Yeah, UMD movies are here to stay. Stay on the shelves of the retailers, that is. There is no space on the market for a format that costs more than DVDs, has less content than DVDs, and can only be played on one single device that isn't selling particularly well.
Having said that, I will admit that I have actually bought about a dozen UMD movies. Many of the major retailers are or were getting rid of them, and it was possible to buy them for a few bucks. So I have a bunch of unwatched UMDs I can watch if I'm going on a longer train trip. The main issue with that is, of course, that watching UMDs drains the battery much faster than watching movies from the memory stick. On the other hand, they look better...
And in 5 years, you won't be able to play these games anymore because your 360 is dead, and Microsoft either leaves the console market or releases the 720 with broken backwards compatibility.
I read that MS was aiming for Gaming to be profitable in FY08. With an extra billion dollar hole to dig themselves out of, it might take an extra year, or two to get back to even for them.
Actually, you're misunderstanding. When MS said "profitable," they meant "the sum of money we're spending in one quarter will be lower than the sum of money we're making in the same quarter," not "we're going to make up for all the losses we've had in all previous quarters." Since they're (probably?) going to write off the one billion in one quarter, they can still become profitable in the next quarter.
you can get Resident Evil 4 for PS2 for $19.99 and play it on your PS3..... after a few games i guess that would add up and you get your money not saved on hardware back
The PS2 version is the worst version of Resi 4. The Wii version is the best version of Resi 4.
Why would you pay for a PS3 just so you could play an inferior version of the game?
and as time goes on I believe more and more Nintendo is deliberately exacerbating the shortage
Do you realize how many of these things they sell? There is no actual "Wii shortage," there's just incredibly high demand. I have no doubt they are producing them as fast as they can, and trying desperately to get more production capacity.
What a PS3 owner told his friends: "It's a nice machine, but don't get it yet, there are not enough good games." What a Wii owner told his friends: Nothing, they were busy playing Wii Tennis.
This is why the PS3 is failing after a strong start, and why the Wii is only increasing in popularity.
What he actually said was "people were burned when they used feature A of product A, and they are now reluctant to buy feature A's successor B, which is from the same manufacturer, because they fear a similar feature B in this product B may be similarly flawed."
I think the lack of GPU support in Linux is by design. It's hidden behind a hypervisor. If it is being hacked, Sony will release a firmware update and make the hack impossible.
People here act like its some huge crime to charge what Sony does for their console.
It's not a huge crime. It's just pretty damn stupid.
I don't see how you could possible be upset with a company because they priced something you *don't* want to buy out of your acceptable range.
I don't think many people absolutely want to not own a PS3.
I think the fact that this story has been tagged "rootkit" is also extremily telling of the way the/. crowd is approaching the console. It's a fucking home entertainment system, not a political canidate running for president.
So we should just ignore how Sony behaves, shut up, and buy their products, like the good little consumers that we are?
The PS3 still costs twice as much as it should. The 360 is way too expensive, too, and you have to pay an additional fee for online gaming. Even the Wii costs more than it should, but since Nintendo is selling them as fast as they can make it, they at least have a reason to price it too high.
A console is a toy. To gain mass appeal, it should be priced as a toy, which means less than 200 US$.
And I say that as somebody who owns both a Wii and a PS3.
You're right. The 3D Castlevanias are all crap. The DS is where the real Castlevania action is at. However, I'd love to see a sidescrolling Castlevania done on the PS3. That would be one hell of a game.
Now I'm kind of peeved because I bought the damn thing a few days after the Euro launch for 900 CHF (740 US$) and most certainly haven't gotten anywhere near 100 bucks of playtime out of it - but okay, I expected a price cut to happen soon, and I bought the PS3 because I was interested in seeing how it worked, not because I expected to get a ton of good games.
But the price cut is still not anywhere near enough! Even the 360 costs way too much. The Wii and the PS2 are the only currently available TV consoles priced for mass market appeal.
You said you quit - but you came back to argue again.
Huh? I did not say I quit. I said I felt you did not want to discuss this, but only to insult me, which was why I felt there was no need to reply. However, you then raised some (barely) interesting points, which I felt I should address. But yeah, you're right, I better make an appointment with a shrink right away. Thanks for your diagnosis, you saved me from certain doom. By the way, switching your argument just to reply to another's argument, and faulty uses of reductio ad absurdum also seem pretty insane to me, so you might want to see your shrink, too.
Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you? You seem way too angry, considering the fact that you live in your own little free market paradise. I suggest you get help instead of trolling/.
You know you've found a true loser if you find somebody who feels the need to preemptively declare himself the winner.
Your arguments - that this proves that laws are not good for consumers, or that something goes out of business if it s bad - are so utterly absurd that any reply to them is inherently unneccessary.
The best part, of course, is that I'm not even Norwegian. I'm Swiss. We have a direct democracy, which means our "nanny laws" were put in place by a vote of the people. Yeah, that's right, the people voted to have these "nanny laws." Where does that leave your "people choose something, so it must be good" theory? You think we are too stupid to make these decisions on our own?
4x does not put quite the same stress on the drive than 52x does
And yet it was the high-end device at the time, and it was a writer, not only a reader. I see no reason why a DVD reader manufactured in 2007 should be of worse quality than a CD burner manufactured a decade ago.
No, it doesn't help consumers, it harms them. Here's some economics.
Sometimes, the lenght some people will go to to rationalize the fact that they're being raped by the people they voted for just astonishes me.
If Wal-Mart was so bad, it would go out of business in the city
Wow. Just... wow. If you really believe that, you're either insane or suffering from severe cognitive dissonance.
Your nanny state has taken this freedom to choose away from the individual.
Yeah. I'm not free because I don't have to worry that an accident will fuck my financials up for the rest of my life. I'm not free because I don't have to worry that I'm stuck with a broken 360 that MS won't replace. I'm... aw, forget it. Why am I even talking to you? You're not interested in discussing this. You're just being a stupid, insulting asshat.
Game Console or PC, a DVD Drive is still a DVD drive with a different face plate.
So? You only use it to play DVDs which are (probably) manufactured by or to the specs of the manufcaturer of your console. It's not like a PC where you constantly put all kinds of burned and questionable CDs and DVDs inside. And even on a PC, I expect the DVD drive to last until I replace the PC, which is at least 3 to 4 years.
Especially since they sold me the hardware below cost
How does that matter? I look at a console and judge its value. I expect the thing to behave like a console, not like a cheap-ass PC I built from parts I found in the dumpster at radioshack.
As far as a game not working, I'd be pretty bummed, but it's never been an issue. I've had drives go out on the PS2, Xbox, 360,
I own a bunch of Cubes and three Dreamcasts. One DC died, all the other ones still work perfectly well. Yes, the PS2 had some pretty damn crappy hardware issues, but that's no reason to accept the same shit from other consoles and manufacturers.
and several on PCs.
And if the DVD drive in your PC dies, you go out, buy a new one for a few bucks, and you're back in business. Try that with a 360. Try getting your 360 fixed in 10 years.
I guess I've been in IT long enough not to expect any drive to last more than a few years, even less for the cheap ones.
My very first CD burner was a yamaha 4x scsi drive. I bought this sucker more than 10 years ago, and to this day, it works. There's no reason why DVD drives have to be shit, especially not if they're used in a console where you can't just replace them.
For heaven's sake, my VCS 2600 still works as well as the day it came out the box. I have a Pong, and it still works as well as the day it came out. And I still hook them up from time to time! There's no reason why all these 360s should die so easily, and if I want to play a little Crackdown 10 years from now, I should be able to.
Don't worry, there will be a 20%-30% chance the Xbox 720 will be Backwards compatible with it and Microsoft will replace it as often as you like for a certain period. And then it's a brick.
Actually, it's more likely that they'll get out of the console business entirely, or have fucked up backwards compatibilitity like the 360's.
I think it's somewhat unrealistic to expect hardware to last forever but 30% fail rate is ridiculous.
I don't expect it to last forever. I just expect it to last longer than a few years.
No, that's actually not the reason. The reason is optical drives. Go to a garage sale. You'll see countless N64s, but you almost never see PS1s. Why is that? Because PS1s break easily, while N64s don't break at all. I own dozens of consoles, some of them over 20 years old. Not a single one of them has ever had any kind of issue, except one of the Dreamcasts; I never bought a PS1 or a PS2.
My original Pong still works. VCS 2600? Still works. NES, SNES, Turbografx, all still work.
Nothing to do with the Internet. It's the moving parts that make consoles prone to breaking. Except with the 360: That's just bad engineering.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, UMD movies are here to stay. Stay on the shelves of the retailers, that is. There is no space on the market for a format that costs more than DVDs, has less content than DVDs, and can only be played on one single device that isn't selling particularly well.
Having said that, I will admit that I have actually bought about a dozen UMD movies. Many of the major retailers are or were getting rid of them, and it was possible to buy them for a few bucks. So I have a bunch of unwatched UMDs I can watch if I'm going on a longer train trip. The main issue with that is, of course, that watching UMDs drains the battery much faster than watching movies from the memory stick. On the other hand, they look better...
And in 5 years, you won't be able to play these games anymore because your 360 is dead, and Microsoft either leaves the console market or releases the 720 with broken backwards compatibility.
Metroid Prime and Prime 2 work, and of course, you can unlock the original NES Metroid if you have the GBA version and a link cable :-)
Actually, you're misunderstanding. When MS said "profitable," they meant "the sum of money we're spending in one quarter will be lower than the sum of money we're making in the same quarter," not "we're going to make up for all the losses we've had in all previous quarters." Since they're (probably?) going to write off the one billion in one quarter, they can still become profitable in the next quarter.
Yeah, this would have been much morer awesomer if we had discovered it on our own :-(
The PS2 version is the worst version of Resi 4. The Wii version is the best version of Resi 4.
Why would you pay for a PS3 just so you could play an inferior version of the game?
Do you realize how many of these things they sell? There is no actual "Wii shortage," there's just incredibly high demand. I have no doubt they are producing them as fast as they can, and trying desperately to get more production capacity.
What a PS3 owner told his friends: "It's a nice machine, but don't get it yet, there are not enough good games."
What a Wii owner told his friends: Nothing, they were busy playing Wii Tennis.
This is why the PS3 is failing after a strong start, and why the Wii is only increasing in popularity.
What he actually said was "people were burned when they used feature A of product A, and they are now reluctant to buy feature A's successor B, which is from the same manufacturer, because they fear a similar feature B in this product B may be similarly flawed."
No logical fallacy.
I think the lack of GPU support in Linux is by design. It's hidden behind a hypervisor. If it is being hacked, Sony will release a firmware update and make the hack impossible.
It got its owners a lot of good-looking games, at least.
It's not a huge crime. It's just pretty damn stupid.
I don't think many people absolutely want to not own a PS3.
So we should just ignore how Sony behaves, shut up, and buy their products, like the good little consumers that we are?
Having world-wide "targeted demographics" auf 10 million "ideal customers" is nuts if you're selling a console.
600 bucks is a significant amount of money for a toy. It doesn't matter if you're Bill fucking Gates, it's still 600 bucks for a toy.
And yes, I own one. It's not dead silent, unless you're deaf.
You're ignoring everything else Sony has done. And don't get me the "Sony is more than one company" argument, it makes no sense.
The PS3 still costs twice as much as it should. The 360 is way too expensive, too, and you have to pay an additional fee for online gaming. Even the Wii costs more than it should, but since Nintendo is selling them as fast as they can make it, they at least have a reason to price it too high.
A console is a toy. To gain mass appeal, it should be priced as a toy, which means less than 200 US$.
And I say that as somebody who owns both a Wii and a PS3.
You're right. The 3D Castlevanias are all crap. The DS is where the real Castlevania action is at. However, I'd love to see a sidescrolling Castlevania done on the PS3. That would be one hell of a game.
I read your post until the part you called Genji "a great game." What???
Huh? I did not say I quit. I said I felt you did not want to discuss this, but only to insult me, which was why I felt there was no need to reply. However, you then raised some (barely) interesting points, which I felt I should address. But yeah, you're right, I better make an appointment with a shrink right away. Thanks for your diagnosis, you saved me from certain doom. By the way, switching your argument just to reply to another's argument, and faulty uses of reductio ad absurdum also seem pretty insane to me, so you might want to see your shrink, too.
Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you? You seem way too angry, considering the fact that you live in your own little free market paradise. I suggest you get help instead of trolling /.
You know you've found a true loser if you find somebody who feels the need to preemptively declare himself the winner.
Your arguments - that this proves that laws are not good for consumers, or that something goes out of business if it s bad - are so utterly absurd that any reply to them is inherently unneccessary.
The best part, of course, is that I'm not even Norwegian. I'm Swiss. We have a direct democracy, which means our "nanny laws" were put in place by a vote of the people. Yeah, that's right, the people voted to have these "nanny laws." Where does that leave your "people choose something, so it must be good" theory? You think we are too stupid to make these decisions on our own?
And yet it was the high-end device at the time, and it was a writer, not only a reader. I see no reason why a DVD reader manufactured in 2007 should be of worse quality than a CD burner manufactured a decade ago.
Sometimes, the lenght some people will go to to rationalize the fact that they're being raped by the people they voted for just astonishes me.
If Wal-Mart was so bad, it would go out of business in the cityWow. Just... wow. If you really believe that, you're either insane or suffering from severe cognitive dissonance.
Your nanny state has taken this freedom to choose away from the individual.Yeah. I'm not free because I don't have to worry that an accident will fuck my financials up for the rest of my life. I'm not free because I don't have to worry that I'm stuck with a broken 360 that MS won't replace. I'm... aw, forget it. Why am I even talking to you? You're not interested in discussing this. You're just being a stupid, insulting asshat.
Have a nice day.
So? You only use it to play DVDs which are (probably) manufactured by or to the specs of the manufcaturer of your console. It's not like a PC where you constantly put all kinds of burned and questionable CDs and DVDs inside. And even on a PC, I expect the DVD drive to last until I replace the PC, which is at least 3 to 4 years.
Especially since they sold me the hardware below costHow does that matter? I look at a console and judge its value. I expect the thing to behave like a console, not like a cheap-ass PC I built from parts I found in the dumpster at radioshack.
As far as a game not working, I'd be pretty bummed, but it's never been an issue. I've had drives go out on the PS2, Xbox, 360,I own a bunch of Cubes and three Dreamcasts. One DC died, all the other ones still work perfectly well. Yes, the PS2 had some pretty damn crappy hardware issues, but that's no reason to accept the same shit from other consoles and manufacturers.
and several on PCs.And if the DVD drive in your PC dies, you go out, buy a new one for a few bucks, and you're back in business. Try that with a 360. Try getting your 360 fixed in 10 years.
I guess I've been in IT long enough not to expect any drive to last more than a few years, even less for the cheap ones.My very first CD burner was a yamaha 4x scsi drive. I bought this sucker more than 10 years ago, and to this day, it works. There's no reason why DVD drives have to be shit, especially not if they're used in a console where you can't just replace them.
Actually, it's more likely that they'll get out of the console business entirely, or have fucked up backwards compatibilitity like the 360's.
I think it's somewhat unrealistic to expect hardware to last forever but 30% fail rate is ridiculous.I don't expect it to last forever. I just expect it to last longer than a few years.
No, that's actually not the reason. The reason is optical drives. Go to a garage sale. You'll see countless N64s, but you almost never see PS1s. Why is that? Because PS1s break easily, while N64s don't break at all. I own dozens of consoles, some of them over 20 years old. Not a single one of them has ever had any kind of issue, except one of the Dreamcasts; I never bought a PS1 or a PS2.
My original Pong still works. VCS 2600? Still works. NES, SNES, Turbografx, all still work.
Nothing to do with the Internet. It's the moving parts that make consoles prone to breaking. Except with the 360: That's just bad engineering.