If that was truely his guiding principle the PS3 would not cost more than 50% (Min) of gamers can afford. It's also pretty much an exact copy of Nintendo's goal. Something tells me this principle is relatively new...say it began about when the 4 millianth Wii sold...
Or you know, after they sold more than 100 million PS1s and 100 million PS2s, the most successful gaming systems of all time, hence reaching a larger audience than anybody else had before or since.
I'll certainly agree with you that the PS3 isn't aimed at that market right now, and because of decisions like the required hard drive it might never reach the right price level, but Sony's gaming history demonstrates that they aimed to make gaming more inclusive than anybody else has - including Nintendo.
But it's a silly argument even besides the imaginary edict: Oblivion on 360 does use the hard drive to cache. If you don't have a hard drive it doesn't. Very simple stuff, and Oblivion is hardly the only 360 game to do this.
I don't find this to be true at all. Sales for videogames seem to be very common, including for new releases. I routinely buy new releases of videogames at Fry's for $5-10 off the MSRP, and I know Best Buy at least generally has sales the week after release. Hell, if videogame sales were really that rare then sites like CheapAssGamer wouldn't be so amazingly popular and successful. But sign up for the forums there and you'll see info on videogame sales nearly every day of the week. I'll agree that sales for videogames may not be as common as we would like (and there definitely seems to be a seasonal factor - sales are a little sparse right now), but they do happen with some frequency.
Just an example to prove my point, right now at Best Buy you can get these 360 games: Gears Of War >>>> $49.99 FEAR >>>> $49.99 Saints Row >>>> $49.99 NBA 2K7 >>>> $39.99 Fight Night: Round 3 >>>> $29.99 Major League Baseball 2K6 >>>> $19.99
All of those are on sale (actually it's possible Fight Night saw a price drop), and at least Gears (retail price: $60) is still doing great business - these aren't solely due to a game bombing. This past week I managed to get the fairly new 360 game Blitz for $20 at Fry's, an advertised sale. It was released a couple months ago for $50 and it looks like Circuit City also has it on sale for $22. CC also has a fairly significant sale on most versions of Madden 07 right now. The sales are out there if you look for them.
They actually sort of already do this. Some Achievements in games will unlock gamerpics for you. For example if you beat Insane difficulty in Gears of War you get a new gamerpic - though unfortunately the system doesn't seem to have any way of mentioning this so I'm sure most players don't know this has even happened. Of course with Live that's not even necessarily a bad thing, as sharing 'secrets' with other gamers is a big (and often ignored) part of the appeal of videogames.
That's true - DOA4 is actually balanced and not broken by idiotic glitches. It also has online play and a bigger tournament scene than SCIII. Maybe the next Soul Calibur will be a return to form?
Yeah, the text size in Dead Rising only seems to be a problem with people that use abnormally small TVs (like significantly under 20 inches) and shitty composite connections. S-video or component and a reasonably decent (not even good!) SDTV are more than sufficient to read Dead Rising's text.
The bigger, more important thing to note is that the PS3 has a standard HDMI port, meaning you can buy any HDMI cable for it. Why no bashing of the Xbox 360 for requiring a proprietary, MS-licensed cable at an inflated price?
Probably because the 360 includes a component cable in the box.
And AFAIK the only real reason it's a standard HDMI port on the PS3 is because that is a licensing requirement for HDMI. It's nice it works out like that, but let's not pretend Sony is doing it out of the goodness in their hearts...
It was higher than that two years ago. I've seen anywhere from six to ten percent. The rate of adoption keep climbing each year. I can't find anything more current but I wouldn't even be surprised if it were up around 20% now, though I don't think it's passed that mark yet.
I've heard estimates of 20% myself, but those are very recent. At the least it's certainly way above "maybe 5%".
(other than Microsoft's idiotic requirement that all games must support the HDD-less retard pack)
There are already at least two HDD-only games on the 360 and they've been out for several months: FFXI and Football Manager. FFXI was even announced prior to the 360's launch. This "requirement" you are talking about doesn't exist.
The biggest actual bug is that fatigue is apparently not in effect. EA has argued that it is actually happening and just isn't shown by the interface (they are admitting there is a bug at least), but various playtesting by fans suggests otherwise. Apparently a patch is coming.
There's also some very strange behavior where other teams will draft Hall of Famers (including dead players!), but EA says this is by design. I believe them, actually, but a lot of players justifiably see this as a major bug.
I'm sure it's just that they finally figured out how to compress things properly. To my understanding none of the game gives off a feeling of being cut up or missing stuff. MS admitted publically before launch that they were behind on offering the kind of compression tech to third parties they had planned. Team Ninja made similar complaints prior to DOA4's release and the game ended up fitting less than a full disc while still loaded with a good amount of HD video (30 or so minutes at a minimum). From's game also had a lot of HD video so I suspect the hold-up was better WMV compression software.
I think some devs certainly could make great use of the extra space of HD-DVD or Blu-ray, but I also don't think it's worth the extra $200-300 it adds to the system cost. Not enough devs would take advantage of it, and some of that money would be better spent on something like fancier GPUs that most devs could actually take advantage of (which is basically what MS did with the X360, while Sony seems to have bundled a lower spec GPU with the PS3 that is basically an off-the-shelf PC part). The currently much lower speed of these HD drives is also a negative - Blu-ray only offers about half the peak read speed of the X360's DVD drive, though admittedly it will hit that peak a lot more often than the X360 will hit its own.
To be fair, they didn't do it by being jerks to their 3rd parties, they just can't get too many A-List 3rd parties since there's not enough room to manuever in the Gamecube's install base.
They certainly were and are! They still charge the highest royalties out of all three console manufacturers (though they did reduce it a bit during this last generation). During the N64 era they wouldn't let third party developers create their own microcode until late in its lifecycle, forcing most of them to use the absolutely terrible stock SGI microcode (which offered something like 30% of the console's performance that second party devs like Rare were able to use). Months after E3 they still haven't informed third parties how they can use the speaker in the Wiimote. And of course their dictatorial NES rules are well known - my favorites are how devs that worked on NES titles weren't allowed to develop for any other competing consoles, and that (non-Nintendo) publishers were limited to only releasing a few games a year. Let's not forget what a bitch cartridges were for third parties either! These are just a few choice examples, mind you - Nintendo's history of screwing over third party devs is lengthy. It even effectively created the Playstation!
Now I do believe they are probably improving on this for the Wii, but it's important to not forget that the only reason Nintendo cares about third party support is that it helps them get a slightly larger audience to sell their own games to. They aren't like MS and Sony, which make the bulk of their profits off licensing and helping third parties effectively get rich. Nintendo is all about selling Nintendo games.
When Namco-Bandai Vice President Shin Unozawa recently said the following, he wasn't just talking about Nintendo making great games:
"I'm unsure about its appeal to the main users, namely middle- and high-school students. Also, when you publish games for Nintendo hardware, your biggest rival is Nintendo."
(Keep in mind this is specifically about the Japanese market. Young kids aren't the main users in the West by any means.)
(And Sega was pretty hostile to third parties on the Saturn even in Japan. They were fond of keeping various performance tricks secret, among other things. There's a reason so many old Sega and Nintendo devs jumped ship to the more friendly Sony and now MS.)
Funny that they claimed that there would be a small up-turn in total consoles sold next-gen over current gen, but somehow the total they predict for all 3 consoles comes in under what the PS2 sold. In Japan alone.
Where are you getting this? The Next Gen article that the original Joystiq article links mentions they expect just the PS3 to sell 30 million units in North America alone. The PS2 has only sold ~23 million consoles in Japan.
From Software actually complained before release that it was going to take multiple DVDs. These problems apparently all disappeared, since not only is the game only one DVD even the American version with two complete vocal tracks (and this is a long JRPG here) is still only a single disc.
My understanding is that the swords are actually derived from earlier Old Republic fiction (canon, too). I guess we don't see them in the current movies because Jedi aren't common enough to require them, but when the Jedi were so dominant it was seen as important to have a weapon that could at least stand up to the lightsaber. I forget the kind of metal they are made out of (and Wikipedia seems to be down right now), but I think they also tended to make some armor out of it as well. This is actually mentioned in the game's fiction too, I think, but it's an easy thing to miss. I don't particularly buy the metal excuse either. Presumably the Jedi are more of a threat because of their Force powers (and the way this augments their melee combat) rather than just their weapon, but maybe if attacked in great enough numbers it's effective. But it is part of the expanded Star Wars universe and has been for quite some time.
I agree with the fact that lightsabers were still made far too weak for gameplay balance purposes.
At least the first one sold enough to become one of MS's Platinum Hits rereleases. Interestingly it seems to have sold mainly due to the appeal of the setting, since the gameplay certainly wasn't any good when I tried it and it definitely doesn't succeed on any kind of aesthetic level. It's not even remotely realistic, even by the gamey standards of something like Call of Duty. I'm pretty sure the enemies don't even speak the correct language (apparently they grabbed Egyptian voice actors, IIRC).
I have no idea about the quality of the sequel, but I suspect it didn't sell that well after players experienced the first one.
More importantly online fighting games are already being done on the consoles using consumer broadband connections. I mainly play the DOA series online, and it's generally pretty damn good. It's not quite as nice as offline play (a lot of normally unsafe moves become safe with the lag), but when the connection is good it's very close to seamless. My understanding is that in smaller countries like Japan it's even better. It's true that with fighting games every single frame (out of 60 in a second) matters, but a well designed game can handle a few frames of lag and still remain fast, deep, and fun.
They want games written for the PS3 to be difficult to port to other systems. It's the same basic route they went with the PS2. It's a very effective strategy if you are the console leader.
Why? Are you aware that id Software still has full OpenGL rendering options in even their most recent games? Even when they are writing for Windows, they avoid locking themselves into Microsoft's proprietary system by continuining to embrace a more open and platform-independent API.
That was true for the Doom3 engine, which started development at least five years ago. Do you know what development platform id is making their newest engine on? The Xbox360. To my understanding that isn't as pure a DirectX environment as a lot of gamers assume, but you can bet Carmack isn't writing on it using OpenGL. (And yes, of course a PC port will also be available.)
I'm definitely sympathetic to the idealism of a platform-independent APIs like OpenGL, SDL, etc., but it's simply a truism that right now the very latest hardware is clearly served better by DirectX and its derivatives. OpenGL and the like have a lot of catching up to do...
My major roadblock at this point with getting an Xbox 360 is the cost. I can't drop 399$ on a console. It's ludicrous. To shell out that much on a console with only a handful of playable games is disturbing, almost. Some of the most hyped titles - Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, for example - apparently aren't even worth the plastic the disk is printed on from a playability standpoint.
Are you sure you are thinking about GRAW? It's not really my kind of thing at all (I spend most of my X360 time with DOA4), but it would be hard for me to argue it isn't a great game. In general most of the big X360 titles have been pretty well received, though I certainly wouldn't begrudge somebody for waiting for a larger library...
The Wii should be at least twice as fast as the original xbox, I see no reason why games shouldn't be able to push 720p.
That's a pretty optimistic prediction. What I've read and seen of the Wii sounds to me like a Xbox 1.5*, the asterisk denoting that the hardware still can't pull off a lot of the fancier tricks the Xbox1 could (especially in the realm of shaders). It should be a nice little system (especially for sub-$200), but it is essentially an overclocked Gamecube with some additional RAM, including most of the same shortcomings and bottlenecks.
But I agree with your central point. I hope Nintendo at least allows devs to go HD if they wish. I could see that being really useful for software like the Opera browser (forget if it was announced or just 'rumored'), simpler party games (like a Bomberman-style game), etc. Even certain beautiful games on the Xbox1 like Amped2 managed 720p, so who knows what devs could manage down the line? The loss of flexibility gained by making some kind of political point would be a bad idea (though it's remotely possible there could be real hardware limitations involved).
Unfortunately since it is Nintendo I'll just be happy if they make widescreen support mandatory...
Yes it would be a tard-box if ICT was an issue. That's where RTFA enters the picture. No, the article just shifts the meaning around a little. Presumably you would have to be retarded or stupid to trust that these companies would keep to their word when it comes to using ICT. And even if somehow these vague claims come true, buying into the Blu-ray format with a player that you'll need to replace in a mere three years is pretty stupid too.
But neither Xbox360 or PS3 are being sold with "junior" as the primary market. They are being sold to your average US gamer, http://www.theesa.com/facts/top_10_facts.phpwho happens to be ~30 years old. As prices for the consoles drop that is when you start getting them selling to large numbers of parents, but that's probably at least a few years out.
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If that was truely his guiding principle the PS3 would not cost more than 50% (Min) of gamers can afford. It's also pretty much an exact copy of Nintendo's goal. Something tells me this principle is relatively new...say it began about when the 4 millianth Wii sold...
Or you know, after they sold more than 100 million PS1s and 100 million PS2s, the most successful gaming systems of all time, hence reaching a larger audience than anybody else had before or since.
I'll certainly agree with you that the PS3 isn't aimed at that market right now, and because of decisions like the required hard drive it might never reach the right price level, but Sony's gaming history demonstrates that they aimed to make gaming more inclusive than anybody else has - including Nintendo.
How does your alleged edict explain Football Manager? See that big "Hard Drive Required" stamp on the cover?
But it's a silly argument even besides the imaginary edict: Oblivion on 360 does use the hard drive to cache. If you don't have a hard drive it doesn't. Very simple stuff, and Oblivion is hardly the only 360 game to do this.
I don't find this to be true at all. Sales for videogames seem to be very common, including for new releases. I routinely buy new releases of videogames at Fry's for $5-10 off the MSRP, and I know Best Buy at least generally has sales the week after release. Hell, if videogame sales were really that rare then sites like CheapAssGamer wouldn't be so amazingly popular and successful. But sign up for the forums there and you'll see info on videogame sales nearly every day of the week. I'll agree that sales for videogames may not be as common as we would like (and there definitely seems to be a seasonal factor - sales are a little sparse right now), but they do happen with some frequency.
Just an example to prove my point, right now at Best Buy you can get these 360 games:
Gears Of War >>>> $49.99
FEAR >>>> $49.99
Saints Row >>>> $49.99
NBA 2K7 >>>> $39.99
Fight Night: Round 3 >>>> $29.99
Major League Baseball 2K6 >>>> $19.99
All of those are on sale (actually it's possible Fight Night saw a price drop), and at least Gears (retail price: $60) is still doing great business - these aren't solely due to a game bombing. This past week I managed to get the fairly new 360 game Blitz for $20 at Fry's, an advertised sale. It was released a couple months ago for $50 and it looks like Circuit City also has it on sale for $22. CC also has a fairly significant sale on most versions of Madden 07 right now. The sales are out there if you look for them.
They actually sort of already do this. Some Achievements in games will unlock gamerpics for you. For example if you beat Insane difficulty in Gears of War you get a new gamerpic - though unfortunately the system doesn't seem to have any way of mentioning this so I'm sure most players don't know this has even happened. Of course with Live that's not even necessarily a bad thing, as sharing 'secrets' with other gamers is a big (and often ignored) part of the appeal of videogames.
That's true - DOA4 is actually balanced and not broken by idiotic glitches. It also has online play and a bigger tournament scene than SCIII. Maybe the next Soul Calibur will be a return to form?
Yeah, the text size in Dead Rising only seems to be a problem with people that use abnormally small TVs (like significantly under 20 inches) and shitty composite connections. S-video or component and a reasonably decent (not even good!) SDTV are more than sufficient to read Dead Rising's text.
The bigger, more important thing to note is that the PS3 has a standard HDMI port, meaning you can buy any HDMI cable for it. Why no bashing of the Xbox 360 for requiring a proprietary, MS-licensed cable at an inflated price?
Probably because the 360 includes a component cable in the box.
And AFAIK the only real reason it's a standard HDMI port on the PS3 is because that is a licensing requirement for HDMI. It's nice it works out like that, but let's not pretend Sony is doing it out of the goodness in their hearts...
It was higher than that two years ago. I've seen anywhere from six to ten percent. The rate of adoption keep climbing each year. I can't find anything more current but I wouldn't even be surprised if it were up around 20% now, though I don't think it's passed that mark yet.
I've heard estimates of 20% myself, but those are very recent. At the least it's certainly way above "maybe 5%".
(other than Microsoft's idiotic requirement that all games must support the HDD-less retard pack)
There are already at least two HDD-only games on the 360 and they've been out for several months: FFXI and Football Manager. FFXI was even announced prior to the 360's launch. This "requirement" you are talking about doesn't exist.
Of course you don't like console games, you haven't tried them in more than 15 years!
The biggest actual bug is that fatigue is apparently not in effect. EA has argued that it is actually happening and just isn't shown by the interface (they are admitting there is a bug at least), but various playtesting by fans suggests otherwise. Apparently a patch is coming.
There's also some very strange behavior where other teams will draft Hall of Famers (including dead players!), but EA says this is by design. I believe them, actually, but a lot of players justifiably see this as a major bug.
The other however, is cool, down to earth and ready to have fun. Right now. And she's fine with just hangin' out.
:(
Yeah, and she's also 12 years old.
(Kidding, kidding...)
I'm sure it's just that they finally figured out how to compress things properly. To my understanding none of the game gives off a feeling of being cut up or missing stuff. MS admitted publically before launch that they were behind on offering the kind of compression tech to third parties they had planned. Team Ninja made similar complaints prior to DOA4's release and the game ended up fitting less than a full disc while still loaded with a good amount of HD video (30 or so minutes at a minimum). From's game also had a lot of HD video so I suspect the hold-up was better WMV compression software.
I think some devs certainly could make great use of the extra space of HD-DVD or Blu-ray, but I also don't think it's worth the extra $200-300 it adds to the system cost. Not enough devs would take advantage of it, and some of that money would be better spent on something like fancier GPUs that most devs could actually take advantage of (which is basically what MS did with the X360, while Sony seems to have bundled a lower spec GPU with the PS3 that is basically an off-the-shelf PC part). The currently much lower speed of these HD drives is also a negative - Blu-ray only offers about half the peak read speed of the X360's DVD drive, though admittedly it will hit that peak a lot more often than the X360 will hit its own.
They certainly were and are! They still charge the highest royalties out of all three console manufacturers (though they did reduce it a bit during this last generation). During the N64 era they wouldn't let third party developers create their own microcode until late in its lifecycle, forcing most of them to use the absolutely terrible stock SGI microcode (which offered something like 30% of the console's performance that second party devs like Rare were able to use). Months after E3 they still haven't informed third parties how they can use the speaker in the Wiimote. And of course their dictatorial NES rules are well known - my favorites are how devs that worked on NES titles weren't allowed to develop for any other competing consoles, and that (non-Nintendo) publishers were limited to only releasing a few games a year. Let's not forget what a bitch cartridges were for third parties either! These are just a few choice examples, mind you - Nintendo's history of screwing over third party devs is lengthy. It even effectively created the Playstation!
Now I do believe they are probably improving on this for the Wii, but it's important to not forget that the only reason Nintendo cares about third party support is that it helps them get a slightly larger audience to sell their own games to. They aren't like MS and Sony, which make the bulk of their profits off licensing and helping third parties effectively get rich. Nintendo is all about selling Nintendo games.
When Namco-Bandai Vice President Shin Unozawa recently said the following, he wasn't just talking about Nintendo making great games:
(Keep in mind this is specifically about the Japanese market. Young kids aren't the main users in the West by any means.)
(And Sega was pretty hostile to third parties on the Saturn even in Japan. They were fond of keeping various performance tricks secret, among other things. There's a reason so many old Sega and Nintendo devs jumped ship to the more friendly Sony and now MS.)
Funny that they claimed that there would be a small up-turn in total consoles sold next-gen over current gen, but somehow the total they predict for all 3 consoles comes in under what the PS2 sold. In Japan alone.
Where are you getting this? The Next Gen article that the original Joystiq article links mentions they expect just the PS3 to sell 30 million units in North America alone. The PS2 has only sold ~23 million consoles in Japan.
From Software actually complained before release that it was going to take multiple DVDs. These problems apparently all disappeared, since not only is the game only one DVD even the American version with two complete vocal tracks (and this is a long JRPG here) is still only a single disc.
My understanding is that the swords are actually derived from earlier Old Republic fiction (canon, too). I guess we don't see them in the current movies because Jedi aren't common enough to require them, but when the Jedi were so dominant it was seen as important to have a weapon that could at least stand up to the lightsaber. I forget the kind of metal they are made out of (and Wikipedia seems to be down right now), but I think they also tended to make some armor out of it as well. This is actually mentioned in the game's fiction too, I think, but it's an easy thing to miss. I don't particularly buy the metal excuse either. Presumably the Jedi are more of a threat because of their Force powers (and the way this augments their melee combat) rather than just their weapon, but maybe if attacked in great enough numbers it's effective. But it is part of the expanded Star Wars universe and has been for quite some time.
I agree with the fact that lightsabers were still made far too weak for gameplay balance purposes.
At least the first one sold enough to become one of MS's Platinum Hits rereleases. Interestingly it seems to have sold mainly due to the appeal of the setting, since the gameplay certainly wasn't any good when I tried it and it definitely doesn't succeed on any kind of aesthetic level. It's not even remotely realistic, even by the gamey standards of something like Call of Duty. I'm pretty sure the enemies don't even speak the correct language (apparently they grabbed Egyptian voice actors, IIRC).
I have no idea about the quality of the sequel, but I suspect it didn't sell that well after players experienced the first one.
More importantly online fighting games are already being done on the consoles using consumer broadband connections. I mainly play the DOA series online, and it's generally pretty damn good. It's not quite as nice as offline play (a lot of normally unsafe moves become safe with the lag), but when the connection is good it's very close to seamless. My understanding is that in smaller countries like Japan it's even better. It's true that with fighting games every single frame (out of 60 in a second) matters, but a well designed game can handle a few frames of lag and still remain fast, deep, and fun.
They want games written for the PS3 to be difficult to port to other systems. It's the same basic route they went with the PS2. It's a very effective strategy if you are the console leader.
Why? Are you aware that id Software still has full OpenGL rendering options in even their most recent games? Even when they are writing for Windows, they avoid locking themselves into Microsoft's proprietary system by continuining to embrace a more open and platform-independent API.
That was true for the Doom3 engine, which started development at least five years ago. Do you know what development platform id is making their newest engine on? The Xbox360. To my understanding that isn't as pure a DirectX environment as a lot of gamers assume, but you can bet Carmack isn't writing on it using OpenGL. (And yes, of course a PC port will also be available.)
I'm definitely sympathetic to the idealism of a platform-independent APIs like OpenGL, SDL, etc., but it's simply a truism that right now the very latest hardware is clearly served better by DirectX and its derivatives. OpenGL and the like have a lot of catching up to do...
My major roadblock at this point with getting an Xbox 360 is the cost. I can't drop 399$ on a console. It's ludicrous. To shell out that much on a console with only a handful of playable games is disturbing, almost. Some of the most hyped titles - Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, for example - apparently aren't even worth the plastic the disk is printed on from a playability standpoint.
Are you sure you are thinking about GRAW? It's not really my kind of thing at all (I spend most of my X360 time with DOA4), but it would be hard for me to argue it isn't a great game. In general most of the big X360 titles have been pretty well received, though I certainly wouldn't begrudge somebody for waiting for a larger library...
The Wii should be at least twice as fast as the original xbox, I see no reason why games shouldn't be able to push 720p.
That's a pretty optimistic prediction. What I've read and seen of the Wii sounds to me like a Xbox 1.5*, the asterisk denoting that the hardware still can't pull off a lot of the fancier tricks the Xbox1 could (especially in the realm of shaders). It should be a nice little system (especially for sub-$200), but it is essentially an overclocked Gamecube with some additional RAM, including most of the same shortcomings and bottlenecks.
But I agree with your central point. I hope Nintendo at least allows devs to go HD if they wish. I could see that being really useful for software like the Opera browser (forget if it was announced or just 'rumored'), simpler party games (like a Bomberman-style game), etc. Even certain beautiful games on the Xbox1 like Amped2 managed 720p, so who knows what devs could manage down the line? The loss of flexibility gained by making some kind of political point would be a bad idea (though it's remotely possible there could be real hardware limitations involved).
Unfortunately since it is Nintendo I'll just be happy if they make widescreen support mandatory...
Yes it would be a tard-box if ICT was an issue. That's where RTFA enters the picture.
No, the article just shifts the meaning around a little. Presumably you would have to be retarded or stupid to trust that these companies would keep to their word when it comes to using ICT. And even if somehow these vague claims come true, buying into the Blu-ray format with a player that you'll need to replace in a mere three years is pretty stupid too.
But neither Xbox360 or PS3 are being sold with "junior" as the primary market. They are being sold to your average US gamer, http://www.theesa.com/facts/top_10_facts.phpwho happens to be ~30 years old. As prices for the consoles drop that is when you start getting them selling to large numbers of parents, but that's probably at least a few years out.