darkside

Damn, Ken was swinging for the fences. He talked some nice smack about the Xbox360 and Revolution.

It does look like Nintendo will not be supporting HD games, but instead will go for an affordable niche system. I'm sure they will do progressive scan again, but not the kind of 1080 resolution stuff the PS3 and Xbox360 will. Honestly it is probably a good strategy for them. Know your niche and find a profitable place in it. Matching horse power with the resources of Sony and MS is just not going to happen for Nintendo. If anything it will send them into the red in a hurry. They are not going to win back the Halo and GTA people no matter what they do because they can't back it up with the Halo and GTA type software.

The thing I'm curious about is Sony. Their console is going to be major overkill and very expensive to build looking at the current components. If the Xbox360 games do compare closely to the PS3 titles Sony will not be able to price their console any higher than MS. Can Sony really afford to lose that much money on every single box they sell? It almost seems like Sony is putting themselves into the positon Microsoft was in this generation. If Sony is planning on selling the PS3 as a $400-$500 console they will not get into many households in '06. If they lose $200-$300 a console it will be a long road to profit with the PS3.

joshd2012

It is really about games, so even if consumers don't see a difference between the two consoles, the exclusives will be enough to ensure success.

Also, you must realize that Sony sells more than Videogames. You buy a PS3 and suddenly you are in the market for SACDs featuring Sony/BMG music; Blu-Ray Discs of Sony Pictures movies, a new Sony HDTV, and possibly a new Sony surround sound system. Everything they have added to the system will help them in other areas of their portfolio.

darkside

That is obviously the advantage Sony has over a company like Nintendo. I honestly don't know if this thing will help sell SACDs, but Sony is betting on the fact it will almost single handedly win the next generation DVD race for them. The PS2 put DVD movies on the map in Japan when it came out. Look at the PSP. Sony has pretty much started a whole new popular movie format because of it.

Success of the PS3 does not guarantee Sony success in selling more HDTVs and Stereos though. Sony has been losing a lot of money in this market and it looks like they will continue to. I can hook up any stereo and HDTV to a PS3 I don't have to buy a Sony model.

I'm not sure the exclusives will be enough to entice people to pay $100+ more for a PS3 though. Sure they will have GTA, but most of the games like Madden will be on both. If you can buy Madden, Halo 3 and an Xbox 360 for the same price as the PS3 you can bet which one most people will pick.

joshd2012

Very true, but also remember that Sony has partnerships with a lot of different companies. I found it hiliarious how people were talking up Samsung as so much better than Sony for HDTVs for partnership with the 360, when they fail to realize that Sony and Samsung are jointly manufacturing LCDs under the S-LCD company for their HDTV applications.

Also, Sony will have the gimmick of selling TVs with Cell processors in them (as will Toshiba). Who knows if that will turn out to be more than a gimmick, but enough people will bite to make it a worthwhile effort on Sony's part.

jeffdsmith

The difference is that Samsung will sell the "same" TV for 25% less then the Sony one.

Gromit

Just by looking at the specs, I find it hard to compare them. Is there a way to compare the PS3's Cell architecture to the 360's PowerPC based architecture? At this point, it just sounds like marketing-speak. It's probably not reliable, but I thought the potential power of the PS3 was perceived to be much greater than the 360.

This may be my big mistake: A lot of my info on the 2 systems comes from watching G4's week of E3 coverage. The first night was actually good. The subsequent nights were a bunch of commercials with horribly written "comedy" diaglouge in between, but the first night was a panel of 'experts' just talking about the press conferences. They were going on and on about how much more powerful the PS3 appeared to be. They did say a night or two later that the 360 demos on the floor were more impressive though, so maybe they were just unimpressed by Microsoft's press conference.

I agree that 'power' doesn't mean much, it's just funny to see the 2 companies scramble to make us think that their competitor's product will be crap.

I'll probably buy both systems, but I think it's possible that neither company will be as successful as they are hoping.

Sony's mistake may be in producing a system that's too expensive. I'm sure they will take a loss on the hardware to at least get close to the 360, but they may be taking a page from Microsoft's book in losing too much money on each console sold.

I think Microsoft is counting too much on the cutting-edge, A/V enthusiast market. They keep talking about how Sony is making a mistake by offering 7 controller and dual HD display support, claiming that it's not a realistic expectation to ever need those 'features'. Well at the same time, Microsoft may be ignoring those gamers who just want to play on a 32" 4:3 SD TV. That's not me (42" plasma), and I realize that HD displays are growing in popularity as prices drop, but Microsoft seems to be the most proud of a feature set that a big majority of their customers won't be able or willing to use. Sounds kind of like Xbox Live, which is great, but is hardly used by a large percentage of Xbox owners.

Of course, Sony is counting on the same thing. Video games are no longer exclusively the domain of 14 year old kids who scrape together their money to buy a console, but not all 28 year old gamers can afford 2 HD displays for the same room, much less a single one.

You obviously have to market the cutting edge features of your upcoming product. I realize that Microsoft isn't going to rave about how great 360 games look on a 13" B&W with a broken knob and a coat hanger antenna, but it's still a gamble to release a game console and hope that the consumers buy the HD displays and 5.1 surround sound systems to take advantage of them. How many people will say "That fancy new system won't do much for my 27 inch RCA TV, I'll just stick with my PS2"?

And maybe that's why Microsoft won't be producing any new Xbox games after this year? Will Sony regret continued support of the PS2 since it hardly encourages those gamers on the fence to splurge for a new PS3?

jeffdsmith

My concern with so many feature additions is the fact that most developers can't pull a good game out of their ass as it is. More power and gizmos fix a bad game not.

joshd2012

Its pretty slow around here today. Hopefully this will get people talking:

I just got done reading some technical articles on the 360, which mention how the processors for both the PS3 and the 360 will be weak on things like AI and physics (proficiency in these areas has been substituted for things like graphical processing and media streaming). It sounds like more indepth games with loose out to eye candy.

But it makes one think, what is enough AI processing power? The most complex AI to emulate would be humans, but how free can you really develop AI before you lose the necessary linearity for following a story? All NPC have a main objective, which is either to help or to hurt you, and possibly a few secondary objectives, like dodge bullets or form groups to better attack. But can it really get deeper than that? Do we really want enemies that "decide" to hide or run away from you if you shoot at them? And quite possibly, I am overly simplifying this.

Another thought I had, was that Nintendo may be heading towards the opposite realm of architecture. Could they possibly be developing a system which can crunch huge amounts of data for AI and physics and make graphics processing the secondary objective? That would definitely be a revolution in gaming.

darkside

Honestly, who knows what Nintendo is doing with their console. I think Nintendo is going to need less horsepower simply by not developing their games to run at anything higher than 480p. That will hurt them with the older gamers that have HDTVs, but honestly that is probably not much of a market they will tap into anyway regardless of the specs of the Revolution.

I am concerned a bit about this big push for more eye candy that Sony and MS are going after. Yes, Halo was a great looking game, but that was a minor part of the success of it. It was the incredible gameplay that sold millions of copies of it. GTA was a mediocre game graphically and made its fame off of gameplay as well.

Not saying there isn't a need to keep pushing the graphics, but I'm worried that many developers will put a ton of time into the polygons on these 10 million dollar budget games making them amazing to look at and not bother to actually make the game fun to play.

As far as better AI, to me that is what really pushes games to new levels. One of the best things about Resident Evil 4 was how smart many of the enemies were. Those guys would duck and dodge your shots and were a refreshing change from the enemies in most shooters.

I can see both sides, but I think many of the gamers out there are pushing the market towards eventual failure by wanting better and better looking games to look at instead of better and better games to play.

Save Ferris

Wait... Awesome CGI graphics and 3D models taking away from content?? If its happened with MOVIES why wouldnt it happen with video games.

Producers drooling over whats POSSIBLE and blowing their $$$ on visuals end up with an empty shell joke of a movie.

Gallant Pig

I dunno. It's a dealbreaker for me. I like Nintendo games and was either going to get a Revo or PS3 depending on 1st party games. After you get used to HD games it's hard to go back to 480p. Seems cheap on their part when even last generation (Xbox, PS2) had Hi Def games.

Josh H

HD doesn't matter to me as I won't have an HDTV anytime soon (i.e. definitely not in the next 3-4 years, probably not next generation period).

joshd2012

I'll bring this thread back to life with something to think about. It has been generally regarded that Sony not including a HDD being a very bad move, because games will not use the hard drive unless it is standard equipment. Then I noticed this from the interview over at TXB:

http://interviews.teamxbox.com/xbox/...d-Holmdahl/p2/

This is a top Xbox hardware guy, in case you were wondering. But if he is correct, it seems the Microsoft has specified to developers that they can not use the hard drive to cache data, or as the sole saving source.

Obviously, Live will require a HDD so it makes sense that 360 ships with a HDD as it also ships with Live. You can provide one without the other. But, couldn't Sony also do the same thing? So far, we have little information about Sony's online plans, but assuming they will sell it as an accessory (as Live is sold as an accessory to Xbox), couldn't they include a hard drive as part of the online package (with a headset, etc)? Both hard drives would serve the same purpose - used for online gaming and as an alternate save medium - and would not affect gameplay during standard play.

My biggest fear about the lack of a hard drive in the PS3 was that gameplay would be affected. But if 360 will not require a hard drive to play games, then any innovation using a hard drive would not be implemented on either system.

Is this a possible senario? Or am I trying to reach too far?

sdcrym

My guess is that games still might use the HDD to cache data, but it's not required to. The result may be that users without the HDD attached might have longer load times. Just a guess.