PS3 to cost $600...

[Bleed S & G]

It isn't about what's inferior, what's 'better,' what renders the fastest, or what can pump the most polygons. 'Better' systems have fallen by the wayside every single year since the days of Atari. The Sega Master System was technically superior to the NES. Didn't matter. The SNES was technically better than the Genesis almost two-times over. That didn't matter either. BetaMax was better than VHS. So what?

The only thing that matters is market penetration and install base. Get the systems in the home, and developers will develop games for it.

In 14 months, Microsoft has sold 10.5M XBox 360s against an unknown number produced.
In a little over 1 month, Sony has sold 1.2M PS3s against 2.4M built.
In the same time, Nintendo has sold 4M Wiis against 4M produced.

More than half of all PS3s are sitting in stores unsold, while the Big N has ramped up production of the Wii targeting 7M by April -- 1M a month. Nintendo will wind up having sold more Wiis than Sony and Microsoft have sold of their current systems combined by this time next year. I am a hardcore gamer. The Wii is the most groundbreaking console in about 15 years.

The PS3 and 360, I'm sure, aren't going anywhere. But I am 110% confident in saying right now that they cannot, and will not, ever touch what Nintendo has on their hands with the Wii. It's the next iPod. It's going to be 2007's tech phenomenon.

i may have to buy a wii then i hear the gyros are nuts but i'll be honest i'm turned off by the shoddy graphics.. if its all you say it is i'll get one at some point

are those #s including the sales overseas?

good points about it not about being the best, i guess why i thought it would be diffrent because it's an established gaming console series, not a newcomer

 

[Dryden]

i may have to buy a wii then i hear the gyros are nuts but i'll be honest i'm turned off by the shoddy graphics.. if its all you say it is i'll get one at some point

The graphics will be better. Many of the launch titles are GameCube games or ports from other consoles with the Wii controller interface overlayed. Zelda: Twilight Princess is the system's current benchmark, and that's really a maxed out GC game, not a native Wii game. The Wii can render twice as much as Zelda demonstrates. We'll see a better approximation of what the system can actually do when Battallion 2 is released. I'll add that the Wii ships with composite video. Buy the component video cables direct through Nintendo to double up the resolution (about $30.00).

are those #s including the sales overseas?

Yes. US sales are about 3M for the Wii vs 600,000 for the PS3.

 

[Dryden]

 

[DCBuckFan]

That's pretty funny, almost looks like one of those pizza hut commercials right now with the other chain's delivery guys eating the pizza... good stuff

 

[ulukinatme]

I picked up a PS3 the first month it was released. So far, I've been pretty pleased with it. Of course, they haven't released many games for it that aren't already on other consoles, its just a matter of time. I'll be the first to say I was a Nintendo fanboy back in the day. I was a child of the 80s and grew up on NES and SNES. I got a 64 too, I laughed at the thought of loading times on Sony's Playstations. When Square jumped ship and began developing FF7 on the Playstation, I decided I had to give it a shot. As time went on, Sony won me over...they were releasing a greater number of good games and started getting more developers on board.

I'm pretty confidant that Sony will pick up the slack once they start releasing more games. Don't get me wrong, I plan on getting a Wii too, there are some games that I will always buy a Nintendo system for: Zelda, Mario Kart, Smash Bros, etc, basically the mainstays of Nintendo. On one hand, this is part of the reason I still rank Sony in front of Nintendo at this point. Nintendo has some great moneymakers that they will rehash every year, like Mario Party (I actually hate this game), but aside from the new system...their games haven't been too innovative lately. They go back to the well a lot for their success (Or lack of success in the Gamecube's & 64's histories). I enjoy these mainstay titles, but I see more unique Sony titles over the lifetime of the system. Heres a key: once Nintendo releases their core rehashes, don't expect a lot of unique titles to appear.

So, for the most part I'm sticking with Sony for now and eventually I'll have a Wii too. I like having my PS3 to play my old games on (And not having to worry about which of my 7 memory cards has a save on it), my new games, and watching movies. At this point, I don't see a reason for me to get an X-Box 360, its just a personal preference. Halo is cool and all, but aside from that there aren't a whole lot of titles here worth getting the system for. A lot thats developed for Microsoft is also made for Sony too, maybe this will change in time as well.

 

[Dryden]

Heres a key: once Nintendo releases their core rehashes, don't expect a lot of unique titles to appear.

It's not the 90s anymore. I have read enough comments from developers and publishers regarding deficiencies in the PS3s hardware, with the Blu-Ray storage format, and with the developer toolkit that I am convinced the most unique titles will wind up on the 360 or the Wii. Sony has already lost most of their exclusives to the other platforms, and 360 has a huge headstart with Halo 3 still on the horizon. Nintendo has gone back to the third parties and embraced them, and are giving away their toolkit for free. Sony is charging an arm and a testicle for theirs, and the platform is so difficult to write to that one publisher has complained that they would have to sell 600,000 copies of a single game written to the PS3 just to break even.

Let me put it this way. You have n months to write a game, and you only have the time to do one, do you:

A. Spend $500,000 on development writing for the Wii, plus getting the Virtual Console channel as an avenue to sell your old catalog of games for pure profit, since they are, of course, already written?

B. Spend $1,000,000 on development writing for the 360, which, by extension, means you're writing for a Windows XP PC since they're both using Direct X, which gives you a target audience of not 2M PS3 owners, or 4M Wii owners, but 10M 360 owners and 100M PC owners? Isn't that really the way to go if you're catering to the hardcore gamer? Let's be frank here, hardcore gamers don't play FPS games with dual analog joysticks -- that sucks ass! Hardcore gamers play on the PC with a keyboard and a mouse. Makes sense, a bleeding edge PC will always be more powerful than a console.

C. Spend $5,000,000 on development writing for the PS3, which requires bringing in new programmers, artists, and project leads for the complexities of the Cell engine, which is rather absurd because the memory pipeline on the system is so broken everybody says (including notable game review sites) that games like Tony Hawk Project 8 and Call of Duty 3 look better on the 360 anyway, and aren't as choppy.

The bottom line is that game developers will make more money faster writing to the 360 and the Wii, and that's where they'll go to develop. Nobody is doing PS3 games out of the goodness of their heart because they look cool; they're doing it to make money.

 

[lvbuckeye]

of course you are correct that a commercial gaming system will always be inferior to a dedicated gaming PC, but if you built a PC that could do what the PS3 does, it would run you well into the thousands... i was looking at a "LAN-boy" PC at Frey's not too long ago, and it cost $2000 just for the hardware. now, does $600 for a PS3 really seem like that much?

 

[Dryden]

if you built a PC that could do what the PS3 does, it would run you well into the thousands

See? That's the rub. Nobody would build a PC that does what the PS3 does!

The PS3's Blu-Ray drive has a burst throughput of 9Mb/s. The XBox 360's ho-hum plain old DVD drive has a sustained throughput of 16Mb/s. The XBox 360's drive I/O is nearly double the PS3s Blu-Ray at any read-point on the disk.

The PS3 only has 512Mb of complete system memory. How anyone at Sony thought that you could plot a million vertices, store nearly 1Gb of textures, cache the pipelines for five co-processors, load a gaming engine, its controls, and TSR the PS3 OS in 512Mb of RAM is beyond me. It doesn't work. The system chokes, and the gameplay on virtually every title released so far is crap. Blazing Angels is being panned for having frame rates drop to the low teens, while Tony Hawk and Call of Duty both run slower on the PS3 than they do on the 360. It's not just me saying this, either. It's not Gamespot or IGN. It's the developers themselves.

Because the Blu-Ray and memory subsystem are so slow, Sony has provided an option to install your games directly to the PS3s hard drive to increase performance -- sometimes at 5Gb a pop! That means if you could only afford the neutered PS3 with 20Gb of hard disk space, you will only have enough space to have four games installed concurrently, or else you'll suffer excruciatingly slow load times.

All of this and I haven't even touched on the removal of the rumble pack from the controller, which was dropped in favor of motion sensors in a blatant, yet half-assed attempt to copy Nintendo's Revolution demo, or the completely borked backwards compatibility which means a number of PS2 and PSX games don't work on the PS3.

If you built a gaming system, you would have 1Gb of RAM at least, a dedicated graphics system with another 512Mb of RAM solely allocated to it, and you'd certainly use something larger than a 20 or 60Gb hard drive, plus you'd take DVD or HD-DVD in a heartbeat over Blu-Ray.

These are all major sticking points that are preventing people from buying the PS3, including myself, and I'm one who dropped $400 on a PS2 during its launch, was a first adopter of the 3DO before that (at a $700 price tag) and spent nearly $3000 on a 486/DX2 just so I could play Doom! The pricetag in and of itself isn't the issue, it the price vs performance. If Sony would have dropped Blu-Ray, doubled the system RAM and hard disk capacities instead, they could have gotten the systems out for around $400 instead of $600, they wouldn't be losing $200 per console sold, and the system would actually work like they promised the consumers it would.

Just call the PS3 what it is. It's a multimedia jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none. It's simultaneously the most expensive gaming console and the cheapest Blu-Ray player, yet it somehow does neither as well as competitors products. It's the new 3DO or CDi. It's a trojan horse to fuck the gamers over and give them the responsibility of making a new media format stick in a new format war, after Sony has realized they've lost billions on old tech potential like BETA and Mini-Discs.

 

[lvbuckeye]

well, i guess i stand corrected...

All of this and I haven't even touched on the removal of the rumble pack from the controller, which was dropped in favor of motion sensors in a blatant, yet half-assed attempt to copy Nintendo's Revolution demo

i thought they had to ditch the rumble pack because they lost that lawsuit...

 

[BrutusMaximus]

The system chokes, and the gameplay on virtually every title released so far is crap.

I have no idea where you are getting this info. I have one, and can tell you that is absolutely not true. Have seen almost zero slowdown in every game so far. Resistance stands out. It is spectacular looking, has no slows at all, including multiplayer. I mean how can you knock 40 play online play?

The wii may be the most "groundbreaking" console in the past 15 years. Too bad they have shit for game selection AGAIN, to go along with all that "groundbreaking" technology.

We have received almost zero wii's since christmas, and probably about 100 ps3's. We are currently sold out of PS3's, so I dont know where this "most of them are in stores unsold" is coming from either. We have also had only 1 PS3 returned, and none traded in. We have had 5 or 6 Wii trade ins already.

It's a trojan horse to fuck the gamers over and give them the responsibility of making a new media format stick in a new format war, after Sony has realized they've lost billions on old tech potential like BETA and Mini-Discs.

This I cant argue with so much.

I will make you a bet though. By this time next year, Sony will be on top of the video game world yet again. Nintendo squeaks by with their Mario, Zelda, Metroid combo everytime, but without the big 3rd party games, that doesnt cut it anymore. I personally think that the Wii will be their last system. At least I hope so.

 

[buckeyefool]

We had a few ps3 that just say a target for weeks, however I dont think that it is because the system is crap is the reason it is the price of it. Everyone just stops and looks at the display and is like...wow that is amazing. I think people are saving money to buy one or waiting to see if sony drops the price( which they wont for awhile) PS3 is also running into the same problem that the zune is and that is false info put out there by people who love things such as 360 or nintendo just as peole who love the ipod are sending out false info about the zune. I can tell you that if I had the money to drop on any of the 3 systems it would be the ps3 based on all that I have seen for it.

I have no idea where you are getting this info. I have one, and can tell you that is absolutely not true. Have seen almost zero slowdown in every game so far. Resistance stands out. It is spectacular looking, has no slows at all, including multiplayer. I mean how can you knock 40 play online play?

The wii may be the most "groundbreaking" console in the past 15 years. Too bad they have shit for game selection AGAIN, to go along with all that "groundbreaking" technology.

We have received almost zero wii's since christmas, and probably about 100 ps3's. We are currently sold out of PS3's, so I dont know where this "most of them are in stores unsold" is coming from either. We have also had only 1 PS3 returned, and none traded in. We have had 5 or 6 Wii trade ins already.



This I cant argue with so much.

I will make you a bet though. By this time next year, Sony will be on top of the video game world yet again. Nintendo squeaks by with their Mario, Zelda, Metroid combo everytime, but without the big 3rd party games, that doesnt cut it anymore. I personally think that the Wii will be their last system. At least I hope so.

 

[jwinslow]

We have received almost zero wii's since christmas, and probably about 100 ps3's. We are currently sold out of PS3's, so I dont know where this "most of them are in stores unsold" is coming from either. We have also had only 1 PS3 returned, and none traded in. We have had 5 or 6 Wii trade ins already

Go on any deal site, and it's fairly unanimous that ps3's are usually plentiful in stores, while Wii's sell out within hours of a new shipment.

 

[BrutusMaximus]

Go on any deal site, and it's fairly unanimous that ps3's are usually plentiful in stores, while Wii's sell out within hours of a new shipment

That is correct, but that is also because we receive maybe 3 wii's every 2 weeks, and about 12 ps3's a week.

Mind you, I am not justifying the purchase of a PS3, or the price, or the blueray, etc. I am simply saying that I have no idea how someone can compare the PS3 and the wii, and call the wii a "groundbreaking" console. The only thing "groundbreaking" about it is the motion sensor stuff, which is not exactly an amazing feet, and gets old after about an hour. It is like paying $250 to go play a couple games at the arcade, then leaving to go back home. It will also sell more because it is $250, and parents are gonna instantly go for the cheaper system. Dont get me wrong, I think the thing is great for kids, as is the DS, the Gamecube, etc.......but for a "hardcore gamer", not a chance. Every game on the system that would actually be interesting, I would much rather play on the PC, PS3, 360, etc. Unless of course you believe that cooking mama and elebits are "hardcore" games

 

[THEWOOD]

My boss has a Wii and a PS3, him and his kids both think the PS3 is better. They like to play Wii Sports but they say nothing compares to Resistance. Which I can agree too...Resistance is a great game with amazing multiplayer gaming.

 

[Bleed S & G]

only time will tell, i think the ps3 will survive:)