NPD November 2010

[Silent_Buddha]

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.

The problem with that is they still have to figure out a way to mass produce it cheaply. That's the largest obstacle it has to overcome in order to gain any sort of widespread use.

The GE breakthrough gets them a little closer, but as with all previous holographic breakthroughs they are still a LONG LONG way from getting it to the point where it's economically feasible to manufacture at a cost that its intended market will bear. And it's initial market will likely be the server market which is far more likely to bear the cost of system where each disk may cost up to 100 USD or more when it is first introduced.

As an exercise compare the breakthrough of Blue laser optical disks to when they were finally rolled out for consumer use (hint, more than 6 years). And that involved a storage system that is inherently cheaper to produce than Holographic media. Holographic storage has been dangled and promised since the 80's and possibly earlier. I'm still waiting for it to hit consumer price points. I still remember back in 1988 where holographic storage was "competing" with Compact Discs to see which would become the dominant storage medium for the 90's.

Regards,
SB

 

[Shifty Geezer]

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.

It'll probably be out the same time we're all buying cheap SED/FED TVs and using handhelds with running time counted in days thanks to using fuel cells...

 

[NathansFortune]

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.

Blu-ray 12x drive with silencing costs 4500 JPY to buy in bulk, and less for Sony to produce. 54MB/s transfer rate. Take a bit out for overheads which leaves you with 50MB/s. Also this is the current BD-ROM 1.0 specification. The proposed BD 4.0 spec has a baseline of 72Mb/s read speed, so you could get an 8x drive which would be less prone to mechanical failure and quieter with a read speed of 70MB/s on a 100GB disc.

HVD is very pie in the sky, the cost of a HVD reader ranges from $10k-100k and the discs cost around $200 to produce and have a very high failure rate. Compared to Blu-ray it is a non-starter for consumer products. A BD drive costs around $40 to produce and discs are replicated in mass for less than $1 for a BD-50, with a success rate over 97% for BD-50 and over 99% for BD-25.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Hmm, so is Reach selling less then Halo 3 then?
Could it be that the audience is slowly getting tired of Halo; or is it the lack of Master Chief? Either way the 343 studio should pay close attention...

 

[RobertR1]

Hmm, so is Reach selling less then Halo 3 then?
Could it be that the audience is slowly getting tired of Halo; or is it the lack of Master Chief? Either way the 343 studio should pay close attention...

I'd say multiple factors:

Rise of the CoD franchise
3 Halo's in 3 years
No Master Chief is certainly a factor

The Halo MP formula while refined, might be getting a bit old now. CoD current MP is still only 3 years old compared to much longer for the Halo formula.

343 need to go back to Master Chief and do an overhaul of the MP.

 

[aselto]

Reach is 153k behind H3, or ~4%, which is a marginal decline. Of course Call of Duty rose fourfold in the same timeframe, so Microsoft/Bungie probably didn't expand as they could have, but at least they defended thair sales against huge onslaught of other shooters that just didn't exist last generation.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

As well, rather than moving Halo:Reach to not be in competition with a COD title like pretty much everyone else, they set it head to head.

Comparing to Halo 3 which had no competition and launched at a time when the X360 library was still fairly small, I'd say Reach is doing pretty well.

Regards,
SB

 

[NRP]

Honestly, Reach's MP is arguably as good as ever. It may be that people are a little burned out and want something different, but I imagine Reach MP will always be popular. People will come back.

IMO, a more plausible explanation is the SP for some reason didn't really feel as compelling as the "Master Chief" Halos.

But hell, I don't know. MS/343 definitely needs to be careful though.

 

[Florin]

Aside from general Halo franchise tiredness and lack of Master Chief, perhaps the fact that it didn't take place on a.. well.. on a halo basically, has something to do with it. Loved Reach but it's not a very halo Halo.

 

[NRP]

Probably. One of the things I loved about the Halo games was the alien landscapes and architecture. If we're mostly looking at Earth landscapes and human architecture, well . . . we've seen it all before and others have probably done it better.

But also, having thought more about it, Reach just never had any epic battles/levels like H3 did. Reach really should have had a few huge Scarab battles and epic warthog runs. Something to get your pulse pounding.

 

[NavNucST3]

Numbers from here and then posted to GAF:

Top 10 numbers

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

Since NFS sold 417k total, that'd mean the PC/Wii games did 13k total.

From the Kinect pricing thread I was hoping for a 500k Dance Central open which was ambitious forecasting but I fully expect Dance Central to have a very strong December and January.

 

[corduroygt]

I feel Dance central, etc. are like the first rock band/guitar hero. They're the new thing and so they're popular, but it'll die out when the novelty ends. Same thing happened with DDR.

 

[NavNucST3]

I feel Dance central, etc. are like the first rock band/guitar hero. They're the new thing and so they're popular, but it'll die out when the novelty ends. Same thing happened with DDR.

Could you elaborate on the ",etc".

Did you see the numbers for Just Dance 2 or have you viewed the LTD of Just Dance? How do you correlate that with your, "Same thing happened with DDR."? Has DDR ever been a massive home console seller compared to its Arcade equivalent (I have never viewed the DDR numbers so this is a very serious question and while this is an NPD thread and I'm normally only interested in the numbers by the respective topics region, in this case, I'm actually interested in the overall DDR numbers).

To your point though, so what, they are good games, don't we want good games to sell? Personally, I have always hated the Rock Band and Guitar Hero model of new instruments (though none of my guitars fully work anymore...) Rock Band 2 should have been the model...make a platform and continue to fill the platform with music, no spin-offs. For me there should have been a Rock Band 1, 2, and maybe a 3 but certainly not all the niche offshoots and really I would have preferred upgrade through DLC at 19.99-39.99 with a retail counter-part. An "upgrade" like that of Burnout Paradise when Big Surf Island was released. Big Surf Island took a series that I had loved, until Paradise arrived (I called it one of my most hated games of this generation) and made it much more enjoyable for me. The RB/GH's could have done the same thing. The catch with Dance Central is that I believe MSFT needs to start actually advertising XBOX Live and its DLC capabilities as stand-alone commercials or a commercial that is 3/4 game and 1/4 DLC advertising.