It's a fact that the Microsoft XBOX 360 and the Sony Playstation 3 will give you 1080, while Pretendo will just give you Piss as in piss on you as they always have.
Why would I care about 1080 - i or p? I don't plan to buy an HDTV until flat-panel HDTV costs less than $300 for a 30 inch set. My first degree was in Business Management (Sales and Marketing focus) - I know the price will drop to around $300 if I just wait a few years. Until then, my digital cable settop box will convert the shows for me.
By that point the PS3 will retail for $250 as well.
In the meantime, I'll be having fun with my Wii. It has fun games. I don't care about the HDTV aspect.
But, I'm amazed that only Gamestop will take preorders - I planned on preordering at EBX, like I did for most of my other consoles and handhelds.
Hmm. Well, I'm all for the pink month, especially since it is very true that men can - and are - getting breast cancer.
But I must admit I'm far more concerned about women getting breast cancer, and think my feelings on the subject are those spoken in The Princess Bride: "There's a shortage of perfect breasts in this world."
Nah, I usually just run linux on my dual core machines. We've got programs that have been running for months, figuring out the statistical inferences of the genetic relationships between subjects in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, and how that correlates with their DNA sequences and inheritance, and you can't do that on Win boxen.
But some other people apparently do that - it's a fairly cheap way to get a nice high-power graphics rendering machine, if you look at the architecture - but my group has no real interest in such features, so we just use standard linux boxen.
player 1 said: The reader being surreptitiously carried by the American-tourist-targeting mugger/kidnapper/whatever in whatever foreign country you're going to won't be.
player 2 said: I was as shocked as you will probably be when you read this, when I found out that Florida is not, in fact, a foreign country.
Not to mention people waiting by the baggage carousels to read your passports for any international airline, and the people in cars next to you going to Canada and Mexico.
Seriously, I've read many print edition articles in both Fortune and the Wall Street Journal which basically say that the whole Blu-Ray debacle may drag Sony down and cripple the company.
These are business analysts, and they usually pump new tech, but even they are down on this Bet The Company decision by Sony.
Wow, you didn't even finish reading the article summary, did you? It also mentions higher priced NDS games, depending on anticipation; do you think Wii games will be any different, in Japan?
I quoted exact amounts from today's Wall Street Journal B1/B6 article on pricing for Japan, as well as pricing for US (NAm) and Europe.
My point being that there is indeed an even higher cost-of-opportunity for buying a Sony PS3. While the console price was dropped in Japan for the PS3, the games are more expensive - and if you live in Europe, the PS3 is very expensive plus the games are expensive. In the US, the console is at the midpoint between the Japan and EU pricings, and the game costs are not quite as bad.
The Wii and xBox360, however, are in fact not priced to these levels, and in point of fact the Wii games are substantially cheaper than the PS3 or 360 games.
Information about that is conflicting, I'd guess if you're in America you're free to import what you want but if you're in Europe you're screwed, as always.
Well, since I'm in Seattle, that's cool. I can see why region encoding might matter in Europe. A Japanese or Chinese game frequently will have a (primitive) US English dialog choice, except for cut-scenes and other chrome, but in Europe they tend to want the base language plus English (e.g. in France you get French and English).
I bought a whole bunch of Nintendo GameBoy Pokemon games in France, and we always had to use different cartridges, or we could mess up the encoding when we stored them. But they still worked.
Today's B1 and B6 article in the Wall Street Journal quotes a retail list price for the Sony PS3 of USD $499 in the US, E$499 ($638) in Europe, and 47,600Y ($409) in Japan.
The Wii price is USD $250 and xBox360 core console about USD $300 ($400 with big HD).
The Wii and PS3 prices are launch prices, without non-standard bundling. I believe the launch bundle for the Wii includes Wii Sports (you know, Tennis, etc) and a Wiimote and nunchuck, and I'm not sure of the PS launch bundle.
I know it's fun to bash Sony and all lately, but the caption below the title is talking about XBOX 360 games being $72. Is that $3 newsworthy?
No, but if a Sony PS3 game sells for $72 US in Japan (Yen) and a Wii game sells for $40 US in Japan (Yen), that's quite a dramatic difference.
Remember, Sony makes a lot of the profit on the game sales, and loses money on the console (almost $200 with their new Japan pricing, according to today's B1 page article in the Wall Street Journal). Nintendo makes a profit on their consoles, and also makes a profit on their games.
Or better yet... Get a Nintendo Wii, save money and sink Sony's market share.
Or, for the price of a Sony PS3 in the US or EU, buy two Ninteno Wii's and give one to a friend so you can play Animal Crossing at each other's villages!
From what's been said the PS3 games aren't going to be restricted by region, so you should be able to order Japanese games and play them in EU or NA.
Should be and are is not the same. Sure, if Sony got it's act together and realized why Nintendo was eating Sony's shorts, they could get a clue stick and kill their region-encoded games they've been pushing, and not be so DRM-heavy, but the reality is they rely on region-encoding far more than Nintendo is planning to be.
Nintendo got a ride on the non-DRM clue train and decided that there were vast untapped markets in the US for formerly Japan-only games - Sony is watching the clue train go by, but showing no signs of jumping on board. They're too high and mighty to do that...
I get sweaty playing DDR and that boxing game with the 3lb "gloves" and that sword fighting game with the 5lb sword. Throw in some old Nintendo running pad olympics, and I think you've got a business plan!
I used to own Konami shares - the Konami firm actually owns a chain of sports gymnasiums in Japan, and I could easily see them expanding DDR with some Wii games here and doing quite well. It's a fairly profitable component of their business, not counting the gaming machines (Mah Jong and gambling ones) they also run here in the US.
But it would be nice if you had to charge up the game console by running a bit, or have some interactive Tae Kwon Do (blue belt) before you could play Tetris.
I think you've hit on Sony's real problem: I don't care about any of the games being released now. Can the PS3 survive long enough for the games I actually want to play to make it out on it?
I agree, the problem is that there's nothing there to excite us. All the exciting games are either Nintendo Wii or they're cross-platform and thus mean we can play Sim: Island on the Wii and Spore on the Wii just as easily as on the PS3.
Trying to keep the cool Japanese games out of the Euro and US markets is the problem - not a good strategy. Pointing out that one is dropping the price in Japan while not dropping it in the US and Europe just makes us madder.
Sony's dropping the price of the PS3 to $410 six months AFTER they should have dropped it to $399 is a day late and a dollar short.
They've already lost not just mindshare - of hardcore and midcore gamers - they've lost Developer mindspace, as many have already rejigged their games to make sure they now are releasing Wii games.
They still have games that cost $10 extra than what a Wii game does.
They still have an overly FPS and Sports focus that gives them no growth areas, while the Wii is expanding into uncharted territory and even importing Japanese and Chinese games into Euro and US markets.
They still have the DRM and Blu-Ray mentality that just makes everyone want to do something else - anything else - to avoid them.
So, no, they can't convince the world.
Will they break even? No. They've already lost a lot on this, and they know it - had to scale back shipments as a result. They may even make number 1 in Japan - due to loyalty factors of Japanese gamers, but they are more likely to place number 2 or hold neck and neck with Nintendo.
They've damaged their ability in both Europe and the US to do better than number 2.
And, unlike Microsoft, they don't have billions of US dollars in free cash sitting around to bleed out for decades to come.
I doubt they're dead, but they're not going to win this platform round - the best they can hope for is a stalemate and aim for a turnaround in late 2007 and 2008.
The worst part was that the hamsters were sleeping on the job. I guess they're not excited about the release games.
It's hard to get hamsters excited about FPS games, considering their lack of opposable thumbs. And they're just not as keen on sports games, since they tend to huddle in their little Cell processor cages hoping not to get trampled by the football players.
Just think, you've changed into the droid version with the Princess Leia head, and you activate your light saber as the Wii controller vibrates with sound... HMMMMMMMMM.... oh, yeah, I'm there.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a fact that the Microsoft XBOX 360 and the Sony Playstation 3 will give you 1080, while Pretendo will just give you Piss as in piss on you as they always have.
Why would I care about 1080 - i or p? I don't plan to buy an HDTV until flat-panel HDTV costs less than $300 for a 30 inch set. My first degree was in Business Management (Sales and Marketing focus) - I know the price will drop to around $300 if I just wait a few years. Until then, my digital cable settop box will convert the shows for me.
By that point the PS3 will retail for $250 as well.
In the meantime, I'll be having fun with my Wii. It has fun games. I don't care about the HDTV aspect.
But, I'm amazed that only Gamestop will take preorders - I planned on preordering at EBX, like I did for most of my other consoles and handhelds.
Hmm. Well, I'm all for the pink month, especially since it is very true that men can - and are - getting breast cancer.
But I must admit I'm far more concerned about women getting breast cancer, and think my feelings on the subject are those spoken in The Princess Bride: "There's a shortage of perfect breasts in this world."
Nah, I usually just run linux on my dual core machines. We've got programs that have been running for months, figuring out the statistical inferences of the genetic relationships between subjects in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, and how that correlates with their DNA sequences and inheritance, and you can't do that on Win boxen.
But some other people apparently do that - it's a fairly cheap way to get a nice high-power graphics rendering machine, if you look at the architecture - but my group has no real interest in such features, so we just use standard linux boxen.
player 1 said: The reader being surreptitiously carried by the American-tourist-targeting mugger/kidnapper/whatever in whatever foreign country you're going to won't be.
player 2 said: I was as shocked as you will probably be when you read this, when I found out that Florida is not, in fact, a foreign country.
Not to mention people waiting by the baggage carousels to read your passports for any international airline, and the people in cars next to you going to Canada and Mexico.
Going to be a lot of cloned passports.
are you happy to see me?
Last time I bought an xBox it ended up I only bought four games for it, three of which were cross-platform and thus not needed.
I can't see wasting money on the 360, as I still don't see any games that I want for it which aren't cross-platform.
I'll stick to buying the Wii and maybe buy a PS3 to run structural genomics Linux work on when the price drops below $300.
Seriously, I've read many print edition articles in both Fortune and the Wall Street Journal which basically say that the whole Blu-Ray debacle may drag Sony down and cripple the company.
These are business analysts, and they usually pump new tech, but even they are down on this Bet The Company decision by Sony.
I doubt it. I'm in my 40's and I've noticed a distinct lack of cow bell in today's music.
But forcing Blu-Ray on me won't get me to buy the White Album again - I already burned it onto MP3.
I have to agree, I tend to buy my CDs direct from the band. It's just that there are so many sucky songs nowadays.
That plus no giant album cover art.
Wow, you didn't even finish reading the article summary, did you? It also mentions higher priced NDS games, depending on anticipation; do you think Wii games will be any different, in Japan?
I quoted exact amounts from today's Wall Street Journal B1/B6 article on pricing for Japan, as well as pricing for US (NAm) and Europe.
My point being that there is indeed an even higher cost-of-opportunity for buying a Sony PS3. While the console price was dropped in Japan for the PS3, the games are more expensive - and if you live in Europe, the PS3 is very expensive plus the games are expensive. In the US, the console is at the midpoint between the Japan and EU pricings, and the game costs are not quite as bad.
The Wii and xBox360, however, are in fact not priced to these levels, and in point of fact the Wii games are substantially cheaper than the PS3 or 360 games.
Information about that is conflicting, I'd guess if you're in America you're free to import what you want but if you're in Europe you're screwed, as always.
Well, since I'm in Seattle, that's cool. I can see why region encoding might matter in Europe. A Japanese or Chinese game frequently will have a (primitive) US English dialog choice, except for cut-scenes and other chrome, but in Europe they tend to want the base language plus English (e.g. in France you get French and English).
I bought a whole bunch of Nintendo GameBoy Pokemon games in France, and we always had to use different cartridges, or we could mess up the encoding when we stored them. But they still worked.
Today's B1 and B6 article in the Wall Street Journal quotes a retail list price for the Sony PS3 of USD $499 in the US, E$499 ($638) in Europe, and 47,600Y ($409) in Japan.
The Wii price is USD $250 and xBox360 core console about USD $300 ($400 with big HD).
The Wii and PS3 prices are launch prices, without non-standard bundling. I believe the launch bundle for the Wii includes Wii Sports (you know, Tennis, etc) and a Wiimote and nunchuck, and I'm not sure of the PS launch bundle.
The baseline PS3 costs $499 so you are wrong. BTW, accessories for the Wii sound ludicrously expensive if your figures are correct.
The article is about Japanese costs for games. In Japan, Sony's PS retails for $402 USD (priced in Yen).
I know it's fun to bash Sony and all lately, but the caption below the title is talking about XBOX 360 games being $72. Is that $3 newsworthy?
No, but if a Sony PS3 game sells for $72 US in Japan (Yen) and a Wii game sells for $40 US in Japan (Yen), that's quite a dramatic difference.
Remember, Sony makes a lot of the profit on the game sales, and loses money on the console (almost $200 with their new Japan pricing, according to today's B1 page article in the Wall Street Journal). Nintendo makes a profit on their consoles, and also makes a profit on their games.
Does that mean that we can get Japanese games for our Nintendo Wii and not worry about region-encoding?
Or will we have to wait until March before they let us buy those in Seattle?
Or better yet... Get a Nintendo Wii, save money and sink Sony's market share.
Or, for the price of a Sony PS3 in the US or EU, buy two Ninteno Wii's and give one to a friend so you can play Animal Crossing at each other's villages!
Just think of it, you too could add to your cluster a PS3, while watching Sony lose $200 per machine, and get a nice machine to hack!
We don't need no steenkin DRM!
From what's been said the PS3 games aren't going to be restricted by region, so you should be able to order Japanese games and play them in EU or NA.
...
Should be and are is not the same. Sure, if Sony got it's act together and realized why Nintendo was eating Sony's shorts, they could get a clue stick and kill their region-encoded games they've been pushing, and not be so DRM-heavy, but the reality is they rely on region-encoding far more than Nintendo is planning to be.
Nintendo got a ride on the non-DRM clue train and decided that there were vast untapped markets in the US for formerly Japan-only games - Sony is watching the clue train go by, but showing no signs of jumping on board. They're too high and mighty to do that
I get sweaty playing DDR and that boxing game with the 3lb "gloves" and that sword fighting game with the 5lb sword. Throw in some old Nintendo running pad olympics, and I think you've got a business plan!
I used to own Konami shares - the Konami firm actually owns a chain of sports gymnasiums in Japan, and I could easily see them expanding DDR with some Wii games here and doing quite well. It's a fairly profitable component of their business, not counting the gaming machines (Mah Jong and gambling ones) they also run here in the US.
and a practice dummy to use it on!
But it would be nice if you had to charge up the game console by running a bit, or have some interactive Tae Kwon Do (blue belt) before you could play Tetris.
I think you've hit on Sony's real problem: I don't care about any of the games being released now. Can the PS3 survive long enough for the games I actually want to play to make it out on it?
I agree, the problem is that there's nothing there to excite us. All the exciting games are either Nintendo Wii or they're cross-platform and thus mean we can play Sim: Island on the Wii and Spore on the Wii just as easily as on the PS3.
Trying to keep the cool Japanese games out of the Euro and US markets is the problem - not a good strategy. Pointing out that one is dropping the price in Japan while not dropping it in the US and Europe just makes us madder.
Sony's dropping the price of the PS3 to $410 six months AFTER they should have dropped it to $399 is a day late and a dollar short.
They've already lost not just mindshare - of hardcore and midcore gamers - they've lost Developer mindspace, as many have already rejigged their games to make sure they now are releasing Wii games.
They still have games that cost $10 extra than what a Wii game does.
They still have an overly FPS and Sports focus that gives them no growth areas, while the Wii is expanding into uncharted territory and even importing Japanese and Chinese games into Euro and US markets.
They still have the DRM and Blu-Ray mentality that just makes everyone want to do something else - anything else - to avoid them.
So, no, they can't convince the world.
Will they break even? No. They've already lost a lot on this, and they know it - had to scale back shipments as a result. They may even make number 1 in Japan - due to loyalty factors of Japanese gamers, but they are more likely to place number 2 or hold neck and neck with Nintendo.
They've damaged their ability in both Europe and the US to do better than number 2.
And, unlike Microsoft, they don't have billions of US dollars in free cash sitting around to bleed out for decades to come.
I doubt they're dead, but they're not going to win this platform round - the best they can hope for is a stalemate and aim for a turnaround in late 2007 and 2008.
The worst part was that the hamsters were sleeping on the job. I guess they're not excited about the release games.
It's hard to get hamsters excited about FPS games, considering their lack of opposable thumbs. And they're just not as keen on sports games, since they tend to huddle in their little Cell processor cages hoping not to get trampled by the football players.
Just think, you've changed into the droid version with the Princess Leia head, and you activate your light saber as the Wii controller vibrates with sound ... HMMMMMMMMM .... oh, yeah, I'm there.
Well, when I saw the Hamster cage, I have to admit, that was kind of shocking.