I couldn't let this one go: "A) they will have thier act together and build a equal to Microsofts XNA tools for developers"
PS3 programming will never be XNA simple. And there isn't another company in the world that can do XNA.
Their XNA is LittleBigPlanet (level design game) and Home (where they will host 'gadget' level stuff). That's it, and Home customization on that level isn't coming in 2008.
This is the console that took months to adapt fl0w - XNA isn't happening. Harrison's speech about user content is pretty much going to mean Home and LBP.
1. The figures for ps1 were from an era with less people. The numbers for ps3 should be much better now. 2. Sony was a completely unproven upstart in gaming at the time. The HUUUGE lead in from the ps2 should lead to much, much better numbers for the ps3. 3. Sony based their business plan on better numbers for the ps3.
It's not a selective memory. The bar is raised each generation, because gaming has gone from millions of dollars to billions of dollars.
If Sony can't drop the price... they can't do a bundled game without raising the price. Retailers don't want a bundled game, because the margin on the ps3 isn't very good. They need to sell games to make up for it, and with PS3's puny library, there isn't a chance that they want its most popular game getting bundled for free. If Sony pisses off the retailers, they're cooked. Well, REALLY cooked.
They DID do a bundle with ps2, remember? GT3 I think. That was cool, but the ps2 at that point was already price-reduced I think.
What they can do is offer voucher for free downloadable games - maybe a ps1 collection when they finally offer those on the ps3. I'm thinking all first party games or semi-first party games like Crash Bandicoot, GT1 & 2, Ape Escape, Legend of Dragoon, etc.
I don't think this looks better than even a Sandisk. AND Sandisk has a lot of built-in advantages over Zune. Retailers want to push it (higher margins) and Sandisk gets memory cheaper than everybody. Obviously, this isn't a credible Ipod-killer.
There is a threshold below which hardware cannot go, because people just think it looks too crappy to be any good. The Zune is below that threshold. Way below. And by the time MS gets to Zune 95, it will be too late.
You didn't even mention how they've beaten the Medal of Honor series into the ground, or wasted the FIFA license or sat on the exclusive NASCAR license for years.
Can I mention a couple other things?
1. C&C: Renegade 2. The largest game company in the world purchased the engine used in Medal of Honor, one of their largest franchises. 3. The largest game company in the world has no equivalent to Steam or battle.net.
And to make this thread somehow tangentially relevant to the subject, Yes, Valve is awesome for maintaining support for awesome games and giving us new reasons to play. Steam is cool, Counterstrike is great and I even like Half-Life, over-rated though it might be.
I just wish my hardware could ante up to the Source engine. Oh well.
Steam doesn't require a CD to run. They answered your supposed HUGE concern and you still ignore them?
It doesn't really matter what anyone writes here defending piracy, btw. The people whose money is producing these games are going to find a way to stop it, like subscriptions and Steam. I'll be surprised if in 10 years even Yahoo Games doesn't use a Steam-like service.
And I continue to be amazed that Vista and Mac OSX don't have this feature built into their update services.
As I got older I stopped playing pirated games. I only borrowed them from friends. I don't know what the law actually says, in my area a library offered PC games to borrow. Borrowing books isn't breaking the law. The philosophical discussion doesn't matter, of course, eventually everything will be digital and controlled. Even the pirate web can't survive the coming Chinese hegemony.
But the first, second and third through 73rd times I hit the menu looking for a command that doesn't exist because I don't know which window has focus I think, Why can't they make a mac more like Windows?
The idea of focus is a pretty advanced concept for most users and it isn't obvious to me that the Mac is less aggravating in this respect. Why does any OS let ANY app steal focus?
For my other pet peeves, I still think double-clicking an icon is more intuitive for installation than dragging and dropping (especially in this web age when we mostly don't drap and drop things anymore AND why oh why does it do ANYTHING when I double-click it if I'm supposed to drag it?). I still hate creating a burn folder, took me forever to figure that one out and NOT because I'm SO used to Windows. In part, it's because the content-to-be-burned is displayed as a shortcut, so the question is, did it create a shortcut or will it actually burn content? And it wasn't obvious to me that Itunes needs a special action to transer Itunes files that are ALL completely unprotected. Wasted more DVDs that way.
Yes, Mac OSX is way ahead of those other guys. But there's no reason why further improvement hasn't been made.
"I think Wikipedia is an amazing ressource that is right far far more often than it is wrong."
But you only think that because you happen to agree with the majority of the editors about liberalism and libertarianism. On any matters that there is actual disagreement on (say, NOT the history of some software product or someone who's been dead 500 years) Wikipedia is wrong MORE than it's right.
Fox News is pretty obvious about their bias and they do invite other POVs on many of their shows. I could argue that Wikipedia is obvious, too, except for the farce of the founder claiming to create a 'bipartisan' politics website last week.
So let me say this: subtly poisoned facts are no help to a free society. I'm not a booster of the mass media, since they have the same damn liberal POV and are just as dishonest about it (funny how Rather is in the news getting hyped as a great source of news...). No, many people hate wikipedia because it's a stupid idea poorly executed. It's degenerated to an editorial staff that shepherds articles to the same "neutral" POV that lazy overpaid college professors spout at public schools across the country, and especially in California.
This isn't a resource. For simpletons, it's confirmation that they're right, conservatives are stupid and poorly educated and they shouldn't worry about inconvenient facts.
You can't just say a person who can see the entire universe from every POV (I like to refer to this person as "G-d") is the ideal of neutrality. Presumably, this person would be able to fix all of Wikipedia's mistakes, and therefore be neutral in no sense of the term. It's not even a neutral POV, because obvervation without motivation leaves no basis for conclusion.
A being, in other words, sufficiently complex to understand all POVs, would necessarily have developed a relationship with all POVs, and therefore have it's own POV.
Neutrality is fiction because any judgement is subject to incomplete information, insufficient time to render judgement and insufficient understanding of collected information. Which is why everyone loves to hate democracy.
Past the age of 12, no one should read any encyclopedia, even as a starting point. They were a crutch in a time before the Internet. They are moderately useful before you learn who to trust and what a bias is. They are of no usefulness for adults. Certainly not this version of an "encyclopedia" where nothing can be relied on minute to minute.
And the philosophy of sharing "all significant points of view" is ridiculous. Who writes for the Amish? What about illiterate Chinese? Who writes for the majority of the society that can't tell the difference between URL and IP address? No one.
Wikipedia should just be honest and state that their primary audience and their primary editorial staff are one and the same: rich libertarians and liberals who are technology early adopters. Wikipedia is another form of post-modern political indoctrination. The real issue isn't that Wikipedia is biased, it's their statement that you can correct their bias. You can't correct bias, because their legion of editors "fix" things back to bias. Article to article, there is no consistency and overall there is no guarantee that your "starting point" won't be complete rubbish.
And to agree with someone far above in this thread, truth isn't democratic.
To hear Linux supporters talk about how Windows forces you into an upgrade cycle, and how Linux will run fine on 'older hardware' and then it turns out that the major distros won't run on anything less than a couple years old, and still don't run comfortably.
KDE and Gnome have to get their act together, because no one takes linux seriously without them. And no one knows how to install anything on Linux. I'm sorry, I mean no normal users.
It's well past the time that Linux detect what kind of hardware it's on and take care of the desktop environment semi-automatically. The next version of Windows will have at least 3 different levels of desktop performance: Aero, XP and classic. Linux should be even THAT user-friendly (I know you need to go into the administration tab to turn off Themes process).
And it's well past time that Gnome and KDE make some real differences between the two projects or merge. Because they're both needlessly complicated, performance intensive half-measures.
I'm sorry, but Civilization 3 and the last two Gran Turismo games were not better, just longer and harder and tedious. Jak 2 reviews were highway robbery. Why did they screw up a classic? Why is it so boring? Why combine GTA with Jak? Why even call it Jak 2 when it was a totally different game? Why would Sony think combining the two was a good idea. Unfortunately, in movies and games you can become a best-seller just by being a sequel to a brand name (like Matrix 2+3).
I used to read reviews all the time, but now it's so misleading, I just buy old games. I'm 100% certain the original Half-Life is worth my time. Not only that, but I'm not going to regret spending 10$-20$ the way I will $50 on GT4.
It's like grade inflation in High School and college. It takes hard work to get below a B average at a public school. You really have to screw up. And that's the way it is with game reviews now. Madden will always get 9's, and if it doesn't, they actually removed features (X360 version). If they get a 10, there was a significant addition, maybe.
And if you come from MIT (Valve) or Harvard (Blizzard) I'm positive you'll work out.
"Price drops significantly, on both the PS3 and the games. I should be able to get a high-end PS3, a game, and a blu-ray movie for under $400."
This may never happen. Not just the ps3 dropping price - I'm thinking a stand-alone Blu-Ray needs to drop below $500 before Sony can really drop the price, but the idea of the games and the movies dropping price isn't likely. There aren't going to be very many games or movies for a long time, it's just too expensive, so each game and movie will be expensive and Blu-Ray discs will take a long time to come down in price - if Sony EVER reaches enough volume to lower the price.
As for games running off the hard drive? Try never. Maybe IF Steam is rolled out on the PS3, there will be a platform to skip discs, but each Blu-Ray disc is roughly 50 gigs already. So you'll be upgrading to a pretty hefty hard drive if you want to store more than a handful of games- although you probably can't afford more than a handful at Blu-Ray prices.
And btw, I think Steam works well enough and piracy is enough of an issue that MS's next console will work this way, and it will come out on the short end of 5 years, regardless of how well ps3/x360 does.
No one is giving up on HDMI. It's business's only hope that they can't be bit-torrented out of existence. Once you have a 1080p digital copy of a movie, that's it. You'll never upgrade and you'll never buy that movie again. They can't let free copies get released, ever, or Hollywood is over. No HDMI eventually means no money, and we're all watching Communist China's movies, because they have other avenues to enforce copyright protection. Why did Valve invent Steam? Because people were ripping them off. Same deal here.
$600 for the console...At least $1200 for a TV that actually takes advantage of the console. $30-$40 for each movie, $60-$80 for each game... The market doesn't have infinite cash, even if you seem to. So PS3 will not sell very many games for a long time.
And on the actual, you know, business side (you know, what the analysts are paid for), it's much more expensive to burn Blu-Rays than DVDs (X360's format of choice) and X360 owners will have more disposable cash by default.
The N64 was pretty much killed by the ps1 because cartridges are more expensive to make than CDs were to burn. So my money is on MS.
Management just listened to their own hype too long. Their own software cannot overcome organizational problems and sheer complexity. Even detailed planning with their project software cannot make a bad idea turn into a good idea. Vista is too complicated by a factor of 10, and the fact that they didn't know how long it would take within a specific year is a sign that they don't even understand their own problem.
Technical people think everything has a technical solution. This is the same for the open source projects as it is for MS. Only Apple really have a vision and knows how to execute on a monthly basis, at least in the OS world.
My first system was a playstation because GT was the first game I was good at, and I loved it so. But now GT is just too long, complicated and unfriendly. It's no longer a system seller. It's a hard core simulation and that can't appeal to a broad audience. Unfortunately, and Sony can't dial back the realism now. And it's stuck in a 6 car, Japanese-centric rut.
MGS is something the Japanese get excited about and the rest of the world mostly shrugs. Most of the game's target audience in the U.S. play Tom Clancy games and own an Xbox or PC. It was a big deal, in other words, pre-Splinter Cell.
Final Fantasy...I have a love/hate relationship, but my sense from the hard core fans are that it's played out. It doesn't attract the dungeons and dragons type like it used to, and no real man can get excited about X-2. And WoW basically eats it's lunch in the MMO world (not commenting on the game itself, just membership). So what's left? It seems they can't reach the heights of FF7, and I don't consider that unattainable by any means. And where was Tactics on the ps2? They've gotten too bored with their own formulas, but can't seem to truly break with their past. So we have sequels to FF7, but they aren't RPGs. We have an online game, but it lacks the key characters their fans have come to know and love. They release the snowboard mini-game on the cell phone, but no avalanche of their other mini-games. I think Squaresoft was completely knocked off their game between the merger and the failed movie. It's so sad.
As for the Assassin's creed, I find it unlikely that this will appeal to a broad GTA audience, which seems to be the crowd Ubi is fishing for. It will be relegated to the artsy crowd with Shadow of the Colossus. That isn't a bad thing, because Sony isn't going to sell many systems at their price for a while anyway, so it will still look successful with lowered expectations... and get a sequel.
X360 has the first RTS, it will get the Tom Clancy games first (always developed for the PC), it will get GTA on the same day, it will have a zillion arcade games soon.
So here's the key thing about exclusives no one says: if your system has a 1,000 games and their system has 500, you have at least 500 exclusives, even if they're all sequels or separate years for sports titles.
Among the actual announced 32 ps3 games are a few exclusives actually. But there's no way Vision Gran Turismo is coming out on time. Each of the last games took an extra year and had features dropped (remember Gran Turismo 2000 changing it's name? Remember the online mode for GT4?). So I'm betting this list is also more hype than reality.
If you think the gov't is f'ing up, it's because everyone hates compromise. If you think change is needed, try voting, joining a party, putting in a little effort unlike all the complainers, eh? And don't cry "cheater" every time you lose. If you think people are resistant to politics, well everyone plays politics at work, please explain that. If you think Americans are not presented with open forums, welcome to the Internet, my friend. If you think Americans can fix the country, who exactly has been breaking it? The North Koreans or Al-Qaeda?
I hate all this non-stop, useless whining about our gov't. Politicians are corrupt, politicians lie to us, politicians are ruining the country, but if I was in charge, things would be perfect, blah, blah, blah. Here's a news flash: Americans don't have the same beliefs, a lot of us are selfish, or lazy enough to vote for selfish reasons, and 95% of you don't even understand Islam. Is there corruption, deceit, actual lying? Of course. Welcome to the world, politicians are just like you but get paid less for their status. That attracts the vain and the power-hungry. And their children. And they are a reflection of our society.
Let me ask, what has this whining ever got you? The Democrats and Republicans both tick you off because they have incentives to do so. People want to work as little as possible and want to pay as little taxes as possible, and have government pay for as much as possible in their own lives. This is selfish and small-minded and corrupt. Since we all live in different towns, we've all taken turns whining to our representatives for personal favors. Not that any of us would do that, unless our job is threatened, or our company is downsizing or our family member is going to Iraq. I mean, Medicare SHOULD pay for my Viagra, I paid into the system. I've made more money than most people, I've worked harder than most people. There's still so much money, it won't hurt, right?
So I'd like everyone to grow up and stop saying "liar, liar". But that's too much to expect, isn't it? Because "liar, liar" is easier. And picking on a minority group like politicians is easier.
Wikipedia has verged toward raving liberal and libertarian views for the same reason. It's not that the ideas are bad per se, but they are unopposed and unsupported because dissent is edited out in about 1.2 seconds and most normal people don't get paid to edit-war like Jimmy's disciples. Groupthink from the editors and friends of Jimmy Wales means that the entire site is laced with useless opinion and irrelevant POVs, which is why this website is already farther left than NYtimes, and as "bipartisan" as the democrats' moveon.org.
Gee, I wonder if you're a hippy-dippy liberal like Jimmy (or are Jimmy)? A liberal-biased, libel-accused, contentious, free-form anarchic content system organization is opening a new site, and you think it will raise people's awareness of something? How un-surprised I am that on one on this site has anything bad to say about gay marriage, but it's soundly defeated at the polls every time it comes to a referendum.
And "mob mentality" is supposed to be a bad thing.
Blu-Ray discs, not the Blu-ray player, will doom Sony. The games will cost too much to burn, too much to sell and together with the slow adoption of the Blu-Ray movies, Sony won't sell enough discs or drives to bring prices down to 360 levels. The 360 already has $30 games. PS3 might never have $30 games, because if the Blu-Ray isn't picked up quickly, they won't be able to lower manufacturing costs. The X360 games are already coming down in price quickly because they are normal DVD discs. And that means used games are cheaper, too.
I have every faith that Sony will have better quality hardware. And I have every faith that Sony is shooting itself in the foot with another proprietary media format that will go nowhere.
Finally, the PS3 may not even be the cheapest Blu-Ray player for very long. Since Samsung doesn't need to insert a Cell chip, hard drive or ps2 chip in every one of their players, Sony could very well lose their big selling point in a couple years.
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't let this one go: "A) they will have thier act together and build a equal to Microsofts XNA tools for developers" PS3 programming will never be XNA simple. And there isn't another company in the world that can do XNA. Their XNA is LittleBigPlanet (level design game) and Home (where they will host 'gadget' level stuff). That's it, and Home customization on that level isn't coming in 2008. This is the console that took months to adapt fl0w - XNA isn't happening. Harrison's speech about user content is pretty much going to mean Home and LBP.
1. The figures for ps1 were from an era with less people. The numbers for ps3 should be much better now.
2. Sony was a completely unproven upstart in gaming at the time. The HUUUGE lead in from the ps2 should lead to much, much better numbers for the ps3.
3. Sony based their business plan on better numbers for the ps3.
It's not a selective memory. The bar is raised each generation, because gaming has gone from millions of dollars to billions of dollars.
If Sony can't drop the price... they can't do a bundled game without raising the price. Retailers don't want a bundled game, because the margin on the ps3 isn't very good. They need to sell games to make up for it, and with PS3's puny library, there isn't a chance that they want its most popular game getting bundled for free. If Sony pisses off the retailers, they're cooked. Well, REALLY cooked.
They DID do a bundle with ps2, remember? GT3 I think. That was cool, but the ps2 at that point was already price-reduced I think.
What they can do is offer voucher for free downloadable games - maybe a ps1 collection when they finally offer those on the ps3. I'm thinking all first party games or semi-first party games like Crash Bandicoot, GT1 & 2, Ape Escape, Legend of Dragoon, etc.
I don't think this looks better than even a Sandisk. AND Sandisk has a lot of built-in advantages over Zune. Retailers want to push it (higher margins) and Sandisk gets memory cheaper than everybody. Obviously, this isn't a credible Ipod-killer.
There is a threshold below which hardware cannot go, because people just think it looks too crappy to be any good. The Zune is below that threshold. Way below. And by the time MS gets to Zune 95, it will be too late.
You didn't even mention how they've beaten the Medal of Honor series into the ground, or wasted the FIFA license or sat on the exclusive NASCAR license for years.
Can I mention a couple other things?
1. C&C: Renegade
2. The largest game company in the world purchased the engine used in Medal of Honor, one of their largest franchises.
3. The largest game company in the world has no equivalent to Steam or battle.net.
And to make this thread somehow tangentially relevant to the subject, Yes, Valve is awesome for maintaining support for awesome games and giving us new reasons to play. Steam is cool, Counterstrike is great and I even like Half-Life, over-rated though it might be.
I just wish my hardware could ante up to the Source engine. Oh well.
Actually, the article I saw said that templates for standard game types (i.e. fps's rpg's, etc.) would be included with the kit, GarageGames-style.
Steam doesn't require a CD to run. They answered your supposed HUGE concern and you still ignore them?
It doesn't really matter what anyone writes here defending piracy, btw. The people whose money is producing these games are going to find a way to stop it, like subscriptions and Steam. I'll be surprised if in 10 years even Yahoo Games doesn't use a Steam-like service.
And I continue to be amazed that Vista and Mac OSX don't have this feature built into their update services.
As I got older I stopped playing pirated games. I only borrowed them from friends. I don't know what the law actually says, in my area a library offered PC games to borrow. Borrowing books isn't breaking the law. The philosophical discussion doesn't matter, of course, eventually everything will be digital and controlled. Even the pirate web can't survive the coming Chinese hegemony.
But the first, second and third through 73rd times I hit the menu looking for a command that doesn't exist because I don't know which window has focus I think, Why can't they make a mac more like Windows?
The idea of focus is a pretty advanced concept for most users and it isn't obvious to me that the Mac is less aggravating in this respect. Why does any OS let ANY app steal focus?
For my other pet peeves, I still think double-clicking an icon is more intuitive for installation than dragging and dropping (especially in this web age when we mostly don't drap and drop things anymore AND why oh why does it do ANYTHING when I double-click it if I'm supposed to drag it?). I still hate creating a burn folder, took me forever to figure that one out and NOT because I'm SO used to Windows. In part, it's because the content-to-be-burned is displayed as a shortcut, so the question is, did it create a shortcut or will it actually burn content? And it wasn't obvious to me that Itunes needs a special action to transer Itunes files that are ALL completely unprotected. Wasted more DVDs that way.
Yes, Mac OSX is way ahead of those other guys. But there's no reason why further improvement hasn't been made.
Why isn't this linked to San Jose Mercury news? Not in the club with Slashdot and gamebizdaily?
"I think Wikipedia is an amazing ressource that is right far far more often than it is wrong."
But you only think that because you happen to agree with the majority of the editors about liberalism and libertarianism. On any matters that there is actual disagreement on (say, NOT the history of some software product or someone who's been dead 500 years) Wikipedia is wrong MORE than it's right.
Fox News is pretty obvious about their bias and they do invite other POVs on many of their shows. I could argue that Wikipedia is obvious, too, except for the farce of the founder claiming to create a 'bipartisan' politics website last week.
So let me say this: subtly poisoned facts are no help to a free society. I'm not a booster of the mass media, since they have the same damn liberal POV and are just as dishonest about it (funny how Rather is in the news getting hyped as a great source of news...). No, many people hate wikipedia because it's a stupid idea poorly executed. It's degenerated to an editorial staff that shepherds articles to the same "neutral" POV that lazy overpaid college professors spout at public schools across the country, and especially in California.
This isn't a resource. For simpletons, it's confirmation that they're right, conservatives are stupid and poorly educated and they shouldn't worry about inconvenient facts.
As for a sane society? Hasn't ever been one.
You can't just say a person who can see the entire universe from every POV (I like to refer to this person as "G-d") is the ideal of neutrality. Presumably, this person would be able to fix all of Wikipedia's mistakes, and therefore be neutral in no sense of the term. It's not even a neutral POV, because obvervation without motivation leaves no basis for conclusion.
A being, in other words, sufficiently complex to understand all POVs, would necessarily have developed a relationship with all POVs, and therefore have it's own POV.
Neutrality is fiction because any judgement is subject to incomplete information, insufficient time to render judgement and insufficient understanding of collected information. Which is why everyone loves to hate democracy.
Past the age of 12, no one should read any encyclopedia, even as a starting point. They were a crutch in a time before the Internet. They are moderately useful before you learn who to trust and what a bias is. They are of no usefulness for adults. Certainly not this version of an "encyclopedia" where nothing can be relied on minute to minute.
And the philosophy of sharing "all significant points of view" is ridiculous. Who writes for the Amish? What about illiterate Chinese? Who writes for the majority of the society that can't tell the difference between URL and IP address? No one.
Wikipedia should just be honest and state that their primary audience and their primary editorial staff are one and the same: rich libertarians and liberals who are technology early adopters. Wikipedia is another form of post-modern political indoctrination. The real issue isn't that Wikipedia is biased, it's their statement that you can correct their bias. You can't correct bias, because their legion of editors "fix" things back to bias. Article to article, there is no consistency and overall there is no guarantee that your "starting point" won't be complete rubbish.
And to agree with someone far above in this thread, truth isn't democratic.
There are new features. They restored Calendar to Windows. Last seen in Windows 3.1.
Um...and Chess.
No sir, we've also received the buggiest, least secure development platform ever... IE!
To hear Linux supporters talk about how Windows forces you into an upgrade cycle, and how Linux will run fine on 'older hardware' and then it turns out that the major distros won't run on anything less than a couple years old, and still don't run comfortably.
KDE and Gnome have to get their act together, because no one takes linux seriously without them. And no one knows how to install anything on Linux. I'm sorry, I mean no normal users.
It's well past the time that Linux detect what kind of hardware it's on and take care of the desktop environment semi-automatically. The next version of Windows will have at least 3 different levels of desktop performance: Aero, XP and classic. Linux should be even THAT user-friendly (I know you need to go into the administration tab to turn off Themes process).
And it's well past time that Gnome and KDE make some real differences between the two projects or merge. Because they're both needlessly complicated, performance intensive half-measures.
I'm sorry, but Civilization 3 and the last two Gran Turismo games were not better, just longer and harder and tedious. Jak 2 reviews were highway robbery. Why did they screw up a classic? Why is it so boring? Why combine GTA with Jak? Why even call it Jak 2 when it was a totally different game? Why would Sony think combining the two was a good idea. Unfortunately, in movies and games you can become a best-seller just by being a sequel to a brand name (like Matrix 2+3).
I used to read reviews all the time, but now it's so misleading, I just buy old games. I'm 100% certain the original Half-Life is worth my time. Not only that, but I'm not going to regret spending 10$-20$ the way I will $50 on GT4.
It's like grade inflation in High School and college. It takes hard work to get below a B average at a public school. You really have to screw up. And that's the way it is with game reviews now. Madden will always get 9's, and if it doesn't, they actually removed features (X360 version). If they get a 10, there was a significant addition, maybe.
And if you come from MIT (Valve) or Harvard (Blizzard) I'm positive you'll work out.
"Price drops significantly, on both the PS3 and the games. I should be able to get a high-end PS3, a game, and a blu-ray movie for under $400."
This may never happen. Not just the ps3 dropping price - I'm thinking a stand-alone Blu-Ray needs to drop below $500 before Sony can really drop the price, but the idea of the games and the movies dropping price isn't likely. There aren't going to be very many games or movies for a long time, it's just too expensive, so each game and movie will be expensive and Blu-Ray discs will take a long time to come down in price - if Sony EVER reaches enough volume to lower the price.
As for games running off the hard drive? Try never. Maybe IF Steam is rolled out on the PS3, there will be a platform to skip discs, but each Blu-Ray disc is roughly 50 gigs already. So you'll be upgrading to a pretty hefty hard drive if you want to store more than a handful of games- although you probably can't afford more than a handful at Blu-Ray prices.
And btw, I think Steam works well enough and piracy is enough of an issue that MS's next console will work this way, and it will come out on the short end of 5 years, regardless of how well ps3/x360 does.
No one is giving up on HDMI. It's business's only hope that they can't be bit-torrented out of existence. Once you have a 1080p digital copy of a movie, that's it. You'll never upgrade and you'll never buy that movie again. They can't let free copies get released, ever, or Hollywood is over. No HDMI eventually means no money, and we're all watching Communist China's movies, because they have other avenues to enforce copyright protection. Why did Valve invent Steam? Because people were ripping them off. Same deal here.
$600 for the console...At least $1200 for a TV that actually takes advantage of the console. $30-$40 for each movie, $60-$80 for each game... The market doesn't have infinite cash, even if you seem to. So PS3 will not sell very many games for a long time.
And on the actual, you know, business side (you know, what the analysts are paid for), it's much more expensive to burn Blu-Rays than DVDs (X360's format of choice) and X360 owners will have more disposable cash by default.
The N64 was pretty much killed by the ps1 because cartridges are more expensive to make than CDs were to burn. So my money is on MS.
Management just listened to their own hype too long. Their own software cannot overcome organizational problems and sheer complexity. Even detailed planning with their project software cannot make a bad idea turn into a good idea. Vista is too complicated by a factor of 10, and the fact that they didn't know how long it would take within a specific year is a sign that they don't even understand their own problem.
Technical people think everything has a technical solution. This is the same for the open source projects as it is for MS. Only Apple really have a vision and knows how to execute on a monthly basis, at least in the OS world.
My first system was a playstation because GT was the first game I was good at, and I loved it so. But now GT is just too long, complicated and unfriendly. It's no longer a system seller. It's a hard core simulation and that can't appeal to a broad audience. Unfortunately, and Sony can't dial back the realism now. And it's stuck in a 6 car, Japanese-centric rut.
... and get a sequel.
MGS is something the Japanese get excited about and the rest of the world mostly shrugs. Most of the game's target audience in the U.S. play Tom Clancy games and own an Xbox or PC. It was a big deal, in other words, pre-Splinter Cell.
Final Fantasy...I have a love/hate relationship, but my sense from the hard core fans are that it's played out. It doesn't attract the dungeons and dragons type like it used to, and no real man can get excited about X-2. And WoW basically eats it's lunch in the MMO world (not commenting on the game itself, just membership). So what's left? It seems they can't reach the heights of FF7, and I don't consider that unattainable by any means. And where was Tactics on the ps2? They've gotten too bored with their own formulas, but can't seem to truly break with their past. So we have sequels to FF7, but they aren't RPGs. We have an online game, but it lacks the key characters their fans have come to know and love. They release the snowboard mini-game on the cell phone, but no avalanche of their other mini-games. I think Squaresoft was completely knocked off their game between the merger and the failed movie. It's so sad.
As for the Assassin's creed, I find it unlikely that this will appeal to a broad GTA audience, which seems to be the crowd Ubi is fishing for. It will be relegated to the artsy crowd with Shadow of the Colossus. That isn't a bad thing, because Sony isn't going to sell many systems at their price for a while anyway, so it will still look successful with lowered expectations
X360 has the first RTS, it will get the Tom Clancy games first (always developed for the PC), it will get GTA on the same day, it will have a zillion arcade games soon.
So here's the key thing about exclusives no one says: if your system has a 1,000 games and their system has 500, you have at least 500 exclusives, even if they're all sequels or separate years for sports titles.
Among the actual announced 32 ps3 games are a few exclusives actually. But there's no way Vision Gran Turismo is coming out on time. Each of the last games took an extra year and had features dropped (remember Gran Turismo 2000 changing it's name? Remember the online mode for GT4?). So I'm betting this list is also more hype than reality.
If you think the gov't is f'ing up, it's because everyone hates compromise. If you think change is needed, try voting, joining a party, putting in a little effort unlike all the complainers, eh? And don't cry "cheater" every time you lose. If you think people are resistant to politics, well everyone plays politics at work, please explain that. If you think Americans are not presented with open forums, welcome to the Internet, my friend. If you think Americans can fix the country, who exactly has been breaking it? The North Koreans or Al-Qaeda?
I hate all this non-stop, useless whining about our gov't. Politicians are corrupt, politicians lie to us, politicians are ruining the country, but if I was in charge, things would be perfect, blah, blah, blah. Here's a news flash: Americans don't have the same beliefs, a lot of us are selfish, or lazy enough to vote for selfish reasons, and 95% of you don't even understand Islam. Is there corruption, deceit, actual lying? Of course. Welcome to the world, politicians are just like you but get paid less for their status. That attracts the vain and the power-hungry. And their children. And they are a reflection of our society.
Let me ask, what has this whining ever got you? The Democrats and Republicans both tick you off because they have incentives to do so. People want to work as little as possible and want to pay as little taxes as possible, and have government pay for as much as possible in their own lives. This is selfish and small-minded and corrupt. Since we all live in different towns, we've all taken turns whining to our representatives for personal favors. Not that any of us would do that, unless our job is threatened, or our company is downsizing or our family member is going to Iraq. I mean, Medicare SHOULD pay for my Viagra, I paid into the system. I've made more money than most people, I've worked harder than most people. There's still so much money, it won't hurt, right?
So I'd like everyone to grow up and stop saying "liar, liar". But that's too much to expect, isn't it? Because "liar, liar" is easier. And picking on a minority group like politicians is easier.
Wikipedia has verged toward raving liberal and libertarian views for the same reason. It's not that the ideas are bad per se, but they are unopposed and unsupported because dissent is edited out in about 1.2 seconds and most normal people don't get paid to edit-war like Jimmy's disciples. Groupthink from the editors and friends of Jimmy Wales means that the entire site is laced with useless opinion and irrelevant POVs, which is why this website is already farther left than NYtimes, and as "bipartisan" as the democrats' moveon.org.
Gee, I wonder if you're a hippy-dippy liberal like Jimmy (or are Jimmy)? A liberal-biased, libel-accused, contentious, free-form anarchic content system organization is opening a new site, and you think it will raise people's awareness of something? How un-surprised I am that on one on this site has anything bad to say about gay marriage, but it's soundly defeated at the polls every time it comes to a referendum.
And "mob mentality" is supposed to be a bad thing.
Blu-Ray discs, not the Blu-ray player, will doom Sony. The games will cost too much to burn, too much to sell and together with the slow adoption of the Blu-Ray movies, Sony won't sell enough discs or drives to bring prices down to 360 levels. The 360 already has $30 games. PS3 might never have $30 games, because if the Blu-Ray isn't picked up quickly, they won't be able to lower manufacturing costs. The X360 games are already coming down in price quickly because they are normal DVD discs. And that means used games are cheaper, too.
I have every faith that Sony will have better quality hardware. And I have every faith that Sony is shooting itself in the foot with another proprietary media format that will go nowhere.
Finally, the PS3 may not even be the cheapest Blu-Ray player for very long. Since Samsung doesn't need to insert a Cell chip, hard drive or ps2 chip in every one of their players, Sony could very well lose their big selling point in a couple years.