NPD November 2010

[Squilliam]

Exactly. Change it to 17GB per layer, and no current drive will be able to read it or write it. Make the drive an HD DVD only drive (give up the essentially useless DVD movie playback), and you have a system which is secure even if you compromise the drive firmware, which is basically the only part of the 360 which has been compromised (except for one quickly fixed hypervisor bug, introduced, amusingly enough, on the HD DVD addon update disc)

If you can say, do you know what an HD-DVD drive maxed out at in terms of read speed at an appropriate accoustic level?

P.S. The firmware updates have been pretty funny, one of my friends has given up on the idea of a chipped Xbox 360 because of the number of times it just stopped working, 2-3 times so far IIRC. Just now I believe there was a compulsary update in the Assassins Creed: Brotherhood DVD and it completely nuked his 360 and all the game saves are coming up as corrupted when he tried his HDD on my 360. I kept telling him it wasn't worth the hassle, he kept not listening to me and now hes upset that his collect of 100+ games is useless. Guess you won back a paying customer and sold a slim Xbox 360!

P.P.S. Is there any indication of whether we're going to be able to sync our WP7 phones to Xbox 360? We Xbox + WP7 customers need to be beloved by EDD since we're buying more of the products than anyone else!

 

[AlNom]

Just as XB360 and Wii haven't really suffered from loack of HD movie playback, because it wasn't a big thing at the start of this gen, neXBox won't miss out by not providing 3D output.

And practically speaking, blu ray is not a requirement for 3D output. As a gaming machine, the only thing limiting 3D output would be the developers themselves. Sure, the lack of HDMI 1.4 support on Xbox 360 presents an issue with the type of 3D output format, but by next gen, it'd be silly for MS not to be using the HDMI version at the time of release, so it's a moot point.

It would be a convenient bonus, but more than likely the average joe will be buying a cheaper, dedicated blu ray device if they are interested in 3D Blu Ray movies.

 

[bkilian]

If you can say, do you know what an HD-DVD drive maxed out at in terms of read speed at an appropriate accoustic level?

P.S. The firmware updates have been pretty funny, one of my friends has given up on the idea of a chipped Xbox 360 because of the number of times it just stopped working, 2-3 times so far IIRC. Just now I believe there was a compulsary update in the Assassins Creed: Brotherhood DVD and it completely nuked his 360 and all the game saves are coming up as corrupted when he tried his HDD on my 360. I kept telling him it wasn't worth the hassle, he kept not listening to me and now hes upset that his collect of 100+ games is useless. Guess you won back a paying customer and sold a slim Xbox 360!

P.P.S. Is there any indication of whether we're going to be able to sync our WP7 phones to Xbox 360? We Xbox + WP7 customers need to be beloved by EDD since we're buying more of the products than anyone else!

No idea. The HD DVD addon drive was single or double speed, and was significantly slower than the internal drive for data transfer.

I hope the team gets into the WP7/360 mashup game soon too, it could be pretty awesome. Although my wife spent half an hour on my phone the other day dressing my avatar funny.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

3D discussion spun off here.

 

[assen]

On the 360, people _are_ burning discs. The Console security is still undamaged, so you have to burn an unmodified game to a disc, and then play it on a drive where the firmware has been hacked to break the "chain of trust". We implicitly trust the drive to tell us if the disc is valid, we do not trust the drive to tell us if the _data_ is valid. The only thing that's been broken is the disc trust, which is very useful for pirates, and completely useless for homebrewers. Moving to a disc type that cannot be burned and can only be replicated would eliminate this issue. I'm pretty sure the next console will take pains to plug this gap in some way.

One could argue that the console hasn't been hacked "proper" precisely because the DVD firmware hack is good enough for pirates, and there's no incentive to them to keep on trying; thus, much less effort has been spent on the rest of the console. (The noble pretense of technical interest, homebrew etc being just that, noble pretense.)

 

[corduroygt]

One could argue that the console hasn't been hacked "proper" precisely because the DVD firmware hack is good enough for pirates, and there's no incentive to them to keep on trying; thus, much less effort has been spent on the rest of the console. (The noble pretense of technical interest, homebrew etc being just that, noble pretense.)

It was hacked beyond the DVD before, but MS blew e-fuses with a firmware update to stop that. There's still incentive to completely hack the 360 for running torrented games from a huge external HDD instead of burning DVD's. I think a significant majority of the DVD+R DL industry is propped by 360 pirates

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Holy cow, COD: BO hits 1B USD sales mark worldwide.

http://investor.activision.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=538246

Continuing to absolutely smash MW2 records. And by now there should be ample word of mouth on the street about the quality or lack there-of so it isn't continuing strong sales only due to the strength of the franchise up to this point.

I think this speaks pretty clearly that your average consumer could give a rats arse whether the game was developed by IW or Treyarch. IMO, IW shot themselves in the foot by leaving for EA, I don't see them challenging the mark they set with COD: MW2 or the mark now set by COD: BO.

Finally cleared some backlog in my games to play list, so maybe I'll give it a try soon.

Regards,
SB

 

[KKRT]

I think this speaks pretty clearly that your average consumer could give a rats arse whether the game was developed by IW or Treyarch. IMO, IW shot themselves in the foot by leaving for EA, I don't see them challenging the mark they set with COD: MW2 or the mark now set by COD: BO.

If they got less money for MW 2 that they will for 3m franchise at EA, its definitely not a shoot in the foot for them.

 

[Squilliam]

Holy cow, COD: BO hits 1B USD sales mark worldwide.

Regards,
SB

Is that surprising? The fragrence / perfume industry around the world is incredibly massive.

 

[NRP]

Finally cleared some backlog in my games to play list, so maybe I'll give it a try soon.

Regards,
SB

Rent it first, if you can.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I thought about it, but I've purchased and enjoyed all the COD games (except for COD 3 which was console only). So I don't mind throwing some money at Treyarch.

I'll probably end up doing the rent or borrow from a friend thing for the latest MoH though. I no longer trust that series.

Regards,
SB

 

[corduroygt]

I thought about it, but I've purchased and enjoyed all the COD games (except for COD 3 which was console only). So I don't mind throwing some money at Treyarch.

I'll probably end up doing the rent or borrow from a friend thing for the latest MoH though. I no longer trust that series.

Regards,
SB

You enjoyed World at War? I thought that game was very weak, and Black Ops is a huge improvement over that game for Treyarch.

 

[RobertR1]

From gaf:

A couple more figures from the IW episode:
Dance Central - 350k
Kinect Sports - 323k
Halo Reach - 355k
Need For Speed Hot Pursuit PS3 - 203k
Need For Speed Hot Pursuit 360 - 201k
Metroid Other M LTD ~ 300k
Iron Man 2 DS - >40k
Michael Jackson The Experience ~ 100k
Goldeneye Wii - 73k

36. Star Wars The Force Unleashed 2 360
41. FIFA 360 - 98k
Number 60 game sold about 75k.

Wheel of Fortune Wii > Kinectimals

Really good numbers for Dance Central and Kinect Sports. Looks rough for Kinectimals.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Really good numbers for Dance Central and Kinect Sports. Looks rough for Kinectimals.

All 3 of those games are on for $30 after xmas so sales may pick up for them.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Nice, those two kinect titles sold quite well. Possibly to 1/3 of the US install base.

Surprised that Kinectimals didn't do better which makes me think Kinect is more attractive to people in their 20's and 30's than I was expecting. Dance Central and Kinect Sports being party titles that would be particularly well suited to those age groups. While less people have bought it for their kids than I was expecting.

Man, I can't wait to see December numbers.

Regards,
SB

 

[Brimstone]

Exactly. Change it to 17GB per layer, and no current drive will be able to read it or write it. Make the drive an HD DVD only drive (give up the essentially useless DVD movie playback), and you have a system which is secure even if you compromise the drive firmware, which is basically the only part of the 360 which has been compromised (except for one quickly fixed hypervisor bug, introduced, amusingly enough, on the HD DVD addon update disc)

One problem with both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is the data rate speeds are much too slow. I doubt consumers want to sit around for several minutes waiting for game data to load.


A General Electric Holographic Disc Drive would have a data rate just over 120 megabytes per second. If a next-gen console has at least 2 GIG of GDDR-5 you are looking at around 30 seconds to fill up the system ram which is in the realm of reasonable. With Blu-Ray and HD-DVD they'll offer anywhere from 5 to 15 megabytes per second. A Holographic Disc has a 100 megabyte per second data rate advantage.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Unfortunately it's also orders of magnitude more expensive. Unless of course you wouldn't mind if they jacked up game prices into the 100-200 (or more) USD range.

Regards,
SB

 

[AlphaWolf]

A General Electric Holographic Disc Drive would have a data rate just over 120 megabytes per second. If a next-gen console has at least 2 GIG of GDDR-5 you are looking at around 30 seconds to fill up the system ram which is in the realm of reasonable. With Blu-Ray and HD-DVD they'll offer anywhere from 5 to 15 megabytes per second. A Holographic Disc has a 100 megabyte per second data rate advantage.

While I'd certainly love to see the holographic medium come to fruition, it seems to have been on the horizon for an awfully long time and nothing has come of it. Sadly I think some caching will be the solution for next gen.

Unfortunately it's also orders of magnitude more expensive. Unless of course you wouldn't mind if they jacked up game prices into the 100-200 USD range.

I think the price would come down pretty quickly on the media if we saw any serious mass production, but that's a huge if. Current companies are using projections of 2020.

 

[Brimstone]

Unfortunately it's also orders of magnitude more expensive. Unless of course you wouldn't mind if they jacked up game prices into the 100-200 (or more) USD range.

Regards,
SB

A mass produced Holographic ROM disc wouldn't cost $100. If the GE format finds its way into a console, it'll have a lower cost ROM format with a around 200 GIGS of storage. There is no need to go for high numbers like 500GB, since they would only hurt manufacturing yields.

If your company is something like a hospital and you want to buy blank 500 GB rewritable discs to archive medical files, then those might cost $100 per disc.

 

[Rangers]

From gaf:



Really good numbers for Dance Central and Kinect Sports. Looks rough for Kinectimals.

Not bad numbers for the KInect games if they can keep it up and be even a little like evergreen Wii titles. Which I think at least through December they clearly have. I mean you can likely easily at least double all those figures now I think.