Wow, don't quit your day job and go into marketing.
Try visiting a college campus at the beginning of a new semester. Banks are ALWAYS trying to get students to open new accounts with them. Clothes? I'm sorry but Banana Republic, Tommy Hilfiger and specialized retailers like Hot Topic disagree. Toys?! Holy crap, have you completely ignored the massive amounts of 80's cartoon remakes lately? Food is too general to aim at a specific audience. When was the last time you saw a senior citizens aimed advertisement?
Teens are too easily swayed by peer pressure. If you build a quality product, its still too random whether they will decide on you product or not.
Yes, even if you have a quality product like the iPod, the Nintendo DS or cell phones that do everything except cure cancer, teens are too random to gauge whether they will decide on your product or not./sarcasm
Seriously, think about it. When Resident Evil 1 for the PS1 came out, one of the biggest reasons why people found the game difficult/frustrating was the horrible controls.
Fast forward to today and only recently are we seeing better controls for survival horror games. The camera no longer screws people over. You can actually SEE the monsters, not a unclear blob of brown and red pixels against a brown and red background. Level designs are no longer tight hallways that make it impossible to run past enemies if they come at you in numbers larger than 1.
Obviously hardware can only do so much (I think we hit the critical point with Resident Evil 4), but in retrospect, games like Resident Evil 1 and Silent Hill 1 were scary because controls blew. Modern camera angles make it a joke to aim, especially if you've played FPSes in the past. Even with a bad TV you can still see the monsters limping towards you. Running away is so commonplace that many survival horror games now include scenarios where the player is REQUIRED to fight.
We evolved really quickly and we're running at a fast rate. As Tyrell says in Blade Runner, "The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long - and you have burned so very, very brightly".
Evolved quickly based on whose standards? Plants mutate practically everyday; the only reason why its not reported is because the change is small and largely insignificant.
Blade Runner is a horrible analogy as well. You can say that the human race (in the movie) didn't burn out, they modified themselves to the extent of burning themselves twice as long but half as brightly.
The same booths existed with the same games and gadgetry, but the show floor was now jam packed with people. Now, there were lines almost everywhere. The PlayStation 3 and HD-DVD areas reminded me of Nintendo's deathtrap Wii booth back at E3, with people lined up in square perimeters.
Translation: People want a public version of E3, even if its a E3-lite version. Long lines cannot stop them. If you host it, they will come.
One reason why Nintendo's having no problems is they're mostly using off the shelf components.
Off the shelf components? Nintendo is one of the THE most well known electronics companies for using the most MODIFIED components. Everything from processor, to motherboard, to the media is specially made. The only company that abused off the shelf components was the original Xbox and Microsoft admitted that was a rush job.
1. Yeah, unplug your computer from the internet. (I'm not kidding) 2. No, single player is limited to 16 bots. (Again, not kidding) 3. Probably not. 4. The kind of security holes that everyone will blame on Microsoft for no good reason. 5. No.
that's the PS button slap-bang in the middle of the pad. At present, it doesn't seem its full power has been truly harnessed, with our friendly Sony representative unable to explain what we can expect from it in final retail units. For the time being though, holding the button down for a couple of seconds - whether in-game of other wise - brings up a secondary menu, featuring options to turn off your console or disable the wireless controller you're using. Even more handily, the display shows the amount of play-time (in minutes, no less!) left in your current battery charge. Toot!
Thats not exactly the words of someone who 'fucking loved it'.
E3 was never really supposed to be a press-only event when you consider how the ESA fumbled the whole thing in the first place. Bill Gates has only showed up once in the 4~5 years the Xbox/Xbox 360 has been out. Nintendo had Spaceworld until 2001 (and has a special relationship with PAX) and Sony has/had a history of making PS1/2/3 announcements sporatically throughout the year (PS2 Linux, PS2 Slim, the PSX, the PSOne, last minute launch changes, etc).
Booths were more attactive than the games themselves at times, the lights were purposely dimmed and coordination between companies were practically non-existant (remember the stories for the Wii demonstration units being so long they closed it off?) I'm sorry, press only? Is the press composed of 13 year old ADD sugar fueled kids or am I missing something here?
Sounds like the G8 political summit. A whole lot of talk, almost no mass public attention and a whole lot decided without the input of the people years before it'll eventually take effect. How is this for the better again?
Remember that entry-level cable modem service is up to 6 Mbps, and DVD is 10 Mbps, and some DVDs don't use the full bitrate
True, but thats assuming you recieve the MAXIMUM amount of potential speed which is realisticly impossible since there's always going to be network congestion/bottlenecks/hardware can't keep up/server gets overloaded/ISP will put a cap on speeds.
Wikipedia already lists 100 or so titles in the works, and there are 20 or so at launch.
"In the works". I'm not buying a system just to wait a year or two to play a game that might end up being cancelled.
And? They're still revenue. Sony will make a tidy sum from people buying bluetooth remote controls, headsets and the like.
Peripherals are pocket change when you consider the costs involved, the competition from 3rd manufacturers and the fact that THEY DON'T SELL if the system itself doesn't sell.
Doesn't mean they won't charge a sub for other things they deem to be premium. Such features might include some kinds of downloadable content, MMOs, music / radio / video streaming, XBox Live style games, VOIP, tournaments etc.
MMOs, downloadable content, tournaments and "Xbox Live style games" are developer decisions. Sony doesn't make anything on that. Music, radio and video are unproven due to current broadband limitations. VOIP will be free since they're using Xfire.
I have no idea what form that might take, but its absolutely certain it will appear sooner or later.
Hey, you know what that reminds me of? The PS2's network adaptor. It only took them 2 years to attach a network card, 56k modem and a hard drive together, but they did it!
Blu-Ray stands a far better chance than HD-DVD and will continue to do so while Microsoft dither about supporting the format or not. [...] their games will still be stuck on DVD and suffer by comparison.
Hey, MS bashing AND "more space != better games" in the same paragraph! Good job there troll, now go show me a game that takes up more than 9.4 GB (a dual layered DVD) compressed.
The launch of PS3 will flood the market with Blu-Ray players.
Half a million units is not flooding the market.
A visit to any Sony Center reveals numerous HDTV models.
Yes, because we all know Sony Centers are an excellent source of the market's future adoption rate of HDTVs.
LocationFree isn't a wireless router. Is is a room-to-room and over-internet television transmission system.
Ok, so its a box set to recieve, forward and transmit information. How is that different from a router?
E3 was "originally" nothing more than a series of scattered events around the world because no one wanted to alienate the masses by making it "corporate employees only" and corporations didn't want to play ball with one another. Obviously you need some "Press Only" events, but they have those already.
Why take away E3? You have immature exhibitors throwing hotel parties before/during/after E3 and they wonder why E3 turned into a giant video game mosh pit! (Websites used to report on these parties but now they're so common that reports of 'so-and-so writer got totally wasted!' are last page news, if at all.)
Games (obviously) With few exceptions, Sony's lineup has nothing on Nintendo's all-star launch and Microsoft "our system is already out so show up or shut up."
Peripherals (like bluetooth TV remotes, headsets, controllers, keyboards / mice (?) etc. Which are directly tied into the system's success. Peripherals don't sell systems, systems sell peripherals.
Monthly subs from "premium" online services, whatever they happen to be They just promised not to have monthly subs. And "premium" services are likely to be one-time purchases, not exactly a cash cow system.
Online games, movies & music promote to buy, rent & (sell?) Unless Sony has some kind of PS3 Online Arcade system in the works, I'm not seeing this happen anytime soon.
Lots of licence fees if Blu-Ray wins the HD TV format war General concensus is: Don't hold your breath.
Blu-Ray movies. Thats assuming Blu-Ray takes off in the first place.
Increased sales of HD televisions. Sony is not a major seller of HD-TVs these days. They don't own the patents either. Sharp is destroying Sony (and the rest of the market) in marketshare as well.
Increase sales of LocationFree wireless room-to-room / internet streaming devices. The only people who would probably benefit from this would be companies like Netgear. People don't exactly think Sony when they buy a wireless router.
I don't think that the article was shortsighted, but it was realistic. Just go down the usual list:
1. Is cheap, reliable, FAST broadband available to the (gaming) masses? No. Its not unheard of to still meet people who surf the net or play online with dial-up.
2. Has anyone ever successfully streamed a DVD quality, full length video over the internet yet without hiccups? Not near the commerical level so that rules out Sony's dream of selling movies directly to customers.
3. Remember when Microsoft initially announced that Xbox Live was going to be broadband only? That didn't sit very well with many people did it?
From what I've told by managers at EBGames, it depends on the manager(s). "Officially" there are usually rules against employees from getting first dibs on major releases (consoles, big name games, etc), to keep them from selling them marked up from the backdoor when launch day arrives and causing a local shortage.
And all those groups have is their reputation, there's no money in it for them, some of them even pay the cost of their distribution out of their own pocket, while Blizzard probably only answers to their shareholders.
And all those Linux groups have is their reputation, there's no money in it for them, some of them even pay the cost of their distribution out of their own pocket, while Microsoft probably only answers to their shareholders.
If Blizzard does fsck up my machine, I have legal and social recourse.
Have you ever read World of Warcraft's EULA? THEY have full legal and social recourse AGAINST YOU if you violate ANY of their rules.
no one can build a trustworthy reputation for removing such defects.
Deviance, Fairlight, Hoodlum and Reloaded are all VERY famous/well known inside and outside of PC gaming pirate circles. Razor 1911 is probably the most famous group of them all if only because they were (for a time) completely and utterly shut down after a Department of Justice raid.
Seeing as Lucas founded and owns ILM entirely (sans Pixar) he can do whatever he wants with his own company.
Every Star Wars year was a financial loss for ILM, sometimes resulting in layoffs, while the non-Star Wars years were spent recouping those losses.
The company was formed in the 70's and only now is Hollywood trying to play catch up. Its called an investment, and Lucas is laughing his way to the bank when movie studios come to him on their knees begging for ILM's decades of expertise.
Researchers asked the students to rate their own performance in school on a scale ranging from "below average" to "excellent," instead of looking directly at their grades or other metrics of academic performance.
Jon, stop apologizing for asking the SoH question... it's like you know it blows but still think it's worth it to add a sponser.
When some of the people you interview are heads of state and you ask them a question like "Who would win a popularity vote" you better fu*king apologize beforehand. Cause when they go back home, they might come home to millions of angry citizens because your answer offended them.
TiVo CSPAN, cut a couple clips out and video record some commentary on it and you've just filled 3 minute of air time. Rinse and repeat. With the exception of covering foreign, on the ground news, news is relatively cheap. Video recordings of press releases from government and corporate sources are coming out of the ass if you know where to look, local news on crimes is a simple phone call to/from a police station and study/poll/survey takes practially pay YOU to put their information on the air.
Network news SHOULD be like Fight Club with everyone trying to be the most objective and uncovering the most dirt in the world, but instead we get human rights violations being passed over for yet another video report of an anti-US protest. We get an alarmingly high (unofficial) unemployment rate in China being passed over for a "ZOMG GAS IS EXPENSIVE/CHEAP!" report. We get Ted Stevens' "the internet is not a dump truck, its a series of tubes" being passed over for "in other news, 4 more U.S. soldiers died today in Iraq..."
Gee wow network news, that must've been pretty expensive. I could watch anti-US protests on the internet since Iran holds them so often NO ONE reports them anymore, I can see gas prices going down, I don't live in a bubble and I know people are dying in Iraq, thats why people are protesting...
The main issue with the commercials is how the face design is so disturbing at medium-close range. In the ultra hated, disturbing commercial where a guy wakes up with The King next to him, hes literally roughly 2 feet away from him. With the same exact grin. Its extremely disturbing since The King was obviously designed to be looked at from a distance or in a logo sized image. Not, "I'm about to kiss you" range.
Slashdot Mirror
If you RTFA, you'll realize that they never claim that the play was historical fact but BASED on historical facts.
Try visiting a college campus at the beginning of a new semester. Banks are ALWAYS trying to get students to open new accounts with them. Clothes? I'm sorry but Banana Republic, Tommy Hilfiger and specialized retailers like Hot Topic disagree. Toys?! Holy crap, have you completely ignored the massive amounts of 80's cartoon remakes lately? Food is too general to aim at a specific audience. When was the last time you saw a senior citizens aimed advertisement?
Teens are too easily swayed by peer pressure. If you build a quality product, its still too random whether they will decide on you product or not.
Yes, even if you have a quality product like the iPod, the Nintendo DS or cell phones that do everything except cure cancer, teens are too random to gauge whether they will decide on your product or not. /sarcasm
Fast forward to today and only recently are we seeing better controls for survival horror games. The camera no longer screws people over. You can actually SEE the monsters, not a unclear blob of brown and red pixels against a brown and red background. Level designs are no longer tight hallways that make it impossible to run past enemies if they come at you in numbers larger than 1.
Obviously hardware can only do so much (I think we hit the critical point with Resident Evil 4), but in retrospect, games like Resident Evil 1 and Silent Hill 1 were scary because controls blew. Modern camera angles make it a joke to aim, especially if you've played FPSes in the past. Even with a bad TV you can still see the monsters limping towards you. Running away is so commonplace that many survival horror games now include scenarios where the player is REQUIRED to fight.
Evolved quickly based on whose standards? Plants mutate practically everyday; the only reason why its not reported is because the change is small and largely insignificant.
Blade Runner is a horrible analogy as well. You can say that the human race (in the movie) didn't burn out, they modified themselves to the extent of burning themselves twice as long but half as brightly.
Translation: People want a public version of E3, even if its a E3-lite version. Long lines cannot stop them. If you host it, they will come.
Off the shelf components? Nintendo is one of the THE most well known electronics companies for using the most MODIFIED components. Everything from processor, to motherboard, to the media is specially made. The only company that abused off the shelf components was the original Xbox and Microsoft admitted that was a rush job.
1. Yeah, unplug your computer from the internet. (I'm not kidding)
2. No, single player is limited to 16 bots. (Again, not kidding)
3. Probably not.
4. The kind of security holes that everyone will blame on Microsoft for no good reason.
5. No.
that's the PS button slap-bang in the middle of the pad. At present, it doesn't seem its full power has been truly harnessed, with our friendly Sony representative unable to explain what we can expect from it in final retail units. For the time being though, holding the button down for a couple of seconds - whether in-game of other wise - brings up a secondary menu, featuring options to turn off your console or disable the wireless controller you're using. Even more handily, the display shows the amount of play-time (in minutes, no less!) left in your current battery charge. Toot!
Thats not exactly the words of someone who 'fucking loved it'.
Booths were more attactive than the games themselves at times, the lights were purposely dimmed and coordination between companies were practically non-existant (remember the stories for the Wii demonstration units being so long they closed it off?) I'm sorry, press only? Is the press composed of 13 year old ADD sugar fueled kids or am I missing something here?
...
Sounds like the G8 political summit. A whole lot of talk, almost no mass public attention and a whole lot decided without the input of the people years before it'll eventually take effect. How is this for the better again?
True, but thats assuming you recieve the MAXIMUM amount of potential speed which is realisticly impossible since there's always going to be network congestion/bottlenecks/hardware can't keep up/server gets overloaded/ISP will put a cap on speeds.
"In the works". I'm not buying a system just to wait a year or two to play a game that might end up being cancelled.
And? They're still revenue. Sony will make a tidy sum from people buying bluetooth remote controls, headsets and the like.
Peripherals are pocket change when you consider the costs involved, the competition from 3rd manufacturers and the fact that THEY DON'T SELL if the system itself doesn't sell.
Doesn't mean they won't charge a sub for other things they deem to be premium. Such features might include some kinds of downloadable content, MMOs, music / radio / video streaming, XBox Live style games, VOIP, tournaments etc.
MMOs, downloadable content, tournaments and "Xbox Live style games" are developer decisions. Sony doesn't make anything on that. Music, radio and video are unproven due to current broadband limitations. VOIP will be free since they're using Xfire.
I have no idea what form that might take, but its absolutely certain it will appear sooner or later.
Hey, you know what that reminds me of? The PS2's network adaptor. It only took them 2 years to attach a network card, 56k modem and a hard drive together, but they did it!
Blu-Ray stands a far better chance than HD-DVD and will continue to do so while Microsoft dither about supporting the format or not. [...] their games will still be stuck on DVD and suffer by comparison.
Hey, MS bashing AND "more space != better games" in the same paragraph! Good job there troll, now go show me a game that takes up more than 9.4 GB (a dual layered DVD) compressed.
The launch of PS3 will flood the market with Blu-Ray players.
Half a million units is not flooding the market.
A visit to any Sony Center reveals numerous HDTV models.
Yes, because we all know Sony Centers are an excellent source of the market's future adoption rate of HDTVs.
LocationFree isn't a wireless router. Is is a room-to-room and over-internet television transmission system.
Ok, so its a box set to recieve, forward and transmit information. How is that different from a router?
E3 was "originally" nothing more than a series of scattered events around the world because no one wanted to alienate the masses by making it "corporate employees only" and corporations didn't want to play ball with one another. Obviously you need some "Press Only" events, but they have those already.
Why take away E3? You have immature exhibitors throwing hotel parties before/during/after E3 and they wonder why E3 turned into a giant video game mosh pit! (Websites used to report on these parties but now they're so common that reports of 'so-and-so writer got totally wasted!' are last page news, if at all.)
With few exceptions, Sony's lineup has nothing on Nintendo's all-star launch and Microsoft "our system is already out so show up or shut up."
Peripherals (like bluetooth TV remotes, headsets, controllers, keyboards / mice (?) etc.
Which are directly tied into the system's success. Peripherals don't sell systems, systems sell peripherals.
Monthly subs from "premium" online services, whatever they happen to be
They just promised not to have monthly subs. And "premium" services are likely to be one-time purchases, not exactly a cash cow system.
Online games, movies & music promote to buy, rent & (sell?)
Unless Sony has some kind of PS3 Online Arcade system in the works, I'm not seeing this happen anytime soon.
Lots of licence fees if Blu-Ray wins the HD TV format war
General concensus is: Don't hold your breath.
Blu-Ray movies.
Thats assuming Blu-Ray takes off in the first place.
Increased sales of HD televisions.
Sony is not a major seller of HD-TVs these days. They don't own the patents either. Sharp is destroying Sony (and the rest of the market) in marketshare as well.
Increase sales of LocationFree wireless room-to-room / internet streaming devices.
The only people who would probably benefit from this would be companies like Netgear. People don't exactly think Sony when they buy a wireless router.
1. Is cheap, reliable, FAST broadband available to the (gaming) masses? No. Its not unheard of to still meet people who surf the net or play online with dial-up.
2. Has anyone ever successfully streamed a DVD quality, full length video over the internet yet without hiccups? Not near the commerical level so that rules out Sony's dream of selling movies directly to customers.
3. Remember when Microsoft initially announced that Xbox Live was going to be broadband only? That didn't sit very well with many people did it?
From what I've told by managers at EBGames, it depends on the manager(s). "Officially" there are usually rules against employees from getting first dibs on major releases (consoles, big name games, etc), to keep them from selling them marked up from the backdoor when launch day arrives and causing a local shortage.
Sorry Safari users, but you've been going nowhere for a long time now.
And all those Linux groups have is their reputation, there's no money in it for them, some of them even pay the cost of their distribution out of their own pocket, while Microsoft probably only answers to their shareholders.
Have you ever read World of Warcraft's EULA? THEY have full legal and social recourse AGAINST YOU if you violate ANY of their rules.
no one can build a trustworthy reputation for removing such defects.
Deviance, Fairlight, Hoodlum and Reloaded are all VERY famous/well known inside and outside of PC gaming pirate circles. Razor 1911 is probably the most famous group of them all if only because they were (for a time) completely and utterly shut down after a Department of Justice raid.
Every Star Wars year was a financial loss for ILM, sometimes resulting in layoffs, while the non-Star Wars years were spent recouping those losses.
The company was formed in the 70's and only now is Hollywood trying to play catch up. Its called an investment, and Lucas is laughing his way to the bank when movie studios come to him on their knees begging for ILM's decades of expertise.
Stop! Enough said.
Oh wait...
When some of the people you interview are heads of state and you ask them a question like "Who would win a popularity vote" you better fu*king apologize beforehand. Cause when they go back home, they might come home to millions of angry citizens because your answer offended them.
Network news SHOULD be like Fight Club with everyone trying to be the most objective and uncovering the most dirt in the world, but instead we get human rights violations being passed over for yet another video report of an anti-US protest. We get an alarmingly high (unofficial) unemployment rate in China being passed over for a "ZOMG GAS IS EXPENSIVE/CHEAP!" report. We get Ted Stevens' "the internet is not a dump truck, its a series of tubes" being passed over for "in other news, 4 more U.S. soldiers died today in Iraq..."
Gee wow network news, that must've been pretty expensive. I could watch anti-US protests on the internet since Iran holds them so often NO ONE reports them anymore, I can see gas prices going down, I don't live in a bubble and I know people are dying in Iraq, thats why people are protesting...
The main issue with the commercials is how the face design is so disturbing at medium-close range. In the ultra hated, disturbing commercial where a guy wakes up with The King next to him, hes literally roughly 2 feet away from him. With the same exact grin. Its extremely disturbing since The King was obviously designed to be looked at from a distance or in a logo sized image. Not, "I'm about to kiss you" range.