# Playstation 3 pricing announced



## KenM (May 10, 2006)

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6149470.html

  A 20 GB for $499.99 and a 60 GB for $599.99. Be interesting to see how many people pay that much for a console. I also heard the $499.99 vesion will have less stuff.


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## trancejeremy (May 10, 2006)

Apparently the $499 version doesn't have HDMI, Wifi, or slots for a PSP style memory stick.


Anyway, as the market for these things is largely those with $2000 HD-TVs, I guess $600 isn't that much if you want to watch movies in HD.  Too rich for my blood.


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## Aesthetic Monk (May 10, 2006)

I wasn't going to buy one anyway, but I have to say that those price points were even a little higher than I was expecting. It'll be interesting to see whether the market can bear them.

Edit: Boohoo--back to post #1.


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## drothgery (May 10, 2006)

Okay, at this point if I pick up a PS3 at all, it will be in the final days of the console along with the handful of RPGs that never got Xbox 360, Wii, or PC ports.


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## Zappo (May 10, 2006)

Currently, a BR player costs 1000$ and the 360 costs 399$ w/HD. By the time the PS3 is released, they are probably going to be 500$ and 299$ respectively, making the 499$ PS3 a steep but fair price.

As for the 599$ PS3, I can't see the point. Noone moves a console around much, so wi-fi is minor; the memory sticks are almost useless, 'cause you can save games on HD or a USB pen drive; and HDMI is useless to anyone that doesn't have an ultra-costly TV and not a big enhancement for those who do. Then again, anyone who owns a HDTV probably won't care much about paying 100$ more. The only real reason I can see for getting the 599$ one is for the larger HD, and then only if downloadable commercial-quality games become a major factor.

499$, though, is quite reasonable given the content: a gaming machine better than any PC you can buy at that price, plus a very costly video player. Sony is probably subsidizing about the same amount that MS is, maybe a little more.


This doesn't change the fact that it's a lot of money, and that I really hoped for 399$ even if I knew it was unlikely. They will still sell their entire production in November and December at least, and they know this full well; this makes the high price a rational move.

I think there is a good chance they cut the price very soon after launch, possibly as soon as they start not selling their entire production; the new 65nm chip fabrication process should cut costs, and those expensive BR drives should get cheaper quickly too.


At least the reports claiming 800$ have been proven for the bulldung they were.


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## Lazybones (May 10, 2006)

Note that if the cheaper version turns out to not actually have an HDMI port, then it may not be able to show Blu-ray movies in hi-def. While the media companies have thus far stated that they will not include the tag that forces non-HDMI connections to downsample the video quality for analog inputs, they fought really hard to get that capability included (HDCP). 

So basically PS3-lite owners may find themselves screwed a year or two down the line if companies start issuing releases with HDCP enabled. 

Of course, this is the same dilemma folks with older HDTV sets without HDMI ports have had; relying on the whim of the content industries to allow them to enjoy HD movies.


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## drothgery (May 10, 2006)

Zappo said:
			
		

> 499$, though, is quite reasonable given the content: a gaming machine better than any PC you can buy at that price, plus a very costly video player. Sony is probably subsidizing about the same amount that MS is, maybe a little more.




It won't be a better than a gaming PC you can get at the price by much, if at all. Figure that by November, you'll be able to get a $400 cheap PC with a low-midrange dual-core CPU (which will smoke a Cell or a Xenon in most tasks, including normal games), well over 60GB of disk space, and 1 GB of RAM (double the PS3 or 360, though a fair amount of RAM will be eaten by the OS). Add this fall's midrange graphics card ($150, should be about equivalent to the near-G70 in the PS3) and an internal HD-DVD drive ($120, about equivalent to the Blu-Ray drive), and you've got a better game machine than a PS3 for $670. And, oh yeah, it's a perfectly good PC too.


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## freebfrost (May 10, 2006)

Well, I knew it would be pricey, so I'll just have to save a little bit more each month then.

I can see the use of the memory sticks for PSP to PS3 game transfers, so they are probably thinking about games that could use that functionality.

I'm just wondering about the bigger hard drive - if you are using the Blu-Ray format to store games, do they expect a lot of downloadable games in the future or is there something else that would require such a large HDD?


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## Arnwyn (May 10, 2006)

Zappo said:
			
		

> Currently, a BR player costs 1000$ and the 360 costs 399$ w/HD. By the time the PS3 is released, they are probably going to be 500$ and 299$ respectively, making the 499$ PS3 a steep but fair price.



A $500 drop for BR players in just 5 months? Wow.



> At least the reports claiming 800$ have been proven for the bulldung they were.



No kidding. Who believed that, anyways?

In any case, I'll definitely be getting a PS3 - just not anytime soon. I'm in no rush, and price drops are inevitable. Hell, the PS1 and Saturn were almost $600 on day 1 - I don't think we are seeing anything new, here.


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## Arnwyn (May 10, 2006)

freebfrost said:
			
		

> I'm just wondering about the bigger hard drive - if you are using the Blu-Ray format to store games, do they expect a lot of downloadable games in the future or is there something else that would require such a large HDD?



If it'll be anything like the Xbox360 (and early Sony comments says that it will be similar), then the space is required. People are already (already! after only 7 months!) complaining rather virulently that there's nowhere near enough space on the 360's 20 GB HD. What with "microtransactions" (confirmed for the PS3) and that whole "online community" nonsense, the HDs supposedly fill up quickly.


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## freebfrost (May 10, 2006)

Arnwyn said:
			
		

> If it'll be anything like the Xbox360 (and early Sony comments says that it will be similar), then the space is required. People are already (already! after only 7 months!) complaining rather virulently that there's nowhere near enough space on the 360's 20 GB HD. What with "microtransactions" (confirmed for the PS3) and that whole "online community" nonsense, the HDs supposedly fill up quickly.



 I still can't figure out why it needs 7 Gb of space "just because."    

Regardless, if you aren't downloading new games or themes on the 360, what is the space for anyways?  I still have over 50,000 blocks available on my old Xbox, and even with the large Oblivion saves, I'll never get close to filling my 360 drive.


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## Arnwyn (May 10, 2006)

freebfrost said:
			
		

> I still can't figure out why it needs 7 Gb of space "just because."
> 
> Regardless, if you aren't downloading new games or themes on the 360, what is the space for anyways?  I still have over 50,000 blocks available on my old Xbox, and even with the large Oblivion saves, I'll never get close to filling my 360 drive.



I agree - but it seems that the assumption is that people wil be doing so. (I am skeptical that the number of 360 HD size complainers are even worthy of being called a statistical blip...)


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## Zappo (May 10, 2006)

Lazybones said:
			
		

> Note that if the cheaper version turns out to not actually have an HDMI port, then it may not be able to show Blu-ray movies in hi-def.



If I have understood the whole next-gen format mess, the downsampling would be to 720p, which is still better than DVD. I'm pretty sure that anything above that would not be visible on a normal TV (and, tbh, I'm not even sure about 720p being noticeably better than DVD on a normal TV).

So, for anyone who doesn't own a HDTV, the "cheaper" PS3 is probably going to deliver the best image quality you can see on your TV anyway; and anyone owning a HDTV can probably afford the "costlier" PS3 anyway. It's a ruthless pricing scheme, but a fairly rational one.

I find this whole "downsampling unless you buy special hardware" mess to be very irritating TBH.







			
				drothgery said:
			
		

> It won't be a better than a gaming PC you can get at the price by much, if at all. Figure that by November, you'll be able to get a $400 cheap PC with a low-midrange dual-core CPU (which will smoke a Cell or a Xenon in most tasks, including normal games), well over 60GB of disk space, and 1 GB of RAM (double the PS3 or 360, though a fair amount of RAM will be eaten by the OS). Add this fall's midrange graphics card ($150, should be about equivalent to the near-G70 in the PS3) and an internal HD-DVD drive ($120, about equivalent to the Blu-Ray drive), and you've got a better game machine than a PS3 for $670. And, oh yeah, it's a perfectly good PC too.



You cannot compare a PC to a console component-by-component. Really. I'm not talking about "ok, the console has a slight edge". A console _destroys_ a PC with similar specs, thanks to tighter integration and more focused developing.

If you think I'm using a hyperbole, try comparing the graphic quality of a PS2 with a Pentium II 300 mhz + 48 megs of RAM + Voodoo 1 graphic card (roughly equivalent to PS2's stuff, RAM increased by 50% to account for OS).

The comparison is simply meaningless; the kit you described will not even touch a PS3 (or a 360 for that matter), and it _still_ costs more. To get in the same ballpark with a PC, you're looking at getting top-of-the-line hardware and paying upwards of 1000$.


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## Arnwyn (May 10, 2006)

Zappo said:
			
		

> The comparison is simply meaningless; the kit you described will not even touch a PS3 (or a 360 for that matter), and it _still_ costs more. To get in the same ballpark with a PC, you're looking at getting top-of-the-line hardware and paying upwards of 1000$.



_And_ you're stuck with just RTSs and FPSs. Yay. (But at least online gaming is free.)


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## Zappo (May 10, 2006)

Arnwyn said:
			
		

> A $500 drop for BR players in just 5 months? Wow.



I know, I know. Since I know how these threads tend to go, I am being _extremely_ generous in the interest of being objective. I don't want a PS-hater to be able to say that my estimates are unbalanced towards Sony.

I have also assumed a 100$ drop for the 360, which is also not terribly likely. Even with these assumptions, the PS3 is _still_ a _very good_ deal for anyone that is interested in a BR reader, and a competitive choice for anyone else.

As for the HD space - well, nowadays I doubt that a 20 gig HD costs substantially more at the factory than a smaller one. Even the 60 gig one probably doesn't cost much more. Obviously, Sony is losing less money on the 599$ console (can't say "earning more" because they are selling at a loss).


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## LightPhoenix (May 10, 2006)

I expect to see prices drop within a year or two of it coming out.  Five to six-hundred dollars is priced well out of what I think the casual market will pay.  When Wii and 360 start kicking its butt in sales, Sony won't have much of a choice but to lower prices or come out with a more barebones version.

I'm with everyone else who is waiting a couple of years before buying a new console.  I'm more likely to buy a nice big-screen TV (a Samsung DLP, more than likely) so the games actually look nice instead.


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## Zappo (May 10, 2006)

It will drop sooner than a year. My own prediction is Spring 2007. Sony is using fairly new technology (Cell, BR, XDR memory) that is currently very costly to produce when compared to 360 (Xenon is pretty cool but not as weird as Cell, the GPU is roughly equivalent to PS3, and the rest of 360 is all stuff that's been around for years and that factories produce very efficiently). Production price is forcing Sony to keep the price high, but production price of a mass-market item can fall very quickly. Also, Cell is currently being fabbed at 90nm, but they are working on the 65nm version. That will cut price.


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## Truth Seeker (May 10, 2006)

That does not include games, extra controllers, accessories, etc, etc...

Can you say.$$$$$$$.


			
				KenM said:
			
		

> http://www.gamespot.com/news/6149470.html
> 
> A 20 GB for $499.99 and a 60 GB for $599.99. Be interesting to see how many people pay that much for a console. I also heard the $499.99 vesion will have less stuff.


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## Zappo (May 10, 2006)

Truth Seeker said:
			
		

> That does not include games, extra controllers, accessories, etc, etc...



*shrug*
That's true for every console ever. PCs too. Heck, even cellphones nowadays.


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## drothgery (May 10, 2006)

Zappo said:
			
		

> A console _destroys_ a PC with similar specs, thanks to tighter integration and more focused developing.
> 
> If you think I'm using a hyperbole, try comparing the graphic quality of a PS2 with a Pentium II 300 mhz + 48 megs of RAM + Voodoo 1 graphic card (roughly equivalent to PS2's stuff, RAM increased by 50% to account for OS).




Why not just go PIII-733, GeForce 3 Ti200, and 128 MB of RAM for a comprable? That's almost exactly an Xbox (the Xbox GPU being something of a "GeForce 2.5"), and avoids messy comparisons (the PS2's CPU/GPU were really strange, even more than the PS3's). It doesn't quite work, because PC games are always designed to at least be playable on midrange (or even low-end) hardware, but the Xbox doesn't destroy the PC.



			
				Zappo said:
			
		

> The comparison is simply meaningless; the kit you described will not even touch a PS3 (or a 360 for that matter), and it _still_ costs more. To get in the same ballpark with a PC, you're looking at getting top-of-the-line hardware and paying upwards of 1000$.




If the PS3 had been released last fall (with a DVD drive instead of a Blu-Ray drive, obviously), that would be true. But it's not being released last year, it's being released this fall. Last November, cheap CPUs were single-core 32-bit Celerons and Semprons. This year they'll be dual-core 64-bit Athlon 64 X2s and Pentium Ds (and possibly even E-series Core 2 Duos). Last fall, midrange GPUs were GeForce 6600s and Radeon X1600s; this fall, they'll be a half-generation beyond the GeForce 7600s and Radeon X1800s that are in that space now. By the time the PS3 has any kind of real availability (late spring of 2007, at the earliest), AMD's cheap CPUs will have clockspeed bumps and Intel will defitely have Core 2 Duos in the low-end/midrange space, GPUs will be a full generation beyond where we are now, and standard memory on PCs will be 2 GB.


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## Zappo (May 10, 2006)

drothgery said:
			
		

> Why not just go PIII-733, GeForce 3 Ti200, and 128 MB of RAM for a comprable?



Ok, but the xbox at launch was costing 299$. I don't think you could find _any_ PC for that price in november 2001, not without purchasing a used machine - and the used market works differently.

Besides, the first xbox is _exceptionally_ similar to a PC, for a console. It's quite literally the most generous comparison you could find.

Whereas the PS3 is packed with strange high-speed buses and has a CPU with _eight_ cores that aren't even symmetrical; I find component-by-component comparisons with a PC to be meaningless.

Only the system as a whole should be compared, and it is too soon to talk about that.


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## Ashrem Bayle (May 10, 2006)

I can't see why anyone would be willing to shell out $600 for Metal Gear and Final Fantasy.


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## drothgery (May 10, 2006)

Zappo said:
			
		

> Besides, the first xbox is _exceptionally_ similar to a PC, for a console. It's quite literally the most generous comparison you could find.
> 
> Whereas the PS3 is packed with strange high-speed buses and has a CPU with _eight_ cores that aren't even symmetrical; I find component-by-component comparisons with a PC to be meaningless.




The PS2 and PS3 are exceptionally different from PCs, nearly as much as the original Xbox is exceptionally similar. The GameCube had a bog-standard CPU (a nearly-identical PowerPC chip, though fabbed by Motorola instead of IBM, was sold in Macs) and a GPU that was the predecessor of today's ATi Radeons (ArtX having been bought by ATi). The DreamCast had another very standard MIPS CPU (close cousin to one that was used in a fair number of Unix workstations) and a PowerVR GPU that was sold for PCs. The original PlayStation likewise had a fairly standard architecture.

The bad thing about the current-gen consoles is that they all have awful CPUs, two designed for maximum theorical power (as opposed to real, useable power) in certain scenarios within a given price and power envelope (Xenon and Cell; Xenon's better in the general case than Cell, but a single-core Celeron or Sempron will stomp all over either in most general-purpose code, and even in fairly multithreaded code they'll get destroyed by an Athlon 64 X2, Pentium D, Core Duo, Core 2 Duo, or dual-core G5), and one that's just cheap (Wii's strongly rumored just have a higher clocked version of the GCN chip).


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## Lhorgrim (May 10, 2006)

I can't wait.  I'll be picking up my Sony console in a few weeks.  Of course it'll be a PS2.    I have never owned a Sony console of any type, but I love games like Ratchet and Clank, and Jak and Daxter so I figure I can drop $129.00.

I'll proably get a PS3 around the time the PS4 is released.  It doesn't have anything to do with the product, it has everything to do with my cash flow.


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## Arnwyn (May 10, 2006)

Ashrem Bayle said:
			
		

> I can't see why anyone would be willing to shell out $600 for Metal Gear and Final Fantasy.



I can - and so can millions of others. It's not particularly hard to see, unless one is willingly blind.


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## Ashrem Bayle (May 10, 2006)

Arnwyn said:
			
		

> I can - and so can millions of others. It's not particularly hard to see, unless one is willingly blind.




To be honest, at $500-$600, plus the price of the games, I'm not sure Sony is going to sell millions. I've seen a slew of hardcore Sony fans give them the bird over this price. If they are going to do it, casual gamers won't hesitate to do it, and it's the casual gamers you've got to get.


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## trancejeremy (May 10, 2006)

If you have a PSP, then the wifi and the memory stick ports is more important. Supposedly you will be able to buy PS1 games via the PS3's online marketplace , then transfer them to your PSP to play


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## KenM (May 10, 2006)

I remember when consoles came with not one but TWO controlers and a game packed in with it.  IIRC, the Atari 2600 cost like $150.00 when it first came out. I thought that was the bomb when I was little.


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## IcyCool (May 10, 2006)

Ashrem Bayle said:
			
		

> To be honest, at $500-$600, plus the price of the games, I'm not sure Sony is going to sell millions. I've seen a slew of hardcore Sony fans give them the bird over this price. If they are going to do it, casual gamers won't hesitate to do it, and it's the casual gamers you've got to get.




*shrug*  Given the relatively small amount of time I have to game, I'd consider myself a casual gamer.  And I'm planning on picking one up.  I'll probably snag a 360 sometime late next year, provided there are more games than just Halo 3 that I want to play on it.

Maybe I don't fit your profile of "casual gamer" though.


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## Arnwyn (May 10, 2006)

Ashrem Bayle said:
			
		

> To be honest, at $500-$600, plus the price of the games, I'm not sure Sony is going to sell millions. I've seen a slew of hardcore Sony fans give them the bird over this price. If they are going to do it, casual gamers won't hesitate to do it, and it's the casual gamers you've got to get.



Well, according to Sony's E3 conference, they have: "two million planned for launch worldwide at launch, another two million in time for the end of 2006 and another 2 million by March 2007."

I suspect they'll sell through (and even if it's only _half_ the amount due to overestimated production - a likely scenario - it'll still be "millions") in the worldwide market during at least the first shipment (though, much like the Xbox 360, probably not the next two shipment periods). I hardly think that so-called "casual gamers" picked up the Xbox 360 for its current selling price (especially considering how poorly the _cheaper_ Core Pack - even dubbed the "tard pack" by consumers and reported by the game media - has been viewed by consumers) - and the number of "hardcore" gamers worldwide is somewhat stunning... especially as the gamer demographic ages and has increasingly larger amounts of disposable income over the years.

The "casual gamer" will be picked up in the inevitable price drops - they're never considered as early adopters during a technology launch.


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## John Crichton (May 11, 2006)

This is a genius move by Sony.  They won't be able to make these things fast enough.  The Blu-Ray drive alone will make the thing sell out in Japan.  The launch price of $600 (I am ignoring the lesser priced system as I won't be even considering one with a HD that small) is perfect for the early adopters, people who love Sony, those with too much money and the hardcore teen/early 20's gamers who are saving up now.

I'm on the fence about pre-ordering one for launch.  It all depends on the games.  If there is even one must-have in there I will be getting one, even if I have to buy it in a bundle.  Why?  It'll be great with my HD-DVD player, which I'll be getting around that time.  After reading around, there is a definite upgrade in picture quality with the next-gen discs and players and there is only so long I'll be able to hold off.  I held off for a year after DVD came out and that was for monetary reasons.

And the price can go nowhere but down and as soon as the first 6 million are gone they'll probably drop the price to get the people worried about the price on board.  To further Sony's smarts is that they are still producing high profile and quality games for the PS2. I watched the whole 2 hour Sony press conference and they spent a good amount of time (read: more than I thought they would) talking about the PS2 and the support it will still be getting.  So, they don't have to rely completely on the PS3 for revenue.  They have the PSP (which is selling well for an expensive portable with an okay roster of titles) and the PS2, which is just a cash cow as the system is dirt cheap and has an unrivaled game lineup.


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## John Crichton (May 11, 2006)

freebfrost said:
			
		

> I still can't figure out why it needs 7 Gb of space "just because."
> 
> Regardless, if you aren't downloading new games or themes on the 360, what is the space for anyways?  I still have over 50,000 blocks available on my old Xbox, and even with the large Oblivion saves, I'll never get close to filling my 360 drive.



Do you do any downloading from the Marketplace?  That's what will eat up space quickly.

For myself, my TV looks really good displaying a 720p signal so I like to download movie trailers like X3, MI:3 and PotC2 that look good on my PC, but the picture is smaller and the audio not so hot.  Those downloads are about a 1/2 gig each.  Same with game downloads - I believe the GRAW demo was almost a gig.  Same with the Tomb Raider: Legend demo.  Yeah, you could just delete stuff as you go, but that's annoying.  

And, the Xbox Live Arcade is a fantastic feature and must be a HUGE moneymaker for Microsoft.  Nintendo and Sony would be fools to not follow suit and offer a similar service.  Many of the games cost only a few bucks and are really fun.  It is certainly the wave of the future and the way games will eventually be distributed.  I can't wait until I can pre-order the newest Metal Gear game and it is downloaded to my PS3 so I can play it on midnight of the launch date.  It worked for Half-Life 2 and a console has tons of encryptions and protections and is considerably harder to hack as you'd have to pop the case.

Bottom line: I can see wanting a larger HD for my 360 within a year.  The fact that just a demo can eat up so much space and that games will be designed for discs that hold 40 gigs of space on the PS3 and I'll be wanting the larger HD for it after my 360 experience.


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## John Crichton (May 11, 2006)

drothgery said:
			
		

> Why not just go PIII-733, GeForce 3 Ti200, and 128 MB of RAM for a comprable? That's almost exactly an Xbox (the Xbox GPU being something of a "GeForce 2.5"), and avoids messy comparisons (the PS2's CPU/GPU were really strange, even more than the PS3's). It doesn't quite work, because PC games are always designed to at least be playable on midrange (or even low-end) hardware, but the Xbox doesn't destroy the PC.
> 
> If the PS3 had been released last fall (with a DVD drive instead of a Blu-Ray drive, obviously), that would be true. But it's not being released last year, it's being released this fall. Last November, cheap CPUs were single-core 32-bit Celerons and Semprons. This year they'll be dual-core 64-bit Athlon 64 X2s and Pentium Ds (and possibly even E-series Core 2 Duos). Last fall, midrange GPUs were GeForce 6600s and Radeon X1600s; this fall, they'll be a half-generation beyond the GeForce 7600s and Radeon X1800s that are in that space now. By the time the PS3 has any kind of real availability (late spring of 2007, at the earliest), AMD's cheap CPUs will have clockspeed bumps and Intel will defitely have Core 2 Duos in the low-end/midrange space, GPUs will be a full generation beyond where we are now, and standard memory on PCs will be 2 GB.



Since I know diddly about computer components, power and all that I'll just quote this gamespot article that talks about how powerful the PS3 will be compared to modern PC's.  I found it interesting.

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6125429/p-2.html



			
				gamespot said:
			
		

> *Supercomputer for Computer Entertainment*
> 
> The PlayStation 3 will have a 3.2GHz Cell processor that consists of a single PowerPC-based core with seven synergistic processing units. The Cell is the result of a joint effort between IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. The primary PowerPC core has a 512KB L2 cache, and each SPE has 256KB of its own memory to work with. The CPU has an eighth SPE for "redundancy." IBM has stated that the first prototypes have weighed in with 234 million transistors each. To put things into perspective, desktop PC processor manufacturer Intel only broke into the 200-million transistor range with its dual-core Pentium Processor Extreme Edition chip, which was released in early 2005.
> 
> ...


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## Lazybones (May 11, 2006)

Zappo said:
			
		

> If I have understood the whole next-gen format mess, the downsampling would be to 720p, which is still better than DVD. I'm pretty sure that anything above that would not be visible on a normal TV (and, tbh, I'm not even sure about 720p being noticeably better than DVD on a normal TV).




According to Wikipedia, it's 540p, which is only slightly better than the default from a progressive-scan DVD. 



			
				KenM said:
			
		

> I remember when consoles came with not one but TWO controlers and a game packed in with it. IIRC, the Atari 2600 cost like $150.00 when it first came out. I thought that was the bomb when I was little.




It was $199 in 1977, which is $645 in 2005 dollars. Video games are actually a bargain today, when adjusted for inflation. 

And RE the hard drive; I've been DLing e3 trailers and demos like a madman this week, and I've all but filled up the drive. Ripping music (in case you don't have your machine networked to a Media Center PC) also takes up a lot of space (I'm not sure what codec the 360 uses, and the box doesn't tell you how big the files are, but just a handful of albums took up almost a gig of space). Even the little LiveArcade games take up a surprising amount of space (couple of 10s of MB each). 

With the demos coming in at 400-700MB each, I've been deleting the short/lame ones quickly to make space for more content.


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## LightPhoenix (May 11, 2006)

The problem with toting Blu-Ray, or HD-DVD for that matter, is that is completely reliant on have a good television in order to take advantage of that.  There are diminishing returns when you have a two hundred dollar television.  The difference between BR/HDDVD and current DVD is minimal on a lower-end television... much less so than VHS to DVD.  Figure at least a grand for a television that can take advantage of these technologies... well, if you're balking at six hundred, another grand on top of that doesn't sweeten the deal.


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## John Crichton (May 11, 2006)

LightPhoenix said:
			
		

> The problem with toting Blu-Ray, or HD-DVD for that matter, is that is completely reliant on have a good television in order to take advantage of that.  There are diminishing returns when you have a two hundred dollar television.  The difference between BR/HDDVD and current DVD is minimal on a lower-end television... much less so than VHS to DVD.  Figure at least a grand for a television that can take advantage of these technologies... well, if you're balking at six hundred, another grand on top of that doesn't sweeten the deal.



Your pricing is way off, man.  Two years ago I bought a Sony 30' CRT for $800 that has an HDMI input and 2 component inputs at Circuit City.  Yeah, it was on sale ($100 off that week) but it was brand new, in the box from a reputable store.  I actually saw it online at the time for as low as $700.  That was 2 years ago.

These days, a TV that can take a component/HMDI/DVI signal can _easily_ be found for $500 or less.  May not have a 60' screen but that's okay.  And the prices on these TVs is dropping monthly.  By this holiday season you'll be able to have a huge choice of TVs that can take a signal produced by a BR or HD player.

Have you looked at Circuit City or Best Buy's prices for HDTV's between 30-39 inches lately?  The notion that you have to spend over a grand to get a setup worthy of next gen tech is outdated and flat-out wrong.  You could go out right now and put together a complete home theater for $1000 and still have a few bucks left over for a DVD to show off your new system.  

I can't wait until a few more years go by so I can get a bigger set and spend less than I did on my 175 lb beast.  

And the bottom line is that, yes, you will need a TV that can take advantage of the BR or HD tech.  But it will actually cost less than the price of the PS3 if you do a little homework and legwork.  Open Box buys can knock a few hundred off a TV easily for a place looking to get rid of it.


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## drothgery (May 11, 2006)

John Crichton said:
			
		

> Since I know diddly about computer components, power and all that I'll just quote this gamespot article that talks about how powerful the PS3 will be compared to modern PC's.  I found it interesting.




GameSpot simply doesn't know what they're talking about when it comes to console CPUs; they're repeating Sony's press releases instead of talking to game programmers. The Xbox 360's Xenon is a bad CPU for a modern game machine. The Cell is a terrible one. And the Wii's 800 MHz or so G3 would have been decent... four years ago; it's not architectually stupid, but it's just way too slow. The theoretical numbers on the Xenon and Cell aren't that bad, but their designs just suck for real games, which aren't massively multithreaded (and can't easily be massively multithreaded), and which are helped a lot by out-of-order execution (which modern PC CPUs have, and neither the Cell nor the Xenon do). Really, I have to think that IBM Microelectronics was giving insanely good deals to do the CPU design work for MS, Sony, and Nintendo, because they would have gotten much better performance out of standard PC CPUs.


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## Zulithe (May 11, 2006)

I'm already building a nest egg for PS3, though I don't plan to buy one on launch day or even within the first 2 or 3 months after the release. Worst case scenario, I decide not to get a PS3 (or wait for a price drop + better game selection) then I can use that extra cash on a Wii or PC hardware ^__^


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## trancejeremy (May 11, 2006)

John Crichton said:
			
		

> Your pricing is way off, man.  Two years ago I bought a Sony 30' CRT for $800 that has an HDMI input and 2 component inputs at Circuit City.  Yeah, it was on sale ($100 off that week) but it was brand new, in the box from a reputable store.  I actually saw it online at the time for as low as $700.  That was 2 years ago.
> 
> These days, a TV that can take a component/HMDI/DVI signal can _easily_ be found for $500 or less.  May not have a 60' screen but that's okay.




Looking on Circuit City, the cheapest HDTV seems to be about $900 (for a 30"), and you don't hit the really high resolution (1080p, which the PS3 and the HD DVD formats are aiming for) until the $3500 mark or so.

If you got one for $700 2 years ago, you got a pretty good deal.

Anyway, on even a HDTV, is the picture from a regular DVD (480p) that much worse than it from a Blu Ray (or HDTV) downsampled to 720p?


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## John Crichton (May 11, 2006)

drothgery said:
			
		

> GameSpot simply doesn't know what they're talking about when it comes to console CPUs; they're repeating Sony's press releases instead of talking to game programmers. The Xbox 360's Xenon is a bad CPU for a modern game machine. The Cell is a terrible one. And the Wii's 800 MHz or so G3 would have been decent... four years ago; it's not architectually stupid, but it's just way too slow. The theoretical numbers on the Xenon and Cell aren't that bad, but their designs just suck for real games, which aren't massively multithreaded (and can't easily be massively multithreaded), and which are helped a lot by out-of-order execution (which modern PC CPUs have, and neither the Cell nor the Xenon do). Really, I have to think that IBM Microelectronics was giving insanely good deals to do the CPU design work for MS, Sony, and Nintendo, because they would have gotten much better performance out of standard PC CPUs.



 Whoa, whoa, whoa...

What are you saying here?  That the PS3 isn't powerful or the 360, er - I dunno.  Seriously, when it comes to the capabilities of consoles it seems terribly difficult to make a comparison to modern PCs considering all the different hardware.  It's even harder when the system isn't even out yet and games haven't been played by any posters here.

The bottom line for me is that there are many ways to play games.  I have played games on PCs that were built by educated pros/reputable companies and there is slowdown, skipping and crashing.  The same goes for consoles except that there is rarely any of the last 2 on my little list.  And keeping up with what is current and being able to play at the best looking resolution requires an upgrade every 2-3 years for PC games these days.

Megahertz, memory and the like are all well and good but when they are focused towards one thing, in this case gaming, it seems like these companies are getting alot out of their dollar.  They are spending millions to make sure their tech is the best for what they are doing while still being able to make a buck.  So, discounting everything in that article with the same amount of techno-speak does nothing for me.

So let me ask you this:

What should have Microsoft done to make their system better for games while still being able to take less of a loss on each sale of a 360?

Why did Nintendo choose the architecture they did for the Wii rather than something "faster?"

Why is the Cell processor terrible?  What would have been better to put in the PS3?

I'm a curious party.


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## John Crichton (May 11, 2006)

trancejeremy said:
			
		

> Looking on Circuit City, the cheapest HDTV seems to be about $900 (for a 30"), and you don't hit the really high resolution (1080p, which the PS3 and the HD DVD formats are aiming for) until the $3500 mark or so.
> 
> If you got one for $700 2 years ago, you got a pretty good deal.
> 
> Anyway, on even a HDTV, is the picture from a regular DVD (480p) that much worse than it from a Blu Ray (or HDTV) downsampled to 720p?



Huh?  Don't look at 1080p - that is tech that will be the average 3-5 years from now.  That tech isn't needed to provide an HD picture.  720p or 1080i is the current sweet spot.

Any TV that has component inputs and can produce at least a 720p picture is considered HD.

As for your question about 480p - Have you seen a picture at 480 vs. 1080i/720p?  There is a definite difference.  It's also about the output.  Downsampling is exactly what is sounds like: going downhill.

The best example I can think of is music.  Compare a current stereo system with a tape deck and CD player.  The same song on a cassette vs a CD.


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## Zappo (May 11, 2006)

The fact that modern games aren't multithreaded much is an issue for both the 360 and the PS3. More for the PS3, in fact. However, it is an issue for dual-core PCs as well.

However, this is a paradigm that has to change eventually. Making faster CPUs while keeping heat under control is becoming harder and harder, with manufacturers pushing for multi-core architectures instead. Even PCs are going to be dual-core as a standard.

Bottom line, game developers _must_ learn how to multithread. Microsoft and Sony aren't being stupid for putting heavily multi-core CPUs in their machines - they simply know this simple fact.

As more of them start writing efficient multithread code, multi-core CPUs will become a real advantage. This is especially true for Cell, and for this reason I expect second and third generation PS3 titles to be much better than early ones. Most current PS3 titles only use two or two PPUs plus the main core, which means that more than half of the CPU's power is not being used. In a few years, this will probably give PS3 a noticeable edge over 360.


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## John Crichton (May 11, 2006)

Zappo said:
			
		

> The fact that modern games aren't multithreaded much is an issue for both the 360 and the PS3. More for the PS3, in fact. However, it is an issue for dual-core PCs as well.
> 
> However, this is a paradigm that has to change eventually. Making faster CPUs while keeping heat under control is becoming harder and harder, with manufacturers pushing for multi-core architectures instead. Even PCs are going to be dual-core as a standard.
> 
> ...



Ah!  That's what I was looking for!  

A plain explaination for what is currently "wrong" and a possible solution.  You have also given yourself and these devs a brain, meaning that you are not offering blind criticism but simply what is going on and where it is going.  I'm glad to hear that this is basically going the same way that Sony/Nintendo consoles have gone in the past.  They start off with game devs not fully getting how to use the hardware and after 3+ years (sometimes more) they are able to really use the system in ways that it was meant to be and can live up to the promises projected at launch.

I exclude MS from this equation as they have only one generation of console and it wasn't very inventive - just a concentrated PC for gaming (which is okay).  Sony and Nintendo have historically put together hardware that takes devs a while to "unlock."  It happened all the way back to the SNES and the PSone.  It you look at some of the titles released at the very end of the cycle you'd be amazed at what they were able to milk out of the hardware.

It's also why we'll almost always be dissappointed by launch games.  But that's not news to anyone.


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## drothgery (May 11, 2006)

Zappo said:
			
		

> The fact that modern games aren't multithreaded much is an issue for both the 360 and the PS3. More for the PS3, in fact. However, it is an issue for dual-core PCs as well.
> 
> However, this is a paradigm that has to change eventually. Making faster CPUs while keeping heat under control is becoming harder and harder, with manufacturers pushing for multi-core architectures instead. Even PCs are going to be dual-core as a standard.
> 
> Bottom line, game developers _must_ learn how to multithread. Microsoft and Sony aren't being stupid for putting heavily multi-core CPUs in their machines - they simply know this simple fact.




It's not just a matter of "learning to multithread" (non-programmers tend to hand-wave this; even when you're doing something that can be effectively multithreaded, writing multithreaded code is *hard*, and despite decades of effort, there hasn't been much progress in making it easier). It's a matter of trying to do things that can be effectively mutli-threaded. There are very severe limits on how multithreaded something that's strongly dependent on user input (i.e. a game) can be. A lot of games might be able to use two threads effectively; very few will be able to use six (three cores + SMT on the Xeon) or one main thread and seven helper threads (PPE + 7 SPEs on the Cell).

And the other massive performance drag on both CPUs is that they're in-order machines (which PC CPUs haven't been since the Pentium), rather than out-of-order. Which means code that branches a lot (extremely common in games) doesn't perform very well. Code that involves doing the same thing over and over again in predictable ways can be very fast on an in-order CPU (Intel's Itanium is an in-order CPU), but they're not very good for general purpose computing, or for games. What they are is relatively cheap to design and build (the cheapest Athlon 64 X2 is almost as expensive as an Xbox 360), and something that allows MS and Sony to give impressive numbers to the press.

But like console makers have done over and over again, they keep ignoring that CPUs and memory get cheaper a lot faster over time than GPUs (new low-cost GPUs are almost always scaled-down versions of new high-cost GPUs, rather than old midrange or high-end GPUs; CPUs almost always move down-market), so it's better to spend the component budget on the CPU and memory.


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## drothgery (May 11, 2006)

John Crichton said:
			
		

> I exclude MS from this equation as they have only one generation of console and it wasn't very inventive - just a concentrated PC for gaming (which is okay).  Sony and Nintendo have historically put together hardware that takes devs a while to "unlock."  It happened all the way back to the SNES and the PSone.  It you look at some of the titles released at the very end of the cycle you'd be amazed at what they were able to milk out of the hardware.




Err.. the original PlayStation was a simple and straightforward architecture, certainly much more so than the competing Saturn and N64. The same goes for the GameCube, DreamCast, and Xbox (and the Wii, for that matter); they weren't just simple relative to the PS2, they were simple, period (that's why with less theoretical power by most measures -- it's only theoretical advantage, though a very significant one, is more memory -- the GCN keeps up with with the PS2 quite well; it's far easier to code against a G3 than an Emotion Engine). The Xbox 360 is less wonky than the PS3 (symetric multiprocessing is far easier to handle than asymetric multiprocessing), though the GPU design on the 360 is new (unfied shaders should be simpler, and are pretty much required in DirectX 10, but they haven't been done before), and they're both fairly wonky by nature of having massively multithreaded, in-order CPUs.


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## drothgery (May 11, 2006)

John Crichton said:
			
		

> What should have Microsoft done to make their system better for games while still being able to take less of a loss on each sale of a 360?




It depends what Intel, AMD, and IBM Microelectronics were offering MS. I'm a lot less concerned about owning all the IP, and about making the system unusual (and therefore hard to hack) than Microsoft was. I also think that MS overestimated the importance of being first to market; I wouldn't have launched the 360 last year, when it was clear neither Sony or Nintendo would (in fact, they're only launching consoles this year because MS did last year; otherwise we'd see the PS3 in 2007, when it almost makes sense to launch a console with a Blu-Ray drive). Heck, I'd've made sure Halo 3 and KotOR 3 were launch titles.

But I'd bet that the best thing IBM could make for a console last year that would be a tweaked PPC970FX (the low-power G5, seen in the last PowerPC iMacs). Single core, but with an excellent vector unit. The dual-core version costs too much and uses too much power for a console. Intel could have provided a tweaked Pentium M "Dothan", or possibly two of them for conventional SMP (the Pentium 4 is too power-hungry for a console; the Pentium D is right out); AMD could have provided a tweaked Athlon 64 (though not an X2; too expensive).



			
				John Crichton said:
			
		

> Why did Nintendo choose the architecture they did for the Wii rather than something "faster?"




Cost, cost, and cost. The Wii's strongly rumored to be launching at under $200, and Nintendo has never taken a loss on hardware.



			
				John Crichton said:
			
		

> Why is the Cell processor terrible?  What would have been better to put in the PS3?




I think I explained above why the Cell's terrible for games, except to add that asymetric multiprocessing on the Cell is even harder to do well than symetric multiprocessing on the Xenon or standard dual-core CPUs, that the Cell's SPEs just aren't good for all that much. When Sony was intending to use two Cells in the PS3, and not have a dedicated GPU, they were halfway decent for processing graphics -- but nowhere near as good as ATi and nVidia's dedicated hardware, which was why they had to scramble and sign on nVidia at the last minute.

Because it's launching in 2006, not 2005, IBM could probably make a dual-core G5 that fit in a console's power envelope. AMD's costs for Athlon 64 X2s are lower now than they were last year. Intel could provide a Core Duo (a Core 2 Duo would be excellent, but they're launching in the next month or two and will still be too expensive by conventional console economics in November).


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## Zappo (May 11, 2006)

I don't handwave. I _am_ a programmer.  The problem is hard, but far from impossible.

By comparison, making single-threaded games constantly better and better _is_ impossible.


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## LightPhoenix (May 11, 2006)

John Crichton said:
			
		

> Your pricing is way off, man.  Two years ago I bought a Sony 30' CRT for $800 that has an HDMI input and 2 component inputs at Circuit City.  Yeah, it was on sale ($100 off that week) but it was brand new, in the box from a reputable store.  I actually saw it online at the time for as low as $700.  That was 2 years ago.
> 
> These days, a TV that can take a component/HMDI/DVI signal can _easily_ be found for $500 or less.  May not have a 60' screen but that's okay.  And the prices on these TVs is dropping monthly.  By this holiday season you'll be able to have a huge choice of TVs that can take a signal produced by a BR or HD player.
> 
> ...




And I think that while the hardcore consumer is willing, or more likely already has, spent money on that setup, the casual gamers have not, and likely will not.  Things may have changed somewhat since the two years I stopped selling electronics, but the average customer didn't come in looking even at a flatscreen television.  And while flatscreens seem to be more prolific now, the point is that your average consumer, and thus casual gamer, IMO, is not going to be spending thousands of dollars to play video games.  And that's why you can't bring up the next-gen playability as a benefit, because the majority of people won't have sufficient set-ups to take advantage of it.


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## drothgery (May 11, 2006)

Zappo said:
			
		

> By comparison, making single-threaded games constantly better and better _is_ impossible.




Maybe (I suspect we haven't passed the point where single-thread is better for gaming performance, and won't soon; moreover, if AMD and Intel were solely concerned with gaming, they'd be putting more effort into fast single cores), but massive multi-threading is not useful for game machines now, and won't be in the expected lifespan of the PS3 and Xbox 360. A second core and/or SMT would be useful. Three SMT cores or 7 helper micro-cores is not.

They're about the worst case for multi-threading; they typically run a single application that doesn't parallelize well. Desktops typically run a lot of apps at one time. Servers tend to run apps that parallelize well (or, in the case of web servers, a lot of small apps, and/or multiple copies of the same app).


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## drothgery (May 11, 2006)

LightPhoenix said:
			
		

> And I think that while the hardcore consumer is willing, or more likely already has, spent money on that setup, the casual gamers have not, and likely will not.  Things may have changed somewhat since the two years I stopped selling electronics, but the average customer didn't come in looking even at a flatscreen television.




He's not talking about flatscreen TVs (or rather, he's not talking about LCDs, DLPs, plasmas, or old-school projection TVs). He's talking about 26" and 30" widescreen CRTs, which are pretty widely available for $500-$800 (if there had been $500 30" CRTs three years ago, I'd have one).


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## John Crichton (May 12, 2006)

drothgery said:
			
		

> He's not talking about flatscreen TVs (or rather, he's not talking about LCDs, DLPs, plasmas, or old-school projection TVs). He's talking about 26" and 30" widescreen CRTs, which are pretty widely available for $500-$800 (if there had been $500 30" CRTs three years ago, I'd have one).



 Yah.  

They are big and bulky, but they more than get the job done.  I'd highly recommend one for any gamer or entertainment enthusist.  I bought the thing to mainly watch DVDs and at the time I just wanted to play Madden on one so I could see more of the field.  Turns out it's some of the best money I've ever spent.  I actually lucked out as HDMI was just coming out and for some reason Sony put one on it when everything else at that price point just had component inputs and usually just one.  1 HDMI + 2 component inputs was a little luck based off some good homework.


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## John Crichton (May 12, 2006)

drothgery said:
			
		

> It depends what Intel, AMD, and IBM Microelectronics were offering MS. I'm a lot less concerned about owning all the IP, and about making the system unusual (and therefore hard to hack) than Microsoft was. I also think that MS overestimated the importance of being first to market; I wouldn't have launched the 360 last year, when it was clear neither Sony or Nintendo would (in fact, they're only launching consoles this year because MS did last year; otherwise we'd see the PS3 in 2007, when it almost makes sense to launch a console with a Blu-Ray drive). Heck, I'd've made sure Halo 3 and KotOR 3 were launch titles.
> 
> But I'd bet that the best thing IBM could make for a console last year that would be a tweaked PPC970FX (the low-power G5, seen in the last PowerPC iMacs). Single core, but with an excellent vector unit. The dual-core version costs too much and uses too much power for a console. Intel could have provided a tweaked Pentium M "Dothan", or possibly two of them for conventional SMP (the Pentium 4 is too power-hungry for a console; the Pentium D is right out); AMD could have provided a tweaked Athlon 64 (though not an X2; too expensive).



You, sir, just exploded my brain.  I understood very little of that.  



			
				drothgery said:
			
		

> I think I explained above why the Cell's terrible for games, except to add that asymetric multiprocessing on the Cell is even harder to do well than symetric multiprocessing on the Xenon or standard dual-core CPUs, that the Cell's SPEs just aren't good for all that much. When Sony was intending to use two Cells in the PS3, and not have a dedicated GPU, they were halfway decent for processing graphics -- but nowhere near as good as ATi and nVidia's dedicated hardware, which was why they had to scramble and sign on nVidia at the last minute.
> 
> Because it's launching in 2006, not 2005, IBM could probably make a dual-core G5 that fit in a console's power envelope. AMD's costs for Athlon 64 X2s are lower now than they were last year. Intel could provide a Core Duo (a Core 2 Duo would be excellent, but they're launching in the next month or two and will still be too expensive by conventional console economics in November).



Okay.  Sounds good.  Heh.  Honestly, I really think that lots of what you say is accurate but with a company as successful as Sony I think they know what they are doing.  And, I really can't tell if you are thinking they made a big mistake in choosing how to make the PS3 or not.


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## John Crichton (May 12, 2006)

LightPhoenix said:
			
		

> And I think that while the hardcore consumer is willing, or more likely already has, spent money on that setup, the casual gamers have not, and likely will not.  Things may have changed somewhat since the two years I stopped selling electronics, but the average customer didn't come in looking even at a flatscreen television.  And while flatscreens seem to be more prolific now, the point is that your average consumer, and thus casual gamer, IMO, is not going to be spending thousands of dollars to play video games.  And that's why you can't bring up the next-gen playability as a benefit, because the majority of people won't have sufficient set-ups to take advantage of it.



drothgery had it right, but my basic point was that it doesn't take thousands of dollars to get a good HD/home theater setup.  You can put the whole thing together for a grand.


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## Zappo (May 12, 2006)

A precisation. What drothgery explained - that out-of-order single-threaded performance on Cell is going to be relatively bad - applies to the 360's Xenon as well. The winners in that field are _PCs_, with their complex and powerful single cores. I don't disagree with that.

My opinion OTOH is that devs will relatively quickly find ways to make more in-order and multi-threaded code for many parts of their games (though not all). This way, they will gain more performance out of the sheer number of cores than what they lose because of the core architecture. It seems that both Sony and Microsoft think the same thing.


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## drothgery (May 12, 2006)

John Crichton said:
			
		

> Okay.  Sounds good.  Heh.  Honestly, I really think that lots of what you say is accurate but with a company as successful as Sony I think they know what they are doing.  And, I really can't tell if you are thinking they made a big mistake in choosing how to make the PS3 or not.




I think Sony made a big mistake with the PS3's CPU, and may get away with it because Microsoft and Nintendo made smaller ones; they probably won't get away with it, because the PS3's price will consign the PS3 to second place at best outside of Japan, and because even at $600, they're taking a loss that they really can't afford to on each console. No one has ever made money selling consoles at a launch; only Microsoft has ever built marketshare that way.

It's also worth noting that Sony's not doing very well lately, oustside of the PS2. Their consumer electronics lines are in trouble due to Samsung, Apple, and a bunch of others. The movie industry isn't doing well, and Sony's properties are no exception. Same goes for music. They're far less capable of taking big losses from consoles than Microsoft.

Sony did what they did because it's a logical extension of what they did with the PS2, and they think that succeeded (they're wrong; the PS2 succeeded in spite of its CPU, not because of it). MS did what they did because they wanted an unusual architecture that's hard to hack and that they'd own, and because IBM Microelectronics (who were already working on the Cell, and didn't want to design two complete console CPUs) was the low bidder. And Nintendo did what they did because it was very cheap.

Researchers have been putting enormous amounts of effort into finding ways to make multi-threaded programming easier for *decades*. And they haven't gotten very far in doing it. So I'm extremely skeptical of any major breakthroughs in the next five years.

And when the biggest names in PC game programming say that there's very little benefit to multi-threading in games -- and almost none beyond two threads -- I believe them.


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## Arnwyn (May 12, 2006)

drothgery said:
			
		

> because the PS3's price will consign the PS3 to second place at best outside of Japan,



Fascinating. People continue talking about the price as if it were to remain the same over the entire console's lifecycle.

History, of course, clearly contradicts such speculation (as I'm sure we all remember the introduction prices of the PSX, Saturn, and N64 - and which one ended up with the most market share).


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## Ashrem Bayle (May 12, 2006)

Arnwyn said:
			
		

> Fascinating. People continue talking about the price as if it were to remain the same over the entire console's lifecycle.
> 
> History, of course, clearly contradicts such speculation (as I'm sure we all remember the introduction prices of the PSX, Saturn, and N64 - and which one ended up with the most market share).




The 360 will be about a year old when the PS3 comes out. It'll have a year's worth of releases, and if rumors are to be believed, it will cost half of what the PS3 costs. Even if the PS3 drops $100 a year later, it'll still be second place to the 360.

The PS3 will take second place outside of Japan. There is no way Sony can remain on top. They have WAY too much going against them.

Also of note, one of the things going against them are the developers themselves. John Carmack (the creater of Doom) was recently interviewed on G4. He basically said that the Cell chip was a nightmare to program for, and developers were only going to work on it because Sony was trying to strong-arm them with their brand name. He said that while the PS3 has more _potential_ power than the 360, it is so hard to program for, developers will never try to push it to its limits.

Of course, this is just one man's opinions, but Carmack is a verteran of the industry and a genius to boot. 

In addition to that, a few moments earlier, they had CliffyB on, the guy in charge of Gears of War and a major player at Epic. He came out and said, in not so many words, that even though they were using both systems, he too preffered the 360.

Now, on top of that, IGN reports a rumor that the 360 might get Metal Gear.


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## drothgery (May 12, 2006)

Arnwyn said:
			
		

> Fascinating. People continue talking about the price as if it were to remain the same over the entire console's lifecycle.




Where is anyone saying that (except in relative terms)? 

All my argument requires is that the PS3 be significantly more expensive than the Xbox 360 and the Wii for the next two or three years (which it will be; their hardware costs are substantially higher than both Microsoft's and Nintendo's, and Sony's less financially able to take losses on hardware). If the PS3's $299, the Xbox 360 is $149, and the Wii is $99, the same financial incentives will play out as they do when the PS3 is $599, the Xbox 360 is $399, and the Wii is $199.

It doesn't require that Sony stick with the $599 price indefinitely.



			
				Arnwyn said:
			
		

> History, of course, clearly contradicts such speculation (as I'm sure we all remember the introduction prices of the PSX, Saturn, and N64 - and which one ended up with the most market share).




IIRC, in the US, the Saturn launched first at the highest price ($399), and had the lowest market share. The PSX debuted at $299. And the N64 was $249, but its games were more expensive due to being the last cartridge-based box (other than handhelds). The PSX was also the easiest to develop for, by far, of its contemporaries, and Sony had the lowest licensing fees.


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## KenM (May 12, 2006)

I saw an interview on G4 from E3. I forgot who it was but he said that Sony mad it harder for 3rd person devolpers to make games for the PS3 due to the way they designed the hardware. This will turn alot of devolpers off.


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## Arnwyn (May 12, 2006)

drothgery said:
			
		

> All my argument requires is that the PS3 be significantly more expensive than the Xbox 360 and the Wii for the next two or three years (which it will be; their hardware costs are substantially higher than both Microsoft's and Nintendo's, and Sony's less financially able to take losses on hardware). If the PS3's $299, the Xbox 360 is $149, and the Wii is $99, the same financial incentives will play out as they do when the PS3 is $599, the Xbox 360 is $399, and the Wii is $199.



Possibly - but, of course, we have no idea what the prices will be in a couple of years. Heck, even you botched up your (already wildly speculative) price ratios. (I.e. if the PS3's $299, then following the current price ratio, the Xbox 360 will be $199. But I digress!)

While I don't claim to specifically know Sony's cost structure and finances to a fine degree (and immediately dismiss speculation from anyone who isn't in their accounting department - even their public financial statements never tell the whole story about what a company can and can't do - I _am_ a professional accountant after all) and whether they can reduce their prices to a specific degree, I do have a hard time believing that they won't be competitive on this front.

But who knows? Predicting market share is a funny business - but yeah, as in all things, I can see the price possibly hurting them. Let's see how hardcore consumers _really_ are about video games...


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## Ashrem Bayle (May 12, 2006)

KenM said:
			
		

> I saw an interview on G4 from E3. I forgot who it was but he said that Sony mad it harder for 3rd person devolpers to make games for the PS3 due to the way they designed the hardware. This will turn alot of devolpers off.




John Carmack, inventor of Doom. See my post above.


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## trancejeremy (May 12, 2006)

I think people are missing that Sony is not dropping the PS2, like MS did with the Xbox. Sony's marketshare has probably increased since the 360 launch, because the PS2 has outsold the 360+ original Xbox.

The 360 might have a larger user base than the PS3, but it's still 70 million behind the PS2.

Besides, I think whatever the price, the PS3 will sell as many units as Sony can make for the first year or so. Look at the 360 - the limiting factor hasn't been price for it, but availability.

I think charging $600 a console is the only way Sony can stay in business. Because as someone else pointed out, Sony is not doing all that well (outside the game division) - they don't have billions in cash just lying around like MS does. They simply can't afford to lose a ton of money on each one, like MS can.


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## drothgery (May 13, 2006)

trancejeremy said:
			
		

> I think people are missing that Sony is not dropping the PS2, like MS did with the Xbox. Sony's marketshare has probably increased since the 360 launch, because the PS2 has outsold the 360+ original Xbox.




Microsoft's trying to get rid of the original Xbox because they lose money the hardware. If they didn't, they'd at least have cut prices to clear out inventory. So now we've got a strange situation where the PS2 is significantly cheaper than the Xbox, and where the last good PS2 games are coming out soon (or have already been released in Japan).

Ready availability of the 360 (pretty nearly the case now), a $199 Wii, some availability of PS3s, and the drying up of new high-profile PS2 games after this year should cause PS2 sales to fall a lot after this year. Heck, after this year most PS2 sales will probably be replacements for people whose PS2 has broken after the warranty expired and who can't afford a PS3.


----------



## trancejeremy (May 13, 2006)

John Crichton said:
			
		

> Huh?  Don't look at 1080p - that is tech that will be the average 3-5 years from now.  That tech isn't needed to provide an HD picture.  720p or 1080i is the current sweet spot.
> 
> Any TV that has component inputs and can produce at least a 720p picture is considered HD.
> 
> ...




1080p might not be common now, but that is what the new DVD formats and the PS3 is aiming for.

Normal widescreen DVDs are 720x480 I think.
Blue Ray/HD DVDs are 1920x1080
720p HDTVs are 1280x720

I actually don't know which is worse, upscaling to 720p from 480 or down from 1080.  I do know that 360 games on a regular TV look pretty bad.  And really, it also all depends on how big the TV is. 

But my point was, the PS3 is really aimed at people with 1080p TVs - they will get the most benefit. And if you have one of those, then you can certainly afford a $600 console.


----------



## John Crichton (May 13, 2006)

trancejeremy said:
			
		

> 1080p might not be common now, but that is what the new DVD formats and the PS3 is aiming for.
> 
> Normal widescreen DVDs are 720x480 I think.
> Blue Ray/HD DVDs are 1920x1080
> ...



 It's not aimed at people with 1080p TVs.  Why?  Because they aren't in wide production or circulation yet.    If you simply meant high-end TVs, please ignore this because if that is what you ment than I agree.  That said, 1080p is great, but not mind-blowingly better than 720p or 1080p.  I would say that the univentented 1560p would be a huge leap towards a relatively affordable upgrade to 720p/1080i which now are at the top of the visual heap.

In short - They are aiming at people with displays that can handle HD.  The PS2 is for everything else (which we seem to agree on).  Anyone wanting a PS3 already has a TV where DVDs look great and they are getting a HD signal for TV shows.


----------



## John Crichton (May 13, 2006)

drothgery said:
			
		

> Microsoft's trying to get rid of the original Xbox because they lose money the hardware. If they didn't, they'd at least have cut prices to clear out inventory. So now we've got a strange situation where the PS2 is significantly cheaper than the Xbox, and where the last good PS2 games are coming out soon (or have already been released in Japan).



Naw, Japan still has some quality PS2 titles on the way.  The only one I can think of right now is God of War 2, but there a few more.



			
				drothgery said:
			
		

> Ready availability of the 360 (pretty nearly the case now), a $199 Wii, some availability of PS3s, and the drying up of new high-profile PS2 games after this year should cause PS2 sales to fall a lot after this year.



I dunno if the high-profile PS2 games will stop in 2006.  If history is any indicator than the PS2 will still have top level releases for at least a year after the PS3 is out, which means that the holiday season of 2007 may still have some hits on the way.

It's hard to ignore the largest user base in the world - PS2 owners.  The games will still sell if they are any good.


----------



## LightPhoenix (May 13, 2006)

Maybe I'm not making my point entirely clear, or maybe I'm just being obtuse in understanding the rebuttal.

A thousand dollars is a lot of money.  And if we're going to take the $500 30" CRT TV, that's $1000 for a barebones system (TV + console) to take advantage of the high-def features that are being toted as selling points for both the 360 and PS3.  That is a lot of money... more than I think the average consumer is going to spend.  Like I said before, maybe this has changed over two years, but in my experience, people did not often buy $500 dollar televisions.  Because of this, features like HD don't mean as much as they are being toted to.

As to the arguement that they are playing to the HD crowd?  Of course they are!  At the prices that are being put forth, only the total enthusiasts are going to buying the stuff.  Since they know that they are both dazzled by high-end technology and going to spend large sums of money on electronics, why not price it as high as it can go?  I don't think it's a bad strategy... I just don't think that it's a winning one.  The key to controlling a market isn't the fringe groups, it's the middle ground.

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume most of the people in this thread are not average consumers.  If you're not balking at a thousand dollars, either you're making quite a bit of money (not average) or electronics is a hobby/passion (not average).  If you're spouting off display ratios and know the difference between plasma and LCD and DLP, you're probably not the average consumer.  I think that's the biggest point that I'm trying to get across and failing.  We (and yes, I do mean we... I plan on spending some good money tomorrow on an iPod) are not the average consumers.  We can talk about 1080p all we want, but most people don't even know what the "p" stands for, let alone what it means.  Those are the people who won't pay six-hundred dollars for a console.  And there are a lot of them.


----------



## John Crichton (May 13, 2006)

drothgery said:
			
		

> I think Sony made a big mistake with the PS3's CPU, and may get away with it because Microsoft and Nintendo made smaller ones; they probably won't get away with it, because the PS3's price will consign the PS3 to second place at best outside of Japan, and because even at $600, they're taking a loss that they really can't afford to on each console. No one has ever made money selling consoles at a launch; only Microsoft has ever built marketshare that way.



I am curious: what should have Sony and Microsoft done?  And keep in mind that you only have the release dates to work with.  You have to launch the console when they did.  What hardware changes should Sony have made for the PS3 that would make the most sense?



			
				drothgery said:
			
		

> It's also worth noting that Sony's not doing very well lately, oustside of the PS2. Their consumer electronics lines are in trouble due to Samsung, Apple, and a bunch of others. The movie industry isn't doing well, and Sony's properties are no exception. Same goes for music. They're far less capable of taking big losses from consoles than Microsoft.



I don't think it's that big of a deal.  They still have viable revenue streams from the PS2 and the PSP, which is selling well.  That means the gaming division is okay.  And to boot, I'll wait until Sony starts not making stuff and selling it at a premium to declare they aren't doing well financially.  They make not be making as much as in the past, sure.  I don't think that makes a huge difference when discussing the launch price of the PS3.  The Blu-Ray player alone will cost $900-1000 to the public.



			
				drothgery said:
			
		

> Researchers have been putting enormous amounts of effort into finding ways to make multi-threaded programming easier for *decades*. And they haven't gotten very far in doing it. So I'm extremely skeptical of any major breakthroughs in the next five years.
> 
> And when the biggest names in PC game programming say that there's very little benefit to multi-threading in games -- and almost none beyond two threads -- I believe them.



That's all well and good but how does that effect games?  Make them look crappy?  Makes the AI harder to program?  I know I sound like I'm just arguing at this point but what does multithreading actually do?  How will it makes gaming better?  I'm really curious.


----------



## Zappo (May 13, 2006)

LightPhoenix said:
			
		

> Maybe I'm not making my point entirely clear, or maybe I'm just being obtuse in understanding the rebuttal.
> 
> A thousand dollars is a lot of money.  And if we're going to take the $500 30" CRT TV, that's $1000 for a barebones system (TV + console) to take advantage of the high-def features that are being toted as selling points for both the 360 and PS3.  That is a lot of money... more than I think the average consumer is going to spend.  Like I said before, maybe this has changed over two years, but in my experience, people did not often buy $500 dollar televisions.  Because of this, features like HD don't mean as much as they are being toted to.



I agree. I wouldn't spend a thousand for a gaming system, or for a video system. Luckily, I don't really care that much about HD. So, in buying the "cheaper" PS3, I will be spending 500$ for _both_ a gaming system and a video system that matches my requirements (of being the best that my TV can display). I would have liked it to be cheaper, but I can't honestly say it's a bad deal.


----------



## John Crichton (May 13, 2006)

LightPhoenix said:
			
		

> Maybe I'm not making my point entirely clear, or maybe I'm just being obtuse in understanding the rebuttal.
> 
> A thousand dollars is a lot of money...
> 
> ...



It's too early in the morning for me to read your pesky logic and thoughfully respond.  Therefore, I will resort to violence!  Ha, HA!  

* uses force lightning on LP *

Bet you didn't see that coming!


----------



## drothgery (May 13, 2006)

John Crichton said:
			
		

> I am curious: what should have Sony and Microsoft done?  And keep in mind that you only have the release dates to work with.  You have to launch the console when they did.  What hardware changes should Sony have made for the PS3 that would make the most sense?




The PS3's a really wierd, expensive design that has a lot of hallmarks of something being stuffed on at the last minute -- in this case, the nVidia graphics card -- and of spending a lot of effort to promote something (Blu-Ray) that adds a lot to cost and does nothing for games (for the rare games longer than 9GB, spanning multiple DVDs is cheaper than using a Blu-Ray disc).

Sony, in my opinion, should have
- used a more conventional CPU (optimized for working with one or two threads, not eight)
- used a single type of memory (the original Xbox showed that unifying video memory and system memory was a Good Thing for a console)
- dropped Blu-Ray (2006 is too soon for a Blu-Ray promoting console to be sold at anything resembling a reasonable price) and integrated Wi-Fi
- never made any silly pretentions about 1080p -- the PS3 isn't capable of running complex games at a decent framerate at that resolution
- launched only one package (the Core/Premium system sucked for the 360, and it sucks for the PS3)

Microsoft, in my opinion, should have
- used a more conventional CPU
- ensured more high-profile titles were available at launch, even if it delayed launching until 2006
- launched with only one package
- included a larger hard drive



			
				John Crichton said:
			
		

> That's all well and good but how does that effect games?  Make them look crappy?  Makes the AI harder to program?  I know I sound like I'm just arguing at this point but what does multithreading actually do?  How will it makes gaming better?  I'm really curious.




A CPU that's designed to run a lot of threads at once rather than run one or two threads fast means that software has to be highly multithreaded to get the most out of the CPU.

Multithreading means you're trying to do multiple things at the same time. So when you're doing stuff that can be easily broken up into independent tasks, that's great. Multi-threading helps a lot in situations like that. But when the tasks all have to talk to each other, then you're spending a lot of time trying to keep in sync rather than doing any real work (you've probably seen why an eight-man team is rarely eight times faster than one guy at anything that can be done by one guy, unless it's something that can be easily broken up into eight independent things -- the same thing applies to computers).

Games historically haven't been very well suited to being multi-threaded, because there's not much going on that isn't reactive to user input (what the guy with the controller is doing). What it means is that AI is harder to program (maybe to the point where what academic computer scientists think of as AI may be useful, rather than the stacks of if/then and case statements that are game AI today), and that if game programmers are going to get any use at all out of the extra CPU cores, they'll have to think of new things to do with them that can be run largely independently of the main thread. No one knows what they will be. What's certain is that using multi-threading to improve games in traditional ways (more complex and better-looking graphics) is going to be extremely difficult, if it can be done at all.


----------



## Orius (May 14, 2006)

Well, all this hardware talk means very little to me, since I have no idea what any of it means. I'm sure I'm not alone, and there are many people who aren't going to pay attention to such stats.  However, I have my impressions of what the different companies are going for, though the impressions may themselves be wrong.

Sony seems to be taking a "bigger is better" approach.  Bigger technical capabilties like graphics and processing, bigger storage space, the whole Blu-Ray drive (which is supposed to have more storage space than HD-DVD), and the ridiculously high retail price.    They have the advantage of backwards compatibility, but that's not as strong as it was with PS2, because at the time, Xbox did not have games to be backwards compatible with, and GC as a disc system couldn't be backwards compatible with cartrige games (unless Nintendo put in a port for carts). They way I understand, each of these systems is supposed to be backwards compatible which the older consoles (I might be wrong).  But if programming for the console is difficult, that could hurt it over the long run.  There's also the whole Blu-Ray issue, if Blu-Ray tanks that could also hurt the console.

Microsoft looks like it's going for the online market.  People might think it's a joke now, but I think Microsoft thinks it may take off eventually and is trying to take an early lead as possible.  It doesn't really surprise me, because over the last 10 years or so, Microsoft has largely been focusing on expanding onto the Internet, which makes sense unless you're a rabid Microsoft hater who thinks their corporate headquarters is a suburb of hell.  They seem to be planning on staying in the market over the long term.  Mircosoft's weakness is that they're not really popular in Japan, but I suspect they may realize that and are focusing on the international market in general.

Nintendo has been taking it hard in the market the last 10 years, and it seems right now they're not focusing on the tech issues that the average consumer has no clue about, but rather trying to market a fun and inexpensive system that is easy to learn and play.  The biggest weakness they seem to have right now is the possiblity of not having enough third party support.  That depends on how easy the Wii will be to develop for, and if third party developers can come up with good and different game concepts that work great on Wii, but not so good on the other systems.


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## drothgery (May 14, 2006)

Orius said:
			
		

> They have the advantage of backwards compatibility, but that's not as strong as it was with PS2, because at the time, Xbox did not have games to be backwards compatible with, and GC as a disc system couldn't be backwards compatible with cartrige games (unless Nintendo put in a port for carts). They way I understand, each of these systems is supposed to be backwards compatible which the older consoles (I might be wrong).




They are, but Nintendo's likely going to be the best at it (at least, if the general reports of how the Wii is put together are correct), simply because the Wii is far more like a GameCube than an Xbox 360 is like an Xbox or a PS3 is like a PS2. The PS2 had complete backward compatibility because it included a PS1 CPU in every PS2 box. With the current set of consoles, all three are using software emulation. So most Xbox games don't run on the Xbox 360 yet (though more are added every once in a while with emulator updates on Live!), and the story for PS2 games on PS3 is likely to be the same (though Sony's currently claiming otherwise).


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## Ashrem Bayle (May 16, 2006)

FYI - According to Peter Moore at E3, something like 40%+* of 360 users are using Live. That's a heck of an increase over the last generation.

* I can't find the exact quote now, but it was something like 42% or 46%.


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## Arnwyn (May 16, 2006)

Actually, that includes "Silver" (read: free, but useless for playing). Not particularly surprising that there's an increase.

I can imagine that "Gold" (read: pay) is quite low (and the percentage won't increase much over time once the casual players start getting 360's in the next few years - casual players are not known to go online, and certainly not known to pay for extra services [especially when they're free on other platform(s)]).

Paying extra for online just isn't in the cards.


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## trancejeremy (May 16, 2006)

Sony and Nintendo seem to be following the PC model when it comes to live - that is, leave online play up to the publisher of the game.

While OTOH, MS seems to want to try to push "Live" onto PC Gamers (with it being in Vista, though I dunno if you have to play $50 a year for that)


----------



## TwinBahamut (May 17, 2006)

Orius said:
			
		

> Nintendo has been taking it hard in the market the last 10 years, and it seems right now they're not focusing on the tech issues that the average consumer has no clue about, but rather trying to market a fun and inexpensive system that is easy to learn and play.  The biggest weakness they seem to have right now is the possiblity of not having enough third party support.  That depends on how easy the Wii will be to develop for, and if third party developers can come up with good and different game concepts that work great on Wii, but not so good on the other systems.



I actually don't think the Third Party support is going to be a big problem for Nintendo with this generation of consoles. According to what I have read, it is amazingly cheap and easy for companies to develop for the Wii. I am hearing as much praise for how easy it is to develop for the Wii as complaints about how hard it is to develop for the PS3. Just like with the DS, Nintendo is pushing ease of game development as one of the primary goals for development of the Wii.



			
				drothgery said:
			
		

> They are, but Nintendo's likely going to be the best at it (at least, if the general reports of how the Wii is put together are correct), simply because the Wii is far more like a GameCube than an Xbox 360 is like an Xbox or a PS3 is like a PS2. The PS2 had complete backward compatibility because it included a PS1 CPU in every PS2 box. With the current set of consoles, all three are using software emulation. So most Xbox games don't run on the Xbox 360 yet (though more are added every once in a while with emulator updates on Live!), and the story for PS2 games on PS3 is likely to be the same (though Sony's currently claiming otherwise).



I think Microsoft and Sony don't even touch Nintendo on backwards compatibility... The demo consoles for the Wii's Virtual Console system at E3 were letting people play games for the Sega Genesis and other non-Nintendo consoles in addition to NES, SNES, and N64 games. Which I think is cool. If the games are priced right, it opens up a lot more than simple Playstation 2-type backwards compatibility.

Honestly, 600$, or anything over 300$ really, is too much for a videogame console for me. Way too much. Especially for a "secondary" console that I am not as excited about as a certain other one.


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## Elephant (May 17, 2006)

Arnwyn said:
			
		

> Fascinating. People continue talking about the price as if it were to remain the same over the entire console's lifecycle.
> 
> History, of course, clearly contradicts such speculation (as I'm sure we all remember the introduction prices of the PSX, Saturn, and N64 - and which one ended up with the most market share).




I don't.  What were the respective prices of those three consoles?


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## drothgery (May 17, 2006)

TwinBahamut said:
			
		

> I think Microsoft and Sony don't even touch Nintendo on backwards compatibility... The demo consoles for the Wii's Virtual Console system at E3 were letting people play games for the Sega Genesis and other non-Nintendo consoles in addition to NES, SNES, and N64 games. Which I think is cool. If the games are priced right, it opens up a lot more than simple Playstation 2-type backwards compatibility.




Emulating an SNES or Genesis doens't really have anything to do with backward compatiblity; the only systems that are hard to emulate are the immediately previous-generation ones. When you're trying to emulate an earlier system, especially if you've secured the rights to do it legally, it's much less complicated because the hardware you're working with is so much more powerful than the hardware you're emulating that the emulator can be extremely inefficient and still be 100% complete.


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## John Crichton (May 17, 2006)

TwinBahamut said:
			
		

> I actually don't think the Third Party support is going to be a big problem for Nintendo with this generation of consoles. According to what I have read, it is amazingly cheap and easy for companies to develop for the Wii. I am hearing as much praise for how easy it is to develop for the Wii as complaints about how hard it is to develop for the PS3. Just like with the DS, Nintendo is pushing ease of game development as one of the primary goals for development of the Wii.



It won't matter.  The Gamecube was also very easy to program for.  It sold horribly.

Big third party companies will release games, especially exclusives on the system that has the largest user base.  That company has been Sony for the last 2 generations.  The majority of these same companies are on board with the PS3 and to a much lesser extent, the 360.  The Wii has a long way to go if they want exclusive games back on their console that weren't developed in-house.


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## Zappo (May 17, 2006)

Ashrem Bayle said:
			
		

> FYI - According to Peter Moore at E3, something like 40%+* of 360 users are using Live. That's a heck of an increase over the last generation.
> 
> * I can't find the exact quote now, but it was something like 42% or 46%.



Some increase is natural as more people get interested in online gaming. However, keep in mind that many of the folks that have a 360 right now are early adopters, hardcore gamers, and other high-end buyers that were willing to preorder, wait in a queue, show up at the shop early, and so on. As 360s become more widespread to people that buy it more casually (maybe for their little kids), I expect the percentage to drop. There's also the "silver vs gold" issue to factor in.


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## Aesthetic Monk (May 17, 2006)

John Crichton said:
			
		

> It won't matter.  The Gamecube was also very easy to program for.  It sold horribly.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> The Wii has a long way to go if they want exclusive games back on their console that weren't developed in-house.




Plus, there's the issue of programming for the Wii-mote. E3 reports suggest that Nintendo's first-party games seem to control well to very well while the third-party-exclusive Red Steel from Ubi Soft has some fairly significant control issues. It's early, and it should get better, but I'd say that the launch titles have to control near perfectly or the Wii hype bubble will lose a lot of air.

In short, everybody's doomed!


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## Kanegrundar (May 17, 2006)

At this point, if I even end up owning a next-gen console, it'll be either a Wii and/or a 360.  The pricetag for the PS3 is going to have to drop by half to get me to even look, plus I despise Sony thanks to the rootkit debaucle.  Sony can take a flying leap as far as I concerned.


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## MoogleEmpMog (May 17, 2006)

The Wii looks very good (although I don't care for the name or the controller).  Third party support sort of concerns me, but I'll probably spend all my time playing the old games anyway, plus Mario and Zelda.  This one is a given, if not at launch, soon after.

The PS3 has Metal Gear and Final Fantasy, but those might show up elsewhere.  I have no reason to think Dragon Quest, Suikoden, Wild ARMs, Valkyrie Profile, Shadow Hearts, Legend of Legaia, Star Ocean, etc. will show up elsewhere, so eventually I will buy a PS3.  It won't be until a significant number of those games become available, though, which, considering the development schedule for console RPGs, means the price should come down.  

Someone could give me an XBox-360 and the only thing I'd play on it would be NBA Live... which I could play on one of the others. :\ If I want to play PC games (or PC-style games), I'll play them on a PC.  All I play on the PC is X-Com, Heroes of Might and Magic and Alpha Centauri.  Don't see those as titles for the 360, somehow.


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## Flexor the Mighty! (May 17, 2006)

Kanegrundar said:
			
		

> At this point, if I even end up owning a next-gen console, it'll be either a Wii and/or a 360.  The pricetag for the PS3 is going to have to drop by half to get me to even look, plus I despise Sony thanks to the rootkit debaucle.  Sony can take a flying leap as far as I concerned.




That is pretty much my view on it.  I really try to avoid buying anything with "SONY" on it as I don't trust the company anymore, and the price makes the decision all that much easier.


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## trancejeremy (May 17, 2006)

Well, none of the 3 companies are exactly nice.  

I would need pages to point out Microsoft's faults, but the thing that scares me about them, is once they become the dominant console, they will put the screws to everyone (consumers and developers), just like they have with PC.  Most of Sony's problems seems to be with the hollywood divisions (music & movie) which is very anti-consumer, but their game division has really got a thing against 2D games. This has hurt a couple of small game companies (Working Designs, Agetec) when games they had translated weren't approved.


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## Michael Morris (May 17, 2006)

Nintendo is the least evil of the three. Microsoft have done things that are unethical and quasilegal. If Sony where a person it would be facing 30 years in jail.  I don't buy from criminals.

I'll be buying a Wii - I'm really interested in trying that controller.  The PS3 and Xbox 360 promise more of the same tired boring but nice looking games that caused me to quit playing video games in the first place.


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## Alzrius (May 18, 2006)

MoogleEmpMog said:
			
		

> I have no reason to think Dragon Quest [...] will show up elsewhere, so eventually I will buy a PS3.





Here's a reason: Dragon Quest on Wii.


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## trancejeremy (May 18, 2006)

Spoony Bard said:
			
		

> Nintendo is the least evil of the three. Microsoft have done things that are unethical and quasilegal. If Sony where a person it would be facing 30 years in jail.  I don't buy from criminals.




I dunno, they do own an AL baseball team, and personally, I think the DH is the worst thing ever invented.

In Sony's case though, it was basicaly a different company.  The music division, which Sony only owns half of.  In fact, the PS3 seemingly does what the music (and movie) division don't want, allows the playing of mp3/wma and ripped movies (just like the PSP)


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## Flexor the Mighty! (May 18, 2006)

trancejeremy said:
			
		

> In Sony's case though, it was basicaly a different company.  The music division, which Sony only owns half of.  In fact, the PS3 seemingly does what the music (and movie) division don't want, allows the playing of mp3/wma and ripped movies (just like the PSP)




I find it amusing though how they are flat out lying and stating both versions of the PS3 have identical functionality when they obviously don't.  In the E3 coverage I was checking out they were stating that, but you can't do true HD on the "lite" version due to the lack of the proper output and that lovely DRM packed Blu-Ray down sampling the HD output.  So apparently the 499 dollar vesion can only output like 480 resolution instead of 1080.  But that kind of marketing BS isn't nearly as bad as thier behavior in the music arena. 

I was so happy when Pearl Jam didn't reup with Sony Music and put out their new album on a new label.  I was almost put into the position of having to download my favorite band's new album since I won't buy any music from Sony due to the rootkit debacle.


----------



## Arnwyn (May 18, 2006)

Flexor the Mighty! said:
			
		

> I find it amusing though how they are flat out lying and stating both versions of the PS3 have identical functionality when they obviously don't.  In the E3 coverage I was checking out they were stating that, but you can't do true HD on the "lite" version due to the lack of the proper output and that lovely DRM packed Blu-Ray down sampling the HD output.  So apparently the 499 dollar vesion can only output like 480 resolution instead of 1080.  But that kind of marketing BS isn't nearly as bad as thier behavior in the music arena.



That's only speculation with people only looking at the hardware from outside a glass case and making wild guesses. "Obviously" indeed.

Unconfirmed.


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## Flexor the Mighty! (May 18, 2006)

Isn't there a "flag" in blu-ray that can be turned on that will downsample the output unless you are connected via HDMI, which the PS3 lacks?  So the lower cost version lacks the digital output which is a definate loss of functionality I would think.  Now the ICT flag is soemthing that is enabled on a disc by disc basis from what I've been reading so it will be up to the studios.  However to think it won't be used is foolish IMO  based on the direction the media conglomerates are trying to move.  Not to mention the lack of Wi-Fi or memory card readers.

I don't decry them for having a cheaper version, I just thougth it was kind of weak for the rep I heard to claim they both have identical functionality.  For me its just an academic discussion since I don't buy Sony anymore.  

I am pulling for the new Nintendo to really hammer both Microsoft and Sony though.


----------



## Arnwyn (May 18, 2006)

Flexor the Mighty! said:
			
		

> Isn't there a "flag" in blu-ray that can be turned on that will downsample the output unless you are connected via HDMI, which the PS3 lacks?  So the lower cost version lacks the digital output which is a definate loss of functionality I would think.



Only for movies, and not for games. IGN had a "Truth about Blu-Ray" article just a short time ago.



> Now the ICT flag is soemthing that is enabled on a disc by disc basis from what I've been reading so it will be up to the studios.  However to think it won't be used is foolish IMO  based on the direction the media conglomerates are trying to move.



Correct (again, for movies).



> Not to mention the lack of Wi-Fi or memory card readers.



Unconfirmed.


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## Flexor the Mighty! (May 18, 2006)

Well movies is what I was talking about.   

I would assume that Sony wouldn't be so foolish as the downgrade the video quality of thier own games...but then again I would have thought Sony wouldn't be so foolish as to put rootkits on CD's then lie about it when caught.

As for the memory card reader that was confirmed by a CEO in an article on ars technica.  He claims you can hook it up to your PC with USB and do that functionality.  Anyway here is the article I was reading earlier Ars Technica article


----------



## John Crichton (May 19, 2006)

Flexor the Mighty! said:
			
		

> I am pulling for the new Nintendo to really hammer both Microsoft and Sony though.



I'd start with wishing for some halfway decent 3rd party supprt and more than 3-4 excellent exclusive games per year.  Don't get me wrong, I want all the consoles to put out lots of great games (I'm not for any one company over the other as I support all 3) but Nintendo's consoles haven't produced nearly enough great games in the last 2 console generations.


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## John Crichton (May 19, 2006)

Alzrius said:
			
		

> Here's a reason: Dragon Quest on Wii.



 This has the smell of Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles all over it.


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## Zappo (May 19, 2006)

trancejeremy said:
			
		

> In Sony's case though, it was basicaly a different company.



True that. Remember that Sony is an _enormous_ company with many independent divisions. Chances are that the unethical people who are responsible for the rootkit fiasco have nothing to do at all with those that are behind the PS3. Then again, I'm enough of a bastard to buy from an unethical company if they make me a good enough offer.  


			
				Flexor the Mighty! said:
			
		

> I find it amusing though how they are flat out lying and stating both versions of the PS3 have identical functionality when they obviously don't.



As you noted, they do have the same functionality _for games_ (unlike the two versions of 360, I may add, since one of them lacks the HD and provides no alternative), which is what they were talking about. The cheaper PS3 only provides less ways to express some of those functionalities, but never removes them altogether: you still have net connectivity (only, you'll have to use a wire) and you still can save on a removable device (only, it'll be a USB stick instead of a memory card).

There is only one functionality that the cheaper PS3 _really_ removes, and that is importing PS2 game saves (since AFAIK the PS2 only saves to memory card).


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## KenM (May 19, 2006)

Zappo said:
			
		

> As you noted, they do have the same functionality _for games_ (unlike the two versions of 360, I may add, since one of them lacks the HD and provides no alternative)




  Thats not true. The 360 does have memory card units for it. Not sure how much MB it holds though.


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## Arnwyn (May 19, 2006)

Flexor the Mighty! said:
			
		

> Anyway here is the article I was reading earlier Ars Technica article



Thanks for that!

The Ars Technica writer was a little misleading, though, (and Kaz was correct) as we all know we can watch HD just fine (and have been doing so) with our "analog" cables (namely component cables). The lack of HDMI is hardly concerning (except for the future, when the movie studios actually do implement their HDMI/HTCP-only security 'features'). _Then_ the owners of the gimped PS3 will be screwed. Bleh. (But, really, who buys the gimped models anyways? The 'Core' 360 is selling quite poorly compared to the 'Premium' package.)

But in any case, Sony deserves all the bile thrown at it for releasing two different versions (just like MS got theirs when they announced two packages). Dumb.


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## ohGr (May 20, 2006)

Anyone remember this?

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=11209



> Phil Harrison has criticised Microsoft for planning to put two versions of the new Xbox 360 console on the market, claiming the decision will merely "create confusion" for consumers.
> 
> [...]
> 
> ...




Heh.   

Sorry, i couldn't resist.


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