s}{ammer

It's pretty amazing how many people on DVD Talk are experts or know the people who work for the experts that run these companies. Everyone here knows better than the billionaires running the show and they aren't afraid to break down to you just what everyone is missing but them. I need to pick up the paper more, it seems like nowadays you read a couple articles and you are the resident expert, kinda like those motel commercials.

zig

Heh.. yeah that does get annoying.. everyone on the internet is a damn expert. But then again.. if we didn't have the "experts" then we wouldn't have much to talk about

Trigger

I've never claimed to be an expert on the console market, but it's my job to know alot about computer hardware and software. I've been running my own PC tech business since 96 and I've been building high-end gaming computers for 4 years for my customers (alot longer than that if you count the ones I built for myself and friends). I present most of what I say as nothing more than an opinion. I attend E3 and have been following the gaming industry for quite some time. That doesn't make me an expert either. I've also worked with a team to develop our own First Person Shooter... that never made it to market, but I've gotten alot of experience out of it. That also doesn't make me an expert. I also know a few indiders at Sony SCEA - which makes me not an expert too. My brother-in-law was a video game designer for a major company for a few years based on my suggestion - that doesn't make me an expert either. If you disagree with what I say, that's fine. If you think I'm wrong, that's fine too. There are people here that know more specifics about consoles than I ever could.

That said - I agree - there do seem to be alot of financial analysts with top-level executive insider info scoops on the console industry here. Maybe we should all just take it with a grain of salt and not bitch.

belboz

Aghama, MS spends over $4B a year on R&D. If they wanted to produce a 3D chip by 2005, they could.

sHammer, it's no different than second guessing professional sports. Sure the GM's and coaches/managers may have devoted their whole lives to the study of the game, but that doesn't mean a casual fan can't have a lot of fun calling them retards or making fun of their decisions.

Aghama

They could make a great dishwashing detergent with that kind of money, too. Doesn't mean there's much chance they will.

Get Me Coffee

GBA and GB have been amazing success story....more so the GB! What it came out around '89 and lasted how long! God thinking about it we had the Game Gear, Lynx, neo, we could say Virtue boy and maybe a few other can't remember...but the point is that the simple GB had such longevity! Has any video hardware lasted that long? One of Nintendo's huge revenue makers was GB! What strikes me is that no other company is going up against GBA. That's like 100% market share for mobile gaming to Nintendo!

I don’t want to knock SNES, N64 or GC with my post. I was only focusing on GB

s}{ammer

Trigger, did my post hit a little close to home there? I wasn't just talking about you there, I was simply stating what I have noticed about this forum.

Trigger

Not particularly - I wasn't posting with a hostile tone. If you'd like me to stop responding to the things you say, I'd be happy to. If you'll notice, I did agree with you. I didn't even assume you were talking just about me, but I was trying to illustrate how I never claimed to be an expert and neither did anyone else here. Don't be so defensive.

belboz

Yeah, but they've got strong financial and strategic incentives to develop a 3D chip.

Aghama

But the money is not in the hardware. MS obviously knows this, which is why it's taking a loss on every Xbox sold. They have never designed a single IC in their 25 years of existence, why would they all of a sudden try to design and fab a state of the art graphics processor just to save a couple bucks per unit?

belboz

Dude, get your butt in the UT2K3 server, i want to kick your ass.

DVDKrayzie

if i had to play mario with an Xbox controller, id throw away all my video games and find a new hobby.

Gallant Pig

Good one.

Trigger

That's how I feel about the Gamecube controller. The Xbox controller is the best thing since this:

ScandalUMD

This is the tech analysis of the ArtX "Flipper" chip inside the Gamecube. It is true that it's not based on any ATI board you'd find in a PC, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. This is not "old" or "crappy." It's a graphics chip designed for the Gamecube, based on the specific needs of console gaming, and while it may not be as powerful as the Xbox GPU, it is apparently very efficient, and does nearly as much for a lower price.

First generation Gamecube games have displayed bump-mapping and some amazing lighting effects. Resident Evil remains, in the opinions of many, the most visually impressive game on any platform. Admittedly, this is more a function of careful art direction than raw hardware power, but that fact just renders the importance of hardware superiority to be effectively moot.

Here's an analysis of the pros and cons of the Flipper chip. I don't pretend to understand all of it, but the basic point is that this is not "old" and "crappy" technology.

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1566&p=3

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1566&p=5

On a side note, when John Carmack showed Doom 3 running on an ATi board, he explained that he felt Nvidia had fallen behind ATi in the computer chip race because they had devoted so much time to developing the Xbox. This is not an uncommon viewpoint.

As such, unless Xbox turns out to be very lucrative for Nvidia, I somewhat doubt doubt either Nvidia or ATi will be willing to design the GPUs for any console in the next generation, for fear of losing ground in the PC hardware arms race.

Nintendo and Sony both have R&D teams in place for hardware design. Microsoft's strategy was an off-the-shelf approach, and they've had a much harder time reducing hardware costs as a result. So they've been fighting their hardware partners ever since shortly after launch.

But Nintendo is the most likely to be out of the hardware game in the next generation, right?

ScandalUMD

I'm a believer in the power of an informed opinion. I don't pretend to be an expert on the video game industry, but if something looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I'm not going to assume it's a golden goose because somebody hired The Rock to advertise it.

I find that if there's one lesson the last five years have taught us, it's that you can never assume billionaires know what they're doing. They did stupid stuff throughout the 90's and people said "There must be profits at the end of this tunnel, because these rich guys say there are."

And what happened? Well, the billionaires pulled the ripcords on their golden parachutes, and all the people who trusted them splattered into the ground and ended up as chump puree.

Which billionaires know what they're doing? The Enron billionaires? The Worldcom billionaires? The Adelphia billionaires? Martha Stewart? The guy who came up with Pets.com and paid a million dollars to put his singing sock puppet on during the Superbowl?

ScandalUMD

Number one, I don't see why an Xbox successor is a given. Xbox is bleeding money. Microsoft fired Seamus Blackley. Microsoft's development assets could just as easily be converted to a software only structure as Nintendo's, and their network infrastucture could be converted for use by PCs, or shifted to support their software on other platforms.

Further, Microsoft has been hurting worse than either Nintendo or Sony on hardware, because they don't develop the stuff, and they're having trouble getting their partners to help them cut costs.

Nintendo and Sony both have more specialized hardware R&D. They're better equipped to be in the hardware business. Microsoft spent a lot of money to get the most powerful hardware into their box, but they're the only ones still losing money.

It seems Microsoft has more to gain than Nintendo by dropping out of the hardware business. Your basic reasoning behind them staying is that you assume they're willing to continue to lose huge amounts of money.

Nintendo is not suffering from poor third party support this round, and they're not suffering low software sales either. I don't understand why you think Nintendo automatically comes in third. We have no hardware specs for these hypothetical consoles, and we have no idea what software is on them either.

Sony may go out on a limb with some kind of crazy network infrastructure that consumers don't go for. Microsoft may go software only. So could Nintendo

Nintendo may launch with several incredible apps, and beat everyone out of the gate. Or Microsoft could spend heavily again and have hardware that blows everything else away. Or Nintendo could get their s**t together when it counts and launch with some of their incredible franchises, much like they didn't with the Gamecube.


It's always worked. At the very least, a Nintendo console has never lost more in any quarter than the Game Boy made. They've been profitable. And Nintendo's market has not shrunk. Gaming has gotten much bigger. The N64 sold more units than the SNES, and the Gamecube will surpass the N64 next year. Further, Nintendo's games sell very well, so in spite of their small market share, many N64 games were among the highest selling titles of the last generation. Nintendo has a pretty sweet thing going.


I would not characterize the Gamecube as "stripped down." The Gamecube is probably more powerful than the PS2, and certainly supports more special effects. You seem to assume that because the Gamecube is small and cute, it must be a toy. In fact, the hardware there, by all accounts, is ample to compete with PS2 and Xbox.

Nintendo has the cash to compete on the technology curve with Sony and Microsoft. Their strategy in this generation was to aim for a lower price point. Most Gamecube games still look as good or better than those on PS2 or Xbox.

If MS and Sony pack functions like Tivo, web browsing and robust DVD players into their next consoles, and Nintendo comes out with a cheaper "budget" console with games that look and play just as well, that could potentially secure them a second place finish, because they'd be more desirable to gamers who already own components that do the extra stuff, gamers on a budget, and gamers looking for a second console in addition to the MS/Sony set-top box.

DVDKrayzie

please, theres no design in the xbox controller. they actually put some thought into the GC. Hell without Nintendo and the n64 theyd have just thrown a sidewinder in with the system.

kinda funny how you think the xbox has the best controller, but have to ask "what exactly is gameplay?"

Trigger

As for "crappy" - I was talking about that company's other products. As for "old" - in this business, 2 year old technology is old. Even for 2 years ago, it was behind the times on many things. It is indeed an efficient chip and the Gamecube graphics are nice. It's also a budget chip. ATi doesn't even manufacture it - NEC does.

ATi would jump at the chance to be the chipmaker for the next Xbox. Nothing that happens between Microsoft and Nvidia could soil that. They showed Doom 3 on ATi's new 9700 card (before it came out) because it was a superior card to nVidia's GeForce 4. It had nothing to do with anything else.

nVidia didn't lose any ground in the PC hardware department at all by working on the Xbox chip. It's more or less a GeForce 3 (nForce). Plus - since then they've done nothing but dominate until last month when ATi finally came up with a GeForce killer. Since nVidia tends to release something new every 6 months, their lead won't last long.

I didn't think Resident Evil's graphics were all that impressive, but that's just my opinion.

Your last comment is just a crack and a cheap shot at me and I never proclaimed to know whether they will make a next generation machine or not.

Trigger

Scandal - okay fine - you win. Gamecube will come out with a console that will crush the competition and they'll continue to make hardware consoles until the end of time. Microsoft will pull out of the video game market by 2004 and by 2005 when Sony releases their PS3, nobody will be interested because it'll have tivo in it. This will mean that Gamecube will be the only console to buy in 2005 or 2006 and everyone will look like this:



My opinion means nothing and I'm an idiot.

Gallant Pig

You mean you wouldn't play video games if you had to use the Xbox or Xbox-S controller? I thought you were joking? Why all the hostility?

ScandalUMD

It's not 2 year old technology, and it's not necessarily "budget" technology either, although cost was certainly a factor. It is a proprietary chip designed for the specific needs of the Gamecube console, and developed by ArtX in conjunction with Nintendo's R&D.

Analyzing the different consoles techincally is something none of us are equipped to do. We can basically read the Anandtech analysis and understand as much as we can. The graphics on Gamecube are certainly competitive with the graphics on other consoles.


As for ATi, I have no way of knowing whether they'd want to do a chip for Microsoft. I suppose they would if Microsoft paid them enough, and probably so would Nvidia. However, if Microsoft wins the arbitration, and Nvidia comes out losing money on the Xbox GPU, I can't imagine that any other company will be prepared to work a similar deal with Microsoft. Of course, as some noted, Microsoft could simply develop its own chip. Money can pretty much solve all problems.

That's what Carmack said. I honestly don't know. ATi more or less caught up to Nvidia with the 8500. The timeline is right.


Granted.


It is a crack. It wasn't a cheap shot at you. It wasn't personal at all. I don't know. I called the Xbox launch, and I called Xbox flopping in Japan, but I was wrong about Rare. I could be right about Nintendo, or I might not be. But their situation is very different from Sega's and any reports of their demise are premature, I'd say. They're still making plenty of money, apparently on hardware as well as software.

Aghama

NEC most likely manufactures it because Nintendo had worked out an agreement with them before ATI bought Artx. The GeForce 3 is also old technology now, so I don't see your point there either.

jeffdsmith

You obviously have no concept of gaming. None.

mmconhea

Aside from the flips and chips, Nintendo is the most profitable video game console maker out there. It's great that all the industry insiders on this board think that the Gamecube, or n64 for that matter, is an utter failure and that Nintendo should just throw in the towel on console manufacturing. I think that's really great that you came up with that idea. That's really creative. I think it's even better that you are here writing your little stories on this board and not actually making these types of decisions for Nintendo. Because if you were, then Nintendo wouldn't be worth over 6 billion and a leader in the Japanese Market for the past three years.