The fact that they are issuing a recall doesn't shield them from liability for damages due to a defective design even if it is in a timely manner. Think about if a car maker built a car with brakes that didn't work. They can't get out of liability for previous accidents just by issuing a recall. It shields them from liability in FUTURE accidents where people involving people who negligently did not participate in the recall.
A more parallel analogy would be if the bowling ball had a protective strap on it to keep it from flying away on your backswing and it broke, at which point you could very easily sue the bowling ball manufacturer.
I don't know what country you are from so forgive me if I'm completely wrong, but it was my understanding that much of the price difference has to do with the high taxes in the EU. So in other words what you are proposing to do might actually be illegal because you would be bypassing the tax by ordering it from a US buyer who doesn't pay the tax.
Where do people get these wild figures for HDMI cables from? Sure monster cables are in that price range, but a normal HDMI cable is more like 10-20 bucks, or you can use the component cable that comes with the system for free. These arguments about people balking at the price after factoring in the most luxurious hdmi cables on the market are getting a little tired.
I wish those rat bastards at lucasarts would take a time out from making crappy starwars games and at least port some of these games to new consoles. There was a time when I would buy any game that had their logo on it. How much would it cost them to port Grim on PSP or Xbox Live Arcade. The whole game is done, they just have to port it? It looks like they're making a new Indiana Jones game too. Looks like it has lots of very nicely rendered hand to hand combat. Makes me wish i still had my copy of Fate of Atlantis.
Lanoitarus, You're sort of comparing two different things. The fact that Microsoft will completely replace and pay for shipping does completely shield them from this lawsuit. They are essentially putting the purchaser in the exact same condition he was in before the breach of the warranty. There is no case and it will be dismissed.
Relating to your example of seat belt, I think you're a little confused. If a company has a recall, it shows that they are aware of the problem and are fixing it. What do you intend to sue them for after they fix your faulty seatbelt? Anything other than the cost of a working seatbelt is called a punitive damage and is not given in a case like this. The only time a company would be sued for more than the cost of repairing the faulty seatbelt is if someone got hurt from it, at which point they would be strictly liable. No one is getting hurt by 360's so it really doesn't apply at all. In the future, if you're not sure if a multi-billion dollar corporation like microsoft has insulated themselves from liability, just assume that they did.
I think someone just got an SNES emulator up and running on it. So in other words all the stuff that you'd have to pay to download on the Wii will be emulated free in linux at some point in time.
I don't think the PS3 is going to be easy to get any time soon unless they really ramp up production. You have to remember that they still have to launch in Europe and Australia, and the demand in the U.S. and Japan is still far from satisfied.
I like your style. You probably won't need an external hard drive because you can just switch out the internal drive for a bigger one. Sony apparently expected people to download a crapload of stuff to this thing in the future.
Anyone who is not interested in playing games or Blu Ray movies (what Sony uses to recoup their losses) will probably be wise enough to spend their six hundred dollars on a box more suited to their needs. I don't see anyone dropping 600 to run linux on a box with no burner, 256mb of ram, no gpu drivers, and a processor that is going to have a bunch of compatibility issues for the foreseeable future. In other words, it is not Sony's worst nightmare because it is never going to happen.
High sales of PS2 would scare you? It is the only last-gen console that still has good games coming out. What this says to me is that people who can't afford/can't/don't want to get the new consoles prefer PS2. I think that is good for Sony because when these systems crap out and they decide to move to the next generation they will probably move to the brand who supported the console for the longest period of time, the one with the familiar controllers that they can play all their old games on. That price difference won't look so bad at that point. I don't care what anyone says, there are still 100 million satisfied people with playstations out there, and that number continues to grow. The company who should be scared of the high volume of PS2 sales is Microsoft. They have been the only next-gen console on the market for the bulk of this year, and they are still being outsold by a six year old console.
These guys need to stop crying. No one is twisting their arm and making them create flashy new games. There are plenty of platforms out there that don't cost a ton of money to develop for. I think that they get pissed when new consoles come out because they actually have to put some money into improving madden.
Idunno if I agree. While it isn't a perfect comparison, look at a game like Golden Axe. Came out for arcade. Ported to Genesis. Now it's ported to PS2, PSP, Xbox Live Arcade, etc. 5 years from now I'll be playing it on my holowatch.
Badspyro, while your comments certainly make a ton of sense for almost every game developer, when it comes to EA I don't buy any of these arguments. Before Madden bought the exclusive NFL contract, Sega was releasing their NFL games for 20 bucks brand new. They were the same quality as the Maddens. The reason for this is that they don't change that much from year to year. Sure it might cost a bunch of money to "bound the boxes" but how much money is it going to cost to slightly improve those box boundaries on Madden 2007? AI- same thing, if it worked last year, it shouldn't cost a fortune to improve it a bit. Physics- same deal here, sure they improve, but the physics were pretty nice last year, and I don't know how much of a difference there is this year. Other games- If I had to guess, I would say that EA probably puts out 10 different versions of Madden. PS2, Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii, PS3, PSP, DS, PC, maybe gamecube,cellphone, i don't know, the point is a ton of recycling is going on here. If squaresoft can profit from a gigantic, original game that only comes out on a few systems, I don't see why EA can't profit off one of the bestselling games in US that has absolutely no competition, that they just have to touch up every year.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but I've never heard that it doesn't do 1080p24. This stuff is all really confusing, but if it did less than 24 frames per second wouldn't it look like crap?
I thought that advertisers paid money based on the audience watching the program. If HDTV's cost way more money than traditional televisions, wouldn't it probably also be the case that the people viewing programs on HDTV's have more money, or are at least are more willing to part with their money? I think with a little market research these idiot executives could make the case for higher priced advertising on HD. Then there is the console war. Now if I was trying to sell a $600 console with 1080P functionality in a competitive market, I would love to pay a little extra money to know that every single person who is viewing my commercial has an HDTV. In the biz, they call that an "advantage" and believe it or not, it is worth something. Another reason they would probably prefer HD commercials is that showing HD game trailers on a standard TV is going to look positively last generation. The moral of the story is that business models are built, they don't just appear out of nowhere. You can't just demand more money, and then complain that you have no business model when people don't pay you. They have a captive audience full of people who like to spend money on new products and they can't get any more money out of these companies? Give me a break.
People keep looking to the games and saying they look the same, and have a hard time justifying the added cost. Anyone who knows anything about consoles knows that it is going to take a while before developers are using all seven cores to their fullest potential.
The reasons for the extra cost are pretty obvious. If you assume the two to be equal from a graphics point of view, which remains to be seen, a free network, built in wifi, HDMI, Blu Ray, and a 60 gb hard drive should be worth 200 bucks to anyone who is planning on using them.
But it wasn't balanced because when the 360 was launched you couldn't download in the background, but it makes it seem like you could. This feature was added later.
This guy had some pretty nasty things to say about the PS3, but some of it seemed a little ridiculous. The first thing that was pretty wild was that it took him 12 minutes to realize that it didn't come with HDMI cables. Now I realize that there might be plenty of people out there who don't realize this, but this guy is a technology reviewer and probably should have known this for the last month. Then he complains about how you have to plug in the wireless controllers so that your system recognizes it. He even puts quotes around wireless, like they're not really wireless or something. This doesn't bother me a bit. You have to plug it in when you get it to charge it anyway. Then if i have to bring it over my friend's house, if I have to plug it in for a second again, it really won't be that big of a deal.
Then he says how the 360 controllers are wireless, and doesn't bother to mention that some 360 controller that come bundled with the system are not wireless. Then he says that some of the PS3's features are going to patched in later, like that's going to be a bad thing, and doesn't mention that half of these 360 features he's loving so much were not out at launch. To be fair, I don't think he knows what the 360 was like at launch because this guy doesn't sound like he plays many games. To compare two consoles is one thing, but he's really just ignoring all the faults of one, and dwelling on the faults of the other.
I guess that's why you get when you read the New York Times in search of unbiased journalism. This article read like the PS3 was the official console of the Republican Party or something.
You doubt that the PS3 would sell out 1 million consoles if they were available? Have you noticed how much they are selling for on ebay? Seems to suggest that demand is far higher than supply maybe. So let's say that the PS3 has sold 300k systems so far. I haven't seen an estimate for the amount sold in North America yet, but that seems reasonable. Now we know that demand is way higher than that because they're selling online for more than the retail price. We're also not talking about demand in Europe and elsewhere because Sony put the kibosh on grey market exporters. I think that any reasonable person would admit that of the 100 million people worldwide who bought the PS2, greater than 1% will be interested in buying the PS3.
I don't know if you've been on the internets lately, but it seems like there are more than a million PS3 fanboys just trying to deface the 360 wikipedia entry.
So you're saying the free online is "poor" in comparison to the 360? I don't know if I would personally complain about free online play, but to each his own. I would argue that the online PS3 is pretty nice for a free network at launch. Well while we're making comarisons the 360 has poor backwards compatibility compared to the PS3, which has problems with about 2% of the 8000 games in the back catalog.
Does the 360 have any problems with High Definition? Last I heard it didn't support HDMI cables and so if your television didn't accept 1080P from components, you don't get true HD.
I've read reports of poor graphics, but I believe some sites have noticed that the PS3's graphics were sharper. I think alot of these problems are based on rush jobs by developers, and not based on the strength of the hardware.
Say what you will about the launch, it could have gone better, it could have gone worse, but for all the complaining about the system, people are still paying a fortune for it on ebay.
The PS3 will have outsold the 360 in Japan by the end of the year(although that's not saying too much). I'll start listening to claims of disaster once people aren't scalping them on the internet for a fortune and they are gathering dust on the store shelves, but right now it is sort of looking more like a success than a failure.
I think the reason you are so "bemused" is that you are mistaken about the process. No one does 15 cent stock trades. It would not be worth the price of the phone call.
No one pays 10% of the share price to buy and sell stocks. Sure it could happen if your broker was charging you 10 bucks per trade and you only bought 100 dollars worth of stock, but you'd have to be crazy to do this.
Yeah man, if they rereleased the original xbox in a smaller form factor i would definitely buy it. Who cares if they stopped supporting it last year?
Shrinking things might be nice for portables, but I really don't think anyone buys consoles based on their size. I mean maybe they do after they consider the games, the price, the graphics, the controllers, the online capabilities, memory, graphics card, how much it heats up, whether or not it is noisy, what forms of media it can play, etc. To be quite honest with you, for my money I want my console to be as huge and imposing as possible.
One thing i agree with you on is that Microsoft pushes their tech out the door way too fast, but then again, they're still trying to break into the market, and if they weren't first this time around they probably would not have stood a chance.
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The fact that they are issuing a recall doesn't shield them from liability for damages due to a defective design even if it is in a timely manner. Think about if a car maker built a car with brakes that didn't work. They can't get out of liability for previous accidents just by issuing a recall. It shields them from liability in FUTURE accidents where people involving people who negligently did not participate in the recall.
A more parallel analogy would be if the bowling ball had a protective strap on it to keep it from flying away on your backswing and it broke, at which point you could very easily sue the bowling ball manufacturer.
Yeah they have to be suing for damages, unless the lawyers are working for free. The injunction is probably only part of the claim.
I don't know what country you are from so forgive me if I'm completely wrong, but it was my understanding that much of the price difference has to do with the high taxes in the EU. So in other words what you are proposing to do might actually be illegal because you would be bypassing the tax by ordering it from a US buyer who doesn't pay the tax.
Where do people get these wild figures for HDMI cables from? Sure monster cables are in that price range, but a normal HDMI cable is more like 10-20 bucks, or you can use the component cable that comes with the system for free. These arguments about people balking at the price after factoring in the most luxurious hdmi cables on the market are getting a little tired.
I wish those rat bastards at lucasarts would take a time out from making crappy starwars games and at least port some of these games to new consoles. There was a time when I would buy any game that had their logo on it. How much would it cost them to port Grim on PSP or Xbox Live Arcade. The whole game is done, they just have to port it? It looks like they're making a new Indiana Jones game too. Looks like it has lots of very nicely rendered hand to hand combat. Makes me wish i still had my copy of Fate of Atlantis.
Lanoitarus, You're sort of comparing two different things. The fact that Microsoft will completely replace and pay for shipping does completely shield them from this lawsuit. They are essentially putting the purchaser in the exact same condition he was in before the breach of the warranty. There is no case and it will be dismissed. Relating to your example of seat belt, I think you're a little confused. If a company has a recall, it shows that they are aware of the problem and are fixing it. What do you intend to sue them for after they fix your faulty seatbelt? Anything other than the cost of a working seatbelt is called a punitive damage and is not given in a case like this. The only time a company would be sued for more than the cost of repairing the faulty seatbelt is if someone got hurt from it, at which point they would be strictly liable. No one is getting hurt by 360's so it really doesn't apply at all. In the future, if you're not sure if a multi-billion dollar corporation like microsoft has insulated themselves from liability, just assume that they did.
I think someone just got an SNES emulator up and running on it. So in other words all the stuff that you'd have to pay to download on the Wii will be emulated free in linux at some point in time.
I don't think the PS3 is going to be easy to get any time soon unless they really ramp up production. You have to remember that they still have to launch in Europe and Australia, and the demand in the U.S. and Japan is still far from satisfied.
I like your style. You probably won't need an external hard drive because you can just switch out the internal drive for a bigger one. Sony apparently expected people to download a crapload of stuff to this thing in the future.
Anyone who is not interested in playing games or Blu Ray movies (what Sony uses to recoup their losses) will probably be wise enough to spend their six hundred dollars on a box more suited to their needs. I don't see anyone dropping 600 to run linux on a box with no burner, 256mb of ram, no gpu drivers, and a processor that is going to have a bunch of compatibility issues for the foreseeable future. In other words, it is not Sony's worst nightmare because it is never going to happen.
The new 360 update bricked a ton of consoles, maybe that is part of their strategy.
High sales of PS2 would scare you? It is the only last-gen console that still has good games coming out. What this says to me is that people who can't afford/can't/don't want to get the new consoles prefer PS2. I think that is good for Sony because when these systems crap out and they decide to move to the next generation they will probably move to the brand who supported the console for the longest period of time, the one with the familiar controllers that they can play all their old games on. That price difference won't look so bad at that point. I don't care what anyone says, there are still 100 million satisfied people with playstations out there, and that number continues to grow. The company who should be scared of the high volume of PS2 sales is Microsoft. They have been the only next-gen console on the market for the bulk of this year, and they are still being outsold by a six year old console.
These guys need to stop crying. No one is twisting their arm and making them create flashy new games. There are plenty of platforms out there that don't cost a ton of money to develop for. I think that they get pissed when new consoles come out because they actually have to put some money into improving madden.
Idunno if I agree. While it isn't a perfect comparison, look at a game like Golden Axe. Came out for arcade. Ported to Genesis. Now it's ported to PS2, PSP, Xbox Live Arcade, etc. 5 years from now I'll be playing it on my holowatch.
Badspyro, while your comments certainly make a ton of sense for almost every game developer, when it comes to EA I don't buy any of these arguments. Before Madden bought the exclusive NFL contract, Sega was releasing their NFL games for 20 bucks brand new. They were the same quality as the Maddens. The reason for this is that they don't change that much from year to year. Sure it might cost a bunch of money to "bound the boxes" but how much money is it going to cost to slightly improve those box boundaries on Madden 2007? AI- same thing, if it worked last year, it shouldn't cost a fortune to improve it a bit. Physics- same deal here, sure they improve, but the physics were pretty nice last year, and I don't know how much of a difference there is this year. Other games- If I had to guess, I would say that EA probably puts out 10 different versions of Madden. PS2, Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii, PS3, PSP, DS, PC, maybe gamecube,cellphone, i don't know, the point is a ton of recycling is going on here. If squaresoft can profit from a gigantic, original game that only comes out on a few systems, I don't see why EA can't profit off one of the bestselling games in US that has absolutely no competition, that they just have to touch up every year.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but I've never heard that it doesn't do 1080p24. This stuff is all really confusing, but if it did less than 24 frames per second wouldn't it look like crap?
I thought that advertisers paid money based on the audience watching the program. If HDTV's cost way more money than traditional televisions, wouldn't it probably also be the case that the people viewing programs on HDTV's have more money, or are at least are more willing to part with their money? I think with a little market research these idiot executives could make the case for higher priced advertising on HD. Then there is the console war. Now if I was trying to sell a $600 console with 1080P functionality in a competitive market, I would love to pay a little extra money to know that every single person who is viewing my commercial has an HDTV. In the biz, they call that an "advantage" and believe it or not, it is worth something. Another reason they would probably prefer HD commercials is that showing HD game trailers on a standard TV is going to look positively last generation. The moral of the story is that business models are built, they don't just appear out of nowhere. You can't just demand more money, and then complain that you have no business model when people don't pay you. They have a captive audience full of people who like to spend money on new products and they can't get any more money out of these companies? Give me a break.
People keep looking to the games and saying they look the same, and have a hard time justifying the added cost. Anyone who knows anything about consoles knows that it is going to take a while before developers are using all seven cores to their fullest potential.
The reasons for the extra cost are pretty obvious. If you assume the two to be equal from a graphics point of view, which remains to be seen, a free network, built in wifi, HDMI, Blu Ray, and a 60 gb hard drive should be worth 200 bucks to anyone who is planning on using them.
But it wasn't balanced because when the 360 was launched you couldn't download in the background, but it makes it seem like you could. This feature was added later.
This guy had some pretty nasty things to say about the PS3, but some of it seemed a little ridiculous. The first thing that was pretty wild was that it took him 12 minutes to realize that it didn't come with HDMI cables. Now I realize that there might be plenty of people out there who don't realize this, but this guy is a technology reviewer and probably should have known this for the last month. Then he complains about how you have to plug in the wireless controllers so that your system recognizes it. He even puts quotes around wireless, like they're not really wireless or something. This doesn't bother me a bit. You have to plug it in when you get it to charge it anyway. Then if i have to bring it over my friend's house, if I have to plug it in for a second again, it really won't be that big of a deal.
Then he says how the 360 controllers are wireless, and doesn't bother to mention that some 360 controller that come bundled with the system are not wireless. Then he says that some of the PS3's features are going to patched in later, like that's going to be a bad thing, and doesn't mention that half of these 360 features he's loving so much were not out at launch. To be fair, I don't think he knows what the 360 was like at launch because this guy doesn't sound like he plays many games. To compare two consoles is one thing, but he's really just ignoring all the faults of one, and dwelling on the faults of the other.
I guess that's why you get when you read the New York Times in search of unbiased journalism. This article read like the PS3 was the official console of the Republican Party or something.
You doubt that the PS3 would sell out 1 million consoles if they were available? Have you noticed how much they are selling for on ebay? Seems to suggest that demand is far higher than supply maybe. So let's say that the PS3 has sold 300k systems so far. I haven't seen an estimate for the amount sold in North America yet, but that seems reasonable. Now we know that demand is way higher than that because they're selling online for more than the retail price. We're also not talking about demand in Europe and elsewhere because Sony put the kibosh on grey market exporters. I think that any reasonable person would admit that of the 100 million people worldwide who bought the PS2, greater than 1% will be interested in buying the PS3. I don't know if you've been on the internets lately, but it seems like there are more than a million PS3 fanboys just trying to deface the 360 wikipedia entry. So you're saying the free online is "poor" in comparison to the 360? I don't know if I would personally complain about free online play, but to each his own. I would argue that the online PS3 is pretty nice for a free network at launch. Well while we're making comarisons the 360 has poor backwards compatibility compared to the PS3, which has problems with about 2% of the 8000 games in the back catalog. Does the 360 have any problems with High Definition? Last I heard it didn't support HDMI cables and so if your television didn't accept 1080P from components, you don't get true HD. I've read reports of poor graphics, but I believe some sites have noticed that the PS3's graphics were sharper. I think alot of these problems are based on rush jobs by developers, and not based on the strength of the hardware. Say what you will about the launch, it could have gone better, it could have gone worse, but for all the complaining about the system, people are still paying a fortune for it on ebay. The PS3 will have outsold the 360 in Japan by the end of the year(although that's not saying too much). I'll start listening to claims of disaster once people aren't scalping them on the internet for a fortune and they are gathering dust on the store shelves, but right now it is sort of looking more like a success than a failure.
I think the reason you are so "bemused" is that you are mistaken about the process. No one does 15 cent stock trades. It would not be worth the price of the phone call. No one pays 10% of the share price to buy and sell stocks. Sure it could happen if your broker was charging you 10 bucks per trade and you only bought 100 dollars worth of stock, but you'd have to be crazy to do this.
If this is actually the case, isn't Googtube going to get the pants sued off them in Japan?
Yeah man, if they rereleased the original xbox in a smaller form factor i would definitely buy it. Who cares if they stopped supporting it last year? Shrinking things might be nice for portables, but I really don't think anyone buys consoles based on their size. I mean maybe they do after they consider the games, the price, the graphics, the controllers, the online capabilities, memory, graphics card, how much it heats up, whether or not it is noisy, what forms of media it can play, etc. To be quite honest with you, for my money I want my console to be as huge and imposing as possible. One thing i agree with you on is that Microsoft pushes their tech out the door way too fast, but then again, they're still trying to break into the market, and if they weren't first this time around they probably would not have stood a chance.