Only the first island is Hispanic. The second island is comprised of eastern Europeans and the third island is made up of English speaking Caucasians and Asians. As the other poster mentioned, you can also choose the race of your character. Current skins include Black, White, Asian, Polynesian, and even Albino characters; the default character is Black. You're really reaching if you're looking for White on Hispanic racial undertones in this game.
My problem with this is that the industry usually defines fun as party games or mini games. There's this delusion that for a game to be fun, it must be simple. A game can be both fun and deep. It's not an either/or situation. What's more, people assume that there is no value in a game that is not "fun". I would not qualify games like World of Warcraft, Shadow of the Colossus, and Oblivion as "fun". However, there is value in the kind of experience they offer. Think of the film industry as an analogy. A movie can be fun and still be deeper than your typical Will Farrel comedy. Likewise, movies like Schindler's List and Hotel Rwanda are not fun in any way. That does not make them bad movies or the experience they offer worthless.
You could maybe count the slimline PS2. It did improve on a few things, but it also cut out the HDD compatibility. It really only affected FFXI players. Still, in those people's eyes, the slimline was probably an inferior machine.
It may have kept them from going under completely, but it was what lost Nintendo's market lead to Sony. One can argue that Nintendo survived the N64 and GC phase, but it was hardly thriving (at least in the console space), and your assertion that it didn't hurt Nintendo until late in the GC lifespan is wrong. The SNES sold 49 million units worldwide. The N64, 33 million units. The Gamecube, just 22 million units. All this while the total market was expanding. Like you said, 1st party exclusive kept them afloat, but that's all they were doing and it's all they will do for the PS3 if it loses it's major third party exclusives, like Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy.
The main reason the Xbox had 3rd party exclusives was because its architecture is almost identical to that of a PC, which meant a title could be released on both platforms with very little extra development cost. Developers weren't just developing for the Xbox, they were developing for the PC too. Also, Microsoft is well known for providing good development tools which, in turn, lower the cost of development. Sony is notorious for not providing those tools. If a game doesn't cost as much to develop, you don't need as large of an install base to sell it on. And lastly Microsoft just threw a whole lot of money at the problem. The Xbox actually lost $4 billion over its lifetime. No small part of this was Microsoft's expenses paying for 3rd party exclusives and flat out buying up developers.
SOE and SCE will not stop making PS3 exclusives. But 1st party exclusives aren't enough for a system to be successful. This is essentially what happened to Nintendo with the N64 and the Gamecube. Those consoles were fueled almost completely by 1st party exclusives and it hurt them big time.
People make this comparison a lot, and I don't think it applies. The 360 had pretty bad launch, but they didn't have to have a good launch. They launched in a vacuum with a whole year to get their crap together. They didn't have to worry about exclusives fleeing to other consoles or pressure to drop the price. They were the only game in town. That's why they did it so soon.
The PS3 is in an entirely different environment. It doesn't matter if it's selling better than the 360 did at launch. It's not competing against the 360 one year ago. It's competing against the 360 (and the Wii) now. It has to sell better than the 360 is selling now, not last year. If two people are racing, and one is given a head start, it doesn't make much sense for the second person to say, "well I'm running faster than he was when he started out". It might be a nice consolation, but he's still going to lose the race. The PS3 has a lot of ground to make up and they're not doing it. In fact they're losing ground.
Sony is in a bad position. They need to make some corrections to their plan. A price drop is the most obvious, but a good library would help too. It can't just be a good library though. It has to be a better library than the 360's, and they have to remember that that's a moving target. The Titanic is sinking and Sony's on deck playing classical music. All this spinning the numbers and looking at things through rose colored glasses isn't helping. It's just keeping people from seeing the problems.
Technically the least expensive consoles are the Gamecube and the PS2, both of which sold less than the Wii. There's more to the equation than just price. The games play a very large role.
No, I considered it. These numbers are US and Canada only, so the comparison is perfectly apt. NPD does not monitor oversees sales figures. In Japan, the numbers are actually worse for Sony. I think this article sums up the situation well. As for Europe, the fact that they haven't released yet there is a bad thing, not an excuse. It would be better for the PS3 to be selling poorly in Europe at this point rather than not selling at all.
It might be to early to predict the exact outcome, but the positioning in this first year is crucial for all companies involved. If Sony can't reach a critical mass with the PS3 fast enough, then developers will stop making exclusive games since they can't make a profit without a large enough install base. As I've stated we've already seen this with VF and GTA. Without exclusive games, the incentive to buy a PS3 diminishes and their sales lag even further behind the competitors. As sales lag more, even more exclusives flee the console to recoup their investments on other systems. It's circular. It's exponentially more difficult to reclaim ground you've lost than it is to keep ground you've already made. At this point, I don't think Sony's fate is written in stone. The margins are still narrow enough that they could come out on top. However, it's going to require a significant price drop or a plethora of excellent exclusive games to regain the ground that they have already lost, neither of which is on the horizon any time soon.
I don't think that the 360's numbers are all that low. Outside of Nov. and Dec. 200k-300k units is about what a console would normally sell. By that, the PS3's numbers aren't even that low. At this point in the game though, it's not enough for Sony to be selling the average amount. They're behind, and they need to make up ground. At this point they're still losing it.
Are you seriously trying to spin the fact that Sony has fewer units on the market than both the Wii and the 360 and is selling them at a slower pace as a good thing? Are you really lumping in PS2 units with PS3 units to inflate the numbers? Are you actually stating that Naughty Dog's game, the one that has only one screenshot available and no name, is "insane" and "people are going nuts over right now"?
I call shill
Sales wise, Sony has a problem. They've sold fewer units than either of their competitors and they're selling them at a slower rate, which means that gulf will only increase. If this continues, more and more franchises that were exclusive to Sony will move to become multi platform. Assassin's Creed, GTA, and VF have already done so. The PS3 may be a great system with great games, but from a sales perspective their situation is dire.
If Nintendo keeps numbers like this up though, the PS3/360 debate becomes moot. They would be the undisputed sales leader by the middle of next year. Even the PS2 rarely broke 400,000 units during a non-holiday-season month. And who knows what they Wii sales figures would be if they could keep up with demand.
This is the problem you always run into when you try to segment a group based on arbitrary criteria. To some people, hardcore means competitive gamers. To others, it may just mean someone who likes games that are more complex than Zuma. Defining games is a bit easier than defining the players though. You're still going to get some games that are cross overs like the Sims, or Animal Crossing, but for the most part it's pretty intuitive. Cars and Gears of War are aimed at totally different audiences. This should be pretty self evident. There's almost no cross-ever between the two demographics, meaning there aren't going to be many people out there who purchase both Cars and Gears of War.
Basically the gist of the article is that historically games have been mostly aimed at the group of people buying Gears of War (and people like them), but more and more games are being targeted towards the group of people buying Cars (and people like them).
This is what worries me about the industries "new" focus on demographics outside the traditional 18-34 year old male that has sustained it for so long. From a development and artistic perspective a lot of these games aren't anything new, a lot are very large steps backwards. It's the same platforming formula or mini-game, only with new controls so grandpa or junior doesn't have to spend as much time figuring it out.
People like to say that traditional games were stuck in the same rut, but I would disagree. Changes and improvements were incremental, but they were there if you looked. It takes time, but over the years these changes added up to wholly different experiences.
Inherently, there's nothing wrong with this. I think it's important to push gaming beyond its traditional boundaries. My concern is that publishers will see this as an easy out. Why spend X amount of dollars trying to make a game that will move a genre forward, when you can spend 1/10*X amount of dollars on a rehash of a decade old game with a new marketing spin.
Obviously it's not quite that simple and a lot of these games are still great games. Wii Sports is tons of fun. However, on the software side, it's incredibly dated gameplay. When the drive to expand the market to new demographics comes at the expense of innovating in established genres, I think it's a net loss for games as a medium.
Really? I'm sorry, I don't even know where to start. Xbox Live is not without its share of problems, but Sony is a very, very long ways from "teaching Microsoft how to do online right".
Seriously, their user base has been saying this for 2 and a half years now. Why are they just now coming to this realization? Microsoft keeps such tight control over XBL and has standards in place for just about every aspect of it. How is it then, that they certify so many games with flat out abysmal matchmaking systems? For a product that touts its online functionality as the primary feature over its competitors, Microsoft is essentially ignoring a huge portion of that experience.
He's not presenting this as some kind of crystal ball that is going to tell you exactly how many units a game will sell. The questions are fuzzy because it's a subjective test. This is an article with game developers as the intended readership. Yes, you could answer them favorably for just about any game, but this isn't some kind of marketing tool to pull the wool over the publics' eyes and make them think a game is better than it really is. These are questions for a game developer to honestly ask themselves and answer only to themselves so that they can improve their game.
Everyone's tearing this apart like it's nothing more than common sense, but he makes some good points in the article. For instance there's a segment about how a game can be recognizable and familiar to audiences without relying on movie licenses or previous IPs. With the loads of licensed crap out there these days, this is certainly something I would want developers to consider while making their game.
Just because the statistic is old doesn't mean that it's inaccurate. While it's possible that things have changed a bit, it's highly unlikely that it would be more than a few percentage points. 7 years old isn't that out of date. If there are newer statistics that show the situation has changed, then by all means cite them. If not, it's perfectly acceptable to use that one.
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Only the first island is Hispanic. The second island is comprised of eastern Europeans and the third island is made up of English speaking Caucasians and Asians. As the other poster mentioned, you can also choose the race of your character. Current skins include Black, White, Asian, Polynesian, and even Albino characters; the default character is Black. You're really reaching if you're looking for White on Hispanic racial undertones in this game.
My problem with this is that the industry usually defines fun as party games or mini games. There's this delusion that for a game to be fun, it must be simple. A game can be both fun and deep. It's not an either/or situation. What's more, people assume that there is no value in a game that is not "fun". I would not qualify games like World of Warcraft, Shadow of the Colossus, and Oblivion as "fun". However, there is value in the kind of experience they offer. Think of the film industry as an analogy. A movie can be fun and still be deeper than your typical Will Farrel comedy. Likewise, movies like Schindler's List and Hotel Rwanda are not fun in any way. That does not make them bad movies or the experience they offer worthless.
Disk drive about 3 months in. MS replaced it for free.
Now that I think of it, there were also some BC problems with the slimlines IIRC.
You could maybe count the slimline PS2. It did improve on a few things, but it also cut out the HDD compatibility. It really only affected FFXI players. Still, in those people's eyes, the slimline was probably an inferior machine.
It may have kept them from going under completely, but it was what lost Nintendo's market lead to Sony. One can argue that Nintendo survived the N64 and GC phase, but it was hardly thriving (at least in the console space), and your assertion that it didn't hurt Nintendo until late in the GC lifespan is wrong. The SNES sold 49 million units worldwide. The N64, 33 million units. The Gamecube, just 22 million units. All this while the total market was expanding. Like you said, 1st party exclusive kept them afloat, but that's all they were doing and it's all they will do for the PS3 if it loses it's major third party exclusives, like Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy.
The main reason the Xbox had 3rd party exclusives was because its architecture is almost identical to that of a PC, which meant a title could be released on both platforms with very little extra development cost. Developers weren't just developing for the Xbox, they were developing for the PC too. Also, Microsoft is well known for providing good development tools which, in turn, lower the cost of development. Sony is notorious for not providing those tools. If a game doesn't cost as much to develop, you don't need as large of an install base to sell it on. And lastly Microsoft just threw a whole lot of money at the problem. The Xbox actually lost $4 billion over its lifetime. No small part of this was Microsoft's expenses paying for 3rd party exclusives and flat out buying up developers.
SOE and SCE will not stop making PS3 exclusives. But 1st party exclusives aren't enough for a system to be successful. This is essentially what happened to Nintendo with the N64 and the Gamecube. Those consoles were fueled almost completely by 1st party exclusives and it hurt them big time.
People make this comparison a lot, and I don't think it applies. The 360 had pretty bad launch, but they didn't have to have a good launch. They launched in a vacuum with a whole year to get their crap together. They didn't have to worry about exclusives fleeing to other consoles or pressure to drop the price. They were the only game in town. That's why they did it so soon.
The PS3 is in an entirely different environment. It doesn't matter if it's selling better than the 360 did at launch. It's not competing against the 360 one year ago. It's competing against the 360 (and the Wii) now. It has to sell better than the 360 is selling now, not last year. If two people are racing, and one is given a head start, it doesn't make much sense for the second person to say, "well I'm running faster than he was when he started out". It might be a nice consolation, but he's still going to lose the race. The PS3 has a lot of ground to make up and they're not doing it. In fact they're losing ground.
Sony is in a bad position. They need to make some corrections to their plan. A price drop is the most obvious, but a good library would help too. It can't just be a good library though. It has to be a better library than the 360's, and they have to remember that that's a moving target. The Titanic is sinking and Sony's on deck playing classical music. All this spinning the numbers and looking at things through rose colored glasses isn't helping. It's just keeping people from seeing the problems.
Technically the least expensive consoles are the Gamecube and the PS2, both of which sold less than the Wii. There's more to the equation than just price. The games play a very large role.
No, I considered it. These numbers are US and Canada only, so the comparison is perfectly apt. NPD does not monitor oversees sales figures. In Japan, the numbers are actually worse for Sony. I think this article sums up the situation well. As for Europe, the fact that they haven't released yet there is a bad thing, not an excuse. It would be better for the PS3 to be selling poorly in Europe at this point rather than not selling at all.
It might be to early to predict the exact outcome, but the positioning in this first year is crucial for all companies involved. If Sony can't reach a critical mass with the PS3 fast enough, then developers will stop making exclusive games since they can't make a profit without a large enough install base. As I've stated we've already seen this with VF and GTA. Without exclusive games, the incentive to buy a PS3 diminishes and their sales lag even further behind the competitors. As sales lag more, even more exclusives flee the console to recoup their investments on other systems. It's circular. It's exponentially more difficult to reclaim ground you've lost than it is to keep ground you've already made. At this point, I don't think Sony's fate is written in stone. The margins are still narrow enough that they could come out on top. However, it's going to require a significant price drop or a plethora of excellent exclusive games to regain the ground that they have already lost, neither of which is on the horizon any time soon.
I don't think that the 360's numbers are all that low. Outside of Nov. and Dec. 200k-300k units is about what a console would normally sell. By that, the PS3's numbers aren't even that low. At this point in the game though, it's not enough for Sony to be selling the average amount. They're behind, and they need to make up ground. At this point they're still losing it.
Are you seriously trying to spin the fact that Sony has fewer units on the market than both the Wii and the 360 and is selling them at a slower pace as a good thing? Are you really lumping in PS2 units with PS3 units to inflate the numbers? Are you actually stating that Naughty Dog's game, the one that has only one screenshot available and no name, is "insane" and "people are going nuts over right now"? I call shill
Sales wise, Sony has a problem. They've sold fewer units than either of their competitors and they're selling them at a slower rate, which means that gulf will only increase. If this continues, more and more franchises that were exclusive to Sony will move to become multi platform. Assassin's Creed, GTA, and VF have already done so. The PS3 may be a great system with great games, but from a sales perspective their situation is dire.
If Nintendo keeps numbers like this up though, the PS3/360 debate becomes moot. They would be the undisputed sales leader by the middle of next year. Even the PS2 rarely broke 400,000 units during a non-holiday-season month. And who knows what they Wii sales figures would be if they could keep up with demand.
Sorry, here it is below with the tags show so it makes more sense:
<joke>FTA:
<quote>what is most noteworthy about the IIPA effort is that <b>dozens</b> of countries... are <b>singled out</b> for criticism.</quote></joke>
This is the problem you always run into when you try to segment a group based on arbitrary criteria. To some people, hardcore means competitive gamers. To others, it may just mean someone who likes games that are more complex than Zuma. Defining games is a bit easier than defining the players though. You're still going to get some games that are cross overs like the Sims, or Animal Crossing, but for the most part it's pretty intuitive. Cars and Gears of War are aimed at totally different audiences. This should be pretty self evident. There's almost no cross-ever between the two demographics, meaning there aren't going to be many people out there who purchase both Cars and Gears of War.
Basically the gist of the article is that historically games have been mostly aimed at the group of people buying Gears of War (and people like them), but more and more games are being targeted towards the group of people buying Cars (and people like them).
This is what worries me about the industries "new" focus on demographics outside the traditional 18-34 year old male that has sustained it for so long. From a development and artistic perspective a lot of these games aren't anything new, a lot are very large steps backwards. It's the same platforming formula or mini-game, only with new controls so grandpa or junior doesn't have to spend as much time figuring it out.
People like to say that traditional games were stuck in the same rut, but I would disagree. Changes and improvements were incremental, but they were there if you looked. It takes time, but over the years these changes added up to wholly different experiences.
Inherently, there's nothing wrong with this. I think it's important to push gaming beyond its traditional boundaries. My concern is that publishers will see this as an easy out. Why spend X amount of dollars trying to make a game that will move a genre forward, when you can spend 1/10*X amount of dollars on a rehash of a decade old game with a new marketing spin.
Obviously it's not quite that simple and a lot of these games are still great games. Wii Sports is tons of fun. However, on the software side, it's incredibly dated gameplay. When the drive to expand the market to new demographics comes at the expense of innovating in established genres, I think it's a net loss for games as a medium.
Really? I'm sorry, I don't even know where to start. Xbox Live is not without its share of problems, but Sony is a very, very long ways from "teaching Microsoft how to do online right".
Seriously, their user base has been saying this for 2 and a half years now. Why are they just now coming to this realization? Microsoft keeps such tight control over XBL and has standards in place for just about every aspect of it. How is it then, that they certify so many games with flat out abysmal matchmaking systems? For a product that touts its online functionality as the primary feature over its competitors, Microsoft is essentially ignoring a huge portion of that experience.
He's not presenting this as some kind of crystal ball that is going to tell you exactly how many units a game will sell. The questions are fuzzy because it's a subjective test. This is an article with game developers as the intended readership. Yes, you could answer them favorably for just about any game, but this isn't some kind of marketing tool to pull the wool over the publics' eyes and make them think a game is better than it really is. These are questions for a game developer to honestly ask themselves and answer only to themselves so that they can improve their game.
Everyone's tearing this apart like it's nothing more than common sense, but he makes some good points in the article. For instance there's a segment about how a game can be recognizable and familiar to audiences without relying on movie licenses or previous IPs. With the loads of licensed crap out there these days, this is certainly something I would want developers to consider while making their game.
Yes, but they're also related to how much the studios like the format's DRM and how much money the format producer is willing to throw at them.
Set to market it as the winner? They've been doing it for over a month now without the help of your puny "statistics"
Just because the statistic is old doesn't mean that it's inaccurate. While it's possible that things have changed a bit, it's highly unlikely that it would be more than a few percentage points. 7 years old isn't that out of date. If there are newer statistics that show the situation has changed, then by all means cite them. If not, it's perfectly acceptable to use that one.