. You're running off of assumptions that were valid 5 years ago, but not now. Things have changed quite a bit. Seriously, get a new, brand-name mobo with a Realtek 6xx or 8xx series chip, install their reference drivers (which, by the way, support multiple chip models and are frequently updated, unlike Creative's horribly bloated and unstable drivers) and give it a shot sometime.
And the problem is... what? WTF do you care if a SB has an Ensoniq chip? Did you also boycott the AdLib and earlier SoundBlaster card for having a Yamaha OPL chip for sound synthesis? Do you also boycott Nvidia because a lot of what's in their chips comes from patents bought and engineers taken over from 3DFX and SGI and Matrox?
Unlike everyone else, Creative doesn't license technology, they buy it -- and provide poorly-maintained drivers, little to no support, and an extremely short product life cycle, all despite the fact that the successor product rarely has much added value.
If they can't buy it, they use any other tactics at their disposal to crush it. Basically they have an "if we can't make money off of it, then *noone* can!" attitude, which slows innovation in the sound hardware market.
To follow your ridiculous analogy with cars:
1. Imagine if Ford bought Chevrolet (imagine that it's their only major competitor) and sold their vehicles as Fords but with no warranty/maintenance package, all for the twofold purpose of both eliminating a competitor and making money off of their product without having to do any of the real work involved in creating it.
Now Ford controls the market and noone else can make an affordable car that's anywhere near the same quality.
2. Imagine if Honda made an extremely affordable electric car. Imagine that Toyota tried to buy Honda in order to, again, eliminate the competition and make all of the profit of selling that car without having to do any of the development work. Imagine that Honda refuses and then Toyota buys out one of the companies that helped devlop it and then terminates Honda's license to produce the car (or raises the license fees to something ridiculous, or sues Honda, or whatever it takes - same effect).
Now Toyota controls the market and it is extremely difficult for anyone else to make money from a competing, let alone better, electric car.
Noone (except rarely MS) buys a company just to kill it and/spit on it corpse, WoW style.
Creative is the MS of hardware.
I was suspecting socially-retarded geek already by the time you got into tirades about brainwashed sheep, and blowing one aspect out of proportion as the only relevant issue about something. It's, sad to say, typical socially-retarded geek. But I do appreciate and respect the honesty of admitting it.
You're in good company. I haven't bought a Creative product for around 5 years now. Just take it one day at a time and remember that there is a growing legion of people who have been freed from Creative's marketing brainwash.
Creative innovated too. Show me who did they copy the original SoundBlaster from, for example.
Adlib.
I also think technically they invented the HDD-based MP3 player, _before_ Apple.
No, they probably bought it from someone else who invented it, then marketed it as a Creative product.
And more importantly the tended to offer products that offer a good bang-per-buck balance. Yes, it's easy to do the "bah, but sounded better or had lower latency" sneer, but from a more pragmatic point of view, Creative did an outstanding job of bridging the gap between pro equipment and the utter crap everyone else was selling.
If by "bang" you mean the sound of your system blowing up from horrible drivers and conflicting hardware.
It's pretty telling that even though virtually any modern motherboard comes with some Realtec or some such sound solution, people still buy SoundBlasters.
That's because of marketing, not product quality. Read Creative's forums/newsgroups for all the problems people have with Creative and their products. People have been brainwashed into believing that they *need* a Creative sound card for high-end gaming, but it's just not true any more because Creative has stopped innovating in that area.
Because invariably those on-board solutions sound like crap. The signal-to-noise ratio is invariably crap, and often they tend to squeak too whenever anything happened on the bus. Pretty much they amplify any noise and EM interference in the system together with the signal. And having actually tried some, let me assure you that the sound boards based on those Realtek, Cirrus Logic and whatnot chips don't sound any better.
Totally untrue. 100% FUD. I've used tons of sound cards and several onboard Realtek solutions, and I can say with absolute certainty that the *only* thing gamers get out of an SB over a Realtek is EAX 3 and 4 support, and that's only because Creative won't share the specs for those with its competitors.
Incidentally, I haven't heard EM noise from a computer's sound hardware since I stopped using Creative cards several years ago.
I even went and bought an USB soundcard/headphones combo from Plantronics in my misguided days of trying to boycott Creative, and,
You, sir/madam, are seriously starting to sound like a shill/astroturfer.
honestly, for all the hype about USB being better because of not picking up EM stuff inside the computer, it actually sounded the worst. It was more of a white noise generator than anything else. _And_ it offered _nothing_ except a DAC on the USB bus. There was no way to get any effects out of it, in games or otherwise. There was not even any way to hook it to anything else (e.g., to speakers). Looking back in retrospect, it was just a waste of money, as eventhe lowest end Creative cards cost a lot less and I already had better headphones too.
Why would anyone use a USB sound device for games? The latency would be too high.
And a lot of those supposedly better-than-Creative sound cards were just a case of fanboyism and Amiga persecution syndrome. E.g., I've actually had an Aureal Vortex based card -- you know, _the_ one that got everyone up in arms along the lines of "waah!! Creative killed Aureal Vortex!! They're evil!!" -- and frankly it wasn't half as great as it sounded on paper. All that reflection processing and whatnot, sure, sounded like a major technical achievement. In practice most of the time it just made it impossible to tell where the sound is coming from, or WTH did they think it reflected on over there to sound actually louder from there than the original sound. I.e., from the perspective of a gamer who lived or died by hearing the enemy's footsteps or gunfire, it actually was a bigger di
I was hoping for something tasty like a memory leak. Something that would gradually bring your machine to a crawl over a 2 hour period. Pissed-off users rebooting all day and not knowing why. Wailing and teeth-gnashing at Microsoft. Now that would have been worth the read...
I thought it might be a memory leak too when I read the title, but then I asked myself, "Windows Media Player has memory leaks? Why would that be news?"
HDTV will become the standard and wont cost as much in the (hopefully) near future. they're just now still overcharging for it. panic is for the impatient.
But that's what people have been saying for, what, five years now? The U.S. government has already pushed back plans to eliminate analog TV over-the-air broadcasts due to the fact that few people have found it worthwhile to HDTV so far.
In any case, the general consensus seems to be that Sony has made a bad gamble which may result in a DoA console out of the gate.
That doesn't make any sense. If something is proven then it must by definition be *the* true explanation for the behavior of a phenomena. You can't disprove anything that is unequivocably true.
Incorrect. Science can prove everything...the only problem is that it comes up with something else after a few years to disprove it's earlier proof and establish a new one (which by the way will be disproved too and so on ad infinitum.....)
That doesn't make any sense. If something is proven then it must by definition be *the* true explanation for the behavior of a phenomena. You can't disprove anything that is unequivocably true.
The way I've always been told that it actually works is that many theories may be proposed to explain something, but the one that seems to fit best (based on things like experimentation) is generally considered to be the de facto explanation - until something better comes along.
I hate it when people criticize media for not getting it right don't get it right.
Hypothesis can't be proved, but only disproved.
SCIENCE is the progression of hypotheses getting more and more accurate as tests rule out the ones that are not the case.
Ruling out all existing hypotheses except for one is not a sufficient condition to claim that the remaining hypothesis must be true. There may be other hypotheses that have not yet been formed.
Saying "science can prove" or "science can't prove" totally misses what science is in the first place.
I wasn't attempting to describe of the purpose of science, but rather what its limitations are and how those limitations are misrepresented by popular media.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it sounds like that was probably one of the first goals they set for themselves when designing the console - i.e.: Make a revolutionary console that will sell for $200. While operating on a different technical level than its competitors, it will no doubt appeal to a much, much wider audience (due both to price and games), so it will be very interesting to see how things pan out in this new generation of consoles.
Ian McConville, the artist of the webcomic Mac Hall recently started working for Three Rings, the company who made these games.
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
Later. Let's play "Global Thermonuclear War".
Oh noes!!!!1111eleven You mean that if someone mods their XBox360, they won't get a free power cord when their power supply starts a fire?
I really can't think of any other reason that anyone capable of modding a console would want out of Microsoft's tech support.
They also forgot to mention that 87% of statistics are made up.
Considering what (little) I've seen so far of Nintendo's marketing for the Wii, it would almost be hypocritical for them to only include one controller. I guess wii'll find out though.
Ah, you're right - please excuse my ignorance, I thought the XBox 360 launched higher than that for some reason. Definitely Nintendo will want to launch the Wii at at least $50 under whatever the street price of the XBox 360 is at that time. I don't see it falling too far under $200 for a while though, as I doubt Nintendo would make enough of a profit at those prices.
Microsoft and Sony have given Nintendo some wiggle room on price here, so I think $199 will be the minimum price for the console through the end of the launch year. I wouldn't be surprised to see it go for as much as $299 at launch, or even $350 if it comes with a strong bundle.
You're the one that brought up the car analogy, and I knew I shouldn't have run with it but didn't go with my gut. I'll try to steer things back on track:
The main difference here -- which is why I had to set up hypothetical situations with the car analogy -- is that while there is a large amount of competition in the car industry, there is currently very little in the sound hardware market. With cars there is healthy, diverse competition: companies compete on multiple levels such as product quality, product features, marketing, and so on. Creative, on the other hand, is a lone juggernaut in the sound card market, and there have been many documented ways in which it has used that position to stifle competition (and, as a side-effect, innovation).
The crux of the issue here is that instead of fighting to bring a better, more affordable product to consumers, Creative is undermining comptetitive efforts in any way it can in order to maintain market dominance. Of course this makes good business sense, but as a consumer rather than a shareholder I find this frustrating, because it means that their quest to stay on top is causing the market to remain technologically and monetarily stale.
And, indeed, that's the way Creative wants it. All they have to do is to continue to release a new product every 6-12 months that adds barely any new features and market the crap out of it, all while underhandedly undermining its competition in any way it can to prevent them from developing and successfully marketing anything better. Any company that actually manages to slip past them long enough to gain a foothold will either be bought out (Ensoniq/E-mu/Sensaura) or litigated out of existence (Aureal).
A very valid point, although you have to admit that ATI and nVidia are on fairly even footing in the video accelerator market while Creative no longer has any competitors in the sound card market.
Show me some data from current Realtek and Creative hardware. You're running off of assumptions that were valid 5 years ago, but not now. Things have changed quite a bit. Seriously, get a new, brand-name mobo with a Realtek 6xx or 8xx series chip, install their reference drivers (which, by the way, support multiple chip models and are frequently updated, unlike Creative's horribly bloated and unstable drivers) and give it a shot sometime.
Unlike everyone else, Creative doesn't license technology, they buy it -- and provide poorly-maintained drivers, little to no support, and an extremely short product life cycle, all despite the fact that the successor product rarely has much added value.
If they can't buy it, they use any other tactics at their disposal to crush it. Basically they have an "if we can't make money off of it, then *noone* can!" attitude, which slows innovation in the sound hardware market.
To follow your ridiculous analogy with cars:
1. Imagine if Ford bought Chevrolet (imagine that it's their only major competitor) and sold their vehicles as Fords but with no warranty/maintenance package, all for the twofold purpose of both eliminating a competitor and making money off of their product without having to do any of the real work involved in creating it.
Now Ford controls the market and noone else can make an affordable car that's anywhere near the same quality.
2. Imagine if Honda made an extremely affordable electric car. Imagine that Toyota tried to buy Honda in order to, again, eliminate the competition and make all of the profit of selling that car without having to do any of the development work. Imagine that Honda refuses and then Toyota buys out one of the companies that helped devlop it and then terminates Honda's license to produce the car (or raises the license fees to something ridiculous, or sues Honda, or whatever it takes - same effect).
Now Toyota controls the market and it is extremely difficult for anyone else to make money from a competing, let alone better, electric car.
Creative is the MS of hardware.
Thanks. Enjoy your kool-aid.
Let me enlighten you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:SoundStorm
You're in good company. I haven't bought a Creative product for around 5 years now. Just take it one day at a time and remember that there is a growing legion of people who have been freed from Creative's marketing brainwash.
Adlib.
No, they probably bought it from someone else who invented it, then marketed it as a Creative product.
If by "bang" you mean the sound of your system blowing up from horrible drivers and conflicting hardware.
That's because of marketing, not product quality. Read Creative's forums/newsgroups for all the problems people have with Creative and their products. People have been brainwashed into believing that they *need* a Creative sound card for high-end gaming, but it's just not true any more because Creative has stopped innovating in that area.
Totally untrue. 100% FUD. I've used tons of sound cards and several onboard Realtek solutions, and I can say with absolute certainty that the *only* thing gamers get out of an SB over a Realtek is EAX 3 and 4 support, and that's only because Creative won't share the specs for those with its competitors.
Incidentally, I haven't heard EM noise from a computer's sound hardware since I stopped using Creative cards several years ago.
You, sir/madam, are seriously starting to sound like a shill/astroturfer.
Why would anyone use a USB sound device for games? The latency would be too high.
100% agreed. In fact, here's my Creative laundry list: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165010&cid=137 79654
I was hoping for something tasty like a memory leak. Something that would gradually bring your machine to a crawl over a 2 hour period. Pissed-off users rebooting all day and not knowing why. Wailing and teeth-gnashing at Microsoft. Now that would have been worth the read...
I thought it might be a memory leak too when I read the title, but then I asked myself, "Windows Media Player has memory leaks? Why would that be news?"
HDTV will become the standard and wont cost as much in the (hopefully) near future. they're just now still overcharging for it. panic is for the impatient.
But that's what people have been saying for, what, five years now? The U.S. government has already pushed back plans to eliminate analog TV over-the-air broadcasts due to the fact that few people have found it worthwhile to HDTV so far.
In any case, the general consensus seems to be that Sony has made a bad gamble which may result in a DoA console out of the gate.
[i]Windoz lusers most likely, that sh*t just promotes stupidity.
*BSD 4 lyfe![/i]
Sounds like BSD doesn't help much in that department either.
The more, the merrier ;)
What?
Straw Man.
Michael Beihn (from The Terminator and Aliens) inspired cover art for Snake in the original Metal Gear game: http://www.sheezyart.com/view/557386/
He's probably getting a bit old for such roles now, though.
That's a valid point. However, the lack of theories that apply better to such a "limited domain" does not prove that a given theory is true/valid.
Incorrect. Science can prove everything...the only problem is that it comes up with something else after a few years to disprove it's earlier proof and establish a new one (which by the way will be disproved too and so on ad infinitum.....)
That doesn't make any sense. If something is proven then it must by definition be *the* true explanation for the behavior of a phenomena. You can't disprove anything that is unequivocably true.
The way I've always been told that it actually works is that many theories may be proposed to explain something, but the one that seems to fit best (based on things like experimentation) is generally considered to be the de facto explanation - until something better comes along.
I hate it when people criticize media for not getting it right don't get it right.
Hypothesis can't be proved, but only disproved.
SCIENCE is the progression of hypotheses getting more and more accurate as tests rule out the ones that are not the case.
Ruling out all existing hypotheses except for one is not a sufficient condition to claim that the remaining hypothesis must be true. There may be other hypotheses that have not yet been formed.
Saying "science can prove" or "science can't prove" totally misses what science is in the first place.
I wasn't attempting to describe of the purpose of science, but rather what its limitations are and how those limitations are misrepresented by popular media.
4 out of 5 dentists said clinical trials showed dolphins love Dentine!
At least before they choked on the gum and floated away.
The dolphins, or the dentists?