[scooby_dooby]

Come on now, I mean, I can understand your points, but clearly you aren't just pressing your lips to the cheeks of MS because you like them, right?

I'm done with you.

If you want to have an adult conversation let me know, I'm not wasting my time reading that angry little rant...

[tha_con]

Originally Posted by scooby_dooby

I'm done with you.

If you want to have an adult conversation let me know, I'm not wasting my time reading that angry little rant...

You know what, you're right. I apologize. The insult was born of the comment you made in reference to my intelligence and not 'understanding' the word arrogant. However, your post comes off more as "hey, it's easy to point a finger at Sony and say they are arrogant because everyone hates them, but doing the same to MS would be inherently difficult".

I'd be more impressive if you pointed out how MS is basically on a fast route to 'crushing' the gaming industry at the moment, and doing everything that is wrong with the PC market (i.e. buying out smaller companies, etc).

I just didn't see much substance in your original post other than 'hey it's easy to point this finger, it doesn't require much work or afterthought'.

That's all.

[jayco]

Of course Sony was arrogant, they had 70% of the market, usually when you are at the top you tend to forget about the consumers, like MS forgot about us when they made DX10 win vista only or when Apple started to sell us overpriced MP3 players.

Sony made it's move, they included BR in the ps3 and right now this and the lack of software is making ps3 a failure, but remember that this is a really long race, and nothing has been decided yet.

As for the future, i think sony has made the right move, right now they are mass producing bluray players for the ps3, this will help production costs go down, so when the real war begins between standalone players, bluray players will be much cheaper, probably not as cheaper as an HD-DVD player but affordable to any consumer (150-250$). If they keep the studio support and with millions of PS3's sold around the world, Toshiba will need a miracle to win the HD format war.

Personally, i don't care who wins, Internet is the future, it will be the distribution line for everything, music,games,movies,ect... Hopefully in a few years instead of going to the cinema or to a BlockBuster we will turn on our 500$ 60" SuperFull HD TV's and buy any movie that we want.

PD: Sorry for my english.

[scooby_dooby]

Originally Posted by tha_con

You know what, you're right. I apologize. The insult was born of the comment you made in reference to my intelligence and not 'understanding' the word arrogant. However, your post comes off more as "hey, it's easy to point a finger at Sony and say they are arrogant because everyone hates them, but doing the same to MS would be inherently difficult".

I wasn't questioning your intelligence, but that comment by Moore is not arrogance, it's something else. Arrogance comes from a feeling of superiority. What does a comment about faiulre rates have to do with MS feeling superior?? It just doesn't make sense.

And along the same thread, what in the world would MS have to be arrogant about in the console space? The fact they lost $6billion while Sony and Nintendo both turned huge profits last generation?? I don't think so...

I can think of a few words for MS in the console space: cheap, short-sighted, disorganized...but not arrogant. They simply haven't achieved enough success to be arrogant about it at this point.

I'd be more impressive if you pointed out how MS is basically on a fast route to 'crushing' the gaming industry at the moment, and doing everything that is wrong with the PC market (i.e. buying out smaller companies, etc).

Where the heck did you get that from? I never said anything remotely close to that....the last thing in the world I want is MS to have a dominant marketshare in the console space, competition is extremely important to me.

I just didn't see much substance in your original post other than 'hey it's easy to point this finger, it doesn't require much work or afterthought'.

That original post had context, and was then pulled out of a thread and made into a new one by one of the mods. Check out the Sept NPD thread, and you'll see that I didn't raise the issue, nor was I trying to lambast sony for anything, I was simply responding to what I felt was a crazy amount of spin going on in that thread.

[patsu]

Originally Posted by jayco

Of course Sony was arrogant, they had 70% of the market, usually when you are at the top you tend to forget about the consumers, like MS forgot about us when they made DX10 win vista only or when Apple started to sell us overpriced MP3 players.

I don't think "forgetting about the consumers" means arrogant though. At least in the MS and Apple cases, I don't think they are (because I can see other reasons for their decisions). In the Sony case, I can also understand why PS3 was priced at US$599 without resorting to the "arrogant" argument.

In the press though, the Sony execs have certainly spoken more than they should on their competition, and not detailed enough on their own product. This is something they will need to revisit once/if their plans materialize.

[jayco]

Originally Posted by patsu

I don't think "forgetting about the consumers" means arrogant though. At least in the MS and Apple cases, I don't think they are (because I can see other reasons for their decisions). In the Sony case, I can also understand why PS3 was priced at US$599 without resorting to the "arrogant" argument.

I think they are the same cases. Apple thinks everyone is going to buy an Ipod at any price just because it's called Ipod and their players look pretty, just like Sony thought we were going to buy their console just because it's called Playstation. Microsoft it's a diferent story, just because we have no choice, in a few months we will be pushed to upgrade to Vista and we can't do anything about it, that's why monopolies suck.

I'm not calling arrogant Sony for pricing Ps3 at 600$, at that price, i think is still a great deal (i bought one even more expensive, at 600€) , they were arrogant because they thought that everyone will buy their console at that price, even when it didn't had any worthy game. They completly forgot about their fanbase that wanted an affordable console oriented too entertain, not to be the superhypermedia center that kutaragi wanted, even accepting that it's a great idea, and i like it, but that is not a console, for that almost everyone prefeers a good barebone system.

PD: Again, sorry for my english.

[patsu]

Originally Posted by jayco

I think they are the same cases. Apple thinks everyone is going to buy an Ipod at any price just because it's called Ipod and their players look pretty, just like Sony thought we were going to buy their console just because it's called Playstation. Microsoft it's a diferent story, just because we have no choice, in a few months we will be pushed to upgrade to Vista and we can't do anything about it, that's why monopolies suck.

In Apple's case, they are just trying to recoup from their R&D in iPhone. There may also be Apple specific accounting practices that encouraged them to lock it at $599 at launch (but I am not sure if I can go further into it). Finally, this is probably the 3rd or 4th time I highlighted that pricing for a brand new product is very difficult to do. It is very common to make mistakes here because past data may not project the forecast and demand well. The mathematical model is either simplistic or if complex, can be unstable (They don't converge, or make too many assumptions, ...). The consumer climate also changes.

By making mistakes, I also mean "charge too low" (but you won't hear about them ).

I am not an expert in pricing. Have only scratched the surface when I worked with a marketing professor in a startup. But it is enough to know that pricing is a deep subject and companies are willing to pay millions to know the right price.

MS's Longhorn has been delayed many times over a number of years. They have to make money to recoup from their R&D too. Similarly, they will have their own way to decide a reference price. These days, pricing is a strategic problem. Management don't trivialize it. The decision probably went through a lot of heated discussions.

Based on what the execs said (and on what basic marketing classes teach), these people should be aware of the potential damage of the high price. It is very often a judgement call whether to proceed or not, and executives can change their mind daily even. In some cases, I know the management didn't trust the numbers churned out from the mathematical model (It may crank out an unexpectedly high number). A portion of those executives followed through and made good money for their shareholders. But clearly in other cases, the reverse can happen.

I'm not calling arrogant Sony for pricing Ps3 at 600$, at that price, i think is still a great deal (i bought one even more expensive, at 600€) , they were arrogant because they thought that everyone will buy their console at that price, even when it didn't had any worthy game. They completly forgot about their fanbase that wanted an affordable console oriented too entertain, not to be the superhypermedia center that kutaragi wanted, even accepting that it's a great idea, and i like it, but that is not a console, for that almost everyone prefeers a good barebone system.

Sure but that's what Kutaragi is made of. A technologist who has a very active mind according to Kaz Hirai. He has managed to pull through PS1 and PS2 following his own vision. PS3 proved to be the most difficult thus far.

[Geo]

This thread is sliding into a "versus" i.e. "let's defend console maker A by beating the bejesus out of console maker B" thread. We don't do that here, so please go back to talking about the thread subject. . .or, y'know, let it die at page 19 as it richly deserves.

[Arwin]

On five million consoles, $200 dollars price difference equals 1 billion dollars. If Sony started selling at 399, but the actual cost of the PS3 was $600 or more, then maybe by now they'd have sold every PS3 they coudl make. But also lost easily $2.000.000.000 more than they have lost now, which would take them a lot of time to recoup and would have to lend or sell a lot of other stuff for to cover for the short term (with many potential long term implications). Economies of scale amplify things considerably. Like patsu said, pricing isn't an easy subject. In Sony's case, they chose a strategy, and it ended up making their console more expensive initially then they'd hoped, as well as have less software available at launch. You gain some you lose some, but important is that they seem to have recovered, caught up, and are now ready to try to recoup their investment by making the most of their console's hardware features.

[-tkf-]

Originally Posted by tcrews

Sorry if you thought it was arrogance in my post, you asked for links and I posted links for each item I mentioned.

I asked for review links as i thought the players were out in the wild. That is 3 new exclusive HD-DVD players but afaik not a single one can be bought yet. It´s going to be tough for these 3 to compete with Toshiba and their price dumps.

[Arwin]

In the interest of data-gathering, here's some comments from Naughty Dog on use of HD and BluRay in Uncharted.

Primarily the whole experience is enabled by the use of the hard drive. If we did not have the hard drive then we could not present the game in the seamless load free way that we are. After you start until you turn the console off and go eat your lunch and come back there is not going to be another load time and you can play the game from start to finish. That was really key to us something that we established with Jak and Daxter and it keeps you immersed in the experience. As soon as you hit those load screens, as soon as you have to take that break, you may put the controller down, you may do something else we really just want to engross you in this experience. So, the hard drive really helped with that. The other thing that we've got going for us is the Blu Ray. We filled that thing up to 24 plus gigs, it was right at the end where we were literally running out of place where we were having to start pulling some stuff out, we ended up fortunately finding this unused cache of audio lines we were able to pull out to save some space so we could get everything in that we wanted to get in. I'm not going to stand here and say it would have been impossible to do on DVD but it would have been a different game, it really would have. It could have looked worse, we would have had to make concessions in terms of our compression. We would have had to spend a lot more developer resources focusing on how to get it on the disk when we could have been creating the game, making it more fun, making it more beautiful. So I'm really happy just to have that. We're still on single layer and this is our first game out of the gates. So I highly suspect that on our future games we'll even go to a double layer and we're going to even start putting more than 24-25 gigs into a single game.

source: http://palgn.com.au/article.php?id=9...rview+Part+One

[Dr Evil]

Is dual layer disc much more expensive?

Originally Posted by Naughty Dog

it was right at the end where we were literally running out of place where we were having to start pulling some stuff out

It seems like going with a dual layer disc was not an option at this stage.

[inefficient]

Originally Posted by Dr Evil

Is dual layer disc much more expensive?

Doesn't look like the jump in cost is too bad. And considering we are talking about $60 games... the jump in cost seems pretty negligible.

"Blu-ray replication costs Plant #2 (Blu-ray only) I received quotes on Blu-ray single layer (25GB) replication at plant #2 between $1.35-$1.45 USD per disc on runs of 25K or more.

Blu-ray DL (50GB) was quoted between $2.15 - $2.25 per disc on a 25,000 quantity run.

(source)

[Arwin]

There are important other factors for a developer though, like having in-house BluRay burners for testing that may still be single layer, non-trivial layer change / streaming issues during coding (I've heard they're not so bad on BluRay as on DVD, but I'm sure there's still some penalty?), and so on and so forth. A last minute change to BD50 would have very likely meant delays, and if you can easily avoid it, then why bother?

[pipo]

Originally Posted by Arwin

In the interest of data-gathering, here's some comments from Naughty Dog on use of HD and BluRay in Uncharted.

On the HDD - Great! And I'm all for a seamless experience, because it's better. But, recent hits like Zelda and RE4 were far from free from loading times. Do the general public and reviewers really care?

Hint: check out the scores and awards for these titles. It's a 'nice to have'. Nothing more.

On the use of BR - I'll wait till the reviews / screens / vids. You can fill up any storage medium. Let's see what they've done in terms of visuals and audio first.

Considering the data they say they need I'm expecting quite something.

[-tkf-]

Originally Posted by pipo

On the HDD - Great! And I'm all for a seamless experience, because it's better. But, recent hits like Zelda and RE4 were far from free from loading times. Do the general public and reviewers really care?

Hint: check out the scores and awards for these titles. It's a 'nice to have'. Nothing more.

On the use of BR - I'll wait till the reviews / screens / vids. You can fill up any storage medium. Let's see what they've done in terms of visuals and audio first.

Considering the data they say they need I'm expecting quite something.

He makes a point of this himself:

I'm not going to stand here and say it would have been impossible to do on DVD but it would have been a different game, it really would have. It could have looked worse, we would have had to make concessions in terms of our compression. We would have had to spend a lot more developer resources focusing on how to get it on the disk when we could have been creating the game, making it more fun, making it more beautiful.

Maybe do a 180 and take the review scores and turn them down a notch or 3 if this had been a game on a DVD based PS3 without DVD.

[pipo]

We both could never prove that of course. Neither can the devs.

I'm sure next year we'll see some multi platform titles that will surpass what they are doing though.

From my point of view, I've seen a couple of claims from devs on this matter. The games so far didn't support their claims though.

Superiour format != Superiour experience.

And that's all that matters here.

Originally Posted by -tkf-

He makes a point of this himself...

That's why I said I'll be keeping an eye on Metacritic. He just raised his bar above the best looking / sounding / fun games on other platforms. The PS3 game shopper in me hopes he's right.

[Phil]

Originally Posted by pipo

On the use of BR - I'll wait till the reviews / screens / vids. You can fill up any storage medium. Let's see what they've done in terms of visuals and audio first.

Considering the data they say they need I'm expecting quite something.

What exactly has the use of BR got to do with reviews / screens / vids? You won't find anything there. It's statet pretty understandable of what the pro's are of using BR over DVD yields: Less time thinking about how to use the (limited) space available, which in turn benefits other aspects of the game. There's not much more to say on top of this.

Originally Posted by pipo

From my point of view, I've seen a couple of claims from devs on this matter. The games so far didn't support their claims though.

Superiour format != Superiour experience.

...and games on older generation consoles didn't yield a worse experience either. The experience isn't directly linked to the medium - but the medium, as well as all other aspects of the hardware combined yield a potential that developers can use (or not) to make the best of it that's within their capabilities. A faster processor helps, so does more space available etc. If developers say that more space has given them an advantage (even if it's only time), then there's little point doubting them on that.

[pipo]

Arwim posted this in defense of the BR strategy for gaming, which he feels is vital for this gen.

It seems you and I agree the medium doesn't make a lot of difference for games. Of course it's easier when you've got more space. But the 'developer resources' point can be argued about for almost anything (e.g. better tools, CPU/GPU choice, etc) on any platform.

And I don't doubt the developers at all.

[Phil]

Originally Posted by pipo

It seems you and I agree the medium doesn't make a lot of difference for games.

The only thing I disagree with, is the notion that Blu-Ray needs any form of defence. Anyone with a little bit of technical understanding can think of possible advantages that more storage yields. The example above by a developer (one out of many) is but little, simply a specific example on how it has helped them.

Does it mean games will be better and suit everyones taste? No, that's quite an absurd argument. Does it mean games can be made better as more storage yields more potential? Clearly, yes it does.

If "better" is a form of saving time that can be used in different areas, so helping making the gaming experience more convinient (no changing discs), to being able to putting "more" on the disc or simply reduce loading times is really up to each and every developer to utilize.

Fact being: More storage is a potential that can be used - exactly in the way a faster processor can be used to do more or better.

[pipo]

Originally Posted by Phil

The only thing I disagree with, is the notion that Blu-Ray needs any form of defence.

You're pointing at the wrong guy then. I'm all for it. I just don't feel it will make a huge difference in games compared to other platforms.

Going even further: PS3 as a console might have been better of with a DVD drive, an earlier launch, a lower price point and more sold units.

Dunno. But vital for games? I don't think so.

[Arwin]

The only reason that this discussion is raging as much as it is right now is because of the diode problems. If that hadn't happened, then we'd probably have the same discussion but now with the lack of software at launch playing a more prominent role and the difficulty of programming for Cell catching more flack.

Anyway, onto more important matters. The 40GB version is confirmed by the German magazine C't to contain 65nm Cell and 65nm RSX. They also measure 60W less power consumption and note that it uses about 60 Watt less than the former models, which in turn leads it to be quieter: 0.5 - 0.8 Sone (C't were also the source of some previous reliable Sone measurements).

I look forward to reading the original article, but suffice to say that there's a good chance the 40GB model is really quite a lot cheaper to build. More here: http://playstation-disorder.com/comm...p?blog_id=996&

[Phil]

Originally Posted by pipo

You're pointing at the wrong guy then. I'm all for it. I just don't feel it will make a huge difference in games compared to other platforms.

Huge difference is a very relative and subjective term. To some, huge is but simply a seamingless world without loading times. To others, it may be more room for more varied textures throughout the game... etc. You either appreciate that the potential is there (and being used in some cases), or you don't.

One thing is quite clear though: Multi-platform titles won't really use this potential to any real benefit. If you want to see it being used - 1st/2nd party games or exclusives are the answer. This game (Uncharted) is one of them and more will follow. You simply won't find a black or white answer where there isn't one.

Originally Posted by pipo

Dunno. But vital for games? I don't think so.

Nothing is vital! We could be still playing on cartridges after all... Seriously, this talk is all too comparable with the talks back when the PS2 launched and included DVD instead of sticking with CDs (or perhaps using an enhanced CD -> GCD for a bit more storage) or the talk about the HD in the Xbox while the PS2 didn't have one. Been there, done that. Lets move on, shall we?

[Crossbar]

Originally Posted by pipo

Dunno. But vital for games? I don't think so.

Judging from the Wii there are a lot of stuf in the PS3 and 360 that are not vital to games.

However, my bet is that in the long run the capacity of the BluRay-drive will turn out to be the biggest differentiator for high profile PS3 console exclusive titles compared to the exclusives on the other two platforms.

If that will be key to the success of PS3, or if it was the right decision of Sony to include the BRD I don´t know. I am just happy that someone is pushing the envelope of technology.

I have sensed a lot of hostility toward the PS3 from some American posters here on the board and I can see from the charts that the PS3 is not selling very well in the NA. At the same time I can see it is doing very well here in Europe. It would be really interesting to see what those differences in consumer behaviour really boils down to.

Perhaps it is cultural differences similar to those leading to the 360 doing so poorly in Japan? Perhaps the high initial price has scared American consumers away, while Europeans are used to getting ripped off, or Americans are just cheaper? (j/k) I hope someone present a study on it.

[-tkf-]

Originally Posted by Arwin

I look forward to reading the original article, but suffice to say that there's a good chance the 40GB model is really quite a lot cheaper to build. More here: http://playstation-disorder.com/comm...p?blog_id=996&

Am i reading that right, the Motherboard layout for the 40GB White and 40GB Black isn´t the same?