PS3 Strategy/Confidence Retrospective

Motrostorm and Resistence were selling a lot even before bundles.

 

You don't know how badly it would have sold without them ...

Pricetag is now down to 399, of course. But it's interesting to see that Insomniac seems to be rewarded for their attempt at getting a launch-game out. They figured they could make it back because early on you have little competition and a long time for people to pick up the game aftewards. Bundles have helped, but these two games having been the best games probably for the PS3 for a long time, they were good picks for a bundle.

 

And a lack of competition. It sold well because it's been one of the only "great" games on the system for 12+ months. If it was released this month, I highly doubt it would be a 2m+ seller.

 

Very true but PS3 was launched less than a year ago (11/11 in Japan, 11/17 in US, and March this year in Europe), so 12+ months it's not.

I believe Insomniac said they targerted Resistance for PS3 launch because it was a new IP and there were fewer competitions. Still they executed very well considering the outstanding gameplay and excellent online performance even by today's standard. Without these, it may not even be bundled (See Genji).

If it were to be released this month, it would have benefited from the additional year of development (assuming infinite resources on Insomniac side). That's mostly irrelevant now.

 

Very true... but 11 months at the top of the pile will of course inflate sales numbers to greater than their natural worth. Add pack-in and the 2m+ number is not representative of the title's true quality compared to other platforms.

Hell, PDZ sold fantastically well - not far off 2m IIRC because of the "no competition launch-wave" just like Resistance, and I wouldn't touch that with a ten foot pole

 

True quality ? Play the game to find out.
Collectively, we will know the final answer.

Sure... I already mentioned that releasing RFOM at PS3 launch is a conscious decision by Insomniac to maximize sales despite a small installed base.

Good for PDZ to perform well, but it does not necessarily reflect on RFOM's quality and path to success.

 

I wrote "publisher-friendly", not "developer-friendly". Yeah larger sales is good "for now". However software life becomes shorter if piracy is possible. It's also important for markets such as China. These are long-term investments to increase profit margin.

To make the context of my post clearer, these are side effects of Blu-ray and others. The main discussion was about Blu-ray's merit on game itself and its relevance to the sales, arguing Blu-ray was the culprit of the $600 price and the smaller install base. There are low-cost solutions for anti-piracy such as GD-ROM and GC's mini-disc, it's obvious anti-piracy was not the main reason Blu-ray was adopted for PS3, though it was surely one of the design motives of the Blu-ray format itself. So "PS3 took anti-piracy at the cost of real sales!" is a pointless argument. These 2 are not mutually exclusive, just complementary. Look at Fox in the Blu-ray camp, the main reason they chose it was because of BD+, and EA supports Blu-ray. I'm pretty sure publishers are keen on this matter, and can't criticize the inclusion of Blu-ray itself though demanding a lower entry price.

Can you elaborate in what way it's not worth it when you gain them as side effects of Blu-ray usage by games? Please make counterarguments to all points in my post. PS3 is $399 now and PS2 is still selling anyway, and Xbox 360 game budgets can't go higher without PS3 porting since the software sales on 360 are not linearly increasing with the size of the Xbox 360 install base. And the extra cost, don't you think production cost to cram it onto a DVD is not trivial in terms of human resources?

 

You also gain the side effects of the higher costs of producing blu-ray discs, which last I heard is something like 50 cents to $1 each (I suspect the publisher eats this cost in full). Also having 2.5x the capacity doesn't automagically make a game longer or better. There's an argument that 1st party (massive budget) games making use of this capacity might put pressure on 3rd parties to do the same to avoid looking lazy. It might not seem like much, but neither does the rampant piracy on the 360.

There's a level of measure that are useful in piracy prevention but the point is that there is a point at which it becomes superfluous. The PS3 will be cracked, there will be pirated games eventually and it doesn't matter how much they spend on prevention after it is cracked, all that extra investment is just wasted. Piracy prevention can also have a negative impact when it starts to impact on the paying customers, we've already seen some examples of this with some newer blu-ray discs where start up times are getting into the ridiculous or examples of PC games just not working because of whatever anti-piracy is in place.

Your comment that 360 budgets can't go higher doesn't really make any sense. Why do they have to? I've no doubt that the highest budget 360 titles have all been exclusives, or do you doubt that Halo3, Mass Effect and Gears of War are among the highest budget 360 titles?

I'm not interested in making counterpoints to your entire post, I picked out the one that I most strongly disagreed with.

 

Gears of War and COD4 are 5-hour games, I don't think it's unrelated to the DVD size, not to mention the possible cut of some maps from the 360 version of UT3. The data set in the PC sides are getting larger and multiplatform development contains PC for these games.

Did you actually see such malfunctions in PS3 since it launched 1 year ago? As anti-crack in PS3 is possible not only by Blu-ray, I don't see how you can conclude it's immediately connected to the cost factor.

This is very simple. Crappy games are most likely not affected, but competitive titles that show up at the top of the rankings are. They have to continue to produce larger, more impressive products to be relevant. If first-party games have the largest budgets as you believe, third-party games have to compete with them to sell, otherwise it's another Nintendo market.

 

Gears is not a 5 hour game. What are you basing this on?

What do you base your CoD4 statement on besides an assumption?

 

Gears of war is not a 5 hour game. I doubt it would have been longer if the disc had been bigger simply because that would have only increased costs for what return? Blu-ray hasn't apparently made any of the PS3 games any longer (do I have to mention names?).

Trying to rearrange your argument on the fly? The 360 has no built in protection? Hrm pretty sure it only runs signed software out of the box. The major difference here is blu-ray, and yes it comes with a cost.

Got some evidence to back these assertions up? I don't think we'll hear a lot of complaining if Gears of War 2 is just a slightly better version of gears one, which should be a lot cheaper to produce not more expensive.

Gears of war and Mass Effect are not 1st party, they're just exclusives. There's no doubt they are on the larger side of the budget equation as obviously would be halo3.

The only real problem third party developers seem to have with the 360 at this point is competing with all the other great titles available.

Spiraling budgets is no doubt a concern for all developers in the industry, I don't think anything about blu-ray or the ps3 alleviates those concerns and at this time (judging by a lot of the discussion in other threads) I'd even suggest that the ps3 more exacerbates than alleviates them.

 

Well I checked CoD4 360 DVD (6.27 GB) and steam size (8 GB).
I think it's fairly safe to assume another hour or so of unique content wouldn't fit in a DVD.

Of course that doesn't necessarily mean game would be any longer if 360 had BD/HDDVD, but I'm surprised how fast a linear game can fillup a single DVD.

 

PC games will always have a bit of bloat due to supporting different play configurations and hardware etc. 8gb will fit on a dual layer dvd.

 

If by play configurations you mean assets I agree.

Not on 360 but doesn't really matter as CoD4 is very short.

 

? I thoughtthey can fit 8.5gb on a disc (less than the maximum but still more than 8), you have a different number? Not that it really matters in any event.

 

Single Sided/Dual-layer DVD (DVD9) capacity = 7.95 GB being a GB 2^30 bytes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvd9#Capacity_Nomenclature
The Xbox 360 games only can use up to 7GB of a DVD9 for security reasons.

 

Well I was referring to the more commonly used form of GB (billions of bytes), but I guess it still falls slightly short of that.

 

I have yet to see any PC application that refers to GB as billions of bytes instead 2^30 bytes. I am sure that the COD4 developers found having to fit the game in a DVD9 limiting, but that only means that, if IW develop COD6 for PS3/XBOX360/PC, they are likely to plan to use 2 DVD for PC/XBox360 since the beginning.

 

And I have yet to see gigabytes marketed on any retail product as anything other than billions of bytes.

And yet they still chose to use less than the available space for CoD4?