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- Thread starter ninelven
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PC-Engine said:If SONY were smart they wouldn't need 4 controller ports and instead would just go wireless.
Bingolina.
sytaylor said:london-boy said:PC-Engine said:If SONY were smart they wouldn't need 4 controller ports and instead would just go wireless.
Bingolina.
I smell a cost cut there by not going wireless, but I hope I'm wrong.
It's either that or 2 controller ports. Sony (and I for that matter) are of the idea that 4-player games are so few and far in between that if you ever need to play with 3 other people, u might as well get a multitap together with the other controllers.
98% of the people out there will never need 4 controller ports so it's no big deal, unless you need to fins something to rant about that is...
sytaylor said:
Or timesplitters or a few others. But really, once the novelty has been tried, no one cares.
I mean, how many must-buy games have been released in the last few years that pushed people to play in 4-player mode?
These days we have online play, LAN multiplayer, all those things make 4 controller ports look like 90's kind of gadget features.
london-boy said:
Might be because you're a PS2 centirc gamer? Or don't normally go for multiplayer?
Halo, Halo 2, Project Gotham 1 and 2, Rallisport Challenge 1 and 2 (which are truly superb games), Dead or Alive 3, most sports games you can mention ... on Xbox it's many of the systems "big guns" that support four players. On a platform that supports four player as standard, the games come, and they get used. It's more common for me to play in 4 player games than 2 player.
I've found the situation is the same on the Gamecube too. It's normally either one person, or a group of us togther "having a laugh".
Online, and mulitplayer on a single console serve a largely different need among gamers. Going the Lan route there is possibly some overlap, but it is a potnetially expensive, frequently impractical, rarely used and altogether poor alternative to offering people the ability to play on the same console, on the same screen. Infact, I've found Lan console gaming's "greatest moments" to be when connecting three Xboxes that all have four players on them!
IMO, requiring an expensive peripheral just to plug more than 2 pads into a console would be, in this day and age, simply offensive!
Sony really laid an egg big time by not having at least four controller ports (or barring that have some USB DS2s) on the PS2. The marginal cost of four controller ports over two can't be much more than 50 cents per console. (I guess) That would be, if correct, an increase in manufacturing costs of around 30 million dollars over the lifespan of production.
I personally know of at least 3 PS2 sales that never happened because the erstwhile buyer wanted a good selection multiplayer games and instead bought a GC or Xbox. All of the lost sales Sony incurred due to this shortsighted decision are probably worth at least 10 times more than whatever they saved by cutting out the ports (plus whatever profit they made from the multitaps).
I personally know of at least 3 PS2 sales that never happened because the erstwhile buyer wanted a good selection multiplayer games and instead bought a GC or Xbox. All of the lost sales Sony incurred due to this shortsighted decision are probably worth at least 10 times more than whatever they saved by cutting out the ports (plus whatever profit they made from the multitaps).
akira888 said:
Oh whatever! Now please do tell us how you'd come to that number... Crystal ball? You know of 3 guys who wanted 4-player games and happened to buy a GC or Xbox and now Sony lost 300M over it?!?! Get real, if someone wanted a GC over an Xbox it was because they preferred the games over PS2's selection, and it looks like most people did the contrary...
Or you're saying that PS2 would have sold even more had it had 4 controller ports?
At the time of manufacturing, having the same interface of PS1 was the only way they could retain PS1 backward compatibility.
So, 4-ports or backward compatibility?
ShootMyMonkey
Veteran
Not so much PS2 sales as game sales. Having 4 ports inherently assumable on the developer's end opens up a few genre and gameplay avenues... namely for co-op/multiplayer without necessarily having to be online. Party-style games are a possibility, but that's pretty much the domain of GC. I don't think anything could have been done on Sony's part to fight that.
If every gamer in the world were like me, then 1 port would have been sufficient -- that and everybody would lose all the time
. Problem is there are plenty of market niches to be filled out there.Where in the world did people ever get the idea that more ports breaks backwards compatibility? Fewer ports, yes, but more? Unless the protocols are packed format and the "port select" is a single bit somewhere in the middle of a packed command word with no padding, I really don't see this as a valid argument. And even then, supporting multiple versions of a protocol is not that difficult, considering that the I/O processor was previously used as a CPU. If anything, I'd say that having two ports was more related to the obscene size of those ports (for the DSUB size) and how much real estate they eat up on the body of the console itself.
Besides which, in PS3's case, backwards compatibility would have to be software based, so there's no reason to worry about the damn controllers or the oversized ports or what type of interface you're using. Any claim that backward compatibility limits you to 4 ports on PS3 is complete and utter nonsense. For that matter, even thinking about legacy at a hardware level on consoles is just plain stupid in the first place. Consoles are supposed to be free of all that crap... it's worries like that that made Windows what it is today, and if you're doing that at the hardware level, you're basically doomed to have a platform that never grows from one version to the next.
