I just realized why there are so few replies to this story so far: everyone here is out trying to figure out how they can get their hands on $200,000 worth of legos. I could build my own home addition with all those; that would be awesome.
It'd be drafty though. I think you might need some insulation between those legos blocks.
Actually a decent chunk of satanists see Lucifer as being solely a metaphor for life, or a "force" equivalent to the Christian (C.S. Lewis et al) view of God as an underlying moral force to the universe. There's a comparatively small proportion of "literal" satanists (the sort that could indeed be considered left-handed Christians), who are more correctly termed Diabolists. Less abridged summary here
those satanists use the monker for shock value of to garner more press. Their attention whores and nothign more. The Le Vey Satanists right.
When I was in china in may, I coudl nto find 1 legitimate copy of WOW. I couldnt' find 1 cafe that had a real copy of WOW on it. So if it turns out that not only was he not on WOW and was playing an illegal copy of war3, what possibel responsibility could blizzard have?
Mod parent up please, the question about the Do Not Call bill is an excellent one, especially considering the potential for abuse.
Any thoughts? I can't honestly see an easy way to prevent this from being abused easily.
SB
They problably cross reference, they may not call a number more then once every 20 min and maybe no more then 3 times a day. That would be enough for ads but would not be harassment. They might also figure the local area via the area code and limit calls after hours.
You're honestly claiming that online gaming is not a significant factor considered by gamers in this day and age? Thankfully, you do not speak for "most" people. On the PC, the top hits nearly always include a multiplayer feature.
It isn't. PC gaming and Xbox live are niche products. Look at the units of pure multiplayer games that move vs games that are single player. Most people do not enjoy getting their ass kicked online and if they play with friends, they can do so at home. The numbers bear out my assertion while yrou is intuitive to us geeks but wrong.
This has been the claim of every manufacturer since the Nintendo. I'm not buying it. We all know that it is common practice for companies to do 'creative accounting'. We know that there are plenty of ways to make it look like money is being lost when it is not in reality. What do you think would happen if MS admitted to making a 10% profit on their hardware? That's right, they would have hundreds of thousands of people screaming that they should lower the price, or stop charging for a "license" to make software for the unit. The very poor excuse for charging this "license" fee has been that that is how they make their money back from the loss on hardware. They loose even that excuse if they admit to making a profit on hardware.
The licence fee is a charge to develope for propriatary hardware system. Not to compensate them for the machine. Nintendo said the GC was profitable from the first sale and there was no demand to cheapen anything. Creative accountign may be done, but it's more for tax purposes then anything else.
Did Sony make money in this past generation of consoles (PS2)? I thought I heard only Nintendo did, or perhaps it was just that Nintendo made the most.
Both Sony and Nintendo did. The PS2 was profitable as little as 5 mo after launch on the hardware while the Gc was profitable to start. R&D cost were recouped int he first year in both. The MS game division was 4 billion in the hole ove rthe course of the Xbox life time so far.
The 360 hardware aside, the PS2 and to a much lesser extent the Gamecube are beginning to show their age. The GC has been spared the ravages of time a bit because of Nintendo's disinterest in pushing the graphic envelope (they have their reasons, and I respect that. I'm not looking for a flamefest on that issue) but the PS2 has really been forced to hang on a bit too long.
The PS2 I agree, it's old and looks terrible on a big screen TV. But the GC came out roughly the same times as the original Xbox. IT graphics are generally on par as well.
My boycott of Sony will include BlueRay and anything else that has Sony branded on it... In my opinion, Sony's DRM techniques have settled the battle between BlueRay and HD-DVD... Just say no to Bluer-ay
Not to ruin yoru moral stance or anything but both formats have DRM.
Worked retail? Yeah, because joe associate knows shit about how the company makes money.
Oh, and yes I've worked retail.
BTW, You're just plain wrong. "consumer electronics margins typically average 15%-20%, compared with 25%-30% in other categories".
I have clothing merchants in the family the mark up is around 300%, as well computer retailers, the mark-up varies. Commodity parts are 5-10% while luxury parts like high end video cards are 20%-30%. Consumer elctronics varies as well, some products are 300% markup(cabling) while others like TV's are 20-25%. This is % over the wholesale price, not % over the final retail price.
Having the most market share isn't a metric that anybody sane uses to measure success anyway. At least not since the dot-com boom ended. In the real world, success is typically measured in profit on a balance sheet and through survival on a resume. On the balance sheet, Sony and Nintendo both won, Sega lost, and Microsoft lost big. On their resumes, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all succeeded, and Sega lost big. Consumers care about survival, and investors care about profit. Only fanboys care about market share.
I only specified a criteria for considering the winner. Most units sold PS2, survival all 3. Balance sheet Sony/Nintentdo. Most money made Sony.
They now have GC modchips and you can replace the case with one that lets you insert standard-sized DVDs (which the GC drive is apparently capable of reading without modification).
The GC disks were basically a mini-DVD. But their design choice did keep the pirates away. IT's still nto common to have modded GC While Modded Xbox's and Modded PS2's are very very common.
Also, expect extra controller sales to be lower this time around, since this is the first console to ever ship with online multi-player in a meaningful fashion. Instead of a friend pulling up an extra controller, they're going to be playing you online with the controller that came with their Xbox.
Live is a niche service, don't expect it to play a major role in the branding or sale of the 360. It only reached 10% of the consumer base. Most people actually prefer toplay ofline, this is true for everythign from PC games to Console games.
If you ask some average Joe which of two TVs is "Better," he's going to point to the bigger one, not the one with the high def picture. If he's got $1000 to spend on a TV, which do you think he'll get? The 27" HD tube, the 36" Trinitron SD model, or the 45" SD rear projection? I bet money that nine times out of ten the answer is "The biggest one that will fit in the available space, HD or otherwise."
Given the uncertain state of copy protection legislation, you'd be stupid to buy an HD set right now anyway. All the early adopters that bought TVs before HDCP now have a 2 year old, $10,000 obsolete piece of junk. If new broadcast flag legislation gets passed, that could happen again.
There is a very clear difference in picture quality when using a DVD player/DVI or S video cables and a HD-TV vs a conevtional TV. Of sets of the same size, the average joe will pick the HD-TV. For a luxury item (that is what TV's are) many people, including my parents and relatives, will spend more to get better perceaved quality.
There is no "standard markup". The markup depends on the product. Typically only "service" products have a markup greater than 100%. 25% is considered excelent for general retail goods. When the PS2 launched, retailers only made $2 in profit per sale. The wholsale price was only $2 less than the retail price. With Xbox, the wholsale price and retail price were identical... No profit. Stores sold them anyway, because margins are high on games and (especially) accessories. That's why stores sell bundles. If stores are selling the 360 for $499, you can bet that Microsoft is getting almost all of that... At least for the first few months. Even in the waning years of a console's life cycle, the margins never get up past 20%.
Ok, now that we've debunked your assumptions, there's really no point in discussing the rest of your comment.
Have you ever worked in retail? Cloths have a 300% mark up, as does anything in food services. Electorinics range from 25% mark up to 300% depedning on the items. Computers generally have a slimmer mark-up, which is why a 256 mb GDDRS 350mzh GeForce 6800 is around $299, while the 550Mzh version is $399. Your $100 card is most likly DDR2. 700 mzh GDDR3 is still not cheap because aside from premium video cards, only the xbox 360 will use it so far. It may be true the Xbox sold at wholesale cost, even so $499 doesn't cover the intitial manufacturing cost.
Also, I forgot to include the price of a hard drive, since the $499 retail price includes a hard drive. Since the heads on a harddrive are the most expensive part, and hard drived never get cheaper to make the price is fixed through out the lifespan of the machine. HD's only come down in price per GB. This tags at least $50 onto the price of any machine. The intitial estimate came from Forbes which estimated the manufacturing cost of the PS3 will be $550 per machine when it come out next year. Apply mores law of transitor yeilds to that and increase the price appropriatly you will get $600 for the Xbox 360 since most of the compnents will have a similiar manufacturign cost, but 6 months premium to be paid for the technology.
I was talking about the XBox 360, not the PS3. Also, remember when the XBox and PS2 came out with DVD drives? Most games didn't take up more space than a CD could hold, and I heard that many PS2 games were "ripped" (had movies and other stuff removed by pirates to reduce game size) to make them fit. Even the Gamecube's supposedly radically different disc was cracked eventually. I fully expect the same to happen with the next generation of consoles.
The GC pirating methods are exstremely clumsy, the data is streamed in through the data port in the back. This means very very few people pirate Gc games exept hobbiest. No commerical pirating is available.
As for PS2, some of the games weren't actually DVD. A few select games were plain old CD's (in the first generation). And thus a mod chip was all you needed then you copied it onto a CD. As for hacked bins. Again it wouldn't be a common thing. The work required isn't that big but DVD burners came out a year later and the window closed on such products. It was never wide spread.
The problem is partly that programmers don't really know how to take advantage of the parallel processing architecture of the PS3. Yes, the will learn, but it may take most of the lifespan of the PS3 and XBox 360 for them to invent a new way of programming games that takes advantage of multi-processor and/or multi-core hardware.
Another part of the problem is that the industry likes porting games across multiple platforms as cheaply as possible, which means that multiplatform titles will probably take as little advantage as possible of system-specific features (which will cripple PS3 titles more than XBox titles).
Also, RAM speeds won't make much difference on consoles due to the low resolutions at which they render. The cache RAM is always much faster than the system RAM as well, so don't believe that it will have an impact at that level.
Even with the numbers on the PS3's side, I expect higher-quality early- and mid-life XBox 360 titles due to the fact that it has diverged less from current hardware architectures (resulting in a softer learning curve).
PS2 developers have had 6 years experience programming for 3 cores. I don't think having 8 will change that much. Since their all seperate CPU's, it means they simply can parrelize things more effectivly. The first gen Xbox 360 games won't because they were rushed out. The first gen PS3 games may not either but 2nd and onwards will. Memory speed is essential for media and 3d proccessing. Texture are gettign bigger, all 3 of the next gen systems have HD-TV output and HD-TV is now become cheaper and more common. I in fact have one, bought it for $3000 CND (the old joke, thats $400USD).
The numbers favor the PS3, as does most theoretical Aritecture analysis. CPU speeds means dick all these days it's all about memory bandwidth, cacheing, and efficient I/O. Since the PS3 has half year behind the 360 this isn't surprising.
Why do people bother to argue with "estimated" data? Especially when the estimated data has tyipcally been wrong in the past?
I wish I could get actual numbers, but I can't because nobody releases them. I'd bet money though that the 360 only costs $450 to make in volume. Look at what's in it. Where does the money go?
Lets assume yrou estimate is right (GDDR3 ram is expensive, so your estimate is pretty off). So microsoft spends $450 dollars to make the system. Now they sell it to wallmart/EB/Circuit city ect... for $150 and the retailer marks it up to $499. Microsoft has now lost $300 on each box.
Remember retail stores don't sell things for free. The standard mark up is to triple to wholesale price. Now even if for this product the whole sale price was higher say $300 Microsoft is still goign to be out money. The only console to make money when it was released in the last generation was the game cube. Both the PS2 and the Xbox cost more then it's retail price to make. a 3 core chip, no matter how efficiently made or special purpose or scaled will still cost ~$200 to make(Remember they purchase this from IBM, they don't make it). 512 GDDR3 ram will cost a lot more then DDR 2 ram to make of the same size, so lets assume Microsoft buys it for $100 from their supplier (they dont' make that), The GPU should be another at least $100 or so (they also don't make that). Lets assume they make the mother board, the controllers, the cables ectt and put it all together for another $150, and shippign and storage woudl make it close to $600 for each box. As their process gets better this price comes down, and someday they will make money on it. (Note: the original xbox stilld doesn't make money per box because they had to purchase all parts from suppliers so the price never really came down. But the retail price did).
So the assertion that the xbox was designed to make money form the start isn't correct. Even the retail mark-up defeats yoru estimate.
Canada has a fair amount of broadband penetration in high population density areas. Go outside the major cities and the situation is the same as the US. Perhaps a bit better, but go out into the country or small rural towns and you can't get broadband. The real advantage we have in Canada is price/speed more than penetration.
The over all percentage of canadians with broad band is also much higher. PArtially due tot he price/speed. Canada is just as geographically diverse as the US but the reason we have more broadband is the government subsidized it's installation.
Why do you think the 360 is coming out *now* and not in a year or two?
Hint: It's not to beat Sony out the door, because Sony wouldn't be releasing the PS3 nearly as soon if not to keep up with Microsoft.
The Xbox 360 is designed to be inexpensive to build and sell at a profit. Even Microsoft can't afford to lose billions of dollars, especially now that they have to pay out their stash of cash as dividends. So they have to get the newer, profitable version out right away. That's also the only explination for why they deviated from the otherwise excelent architecture of the first Xbox too. Xbox was well designed - everything a PC should be - and there was no reason Xbox 2 couldn't have been the same thing with a faster processor, faster GPU, and faster memory... But you need to make a profit!
Teh 360 isn't designed to be profitable anytime in the near future on hardware sales alone. This release date is to catch the 2005 christmas season and beat Sony to market. Sony initially planed a 2007 winter release but have moved it up to compete. The core compnents of the 360 even at a manufactuers price will be ~$600 USD as of november 2005. IT's sellign for $499.
The estimated manufacterers prices for the gear in a PS3 will be ~$550 USD, their also goign to be sellign it at $499.
With inflated game prices like that, you can bet that modchips will be coming out very quickly.
It's also kind of a lackluster lineup, dominated by run-of-the-mill EA sports titles with most of the remainder being PC ports.
As I've probably mentioned before, I'm only looking forward to the 360 launch because I'm thinking of buying an XBox (original, not 360) and I know the price will go down once the 360 is on the shelves.
they will, but sony's HD DVD system will keep it impractical for at least 2-3 years.
90% of owners didn't purchase an addon for playing online. Gee, do you think it might be more popular when it's built into the system? So, based on the fact that the PS2 hard drive sold for shit, can we assume that gamers don't prefer a hard drive? Or does it mean that optional accessories consistently sell for shit?
Even though you still have to pay for a subscription to Xbox Live Gold to get all of the features, the vast majority of people who buy an Xbox will get a free trial to Xbox Live Gold, many of whom will decide they like it and keep it on after the free trial.
What percentage of game players have wireless controllers now? Not that high of a percentage. Just about everyone I know who's looking forward to the 360 has mentioned those as a reason. But because not a lot of people bought them before, it must not be a large factor?
Live isn't that popular. Most people actually prefer not to play with random retards who scream in thier ear or who are so ridicoulously betters/worse then they are that playign isn't fun. The subscription rate per xbox hovers at around 10%. Same wiht Pc online play, most people just aren't that interested. They prefer real people or solo play. So while Sony is being backwards with thier online support, it likly won't hurt them.
What? I admit that I haven't been following this for the last month or so, but from what I've seen the XBox 360 will be at least as powerful as the PS3. Yes, the PS3 has a bunch of processing units in its cell processor, but most of them are special-purpose and not as powerful as the XBox 360's three generic cores.
Both have a PPC based chip running at 3.2 ghz. Except the 360 has a shared cache, while the Cell has multiple cashes. Speed is a hard thing to calculate with such different architectures but generally, the division of work set up in the cell chip has less obvious bottle necks then the 3 core 360 chip. 1mb lvl 2 cache as opposed to 512k l2 and 32k l1 with 7 256 caches. The price of branch prediction failure is much lower in the cell chip, and parrellelism is easier to achive due to the almost independant nature of eact SPU. Both have similiar memory bandwidth profiles with the PS3 having a slight edge. The memory systems give a huge edge to the ps3, having ram clocked at the same speed at the CPU while both have 512 total, the PS3 has 256 in 3.2ghz rama nd 256 in 700 mzh ram, while the Xbox 360 is all 700 mhz. This in essence adds a new layer of cache/memory architecture that allows for some creative storage algorithms. The only major question is how fast will the blu-ray be vs the 12 speed DVD. It is a fairly major question since the one wiht the fastest drive will have the least load time.
From a Computer architecture point of view, the PS3 will most likly be more powerful hands down if for no there reason then for the 3.2 mzh clocked ram. Drastically reducing the cost of any and all cache misses. But only time will tell if this is true.
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I just realized why there are so few replies to this story so far: everyone here is out trying to figure out how they can get their hands on $200,000 worth of legos. I could build my own home addition with all those; that would be awesome.
It'd be drafty though. I think you might need some insulation between those legos blocks.
Actually a decent chunk of satanists see Lucifer as being solely a metaphor for life, or a "force" equivalent to the Christian (C.S. Lewis et al) view of God as an underlying moral force to the universe. There's a comparatively small proportion of "literal" satanists (the sort that could indeed be considered left-handed Christians), who are more correctly termed Diabolists. Less abridged summary here
those satanists use the monker for shock value of to garner more press. Their attention whores and nothign more. The Le Vey Satanists right.
When I was in china in may, I coudl nto find 1 legitimate copy of WOW. I couldnt' find 1 cafe that had a real copy of WOW on it. So if it turns out that not only was he not on WOW and was playing an illegal copy of war3, what possibel responsibility could blizzard have?
Mod parent up please, the question about the Do Not Call bill is an excellent one, especially considering the potential for abuse.
Any thoughts? I can't honestly see an easy way to prevent this from being abused easily.
SB
They problably cross reference, they may not call a number more then once every 20 min and maybe no more then 3 times a day. That would be enough for ads but would not be harassment. They might also figure the local area via the area code and limit calls after hours.
You're honestly claiming that online gaming is not a significant factor considered by gamers in this day and age? Thankfully, you do not speak for "most" people. On the PC, the top hits nearly always include a multiplayer feature.
It isn't. PC gaming and Xbox live are niche products. Look at the units of pure multiplayer games that move vs games that are single player. Most people do not enjoy getting their ass kicked online and if they play with friends, they can do so at home. The numbers bear out my assertion while yrou is intuitive to us geeks but wrong.
This has been the claim of every manufacturer since the Nintendo. I'm not buying it. We all know that it is common practice for companies to do 'creative accounting'. We know that there are plenty of ways to make it look like money is being lost when it is not in reality. What do you think would happen if MS admitted to making a 10% profit on their hardware? That's right, they would have hundreds of thousands of people screaming that they should lower the price, or stop charging for a "license" to make software for the unit. The very poor excuse for charging this "license" fee has been that that is how they make their money back from the loss on hardware. They loose even that excuse if they admit to making a profit on hardware.
The licence fee is a charge to develope for propriatary hardware system. Not to compensate them for the machine. Nintendo said the GC was profitable from the first sale and there was no demand to cheapen anything. Creative accountign may be done, but it's more for tax purposes then anything else.
Did Sony make money in this past generation of consoles (PS2)? I thought I heard only Nintendo did, or perhaps it was just that Nintendo made the most.
Both Sony and Nintendo did. The PS2 was profitable as little as 5 mo after launch on the hardware while the Gc was profitable to start. R&D cost were recouped int he first year in both. The MS game division was 4 billion in the hole ove rthe course of the Xbox life time so far.
The 360 hardware aside, the PS2 and to a much lesser extent the Gamecube are beginning to show their age. The GC has been spared the ravages of time a bit because of Nintendo's disinterest in pushing the graphic envelope (they have their reasons, and I respect that. I'm not looking for a flamefest on that issue) but the PS2 has really been forced to hang on a bit too long.
The PS2 I agree, it's old and looks terrible on a big screen TV. But the GC came out roughly the same times as the original Xbox. IT graphics are generally on par as well.
Doesn't Microsoft lose money on every X-box sold in the first place?
More accuratly, Microsoft loses money on every machine made. More if the machien is unsold.
My boycott of Sony will include BlueRay and anything else that has Sony branded on it... In my opinion, Sony's DRM techniques have settled the battle between BlueRay and HD-DVD... Just say no to Bluer-ay
Not to ruin yoru moral stance or anything but both formats have DRM.
Worked retail? Yeah, because joe associate knows shit about how the company makes money.
Oh, and yes I've worked retail.
BTW, You're just plain wrong. "consumer electronics margins typically average 15%-20%, compared with 25%-30% in other categories".
I have clothing merchants in the family the mark up is around 300%, as well computer retailers, the mark-up varies. Commodity parts are 5-10% while luxury parts like high end video cards are 20%-30%. Consumer elctronics varies as well, some products are 300% markup(cabling) while others like TV's are 20-25%. This is % over the wholesale price, not % over the final retail price.
Having the most market share isn't a metric that anybody sane uses to measure success anyway. At least not since the dot-com boom ended. In the real world, success is typically measured in profit on a balance sheet and through survival on a resume. On the balance sheet, Sony and Nintendo both won, Sega lost, and Microsoft lost big. On their resumes, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all succeeded, and Sega lost big. Consumers care about survival, and investors care about profit. Only fanboys care about market share.
I only specified a criteria for considering the winner. Most units sold PS2, survival all 3. Balance sheet Sony/Nintentdo. Most money made Sony.
All three.
If you consider surviving winning, then yes. IF you consider coming in with most units/games sold then it was the PS2.
They now have GC modchips and you can replace the case with one that lets you insert standard-sized DVDs (which the GC drive is apparently capable of reading without modification).
The GC disks were basically a mini-DVD. But their design choice did keep the pirates away. IT's still nto common to have modded GC While Modded Xbox's and Modded PS2's are very very common.
Also, expect extra controller sales to be lower this time around, since this is the first console to ever ship with online multi-player in a meaningful fashion. Instead of a friend pulling up an extra controller, they're going to be playing you online with the controller that came with their Xbox.
Live is a niche service, don't expect it to play a major role in the branding or sale of the 360. It only reached 10% of the consumer base. Most people actually prefer toplay ofline, this is true for everythign from PC games to Console games.
If you're going to play the stereotype game...
If you ask some average Joe which of two TVs is "Better," he's going to point to the bigger one, not the one with the high def picture. If he's got $1000 to spend on a TV, which do you think he'll get? The 27" HD tube, the 36" Trinitron SD model, or the 45" SD rear projection? I bet money that nine times out of ten the answer is "The biggest one that will fit in the available space, HD or otherwise."
Given the uncertain state of copy protection legislation, you'd be stupid to buy an HD set right now anyway. All the early adopters that bought TVs before HDCP now have a 2 year old, $10,000 obsolete piece of junk. If new broadcast flag legislation gets passed, that could happen again.
There is a very clear difference in picture quality when using a DVD player/DVI or S video cables and a HD-TV vs a conevtional TV. Of sets of the same size, the average joe will pick the HD-TV. For a luxury item (that is what TV's are) many people, including my parents and relatives, will spend more to get better perceaved quality.
Let's stop right there.
There is no "standard markup". The markup depends on the product. Typically only "service" products have a markup greater than 100%. 25% is considered excelent for general retail goods. When the PS2 launched, retailers only made $2 in profit per sale. The wholsale price was only $2 less than the retail price. With Xbox, the wholsale price and retail price were identical... No profit. Stores sold them anyway, because margins are high on games and (especially) accessories. That's why stores sell bundles. If stores are selling the 360 for $499, you can bet that Microsoft is getting almost all of that... At least for the first few months. Even in the waning years of a console's life cycle, the margins never get up past 20%.
Ok, now that we've debunked your assumptions, there's really no point in discussing the rest of your comment.
Have you ever worked in retail? Cloths have a 300% mark up, as does anything in food services. Electorinics range from 25% mark up to 300% depedning on the items. Computers generally have a slimmer mark-up, which is why a 256 mb GDDRS 350mzh GeForce 6800 is around $299, while the 550Mzh version is $399. Your $100 card is most likly DDR2. 700 mzh GDDR3 is still not cheap because aside from premium video cards, only the xbox 360 will use it so far. It may be true the Xbox sold at wholesale cost, even so $499 doesn't cover the intitial manufacturing cost.
Also, I forgot to include the price of a hard drive, since the $499 retail price includes a hard drive. Since the heads on a harddrive are the most expensive part, and hard drived never get cheaper to make the price is fixed through out the lifespan of the machine. HD's only come down in price per GB. This tags at least $50 onto the price of any machine. The intitial estimate came from Forbes which estimated the manufacturing cost of the PS3 will be $550 per machine when it come out next year. Apply mores law of transitor yeilds to that and increase the price appropriatly you will get $600 for the Xbox 360 since most of the compnents will have a similiar manufacturign cost, but 6 months premium to be paid for the technology.
I was talking about the XBox 360, not the PS3. Also, remember when the XBox and PS2 came out with DVD drives? Most games didn't take up more space than a CD could hold, and I heard that many PS2 games were "ripped" (had movies and other stuff removed by pirates to reduce game size) to make them fit. Even the Gamecube's supposedly radically different disc was cracked eventually. I fully expect the same to happen with the next generation of consoles.
The GC pirating methods are exstremely clumsy, the data is streamed in through the data port in the back. This means very very few people pirate Gc games exept hobbiest. No commerical pirating is available.
As for PS2, some of the games weren't actually DVD. A few select games were plain old CD's (in the first generation). And thus a mod chip was all you needed then you copied it onto a CD. As for hacked bins. Again it wouldn't be a common thing. The work required isn't that big but DVD burners came out a year later and the window closed on such products. It was never wide spread.
The problem is partly that programmers don't really know how to take advantage of the parallel processing architecture of the PS3. Yes, the will learn, but it may take most of the lifespan of the PS3 and XBox 360 for them to invent a new way of programming games that takes advantage of multi-processor and/or multi-core hardware.
Another part of the problem is that the industry likes porting games across multiple platforms as cheaply as possible, which means that multiplatform titles will probably take as little advantage as possible of system-specific features (which will cripple PS3 titles more than XBox titles).
Also, RAM speeds won't make much difference on consoles due to the low resolutions at which they render. The cache RAM is always much faster than the system RAM as well, so don't believe that it will have an impact at that level.
Even with the numbers on the PS3's side, I expect higher-quality early- and mid-life XBox 360 titles due to the fact that it has diverged less from current hardware architectures (resulting in a softer learning curve).
PS2 developers have had 6 years experience programming for 3 cores. I don't think having 8 will change that much. Since their all seperate CPU's, it means they simply can parrelize things more effectivly. The first gen Xbox 360 games won't because they were rushed out. The first gen PS3 games may not either but 2nd and onwards will. Memory speed is essential for media and 3d proccessing. Texture are gettign bigger, all 3 of the next gen systems have HD-TV output and HD-TV is now become cheaper and more common. I in fact have one, bought it for $3000 CND (the old joke, thats $400USD).
The numbers favor the PS3, as does most theoretical Aritecture analysis. CPU speeds means dick all these days it's all about memory bandwidth, cacheing, and efficient I/O. Since the PS3 has half year behind the 360 this isn't surprising.
Why do people bother to argue with "estimated" data? Especially when the estimated data has tyipcally been wrong in the past?
I wish I could get actual numbers, but I can't because nobody releases them. I'd bet money though that the 360 only costs $450 to make in volume. Look at what's in it. Where does the money go?
Lets assume yrou estimate is right (GDDR3 ram is expensive, so your estimate is pretty off). So microsoft spends $450 dollars to make the system. Now they sell it to wallmart/EB/Circuit city ect... for $150 and the retailer marks it up to $499. Microsoft has now lost $300 on each box.
Remember retail stores don't sell things for free. The standard mark up is to triple to wholesale price. Now even if for this product the whole sale price was higher say $300 Microsoft is still goign to be out money. The only console to make money when it was released in the last generation was the game cube. Both the PS2 and the Xbox cost more then it's retail price to make. a 3 core chip, no matter how efficiently made or special purpose or scaled will still cost ~$200 to make(Remember they purchase this from IBM, they don't make it). 512 GDDR3 ram will cost a lot more then DDR 2 ram to make of the same size, so lets assume Microsoft buys it for $100 from their supplier (they dont' make that), The GPU should be another at least $100 or so (they also don't make that). Lets assume they make the mother board, the controllers, the cables ectt and put it all together for another $150, and shippign and storage woudl make it close to $600 for each box. As their process gets better this price comes down, and someday they will make money on it. (Note: the original xbox stilld doesn't make money per box because they had to purchase all parts from suppliers so the price never really came down. But the retail price did).
So the assertion that the xbox was designed to make money form the start isn't correct. Even the retail mark-up defeats yoru estimate.
Canada has a fair amount of broadband penetration in high population density areas. Go outside the major cities and the situation is the same as the US. Perhaps a bit better, but go out into the country or small rural towns and you can't get broadband. The real advantage we have in Canada is price/speed more than penetration.
The over all percentage of canadians with broad band is also much higher. PArtially due tot he price/speed. Canada is just as geographically diverse as the US but the reason we have more broadband is the government subsidized it's installation.
Why do you think the 360 is coming out *now* and not in a year or two?
Hint: It's not to beat Sony out the door, because Sony wouldn't be releasing the PS3 nearly as soon if not to keep up with Microsoft.
The Xbox 360 is designed to be inexpensive to build and sell at a profit. Even Microsoft can't afford to lose billions of dollars, especially now that they have to pay out their stash of cash as dividends. So they have to get the newer, profitable version out right away. That's also the only explination for why they deviated from the otherwise excelent architecture of the first Xbox too. Xbox was well designed - everything a PC should be - and there was no reason Xbox 2 couldn't have been the same thing with a faster processor, faster GPU, and faster memory... But you need to make a profit!
Teh 360 isn't designed to be profitable anytime in the near future on hardware sales alone. This release date is to catch the 2005 christmas season and beat Sony to market. Sony initially planed a 2007 winter release but have moved it up to compete. The core compnents of the 360 even at a manufactuers price will be ~$600 USD as of november 2005. IT's sellign for $499.
The estimated manufacterers prices for the gear in a PS3 will be ~$550 USD, their also goign to be sellign it at $499.
With inflated game prices like that, you can bet that modchips will be coming out very quickly.
It's also kind of a lackluster lineup, dominated by run-of-the-mill EA sports titles with most of the remainder being PC ports.
As I've probably mentioned before, I'm only looking forward to the 360 launch because I'm thinking of buying an XBox (original, not 360) and I know the price will go down once the 360 is on the shelves.
they will, but sony's HD DVD system will keep it impractical for at least 2-3 years.
90% of owners didn't purchase an addon for playing online. Gee, do you think it might be more popular when it's built into the system? So, based on the fact that the PS2 hard drive sold for shit, can we assume that gamers don't prefer a hard drive? Or does it mean that optional accessories consistently sell for shit?
Even though you still have to pay for a subscription to Xbox Live Gold to get all of the features, the vast majority of people who buy an Xbox will get a free trial to Xbox Live Gold, many of whom will decide they like it and keep it on after the free trial.
What percentage of game players have wireless controllers now? Not that high of a percentage. Just about everyone I know who's looking forward to the 360 has mentioned those as a reason. But because not a lot of people bought them before, it must not be a large factor?
Live isn't that popular. Most people actually prefer not to play with random retards who scream in thier ear or who are so ridicoulously betters/worse then they are that playign isn't fun. The subscription rate per xbox hovers at around 10%. Same wiht Pc online play, most people just aren't that interested. They prefer real people or solo play. So while Sony is being backwards with thier online support, it likly won't hurt them.
But only time will tell.
What? I admit that I haven't been following this for the last month or so, but from what I've seen the XBox 360 will be at least as powerful as the PS3. Yes, the PS3 has a bunch of processing units in its cell processor, but most of them are special-purpose and not as powerful as the XBox 360's three generic cores.
Both have a PPC based chip running at 3.2 ghz. Except the 360 has a shared cache, while the Cell has multiple cashes. Speed is a hard thing to calculate with such different architectures but generally, the division of work set up in the cell chip has less obvious bottle necks then the 3 core 360 chip. 1mb lvl 2 cache as opposed to 512k l2 and 32k l1 with 7 256 caches. The price of branch prediction failure is much lower in the cell chip, and parrellelism is easier to achive due to the almost independant nature of eact SPU. Both have similiar memory bandwidth profiles with the PS3 having a slight edge. The memory systems give a huge edge to the ps3, having ram clocked at the same speed at the CPU while both have 512 total, the PS3 has 256 in 3.2ghz rama nd 256 in 700 mzh ram, while the Xbox 360 is all 700 mhz. This in essence adds a new layer of cache/memory architecture that allows for some creative storage algorithms. The only major question is how fast will the blu-ray be vs the 12 speed DVD. It is a fairly major question since the one wiht the fastest drive will have the least load time.
From a Computer architecture point of view, the PS3 will most likly be more powerful hands down if for no there reason then for the 3.2 mzh clocked ram. Drastically reducing the cost of any and all cache misses. But only time will tell if this is true.