According to an AP story, municipal Wi-Fi is going nowhere fast. Seriously... maybe it's the time of night, lack of sleep, alcohol... but I thought that was funny I got a chuckle. I wanted to know if anyone else talked about it. I scrolled through the pages, upon pages, of responses... nada.
When I am done my career in IT, I'm dreaming of moving far away from here, at least a 9 day drive somewhere... settling down and having a break/family/life. Move to Canada:D It's cheap:D
Amongst all of the replies... I would like to post my response to this comment and post.
I don't buy a game for the movies. It's the reason i stopped playing Final Fantasy after 8. 8 Had enough cinematics to make me want to only pay $13 for it, cause that's how much I could have seen the goddamn movie for in the theatre.
Maybe someone will spare the rest of the world with cutscenes, and put some "game" into videogames. You know... good things, like storyline while giving purpose to killing those aliens, or even *gulp* themes.
IMO the worst thing you could do is do "cinematics to explain why you are playing the game, or the next leg of the game."
And you agree'd that it was beta in the signup agreement, that you cannot hold them responsible for any lost sensitive materials right? Honestly... get over it. Anyone who would store sensitive (CANNOT LOSE) data on a beta service and stops using a traditional way is just idiotic...
Does NPD evaluate online sales of Half-Life 2 into it's figures? That game sold more copies than WoW did in 2 years I am willing to bet. very very important game.
Yes, I agree that color lasers are a lot cheaper than they used to be. However, there is still the lingering "ooooh those are expensive to run." thoughts that abound whenever you suggest a client use a color laser.
Personally, I have had to physically show people on paper, what the difference and cost savings that are involved in color lasers.
(The following is Canadian Prices) People walk into a store, see a $99 inkjet that does photos, look over in the laser aisle and would see a $299 machine. If the customer isn't scared off by that, they will look closer at the ink of about $70-80 for a set of color and black cartridges, and about $400 for a set of toner cartridges. That is the killer. That is when you have to explain that there is pretty much 10 sets of inkjet cartridges inside of that single set of toner.
What they need to do, is do a test of the "best inkjet" that everyone says is so cheap (ask around and i'm sure you'll get a few responses). Then, take 4 different color lasers. Buy 4 sets of ink for each printer. Run through them all and see how many sheets you can get that "look good", and then just start printing with the color laser, stacking all the paper in piles. Then put THAT on the advertisments and bulleting boards.
Main issue here. The box stores get paid to sell inkjets rather than lasers, because people will have to replace them more... they sell warranties ontop of the inkjets... well inkjets are a money maker for box stores and wholesalers...
Personally, I would be setting up a server like Blizzard is going to when the arena season is over.
For those who don't know, the winners of the tournaments are going to be character-copied to a private blizzard arena server, where they will be taking part in the final tournament.
I would be doing a similar thing, licensing a private server for use in this very matter. Why not have WoW:Arena Battles? If Blizzard can swing a private server for this, why not have [insert sponsorship group name] license a private server directly from Blizzard. The sponsorship group handles all the signups and whatever. When the lists are complete, they submit them to Blizzard for a character-copy to the private arena server. This would allow *ANY* character/group/team/guild to compete in a custom arena server.
I mean seriously... it wouldn't be that hard. They restrict transfer of characters from certain places to others based on the ease/difficulty of attaining rank/gear and such... but in the Arena server it wouldn't matter.
I think something like this would have to be a lead project by the sponsorship group. Lets say CheckSix decides to do something like this. They would have to contact Blizzard and do the licensing. Blizzard could have a Licensing System. Something that could do it would be like:
$50,000 USD for an Arena Server License (4month)
- 100x5v5 Team Character Transfer (500 Characters)
- 200x3v3 Team Character Transfer (600 Characters)
- 800x1v1 Team Character Transfer (800 Characters)
- Server Farm Rental
- 5 GM Accounts for Management Purposes
- Must be a known sponsor of tournament competitions (to avoid no-name groups getting their own servers)
Actually, Failure Rates or acceptable defect rates are scary. Today's world has throwaway technology out the yin yang. If you cannot see that they want a product to basically outlive it's cost to produce by as small a margin as possible, so you can feel you got your money's worth and go buy another one... well wake up please.
The company's figure out how long it takes for a product to die, or how many out of their production line (quality testing) are defective. Then they design their return policy and/or repair policy based on those figures.
If you buy a Razr, and it dies in 2 months, and Motorola's value for producing that phone was worth 1 to 1.5 months of service, they will not feel bad for you at all. You will have to get another phone. Now that is harsh, but it's probably more along the lines of 2 years of life span out of a cellphone with normal usage excluding physical damage or liquid damage.
I don't know, ya it may be pretty hardcore mean of a company to do it, but it's the business and society we live in today. Throw away technology reigns. I know i've sold a lot of phones, but trust me when I say, that it's very hard to take that number of broken phones and put them into a manufacturers defect, and how many of them were actually caused by the user, and it slipped by. You can drop a phone and jar the port on the bottom, and fix it yourself. Then bring it into a store and say "my plugin won't go in." and we send it off for repair. They may fix it thinking a pin may have been bent, causing you to not be able to plug it in, and you forced it in causeing the damage. Therefore their minds go "Manufacturers defect of a $0.05 part... ya we'll fix it. Not worth making the customer mad saying they have to buy a new phone."
The Razr is one of the best phones on the market today. Just because a small amount of phones are defective and the seller/dealer/provider will only repair a phone that has a blatant manufacturing defect in it, doesn't mean that all phones are like this.
Out of every 20 grey Razr's I sell on Telus, there is about 1 bad one, and it's a problem one. For every 10 Pink Razr's I sell there's a bad one. I don't know what they did to the pink ones but... meh.
I bought one myself, and to the person who said it has no features, you cannot compare all Razr's across all providers. It cannot be done.
Every provider does things differently. Now as I say that here's what the Razr on Telus has.
Digit Dial (by number/contact) Picture and Video recording/messaging Text Messaging Sends and Recieves Phone Calls Bluetooth MP3's with use of a datacable Java built in
What it doesn't do:
Television/XM Radio/Mobile Music Amp'd no expandable memory (but that's what the Krzr is for)
It is extremely durable, it has a metal casing which is more than the other models Telus sells. It has the best reception out of any Dual Digital phone Telus currently provides in my opinion. I have gone into areas that every other phone either has no service or switches to Analog, and it gets service with no bars or 1 bar.
The only other phone Telus offers that is almost as good is the LG 8500 (Chocolate). Similar reception, but is easy destroyed (plastic). I have had more problems with Telus' 8500 than I care to mention. However, I still have my Razr and I worship the ground Motorola walks on. They make quality goods, and I will always stand by Motorola.
Warhammer Online will be cool, but 40k would be better. Same diversity if not more, PLUS you get the future thing which most company's have failed with. IMO it's because their stories are crap. At least with 40k there isn't really a story, so you don't have to worry about it. You go in, kill or be killed. It's simple... that's why it will succeed.
If he makes a movie that's fine. If he makes a game, all the power to him. Regardless of the developers political agenda are, people will play the game if they want to. As long as I can fart in the general direction of then I'll play it as well.
Most of the games out there have some sort of political undertone, but how many kids pay attention to them? The kids out there today don't care what the game stands for, as long as they get to do what they want to do. If a game is sporting street racing, they want to be able to smash a car against the rails in hopes to crush some innocent bystandard. If a company sports a way to comb a barbies hair, they will play it to see what kind of funky styles they can do that no other barbie would wear. It fits for all genders across all genres. It even spans across age groups, as the 10 year olds are playing GTA: Vice City because they want to stab a hooker, rob a store, etc.
Keep making games, kids will keep playing them. Oddworld was definately one of the better side scrolling games to come out when it looked like it was going to be a dying breed of gamestyles. It kinda brought new life to the genre.
I was thinking more along the lines of Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears... oh wait they're in a video game...
At least with Guitar Hero there's a little bit of an insert of rock music into a mainstream to impress young minds with. Nothing like nose-bleeding rock and roll to battle the onslaught of Snoop Dogg and Eminem. Lets vote NO for brainwashing!
Honestly, I have never recieved Piracy Spam. I get tonnes of Viagra and the latest inside trading information on very informative products like.... Viagra stocks... lol
Maybe it only affects those IN China, and not people in China broadcasting outside of China?
But I agree with the deaths of hundreds of people in China. The American organizations have to realize, yes they are trying to do good, but yes they are going to kill them when they find them. They will put them in a holding cell, then they will "die of undiagnosed heart complications."
*shrug* If they want to have their name attached to those events, all the power to them. I still won't buy their stuff:P
You should be into the review writing business for these company's.
Your reply has given me more information about the actual gameplay, how things work (mini-game-esque even) and how the game compares to the FPS Genre on consoles.
Not being a fan of non-mouse/keyboard FPS' games, I may have to give this one a shot. Zonk, as much as he writes reviews and I usually find them to have some factual merit, your response seems to add more depth to his findings, explaining more where he could have gone into more detail about the actual functionality of certain aspects of the games interaction with the user.
Knowing that the game has many features of the gameplay, as Zonk described them, helps. And I don't believe your response has negated anything he said. Rather, I feel it has added a lot.
I'm replying because a mod point just wouldn't do the same job. Needs more explanation:D
The Razr V3 or V3M or whatever it is on Rogers Canada is GSM/GPRS and it does EDGE.
And off topic, but... switching providers in Canada = buying different phones anyway. There is no provider in Canada even across the 3 or so CDMA providers in this great nation, that allow you to freely sign a contract with an existing phone.
I think Bell Mobility in the East allows you to add a foreign ESN onto their system, but there is some sort of fee for it. Rogers is the only one that I know of that is GSM unless FIDO has GSM... not sure...
Ok well as much as it doesn't work, the Razr DOES have an EvDO solution. I have one on Telus Mobility in Canada.
It's quite fast compared to the 1x/EDGE and whatever else is out there. It's about 300kbps on average from what I can tell. It loads good in about a second, globe and mail shows up in about 20 seconds minus a bunch of crap they put on their site...
Worst thing is the articles subject. Pages look like garbage.
However on my Blackberry 7130e they don't look bad. I got an email about gamespy's review of The Burning Crusade expansion, and I was waitin gin line at McDonalds, so I started reading the article on it.
It loaded everything in the perfect width of the page, where the pictures were, it put the text above and below it... unlike shoving the page down by columns, and rendering it page by page by column... like most sites with tags. Not sure what they did differently... but it is definately readable.
Blackberry Browser gets a higher rating than any other PDA. Even the iPaq's screw up frames so badly that you want to scream...
I would agree with point #5 for the most part. But UO is in it's 9th year... the longest running MMO that is still running today... That in itself kinda redeems itself, but my thoughts are in... "The players of the first game and LBR, they are long gone." Today's UO player is NOT the same as yesteryear, and that will never change. However, if they're still goin, all the power to em...
I played for 5 years, then quit. Time to move onto new things.
Ya, today's games however sacrifice graphics for gameplay. It's the way the market is directing it. In a marketing perspective it's perfect.
You make a game with awesome graphics, but 40 hours of gameplay. The people get bored and buy a new game. The cycle repeats.
Downside? People lose respect for the games that they don't get enjoyment out of. They stop buying games from them. Then they try to make a better game, get bought out by a larger company, and make games like The Matrix: The Path of Neo...
All I can say, is at least they were working together, and whatever games they produced, they knew what they were. Unlike EA's purchase of the Ultima Online game. Where they totally messed it up.
They've done it many times in the past, where they buy a game, develop it under their name, and they don't let the designers do what they wanted. The game changes, it comes out and people don't buy it.
Please let DICE do their own thing... ya, they have your name, you can approve/disapprove of certain things, but don't go saying "Oh no, we should only have 2 spell books and lets put some futuristic vehicles in it. Hey lets add a racing segment, with dancing baby clowns..." You know, stuff that EA would do:)
Regardless of how dumb this question is, your explanation is pointless. The question asked whether or not sony COULD convince us, not whether or not they had to.
If they aren't a dominant force (which I don't believe there is any one dominant force at this moment in time in the console market), how would they go about convincing people? It will be very hard to at least put on a facade of a dominant unrefutable force to be reckoned with, when deciding on what console to purchase for your loved one this holiday season.
I don't buy anything when it first comes out anyway, there are always problems at the start, and it is the same with anything that a consumer buys. Someone has to buy it or we won't know about the issues, but I for one will let the cows goto the slaughter house before I go ahead and test my luck with a PS3. It would take something immensly cool and not-done-before to make me want to purchase a PS3. Last console I bought was an N64, and it was a big mistake for me. I could play better games on the PC than on N64, but the marketing team managed to convince me that GoldenEye was the be-all-end-all of games. So I bought it. It was awesome, but i regret paying X dollars for a system I purchased to play one game. No other game on N64 peaked my interest enough.
Sony needs a good marketing team, they may be able to convince people to buy a machine.
I don't know about you, but I heard 13 year olds saying fucktard more than they say they're sorry around here. I think they should change the rating schema. =D
As far as "Fizzling out", I think that will only happen if the newer players emerging as they grow up and WoW gets older, do not understand the Warcraft scene. If blizzard keeps innovating the warcraft/starcraft/diablo franchizes successfully, then there will be a constant stream of new interested players.
That is what makes it so popular, there are so many people young and old that played warcraft during the 3+ games of warcraft plus all the starcraft games. They built up a reputation for great games no matter how young/old you are. That's why there are 10-60 year olds playing this game. They checked it out cause Blizzard was a reputable name, got hooked. It's that simple.
They designed an innovative game that stole the minds and eyes of many bodies in the world. As long as they keep new players coming in by continuing the reputation building they've done in the real world, people will continue to login and build reputation in game.
Slashdot Mirror
When I am done my career in IT, I'm dreaming of moving far away from here, at least a 9 day drive somewhere... settling down and having a break/family/life. Move to Canada :D It's cheap :D
Amongst all of the replies... I would like to post my response to this comment and post.
I don't buy a game for the movies. It's the reason i stopped playing Final Fantasy after 8. 8 Had enough cinematics to make me want to only pay $13 for it, cause that's how much I could have seen the goddamn movie for in the theatre.
Maybe someone will spare the rest of the world with cutscenes, and put some "game" into videogames. You know... good things, like storyline while giving purpose to killing those aliens, or even *gulp* themes.
IMO the worst thing you could do is do "cinematics to explain why you are playing the game, or the next leg of the game."
So when it comes up in google cause they cached your post... will you sue /. or google?
And you agree'd that it was beta in the signup agreement, that you cannot hold them responsible for any lost sensitive materials right? Honestly... get over it. Anyone who would store sensitive (CANNOT LOSE) data on a beta service and stops using a traditional way is just idiotic...
Does NPD evaluate online sales of Half-Life 2 into it's figures? That game sold more copies than WoW did in 2 years I am willing to bet. very very important game.
Personally, I have had to physically show people on paper, what the difference and cost savings that are involved in color lasers.
(The following is Canadian Prices) People walk into a store, see a $99 inkjet that does photos, look over in the laser aisle and would see a $299 machine. If the customer isn't scared off by that, they will look closer at the ink of about $70-80 for a set of color and black cartridges, and about $400 for a set of toner cartridges. That is the killer. That is when you have to explain that there is pretty much 10 sets of inkjet cartridges inside of that single set of toner.
What they need to do, is do a test of the "best inkjet" that everyone says is so cheap (ask around and i'm sure you'll get a few responses). Then, take 4 different color lasers. Buy 4 sets of ink for each printer. Run through them all and see how many sheets you can get that "look good", and then just start printing with the color laser, stacking all the paper in piles. Then put THAT on the advertisments and bulleting boards.
Main issue here. The box stores get paid to sell inkjets rather than lasers, because people will have to replace them more... they sell warranties ontop of the inkjets... well inkjets are a money maker for box stores and wholesalers...
Hunter Weapon.
It's valid on so many levels.
For those who don't know, the winners of the tournaments are going to be character-copied to a private blizzard arena server, where they will be taking part in the final tournament.
I would be doing a similar thing, licensing a private server for use in this very matter. Why not have WoW:Arena Battles? If Blizzard can swing a private server for this, why not have [insert sponsorship group name] license a private server directly from Blizzard. The sponsorship group handles all the signups and whatever. When the lists are complete, they submit them to Blizzard for a character-copy to the private arena server. This would allow *ANY* character/group/team/guild to compete in a custom arena server.
I mean seriously... it wouldn't be that hard. They restrict transfer of characters from certain places to others based on the ease/difficulty of attaining rank/gear and such... but in the Arena server it wouldn't matter.
I think something like this would have to be a lead project by the sponsorship group. Lets say CheckSix decides to do something like this. They would have to contact Blizzard and do the licensing. Blizzard could have a Licensing System. Something that could do it would be like:
$50,000 USD for an Arena Server License (4month) - 100x5v5 Team Character Transfer (500 Characters) - 200x3v3 Team Character Transfer (600 Characters) - 800x1v1 Team Character Transfer (800 Characters) - Server Farm Rental - 5 GM Accounts for Management Purposes - Must be a known sponsor of tournament competitions (to avoid no-name groups getting their own servers)
Something like that...
Actually, Failure Rates or acceptable defect rates are scary. Today's world has throwaway technology out the yin yang. If you cannot see that they want a product to basically outlive it's cost to produce by as small a margin as possible, so you can feel you got your money's worth and go buy another one... well wake up please. The company's figure out how long it takes for a product to die, or how many out of their production line (quality testing) are defective. Then they design their return policy and/or repair policy based on those figures. If you buy a Razr, and it dies in 2 months, and Motorola's value for producing that phone was worth 1 to 1.5 months of service, they will not feel bad for you at all. You will have to get another phone. Now that is harsh, but it's probably more along the lines of 2 years of life span out of a cellphone with normal usage excluding physical damage or liquid damage. I don't know, ya it may be pretty hardcore mean of a company to do it, but it's the business and society we live in today. Throw away technology reigns. I know i've sold a lot of phones, but trust me when I say, that it's very hard to take that number of broken phones and put them into a manufacturers defect, and how many of them were actually caused by the user, and it slipped by. You can drop a phone and jar the port on the bottom, and fix it yourself. Then bring it into a store and say "my plugin won't go in." and we send it off for repair. They may fix it thinking a pin may have been bent, causing you to not be able to plug it in, and you forced it in causeing the damage. Therefore their minds go "Manufacturers defect of a $0.05 part ... ya we'll fix it. Not worth making the customer mad saying they have to buy a new phone."
I put that in there because someone was saying they just wanted a phone that makes phone calls. :P
I support this thread... almost
The Razr is one of the best phones on the market today. Just because a small amount of phones are defective and the seller/dealer/provider will only repair a phone that has a blatant manufacturing defect in it, doesn't mean that all phones are like this.
Out of every 20 grey Razr's I sell on Telus, there is about 1 bad one, and it's a problem one. For every 10 Pink Razr's I sell there's a bad one. I don't know what they did to the pink ones but... meh.
I bought one myself, and to the person who said it has no features, you cannot compare all Razr's across all providers. It cannot be done.
Every provider does things differently. Now as I say that here's what the Razr on Telus has.
Digit Dial (by number/contact)
Picture and Video recording/messaging
Text Messaging
Sends and Recieves Phone Calls
Bluetooth
MP3's with use of a datacable
Java built in
What it doesn't do:
Television/XM Radio/Mobile Music
Amp'd
no expandable memory (but that's what the Krzr is for)
It is extremely durable, it has a metal casing which is more than the other models Telus sells. It has the best reception out of any Dual Digital phone Telus currently provides in my opinion. I have gone into areas that every other phone either has no service or switches to Analog, and it gets service with no bars or 1 bar.
The only other phone Telus offers that is almost as good is the LG 8500 (Chocolate). Similar reception, but is easy destroyed (plastic). I have had more problems with Telus' 8500 than I care to mention. However, I still have my Razr and I worship the ground Motorola walks on. They make quality goods, and I will always stand by Motorola.
www.warhammeronline.com
Warhammer Online will be cool, but 40k would be better. Same diversity if not more, PLUS you get the future thing which most company's have failed with. IMO it's because their stories are crap. At least with 40k there isn't really a story, so you don't have to worry about it. You go in, kill or be killed. It's simple... that's why it will succeed.
Most of the games out there have some sort of political undertone, but how many kids pay attention to them? The kids out there today don't care what the game stands for, as long as they get to do what they want to do. If a game is sporting street racing, they want to be able to smash a car against the rails in hopes to crush some innocent bystandard. If a company sports a way to comb a barbies hair, they will play it to see what kind of funky styles they can do that no other barbie would wear. It fits for all genders across all genres. It even spans across age groups, as the 10 year olds are playing GTA: Vice City because they want to stab a hooker, rob a store, etc.
Keep making games, kids will keep playing them. Oddworld was definately one of the better side scrolling games to come out when it looked like it was going to be a dying breed of gamestyles. It kinda brought new life to the genre.
I was thinking more along the lines of Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears... oh wait they're in a video game...
At least with Guitar Hero there's a little bit of an insert of rock music into a mainstream to impress young minds with. Nothing like nose-bleeding rock and roll to battle the onslaught of Snoop Dogg and Eminem. Lets vote NO for brainwashing!
Maybe it only affects those IN China, and not people in China broadcasting outside of China?
But I agree with the deaths of hundreds of people in China. The American organizations have to realize, yes they are trying to do good, but yes they are going to kill them when they find them. They will put them in a holding cell, then they will "die of undiagnosed heart complications."
*shrug* If they want to have their name attached to those events, all the power to them. I still won't buy their stuff :P
You should be into the review writing business for these company's. Your reply has given me more information about the actual gameplay, how things work (mini-game-esque even) and how the game compares to the FPS Genre on consoles. Not being a fan of non-mouse/keyboard FPS' games, I may have to give this one a shot. Zonk, as much as he writes reviews and I usually find them to have some factual merit, your response seems to add more depth to his findings, explaining more where he could have gone into more detail about the actual functionality of certain aspects of the games interaction with the user. Knowing that the game has many features of the gameplay, as Zonk described them, helps. And I don't believe your response has negated anything he said. Rather, I feel it has added a lot. I'm replying because a mod point just wouldn't do the same job. Needs more explanation :D
And off topic, but... switching providers in Canada = buying different phones anyway. There is no provider in Canada even across the 3 or so CDMA providers in this great nation, that allow you to freely sign a contract with an existing phone.
I think Bell Mobility in the East allows you to add a foreign ESN onto their system, but there is some sort of fee for it. Rogers is the only one that I know of that is GSM unless FIDO has GSM... not sure...
Ok well as much as it doesn't work, the Razr DOES have an EvDO solution. I have one on Telus Mobility in Canada. It's quite fast compared to the 1x/EDGE and whatever else is out there. It's about 300kbps on average from what I can tell. It loads good in about a second, globe and mail shows up in about 20 seconds minus a bunch of crap they put on their site... Worst thing is the articles subject. Pages look like garbage. However on my Blackberry 7130e they don't look bad. I got an email about gamespy's review of The Burning Crusade expansion, and I was waitin gin line at McDonalds, so I started reading the article on it. It loaded everything in the perfect width of the page, where the pictures were, it put the text above and below it... unlike shoving the page down by columns, and rendering it page by page by column... like most sites with tags. Not sure what they did differently... but it is definately readable. Blackberry Browser gets a higher rating than any other PDA. Even the iPaq's screw up frames so badly that you want to scream...
I would agree with point #5 for the most part. But UO is in it's 9th year... the longest running MMO that is still running today... That in itself kinda redeems itself, but my thoughts are in... "The players of the first game and LBR, they are long gone." Today's UO player is NOT the same as yesteryear, and that will never change. However, if they're still goin, all the power to em...
I played for 5 years, then quit. Time to move onto new things.
Ya, today's games however sacrifice graphics for gameplay. It's the way the market is directing it. In a marketing perspective it's perfect.
You make a game with awesome graphics, but 40 hours of gameplay. The people get bored and buy a new game. The cycle repeats.
Downside? People lose respect for the games that they don't get enjoyment out of. They stop buying games from them. Then they try to make a better game, get bought out by a larger company, and make games like The Matrix: The Path of Neo...
All I can say, is at least they were working together, and whatever games they produced, they knew what they were. Unlike EA's purchase of the Ultima Online game. Where they totally messed it up.
:)
They've done it many times in the past, where they buy a game, develop it under their name, and they don't let the designers do what they wanted. The game changes, it comes out and people don't buy it.
Please let DICE do their own thing... ya, they have your name, you can approve/disapprove of certain things, but don't go saying "Oh no, we should only have 2 spell books and lets put some futuristic vehicles in it. Hey lets add a racing segment, with dancing baby clowns..." You know, stuff that EA would do
Regardless of how dumb this question is, your explanation is pointless. The question asked whether or not sony COULD convince us, not whether or not they had to.
If they aren't a dominant force (which I don't believe there is any one dominant force at this moment in time in the console market), how would they go about convincing people? It will be very hard to at least put on a facade of a dominant unrefutable force to be reckoned with, when deciding on what console to purchase for your loved one this holiday season.
I don't buy anything when it first comes out anyway, there are always problems at the start, and it is the same with anything that a consumer buys. Someone has to buy it or we won't know about the issues, but I for one will let the cows goto the slaughter house before I go ahead and test my luck with a PS3. It would take something immensly cool and not-done-before to make me want to purchase a PS3. Last console I bought was an N64, and it was a big mistake for me. I could play better games on the PC than on N64, but the marketing team managed to convince me that GoldenEye was the be-all-end-all of games. So I bought it. It was awesome, but i regret paying X dollars for a system I purchased to play one game. No other game on N64 peaked my interest enough.
Sony needs a good marketing team, they may be able to convince people to buy a machine.
I don't know about you, but I heard 13 year olds saying fucktard more than they say they're sorry around here. I think they should change the rating schema. =D
That is what makes it so popular, there are so many people young and old that played warcraft during the 3+ games of warcraft plus all the starcraft games. They built up a reputation for great games no matter how young/old you are. That's why there are 10-60 year olds playing this game. They checked it out cause Blizzard was a reputable name, got hooked. It's that simple.
They designed an innovative game that stole the minds and eyes of many bodies in the world. As long as they keep new players coming in by continuing the reputation building they've done in the real world, people will continue to login and build reputation in game.