PS3 Strategy/Confidence Retrospective

[Carl B]

For digital consumer products would you really want to strip out the PPE? A Cell with 4 SPE and a the 4 decode and encoding chips can't that much more expensive than the Spur engine, which seems dependent on a seperate host processor.

Well, you have to consider that the present applications for the SpursEngine assume another processor present to begin with. Other factors are that it's fabbed on a bulk process rather than SOI, so I think that the PPE core was viewed as: a) large, b) a hassle to port to CMOS, and c) they don't want to pay POWER licensing costs anyway. The SpursEngine is cheap and small (and low power) on CMOS.

I should mention also that I actually spoke via email with a Toshiba rep after that story and had the SpursEngine team answer some questions of mine. Alas, I lost *all* of my email for the last couple of months recently in our server switch, but yeah, Toshiba seems excited.

Here's a more recent post-CEATEC interview that's worth reading on the subject with Matsubushi:

http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20071017/140756/

You'll note that although the initial September 20th materials didn't mention it, the SpursEngine does in fact have a 'control' core onboard, it just isn't the PPE, and serves a very specific role.

 

[Dr. Nick]

People want to label Sony as "arrogant" because they attach their emotion to the high price, and most importantly, some of the Sony execs mishandled PR when the ex-PR head left).

I would really like someone to interview that guy. It would make for some great reading.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

But again, I'm seeing the excuse that "they were aiming for the sky, so it's ok that they screwed up".

My point is, if they were acting to win this generation and push things forward, they would have had more titles on the shelf by now.

And if the British Government wanted a national centralised medical computer system by 2005, they'd have it by now no worries, right?

They can only push forward as fast as they can write the software, and they can only write the software as fast as is humanly possibly given the resources they have to spend. What you seem to be saying is they should have dropped everything else, PS2 and PSP, and focussed 100% on 2 years software development with no returns at all to make a big splash with PS3's launch, at $600 a pop. How many units do you think Sony would have sold if they had the current line-up and the machine was still $600? Furthermore, how is Sony's position any different to MS's? MS launched with a couple of major titles, and so did PS3. A lot of key MS titles were 'late'. BD was the champion of the Japanese market. If MS were acting to win the Japanese market, they would have had BD released with the console and not a year later, right? And if they were serious about making an impact, they'd have launched with their flagship Halo 3 title, right? Furthermore, how much of Sony's resources were they withholding? Do you have a list of PS2 and PSP titles in development during which time they could have been refocussing on PS3? I can think of GOW, but no other big titles. There were of course SingStar varieties. I suppose they could have taken all those devs off SingStar to make a Halo3 beater... I seriously don't understand what you expect to be different? For Sony to launch with as many titles as XB360 has had after being a year on the market? You think Sony should have funded that many 3rd party developers so for the first and only time in history, a console launches with a year's worth of titles instead of a small and mixed bag?

If MS were to have included with xb360: a full copy of Windows, a monitor, kb, mouse, MS office, and a printer/copier/fax machine AIO, and said "hey we want to make money in these arenas and further establish our OS/computer agenda" all the while, charging $600 for it and saying things such as "hey, the first 5 million are going to buy it because we make windows", I think most here would call that arrogant with them trying to sell this thing into the games space.

I'd called the comment arrogant, and if they thought the brand alone would enough to sell the device when they planned it, then I'd call that presumptuous too. But that's not what's going on here. Sony had several targets to go after, and the PS3 was a good platform to spearhead those initiatives so they went in. That's not inherently arrogance. The fact a guy said they could sell 5 million of the things on the strength of the brand was arrogance, but if that wasn't the mentality behind the creation of the product and the hardware design choices then that isn't arrogance.

I'm not sure why Sony is viewed in such an admirable light when their agenda was just as ridiculous w/BD profits in mind.

Not admirable light, just not prejudiced in the negative. I don't understand how the complaints you levy against Sony don't apply to the others. IMO they've all made interesting, considered choices, approaching the market from different, rational directions hoping that'll work best for them. Sony are in no worse of a situation regards software and things than MS or Nintendo. Nintendo's first party line-up has been pretty dire, and 3rd party has been lacklustre. MS didn't have A1 devkits. Heck, I'm just repeating myself now. I've mentioned all this before but you've just ignored all my questions on your opinion of MS's position.

You don't seem to be able to separate choices made 5+ years ago from comments made 1 year ago. Imagine, if you can, that the '5 million consoles without any software' comment had never been uttered. What we'd have is the same situation now, with PS3 selling the same numbers and the same software line-up. We'd be able to look at the situation and say 'Sony could have done with more software. Still Cell is pretty difficult, and they've improved leaps and bounds from last gen. They've also provided devs with closer to final hardware earlier than MS managed' and 'PS3 really seems to be helping the HD media initiative. 2:1 sales versus HD DVD and climbing' and 'PS3 prices are really hampering sales. Loss of BRD would help that, but then they'd miss out on the potential BRD revenues' and 'the expenses Sony have incurred in creating and launching this PS3 are really high! Good thing for them they can still capitalize on PS2's success as that still turns a nice profit. If not for PS2 they'd be in a far worse financial position!' and have opinions that aren't based entirely on trying to second-guess the motives of the decision makers based on PR nonsense. I see no reason at all to think Sony's PR bluster is as indicative of corporate policy as any other organisation. Do you think when MS put pen to paper for XB360, they said 'we're designing a machine to sell 1 billion units'? 'Coz that's what the PR bluster said. Or did they design their system saying 'we want to maximize profits, and can try leveraging our online advantage with downloads at high margins, and use licensed hardware technologies so we can source cost-effective production and never suffer that atrocious XBox situation!' and then the marketeers and overexcited executives started running around talking about great it was? Do you think Sony engineers planned to the tune of 'doesn't matter what we put in it as we can sell it on name alone, so let's stuff it to the gills with technology and damned the price' or do you think they approached the problem with the professionalism of the many employees they have along the lines of 'we want to maximize profits, and Kutaragi san here wants to use a funky new processor. Sony wants to further this BRD plan, which could have benefits for the games too; every gen has expanded on space demands. But then it'll cost a lot more than DVDs. Anyone know how much? What are our forecasts on that? Then there's all that Sony media content that we want to get in there. We'll want a hard-drive, but that'll be more cost. Expensive machine! We probably don't want to launch before 65nm is out. That'll probably be 2006 the way things are headed. Well, lots of decisions to make. I want you, you, and you to go and do some research into cost projections and BOMs for different configurations. Just ball-park figures for now? What, there's no estimates on blue laser diodes at this point. Well, do the best you can. Go talk to the labs about what they think. Also get someone in from marketing to try and attribute a good will value to the PS brand-name and see how much that'll carry us for. If push comes to shove, we may be able to price a little higher on that'?

I think the latter case is a reasonable portrayal of what happened in every one of these companies. There were flip-charts and white-boards and brain-stormings and market research and costings galore. No-one just sat down and threw together an idea expecting they'd be number one sales within one year of launch. Whatever face a company presents, the background is invariably the same. It's the only way to do effective business. Market research, costings, analyses, focus groups, and predictions, and arguments between development team members with different ideas, to try and find the best direction to go.

 

[fearsomepirate]

I don't see why it would have been absurd for Sony to wait until Fall 07. Nintendo delayed the N64 quite a bit, which had less going for it than PS3 (PS1 already out when N64 finally unveiled, cartridge media, graphics not really all that amazing, horrible 3rd-party relations), and yet that extra year, which was spent finishing up some fantastic launch titles, apparently was enough for the N64 to sell more units than either the Xbox or the Gamecube did. What happened in PS3's first year? No huge games were released, developer support wasn't that great, and it ended up not being appreciably more powerful than the Xbox 360. Given another year, and it could have come out for less money, possibly with a better GPU and more RAM, and some killer launch titles.

While Sony official's rhetoric said "arrogance," to me the whole saga says "feature creep" and "mismanagement."

 

[Acert93]

1. Cost of blue laser diodes hadn't come down to a level where they made economic sense to put in a CE product like the Playstation 3.
2. Speed of CELL chips had to be lowered to 3.2GHz to reach acceptable yield.

I also believe 65nm was an issue as well. The noise coming from the Sony camp was quite loud in this regard in 2003/2004, and it seems that Sony like everyone else hit the same hurdles. Launching at 90nm, instead of 65nm, likely impacted the cost of the system and its performance. Left to their own devices (i.e. no MS) I think we would have seen the PS3 later than 2006. Sony clearly was riding PS2 software well into 2005 and their hardware choices--BDR, HDMI, process nodes, etc--all indicate 2005/2006 was not their original plan. i.e. Filter out the noise about, "We can launch in 2005 if we wanted to" non-sense.

In general I think Sony was too much, too soon. MS was bleeding badly with the Xbox--a strong PlayStation 3 showing out of the gates could have killed Microsoft. And that isn't without factoring in their idiot moves and stuff like RROD. I strongly question the business sense of putting your cash cow in jeopardy for a short term boost (2005/2006) and neglecting longterm potential (PS3 and beyond). I said this in early 2005 and I believe the market has played out as such.

I know Sony wants to be the media hub of the living room. I also know that the PlayStation is essential for distributing their coorporate vision/agenda. But they went for too much, too soon. An "also me" PS3 in 2005 would have crushed MS at this point. MS would have exited the market (which they may still), and Sony would

a. Make a profit on the PS3
b. Have the high end home media market to themselves in 2011

At which point Sony would be free to use the PlayStation as the living room trojan it had the potential to be--home PC, supercomputer, living room/home media hub and distribution, etc.

Their biggest problem is they totally underestimated the competition and didn't have solid contingencies inregards to process nodes, BDR, etc that would have made for a compelling product. Sony evangalists aside, it is very clear from a market perspective that when you competitor has a high defect rate and eats $1.1B in repair costs--and is outselling you--that your product vision was amiss. Sure, the vocal minority will sing the praises as a super machine that meets their every need. By the same token a lot of people bought Deer Hunter. But in the broader view Sony's PS3 strategy has lost them significant mindshare and marketshare--when truly, when looking at Microsoft's massive mistakes, Sony should be lighting victory cigars right now.

 

[Mintmaster]

Maybe, but besides GT4 (since you believe GT4 HD would be almost as good as GT5), I fail to see how launching early would enable better software wrt 2006 PS3.

I'm not saying it would. I just mentioned software because for a 2005 launch to work you need a different software plan. That's all.

...Halo

If 360 was built like PS2, Halo wouldn't look so good, and wouldn't be as enticing. At the time, Halo looked better than any FPS on the PC, thus leading up to the hype.

Two years later, after 360 would have even bigger userbase, PS2 like developer support, and even higher PS3 production costs, I highly doubt that Sony would have a better chance besides in mass market.

Why not? What's a 13M unit deficit when your goal is 100M units? The reason for PS3's bleak outlook is not XB360's lead, but rather the lack of any big benefit over XB360.

This is my point: If you launch at the same time as your competitor with a similar product, the company with the better brand and market presence will win easily. If you launch much later and give your competitor a head start, you've now lost the market presence and can only win comfortably with a superior product. Sony launched late with a similar product, which is neither of these situations.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Why not? What's a 13M unit deficit when your goal is 100M units? The reason for PS3's bleak outlook is not XB360's lead, but rather the lack of any big benefit over XB360.

Yes, this is the real problem for Sony. And this battle will be fought on software, where both companies are looking to very different strategies at the moment. The over-priced hardware point is now pretty much moot I think. PS3 is now 'affordable', as affordable as it ever was going to be with Sony's hardware choices. Whether they intended to launch at $600, or $400 but got scuppered, we are now where we're at. Sony are 5+ million behind, but in the grand scheme of the whole generation, 5 million isn't a lot. Indeed one could say that for Sony's bad choices, MS have probably made a more serious one by not being more aggressive. A whole year head-start and being far cheaper has only netted them 7 million units while allowing Nintendo to overtake. Anyway, the prices aren't changing dramatically any time soon. It's down to the platform holders to attract the custom through the machines' capabilities and services. It's time to make software move units. That of course is a topic as equally polarized as many console topics; the same software library on a machine can be perceived as weak and lacklustre by some parties and rock-solid and inviting by others!

 

[Mintmaster]

Dropping BR was not an option at any point imo and would've made zero sense to do so.

True as I said, but still ignoring the possible long term advantages of BD.

The rationale for Sony putting a BD drive in the PS3 was obvious on several levels

To everyone going on about the inclusion of BD on the PS3 helping Sony win the format war:

PS3 is a very silly place to make this investment. Look at the terrible attach ratio of HD movies to PS3 systems. Instead of subsidizing $500 amongst the BR drives in five PS3s, they could knock off $250 from two BR standalones. Then they'd get around twice the disc revenue from the same subsidy while eliminating HD-DVD's cost advantage to boot.

As for BD usage in games, devs are not having any trouble fitting 10 hours of gameplay into a DVD. Sure, they could use more space, but it has little impact on the quality or marketability of a game. In fact, long games are probably the opposite of what Sony/MS or even the devs would want, as they'd rather sell extra content or make seperate games.

 

[Arwin]

For a slam-dunk console victory I agree wholeheartedly. Another PlayStation, fancy graphics and a mainstream price, launched with PES and Madden exclusives, and..GTA or whatever. In the bag. End of story.

Question is, was that at all a realistic scenario? Would EA have gone for this? I doubt it. And even if Xbox1 and Gamecube didn't win the previous generation, they were presences, and they were enough to be supported. In the end, most games were available on all three, and the PS2 often had the weakest version.

Some people seem to think that if the PS3 simply consisted of any basic current processor (preferably an OOO Intel one or a G5) and a G71 with a DVD drive, in short, a very old-fashioned PC, and brought that to the market at a price equal to or below the 360, they would have won by default. Is that really so?

No. In this industry, you can only for a short while live on your name alone before a competitor takes your leadership position. We all know the examples, so I'm not going to list them.

So the next alternative would be to compete primarily on the software level. Sony creates the best developer tools, some really great first party games, and spends some big cash on some hot exclusives. Could they have pulled this off? They'd have been a lot more vulnerable to the Wii, to begin with, and it is questionable that they could have competed with Nintendo's game design or Microsoft's experience with creating SDKs, unified software platforms, Windows support through Games for Windows and Live, and so on. Let's not forget that the Xbox in its final years was already making some decent inroads, especially in the U.S.

My take? No way they could have pulled this off, and it would have meant an end to one of the original Playstation's main source of success, which is that they both were forward looking platforms with a solid hardware basis that left software a lot of room to grow and do new things. Sony's first party stuff hasn't been the primary driver for its platforms. Instead, it's creating a viable and lasting hardware foundation and then funding the right software projects to make the most out of it.

So their final alternative was to continue the logical path of the previous two generations. This is what they have done, and this is partly what competitors either expected or feared they would do and assumed they could not compete with. The Playstation series has been a series of consoles recognising that games demand hardware that is so highly specced, that increasingly the console that supplies this hardware is also capable of other multi-media functions. They basically come for free after the requirements for the console have been met. While both Microsoft and Nintendo chose differents paths, to make the most of their own strengths, even they recognise this, but neither of them can and will make as much of these features as the Playstation can.

Microsoft and Nintendo both have been successful so far, but the main strength of the Playstation platform, building a durable and fertile platform for both first and third parties to grow and blossom on, still has to pan out. Sony has been by far the most forward looking of the three, and that almost by definition means that its strength will become apparent more as time progresses. It has been unlucky with a few things (diode, rumble), and simply mistaken in others (especially online SDK could and should have received more attention earlier on, and I fully blame this on Sony Japan - SCEE and SCEA have worked hard to change this, and eventually the importance of this was recognised and Phil was set to work), but that wouldn't have been a big problem if Sony didn't have competitors who focussed primarily on trying to get an early win.

If you look at Sony today, then you see a company that has set a firm hardware basis, and has reached the 399 pricepoint required for serious competition, and has nearly finished ironing out the last chinks (rumble is nearly out there). I'd say the Playstation hardware, with probably only sacrificing BC in the 40GB version excepted, reached an important milestone with a surprising number of hardware features intact (BluRay, Wifi, 40GB HDD, soon both motion controls and rumble, HDMI 1.3, 1Gbit Network port, it's all still there), and from now on it is all about the software.

The 360 has received its early boost, but from now on the playground will level out, and the battle is on full scale in the software realm, with the Wii and the RROD issues helping to hold it back from becoming the huge success at retail it could have been in the last 12 months. Firmware 2 is coming soon, and the public beta for Home will no doubt follow closely on its heels, as I'm sure the two are closely intertwined, which should offer the PSN platform an SDK that sufficiently rivals and in some ways exceeds Live. Where the 360 has almost all its aces on the table, Sony is only barely starting to get its big hitters out there, with Eyetoy/EyeCreate/Eye of Judgment and Singstar (with EyeToy support and online features, and iTunes like music platform and never before released in the U.S.) catering to a wider audience, Gran Turismo looking as sharp as ever (and with Top Gear!), and showing that it still has a good nose for talent, snapping up promising and original new ips both for bigger titles and for PSN downloadables, (from Echochrome to WipeOut with online play and sixaxis support), Little Big Planet and many other wonderfully original things. Unreal Tournament will be significant not only in proving that Sony not only offers a more open network experience, but that the Unreal Engine itself is now running very well on the PS3 which is important for a number of multi-platform games. Also this year should be the last year in which PS3 versions of EA games are the lesser versions, and we have already started seeing PS3 versions of multiplatform games that look and/or play better, among which Burnout 5 being an interesting one for also having a more immersive online experience on the PS3 than on the 360. And maybe something overlooked, but whereas in the last generation some PC games were only ported to the Xbox because it had more memory, this generation there's no such difference and only the initial learning curve has been holding the PS3 back so far (but won't be in the future).

You won't hear me claim that the PS3 is the winner by default, but everyone who thinks that Sony is losing is rushing into a judgment that is not yet based on what the large audience is buying this gen, but mostly on early adapters and enthusiasts, many of whom were early HD adopters, will own both consoles, who were loyal to the original Xbox and Halo 2 fans (or fans of Live in general) and either had to stop buying games or upgrade, and so on. So far, happy Playstation 2 owners have had the least urgency to upgrade to the next thing, but that does not mean they will suddenly choose to upgrade to a 360. That the 360 is poised to take a stronger market share in the US is, as far as I am concerned, a given. But the overall battle will be hard fought by all parties, and the longer it lasts, the more likely the overall win will go to Sony.

There's a lot more to say, obviously, and I'm having trouble finishing this post as tonnes of thoughts keep making me want to add things (on all sides of the scale) and yet that only goes to underline the complexity of the matter and how unlikely it is that anyone right now can reliably predict the future. But if things pan out as they are looking to, then I expect the Playstation to go a long way.

 

[Arwin]

In fact, long games are probably the opposite of what Sony/MS or even the devs would want, as they'd rather sell extra content or make seperate games.

The DVD drive in the 360 doesn't even hold as much data as the DVD drive did in the Playstation 2. You can say and repeat this all you like, but I don't buy it. Not only are we seeing even in 360 exclusives that you are not right (Blue Dragon and Lost Oddysey, 3 and 4 discs respectively), or in Playstation 3 exclusives that you're not right, or lots of announcements of the use of BluRay by first and third parties (announced level compilations for LBP and UT3), or Hard Boiled in HD being included with the PS3 version of Stranglehold, but even in more mundane details such as language options even in a high profile game like Halo 3, that can only be played in one spoken language depending on where in Europe you buy it, where even on PS2 it was common to have at least 4 different languages to choose from, and more for some games (and games like Resistance, Heavenly Sword and so on already offer 13 spoken languages just on one disc, allowing developers at a minimum to reduce the number of different SKUs), not to mention that the choice for BluRay means that the machine will probably always be able to run far more quietly than the 6x as fast spinning DVD drive in the Xbox. And that's just scratching the surface, as we're still in the PS3s first year. By year five, I'm sure that several games will struggle to stay withing the 50GB limit.

I'm sure there will be plenty of games on the 360 that will wow us with what they managed to cram on the little disc, but certain game types are more suitable for this than others and it will be very hard. In the future, if anything is going to bring more graphical beauty to a PS3 game over a 360 game, then this will be it, especially in the non-multiplatform games, but eventually even in some of those. I simply do not, and do not have any reason to, buy that the few puny (in terms of raw data) games we've seen on the 360 are any proof that thus games will have plenty of room using only 7.4Gb. There's too much evidence to the contrary already, and combined with historical perspective I'll need some very good reasons to be convinced otherwise, and certainly better than I've seen on any forum so far.

 

[one]

The reason for PS3's bleak outlook is not XB360's lead, but rather the lack of any big benefit over XB360.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. You want Blu-ray to be a big benefit over Xbox 360, so you put it on PS3 to make it a more prevailing format. Cell is another format that enables unique applications such as this. Online distribution is the present, not future, so Blu-ray is the last chance to make money on optical disc technologies, its introduction can't be later. When you know Intel is developing Larrabee for the same kind of workload for Cell, it's most likely a good place to invest in. Entertainment business is fickle - I don't think FPS games are the most efficient place to make money. If PS3 could play FPS games significantly better looking than Xbox 360, then I'd call it overkill since it must be a very very expensive product Sony can't sell even at $600.

PS3 is a very silly place to make this investment. Look at the terrible attach ratio of HD movies to PS3 systems. Instead of subsidizing $500 amongst the BR drives in five PS3s, they could knock off $250 from two BR standalones. Then they'd get around twice the disc revenue from the same subsidy while eliminating HD-DVD's cost advantage to boot.

I think someone already mentioned the effect of volume production of blue-laser diodes for PS3?

 

[RobertR1]

PS3 is a very silly place to make this investment. Look at the terrible attach ratio of HD movies to PS3 systems. Instead of subsidizing $500 amongst the BR drives in five PS3s, they could knock off $250 from two BR standalones. Then they'd get around twice the disc revenue from the same subsidy while eliminating HD-DVD's cost advantage to boot.

For Sony, leveraging their product, the PS3, was their way of getting support from the industry. As always, all presentations smell like roses. Execution and end results are another story.

For Studios, if Sony is taking most of the chances and asking you to sign up, why not? esp if they'll author your discs and subsidize the media on top of everything else. How happy you think CE's are with the PS3 being the best BR player at $399?

BR isn't a calculated risk for Sony, it was and is a large gamble. Now with 2 for 1 sales and titles routinely being sold around their DVD counterparts, where is the profit? The new discs are more expensive to manufacture/replicate and author. Net net you have smaller profit margins than DVD. Conditioning consumers to wait on such sales before buying certainly doesn't help that profit margin . I'm glad for Hi Def as I have 85+ titles from both sides but I'd be cringing if I was incharge of the business model. I can confidently say the model today looked like nothing what was shown in those presentations.

Beating HD DVD is the least of their problem. Next up is DVD and brewing on the side are digital downloads. Remember, convenience wins over quality. When DD's started for music, it was slow to get up and there were many skeptics. Clearly not the case now. BR will have an uphill battle during it's lifecycle. Anything below mass consumer adoption is a failure and we're not even taking into account the profit margins.

 

[PARANOiA]

I'm sure there will be plenty of games on the 360 that will wow us with what they managed to cram on the little disc, but certain game types are more suitable for this than others and it will be very hard. In the future, if anything is going to bring more graphical beauty to a PS3 game over a 360 game, then this will be it, especially in the non-multiplatform games, but eventually even in some of those. I simply do not, and do not have any reason to, buy that the few puny (in terms of raw data) games we've seen on the 360 are any proof that thus games will have plenty of room using only 7.4Gb. There's too much evidence to the contrary already, and combined with historical perspective I'll need some very good reasons to be convinced otherwise, and certainly better than I've seen on any forum so far.

For me, the evidence lies in two main points.

Firstly, PC games have only relatively recent begun shipping on DVD's as standard - and PC games run at better resolutions than any of the consoles... so space doesn't seem to be a big issue just yet - maybe in a few years, but not right now.

Secondly is cost - and opportunity cost. I wouldn't have bought my 360 if it cost $AUD1000, like the PS3 launched. As is, the "cheap" PS3 still costs me more than I paid for my pro 360 with two games, and it comes with no games and no BC. So while there may come a time in 2009 or 2010 that devs find the art resource to use more than a dual layer DVD worth of space that can't be spanned across discs, I haven't seen it today. The cost of paying to cross this barrier from DL-DVD to BR-sized games would be, for me, 18 months worth of some the best gaming I've ever had, plus an extra few hundred dollars in my pocket. Not being able to play Halo in German really doesn't make me wish I spent a few hundred dollars more on it.

I guess the flipside is, I haven't seen any games out today that make me wish MS spent more money on included a HD-based drive, and passed that cost onto me, the consumer. I'd love to see some pointed out if you can.

 

[Geo]

Umm, 100% of PCs have hard drives. This has consequences.

 

[PARANOiA]

Umm, 100% of PCs have hard drives. This has consequences.

I appreciate that, but how many games that don't stream have more data than a dual-layer disc? IIRC Myst 4 was mainly FMV... any others?

So the multi-CD option was viable (if awful for the user!) because they could just install.. but it doesn't inherently have more data than a dual-layer disc, which was my point. Just because a medium has high resolutions doesn't mean it needs more data, as proven by pretty much all PC games.

 

[Carl B]

To everyone going on about the inclusion of BD on the PS3 helping Sony win the format war:

I can only comment on your response to my own quote, but I certainly wasn't saying that PS3 has won Sony the format war, simply that the rationale for its inclusion was obvious... and yes, in the context of the format war.

Whether one calls it foolish or not in retrospect, certainly anyone can understand what Sony felt they could gain by making that gamble.

PS3 is a very silly place to make this investment. Look at the terrible attach ratio of HD movies to PS3 systems. Instead of subsidizing $500 amongst the BR drives in five PS3s, they could knock off $250 from two BR standalones. Then they'd get around twice the disc revenue from the same subsidy while eliminating HD-DVD's cost advantage to boot.

The BD standalones could be much cheaper than they are now anyway if the manufacturers were in the mood for subsidizing... or even just reducing margins. Certainly in real terms, the BD players can't cost but about $50 more to make than their HD DVD counterparts; it's just simply that the major Japanese CE firms behind Blu-ray always wanted a period of fat margins.

PS3's major contribution to the BD ecosystem goes beyond the movie sales... sales which I'm sure Sony will hope to increase further through awareness and marketing to the PS3 ownership this Fall. It goes all the way to the build-out of the entire supply-chain, from diode replication, to disc replication on the order of millions of discs per month rather than hundreds of thousands. Without a high volume product like PS3 to kick the BD-related component manufacturing in the pants, BD could be faced still with pre-2007 level sourcing woes.

PS - Please remember I'm not making a judgment as to whether the inclusion was a good choice or not.

 

[Mintmaster]

<blah blah BR rules for games blah blah>

Believe it or not, you're just proving my point. Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey are not only small potatoes, but multiple discs don't interfere with gameplay. PS3 examples are irrelevent. I just told that devs will use the space if its there, but it's not a big priority. You completely missed the whole point of my post:

"it has little impact on the quality or marketability of a game."

In the future, if anything is going to bring more graphical beauty to a PS3 game over a 360 game, then this will be it, especially in the non-multiplatform games, but eventually even in some of those.

How? The RAM is the same (actually less). All BR will buy you is variety from one point in the game to the other, and even that will only be true if the studio is willing to author more content. I don't see complaints about worlds being too tiny or games having too much environmental repetition. Permanent storage space is not a limiting factor right now.

I simply do not, and do not have any reason to, buy that the few puny (in terms of raw data) games we've seen on the 360 are any proof that thus games will have plenty of room using only 7.4Gb. There's too much evidence to the contrary already, and combined with historical perspective I'll need some very good reasons to be convinced otherwise, and certainly better than I've seen on any forum so far.

The problem is you don't understand the meaning of "enough room". You are not going to get better screenshots with more storage space. It's very unlikely that you'll get higher review scores with more storage space. You're not going to get higher sales with more storage space.

Put all this together and it means there is "enough" room. Despite the idiotic ratio comparisons that people bring up, this isn't like N64 vs. PS1. Next gen we'll have 2-4GB of RAM and then DVD would indeed be a visual limitation, but not this gen.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Believe it or not, you're just proving my point. Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey are not only small potatoes, but multiple discs don't interfere with gameplay. PS3 examples are irrelevent. I just told that devs will use the space if its there, but it's not a big priority. You completely missed the whole point of my post:

"it has little impact on the quality or marketability of a game."
How? The RAM is the same (actually less). All BR will buy you is variety from one point in the game to the other, and even that will only be true if the studio is willing to author more content. I don't see complaints about worlds being too tiny or games having too much environmental repetition. Permanent storage space is not a limiting factor right now.

The problem is you don't understand the meaning of "enough room". You are not going to get better screenshots with more storage space. It's very unlikely that you'll get higher review scores with more storage space. You're not going to get higher sales with more storage space.

Put all this together and it means there is "enough" room. Despite the idiotic ratio comparisons that people bring up, this isn't like N64 vs. PS1. Next gen we'll have 2-4GB of RAM and then DVD would indeed be a visual limitation, but not this gen.

Clearly its the 5-10gb of uncompressed audio that they can throw on there that will make BR worthwhile.

 

[Mintmaster]

The BD standalones could be much cheaper than they are now anyway if the manufacturers were in the mood for subsidizing... or even just reducing margins. Certainly in real terms, the BD players can't cost but about $50 more to make than their HD DVD counterparts; it's just simply that the major Japanese CE firms behind Blu-ray always wanted a period of fat margins.

Fine, but I'm talking about Sony. They want to sell BD players, and have a $399 model competing with Toshiba's HD-DVD players. If you make the former cheaper, what's the point in buying the latter? A half million subsidized BD players would cement BR into first place a lot more solidly than a few million PS3's, especially since this scenario also means reduced sales for HD-DVD.

It goes all the way to the build-out of the entire supply-chain, from diode replication, to disc replication on the order of millions of discs per month rather than hundreds of thousands. Without a high volume product like PS3 to kick the BD-related component manufacturing in the pants, BD could be faced still with pre-2007 level sourcing woes.

Several people in this thread have made this point, and it makes no sense to me.

How does buying a half million diodes for BD players cost more than 5 million diodes for PS3? How does the latter reduce sourcing woes when it accounts for the bulk of the demand?

Teething pains are there regardless of whether the PS3 has BR or not. If anything, PS3 increased those costs because Sony had to fix issue as fast as possible. Low yeild would have affected far fewer discs if PS3 didn't have BR.

 

[Mintmaster]

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. You want Blu-ray to be a big benefit over Xbox 360, so you put it on PS3 to make it a more prevailing format.

Except it isn't. Sony misjudged the willingness of people to spend $500 for HD movies over a $50 upscaling DVD player.

Cell is another format that enables unique applications such as this.
...
When you know Intel is developing Larrabee for the same kind of workload for Cell, it's most likely a good place to invest in.

Cell is great. I have no problem with it, and I doubt it has a much higher unit cost than Xenon does. I don't see many situations where scaling down a Cell-intensive effect to the 360 would make a big difference in gameplay, but a less than spectacular benefit from Cell isn't a problem in light of low marginal cost.

Online distribution is the present, not future, so Blu-ray is the last chance to make money on optical disc technologies, its introduction can't be later.

I'm not saying to introduce it later. I'm saying subsidize the drives in the standalone players where your subsidy is most effective.

Entertainment business is fickle - I don't think FPS games are the most efficient place to make money. If PS3 could play FPS games significantly better looking than Xbox 360, then I'd call it overkill since it must be a very very expensive product Sony can't sell even at $600.

Who said anything about FPS games? More RAM helps the visuals and physics of all games. Imagine if every review said the PS3 has sharper textures.