Are you telling me that people in the US learn how to drive using automatic transmission? That's... in...teresting (Okay, I was about to end that word in "sane").
Would things be better if the RIAA sold their own special CD players that you had to use to play their music?
I don't think that's what GP said. The RIAA is the publisher, not the hardware manufacturer. If the music publishers had to get their music licensed by the hardware manufacturer, they would have less power. No crappy broken CDs with spyware, for example.
That's exactly what I thought. It's already been done. It's the 3DO. It doesn't work.
Nintendo wants its quirky features like a novel controller, backwards compatibility back to the NES, a way to play GBA games on it, a way to plug GC controllers in and a shopping channel. Sony wants Bluray and backwards compatibility back to the PS and proprietary memory sticks and compatibility with its proprietary Sony media sharing tech, and anyway, only 3D games without nudity are allowed, and the thing needs a huge disk so Sony can sell its music and movies through its online store. Microsoft wants it to run Windows and HD-DVD and USB and games need to be online and have achievments and it needs to be backwards compatible to the Xbox and it needs to hook into you media center and you need to be able to plug the Zune into it and play its games on Windows Mobile platforms.
And then you end up with a console that does everything and supports everything and is an overpriced steaming pile of crap that is even worse than the PS3.
And who will license games? Who will make money from this thing?
If Blu-Ray becomes the successor to DVDs (low probability), PS3 MIGHT sell because it has a Blu-Ray player. But this does nothing to boost the software sales (where all the money is).
Well, it might do something. The question, of course, is how much, and as I've said, it's entirely unclear how many games people who buy a PS3 as a Bluray player would buy. Probably some, but probably not very many.
You're wrong. As I said, in the earlier adventures from Lucas Arts (such as Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders or Maniac Mansion (the original, not DotT)), you could easily get into situations where you could not finish the game, without being alerted to it.
Well, the fact remains: Nintendo almost never takes losses on their consoles, and they've only had one simple quarter where the company had to post losses (and that was due to currency fluctuations). Sure, they are not directly causal. You can make a profit on every console sold and still lose money due to investments you've made to develop the console. But that is besides the point, since I don't think anyone would claim otherwise.
Nintendo's model certainly seems healthier for the business, and fairer for competitors, compared to what Microsoft is doing - paying for Xbox market penetration with money from Office and Windows.
Botton line, they are all evil companies, but which one is the lesser evil?
The least total evilness is reached when all three companies have comparable market share and none of them can behave like they customer raping monopolists they would like to be.
As for the ego, it's there. But it's not contempt for consumers, as most detractors would have you believe. It's confidence. They're saying, "we're number 1". Sony needs to be seen as confident in this console outing. You want them to say "Yeah it sucks, get an Xbox?"
No, but they need a huge slice of the humble pie. They don't need to acknowledge the competition, but they do need to stop insulting their customers. It should be obvious, but since it apparently isn't, I'll say it: Insulting the people who buy your stuff is a bad idea. They are the ones who make you what you are.
Ah, another tip: I used two Roomba virtual walls to figure out how wide the sensor bar should be. Candles probably work, too. You need to open your setting in Zelda. I didn't find it on my own, either, I read on the Internet that it was possible to calibrate in Zelda, and only found it when I actually went and specifically looked for it.
Agreed. It's kind of amazing. My brother hit the ceiling with his remote. Three times. My dad smashed it into a cabinet. I hit the wall twice. Some of my pals who came over to play hit the walls. No, I don't have such a small living room, it's just that with four players playing tennis and trying to avoid hitting each other, the wall kind of becomes a natural target. Anyway, all remotes still work perfectly fine.
Ah, just to add to my previous answer, there's a third way to fix the problem: Move the sensor bar to be closer to you. That way, the Wii remote will more closely match your larger TV (although even back when I did not do that, I never noticed an issue. I have a beamer which projects a picture about 6 meters in diameter. People who came to my place actually asked me how the Wii knew how big my screen was - they never noticed that they only moved the pointer and didn't directly point at it).
Actually, that is kind of wrong. There are two ways to fix this issue:
Some games, like Zelda, allow you to calibrate the cursor. I don't know why Nintendo didn't include that in the Wii itself instead of forcing games to do it, but there you have it. It's certainly possible for games to fix the issue, and light gun games would have to do this.
You can "cheat" by creating your own sensor bar, which is pretty easy (it's just two sets of IR LEDs on each side - you could even make two non-connected Sensor Bar parts to figure out how far apart they need to be). The Wii expects the Sensor Bar to be about half as wide as your TV. If you do that (and experiment a bit with the size of the bar), you can get your cursor to match your remote perfectly without any calibration.
While I love both Wii Sports and Zelda (I hated using the hook in the Wind Waker since I could never get it to hit the targets using the Wavebird - the Wii controls are so much better), one of them is a pack-in originally intended to be a tech demo, and the other is a port of a Gamecube game. It's hardly fair to judge the Wii based on these two games.
Either way, I consider myself a hardcore gamer, I got a Wii on launch day, and I still play Wii almost every day.
A $200 device isn't going to have anywhere near the precision (or graphics) necessary to make it a good, long term platform that people will enjoy for years like the PS2 has been.
Yeah, because the PS2 has such great graphics (and precision, whatever that means) compared to the Wii. And we've all seen how spectacularly the DS has failed. I mean, the DS has all those ugly games, some even 2D, believe it or not, it's not like anyone would want to play these.
It's very rare to have a system-seller game at launch. Out of all of the various different console launches over the years, I can only think of two such cases -- the SNES launch with Super Mario World, and the Xbox launch with Halo.
Wii Sports is viral. That's really all I can say. Zelda may have a huge attach rate, and it definitely shifted a few consoles, but Wii Sports, as simple as it may be, is the Wii's true system seller.
Probably at least as effective as Super Mario World.
they have x million yen development cost, and then they sell the first few thousand consoles on launch day for $250 each. Can every one of these sold in the very beginning make a profit? I don't think so.
That's a different question from the one which was asked. Obviously, you can't get back your investment instantly. The question is: Does each sold console add to your gains or to your losses?
I think what he actually said was that they sold the Cube at a loss for a small amount of time. They lowered the price just before releasing it, which may have put it into loss zone, but only for a few months. I'm not sure I remember correctly, though, it was a few years ago, I think.
Living in Europe, I can tell you that lots of my friends were able to get Wiis. Wiis are still generally sold out. I know one person who will definitely get a PS3 (for Gran Turismo). Furthermore, Amazon UK took quite a bit of time selling out the PS3 preorders (over 9 hours, last time I checked). Wii preorders were sold out in 2 minutes. It's all anecdotal evidence, but I think people are wising up to the PS3. It won't do as well as in the US.
Yeah. Nobody wanting to buy your product is a good thing, and not being able to manufacture stuff fast enough is a bad thing. In your bizarro parallel universe. Nintendo clearly underestimated the demand for the Wii, but look at the sales numbers. It's not as if there were no Wiis available because Nintendo didn't make any. They're clearly not making enough, but they are making a ton of them.
There are no Wiis available because everyone and his mother and his grandmother (quite literally, too) are trying to buy them.
Apart from R:FoM, what does the PS3 really have? Until better games come out, there isn't going to be an increase in demand at this point.
I'm wondering whether that will be enough. It took the PSP quite a while to come out with some decent games, and it seems to be too late. The console war is more of a sprint than a marathon. Your console needs to achieve critical mass quickly in order to get good third-party support. If that doesn't happen, a few good games a year later won't move enough boxes to change the course.
It seems that third-party devs are already moving support from the PS3 to the Wii, even after only a few months of sales. That could spell disaster for Sony.
What could help the PS3, though, is Bluray. If (and that's a big if) people want to move away from DVDs, the PS3 may yet reach a market. Even then, however, it's unclear whether that market would also be interested in games.
I totally agree. They are trying to maximize short-term profits, thereby destroying their goodwill with the very people who give them money, thereby destroying their long-term profits. I see more and more people who simply don't care about copying stuff anymore. People post those insane ads from the recording companies ("isn't it funny that by pirating movies, you're bacrupting the very bands you love?") to their blogs and make fun of them. Less and less people think it's wrong to copy music.
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Are you telling me that people in the US learn how to drive using automatic transmission? That's... in...teresting (Okay, I was about to end that word in "sane").
I don't think that's what GP said. The RIAA is the publisher, not the hardware manufacturer. If the music publishers had to get their music licensed by the hardware manufacturer, they would have less power. No crappy broken CDs with spyware, for example.
That's exactly what I thought. It's already been done. It's the 3DO. It doesn't work.
Nintendo wants its quirky features like a novel controller, backwards compatibility back to the NES, a way to play GBA games on it, a way to plug GC controllers in and a shopping channel. Sony wants Bluray and backwards compatibility back to the PS and proprietary memory sticks and compatibility with its proprietary Sony media sharing tech, and anyway, only 3D games without nudity are allowed, and the thing needs a huge disk so Sony can sell its music and movies through its online store. Microsoft wants it to run Windows and HD-DVD and USB and games need to be online and have achievments and it needs to be backwards compatible to the Xbox and it needs to hook into you media center and you need to be able to plug the Zune into it and play its games on Windows Mobile platforms.
And then you end up with a console that does everything and supports everything and is an overpriced steaming pile of crap that is even worse than the PS3.
And who will license games? Who will make money from this thing?
Well, it might do something. The question, of course, is how much, and as I've said, it's entirely unclear how many games people who buy a PS3 as a Bluray player would buy. Probably some, but probably not very many.
Everything after and including Indy 3 and Monkey Island should be fine.
You're wrong. As I said, in the earlier adventures from Lucas Arts (such as Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders or Maniac Mansion (the original, not DotT)), you could easily get into situations where you could not finish the game, without being alerted to it.
Well, the fact remains: Nintendo almost never takes losses on their consoles, and they've only had one simple quarter where the company had to post losses (and that was due to currency fluctuations). Sure, they are not directly causal. You can make a profit on every console sold and still lose money due to investments you've made to develop the console. But that is besides the point, since I don't think anyone would claim otherwise.
Nintendo's model certainly seems healthier for the business, and fairer for competitors, compared to what Microsoft is doing - paying for Xbox market penetration with money from Office and Windows.
Yes, it does. It says "if you create a game for that console, you can sell it to that many people."
The least total evilness is reached when all three companies have comparable market share and none of them can behave like they customer raping monopolists they would like to be.
No, but they need a huge slice of the humble pie. They don't need to acknowledge the competition, but they do need to stop insulting their customers. It should be obvious, but since it apparently isn't, I'll say it: Insulting the people who buy your stuff is a bad idea. They are the ones who make you what you are.
Ah, another tip: I used two Roomba virtual walls to figure out how wide the sensor bar should be. Candles probably work, too. You need to open your setting in Zelda. I didn't find it on my own, either, I read on the Internet that it was possible to calibrate in Zelda, and only found it when I actually went and specifically looked for it.
Agreed. It's kind of amazing. My brother hit the ceiling with his remote. Three times. My dad smashed it into a cabinet. I hit the wall twice. Some of my pals who came over to play hit the walls. No, I don't have such a small living room, it's just that with four players playing tennis and trying to avoid hitting each other, the wall kind of becomes a natural target. Anyway, all remotes still work perfectly fine.
Ah, just to add to my previous answer, there's a third way to fix the problem: Move the sensor bar to be closer to you. That way, the Wii remote will more closely match your larger TV (although even back when I did not do that, I never noticed an issue. I have a beamer which projects a picture about 6 meters in diameter. People who came to my place actually asked me how the Wii knew how big my screen was - they never noticed that they only moved the pointer and didn't directly point at it).
Actually, that is kind of wrong. There are two ways to fix this issue:
While I love both Wii Sports and Zelda (I hated using the hook in the Wind Waker since I could never get it to hit the targets using the Wavebird - the Wii controls are so much better), one of them is a pack-in originally intended to be a tech demo, and the other is a port of a Gamecube game. It's hardly fair to judge the Wii based on these two games.
Either way, I consider myself a hardcore gamer, I got a Wii on launch day, and I still play Wii almost every day.
Yeah, because the PS2 has such great graphics (and precision, whatever that means) compared to the Wii. And we've all seen how spectacularly the DS has failed. I mean, the DS has all those ugly games, some even 2D, believe it or not, it's not like anyone would want to play these.
Yeah, just like the NES had huge problems once the novelty of the D-Pad wore off. Joysticks FTW!
Wii Sports is viral. That's really all I can say. Zelda may have a huge attach rate, and it definitely shifted a few consoles, but Wii Sports, as simple as it may be, is the Wii's true system seller.
Probably at least as effective as Super Mario World.
That's a different question from the one which was asked. Obviously, you can't get back your investment instantly. The question is: Does each sold console add to your gains or to your losses?
I think what he actually said was that they sold the Cube at a loss for a small amount of time. They lowered the price just before releasing it, which may have put it into loss zone, but only for a few months. I'm not sure I remember correctly, though, it was a few years ago, I think.
Living in Europe, I can tell you that lots of my friends were able to get Wiis. Wiis are still generally sold out. I know one person who will definitely get a PS3 (for Gran Turismo). Furthermore, Amazon UK took quite a bit of time selling out the PS3 preorders (over 9 hours, last time I checked). Wii preorders were sold out in 2 minutes. It's all anecdotal evidence, but I think people are wising up to the PS3. It won't do as well as in the US.
Yeah. Nobody wanting to buy your product is a good thing, and not being able to manufacture stuff fast enough is a bad thing. In your bizarro parallel universe. Nintendo clearly underestimated the demand for the Wii, but look at the sales numbers. It's not as if there were no Wiis available because Nintendo didn't make any. They're clearly not making enough, but they are making a ton of them.
There are no Wiis available because everyone and his mother and his grandmother (quite literally, too) are trying to buy them.
I'm wondering whether that will be enough. It took the PSP quite a while to come out with some decent games, and it seems to be too late. The console war is more of a sprint than a marathon. Your console needs to achieve critical mass quickly in order to get good third-party support. If that doesn't happen, a few good games a year later won't move enough boxes to change the course.
It seems that third-party devs are already moving support from the PS3 to the Wii, even after only a few months of sales. That could spell disaster for Sony.
What could help the PS3, though, is Bluray. If (and that's a big if) people want to move away from DVDs, the PS3 may yet reach a market. Even then, however, it's unclear whether that market would also be interested in games.
It's worth noting that many early Adventure games are like this, even those from Lucas Films Games (or whatver they used to be called).
I totally agree. They are trying to maximize short-term profits, thereby destroying their goodwill with the very people who give them money, thereby destroying their long-term profits. I see more and more people who simply don't care about copying stuff anymore. People post those insane ads from the recording companies ("isn't it funny that by pirating movies, you're bacrupting the very bands you love?") to their blogs and make fun of them. Less and less people think it's wrong to copy music.