PS3 Strategy/Confidence Retrospective

Yeah only that many of these are misinterpreted by people. 4D was explained already by Sony what they meant.

The extra dimension was supposed to represent time and it was supposed to represent alterations in the conditions/scenarios of the game world real time.

This was particularly explained in the Getaway demo. Real time information regarding traffic and pedestrians in real life London at a certain moment of time would have been transfered to your game if connected online changing the conditions of the Getaway London. Also the idea behind this was to create real life scenarios in games such as F1.

The game was supposed to collect data from an F1 event like weather and driving times.

120fps was about BR movies. Not games.

1080p outputs was supposed to be the double HDMI's. But one was scrapped for cost reductions.

As for HD era doesnt start until they said so, I see nothing too extraordinary about that especially in press conferences and especially when the PS3 was the only console that was going to be released with the ability to play HD movies out of the box. Typical PR all companies do.

And if we are going to talk about arrogance lets not forget MS's amusing actions during PS3's european launch.

All companies do their PR in some extent trying to downplay competition

But people seem to have selective memory, over inflate and misinterpret many of the actual events.

 

Dude that bird is nucking futs. I'm more amazed by it than I am by my own tonsils, which I looked at in the mirror today, and blew my *u***** mind!

Seriosly everyone go find the crazy earth birds, STAT.

Anyways... the Blu Ray thing. Without Blu Ray the PS3 would just be an XBox 360 taht doesn't break. Viva la different stuff. Much more interesting to have a selection of consoles with different features and prices than to have functional clones.

I think we mostly agree that you don't need Blu Ray for games. But can those of us who think that it is a worthwile, high potential and a big value adder get a break here? I've yet to hear from anyone who bought a ps3 and felt that they where bamboozeled into a bluray player.

 

It's not the 4 million who did that should worry Sony, it's the 116 million that didn't.

 

Where's your old PR thread when you need it?

 

While I understand your thoughts, Anyone looking at the future 3 years ago would have seen the wave of downloadable content being the future, another PC norm, why even have a compact disk in general? of any format? if downloadable content does not create it's demise, the huge wave of affordable mass storage devices will. why not put the game on a flash drive, the Disk itself is still a disk, prone to scratching, mishandling, load times?. To me the current advancement in mass storage devices could trump it all, but then again why, when you can download it, both PS3 and 360 have internal hard drives?.

 

Buzz = popularity/desirable factor/"cool" factor. Not price points. All these that the Wii ripped away from the PS3. Put the buzz on the PS3's side and you'd have a lot more sales. No, not Wii level sales due to the price point but certainly get people away from 360's or extend their budgets for keep up with the Jones'. Each month that passes the Buzz factors drifts further away from the PS3 until a price drop occurs. Then people jump in and buzz slip aways rapidly. The Wii is the "in" thing. The PS3 could have certainly benefit from that buzz.

 

Where did they say that? Movies are 24fps. From there the TV would do a 5:5 pulldown (or others) for the appropriate output. There's a reason why the 24 output was such a big plus to many enthusiasts.

 

If Sony really wanted to over shadow the 360 and blow people away, sticking with DVD9, using the BR costs and putting them towards more RAM and a better GPU would have much a greater impact than trying to sell the mass consumers on BR. Imagine if the PS3 came out and the ports were much better on it and power difference was obvious time after time. Oh man, the 360 would take a beating! but no, they had other plans.

If you want to sell BR, sell it as an add on if you're so sure people want Hi Def movies. Don't trojan horse your console at the expense of it just so studios and CE's sign up with your promises

 

Except it would be the other way around if PS3 launched in 2005. XB360 would be an unreliable PS3 by a wannabe console maker.

IMO, Sony should have taken one of two different routes:
A) Launch in 2005 w/o BR and plan better wrt software
B) Ride the PS2 until a launch in 2007 with 1GB RAM and/or a faster GPU so that there is a clear difference over 360 games.

As it is they're straddling no mans land: A much higher production cost than 360 but very few visible advantages to show for it. BR, BC, HDD, card reader, wifi, etc. all have very little effect on the marketability of PS3 when you consider their cost.

 

The claim was irrelevant with how many frames a TV can output.

You know I think you are perfectly right on that. That would DEFINITELY have had a bigger impact. But as a company they dont care about the well being of one product alone.

They care about many products they make. Well, so they decided to add BR in it. For the sakes of that one too.
Personally if I were Sony, I might have though adding BR in the next PS a good idea too for my company.

I believe that one of the reasons people had originally high expectations was that the console was supposed to come after the 360. After is usually translated into better hardware which equals better graphics. Add the expectations created from past experiences (see XBOX-PS2) and the the E3 demonstrations and voila people were waiting for a huge difference. Your solution would have brought that difference that we experienced naturally. They sacrificed it on storage. Fortunately or unfortunately.



Btw I wonder how much impact some of the small hardware downgrades have had on the graphics. I think they discovered later that costs were much higher than anticipated so they cut back some extra things from RSX.

Because if we look back, we sometimes get the impression that changes occurred in game development too.

 

Agreed,

but A) was IMO the better option. Timing is huge in the games market.

 

Oh. Right. Durrr..

 

While I agree plan A and B is a sure win for Sony, but I think it's possible with Plan C.

C) Launch in 2006 with BR and better plan wrt to software.

Looking at the 360 HW sales, it's very impressive considering it's not that much cheaper than PS3. The Elite is doing pretty well despite not supporting any physical HD media. What's driving the 360 sales so impressively is the software, the strong focus on games (from a marketing pov) and a strong online support.

 

Indeed, but that's the point. As a gamer and someone interested in tech, BR is an inhibitor to success in realms we as tech/3d/game heads care about. It has been an anchor for sales and a longterm cancer.

 

Jury is still out on BR. I personally think originally announced launch date with UT3 or Killzone 2 would be better than anything in terms of initial reception. Unfortunately not everything goes according to plan.

TBH, it's not even clear Halo 3, Gears, UT3 or Killzone 2 means sustainable user growth.

At that point PS3 would be irrelevant.

Very true, but did Xbox's bigger memory, faster GPU help marketability in the end?

Avarage Joe can barely tell the difference between PS2 and PS3, I don't think a year of CPU, GPU or memory difference would effect anything, certainly not worthy of a delay.

 

yep.

A delay would be good for 3d tech heads, that's it.

Speaking of 3d tech heads ... question ... why was xbox not more popular around here? It was by far the most capable console graphics wise last gen...

 

Baloney..more powerful tech would have made all the difference in the world...

PS3's future is murky precisely because it doesn't seem to offer any serious long term technical advantage over 360. That places the ball precisely in the court of games and price, where 360 shines..

If PS3 was clearly, clearly, significantly more powerful than 360, I think people (read: Developers) would be a lot more comfortable placing future bets on it. Confident it would indeed pull through in the coming years. As of now, I dont think that's certain at all.

 

Yes, but average Joe (and also Harcore-gamers) generally notice in first the difference in "graphic Waow", so a G80 base GPU and 1Go Ram can really push the graphic in the "Waow" .
Don't forget the Brand name "Playstation", particulary in Europe (here we don't play console, we "Playstèchieune" ) and in Japan.
I think Sony (in particulary due to shareholders) was afraid to let MS 2 years alone on the " Next Console"market, but look at the sell of the PS2 on Hardware and on Software, Sony have got the strenght to wait until with winter for launching the PS3 with better GPU, more RAM, better libraries and more important GAMES.

How Lair, HS, etc… would be ranking if they are launch games?
How look Motorsport, Resistance on a more "powerfull" PS3?
And GT?

We speak for "Arrogance" for Sony but personnally now I more saw "Fear"…
Fear to not reach the "+20% year more" than expect the Shareholder…

 

Funny, i thought it was the other way around, that Microsoft told me DVD was enough?

Question, how should XBOX exclusives prove that DVD is enough. Of course the games will fit within 7GB it´s impossible to release something that can´t fit on the disc.

Each of these games were designed with the storage in mind. As i have said countless times CD-ROM is enough but more is better.

And everytime there is just the slightest hint that a 360 developer has compromised or had to drop something from a game or made a "design" choice because of the limited space a PR is released that debunks it all and the world is in balance again.

Does the $280 XBO 360 base include a Harddrive (sorry not up to date on prices)?

 

I think most people are seeing things in the wrong perspective here. The current debate on whether or not Sony did well enough this generation does Microsoft's efforts some discredit. But the conclusions are also still premature. I've long been wanting to make a post making a very detailed analysis of the whole next-gen business, one that I will also be updating and revising as new details emerge. I'm fairly sure I'll still be doing that, but right now I am at work so I'd better not.

Some brief points though. I'm only listing the bright sides for Microsoft and Sony for now:

Credits to Microsoft, for choices they made that are helping them at least on the short term.

1. Microsoft made huge investments last gen, and part of its success this gen come from those investments paying dividents.
2. Microsoft went into this gen with a very clear strategy based on lessons learnt (from both the previous gen and from the Dreamcast through Peter Moore), and that was being a) cheaper and b) first to market, since those were the two things they experienced their biggest disadvantages versus the Playstation 3. All their descisions follow from this strategy, being a) having a HDD-less SKU, making as many things optional, and transfer some of the required profits to peripherals and b) dropping the HD-DVD drive, and making sure that development for the 360 would be relatively easy

Now here's Playstation 3 going into this generation.

Credits for Sony for daring to look at the long term:

1. Sony matched the difficult task of creating a worthy follow up to the original Playstation and managed to not only sell it much faster, but also selling more of them and the console is looking to live on for a few years still. Their integration of DVD features was also a big success, as were many of their attempts to create new and interesting franchises including peripherals.
2. Sony has always been forward looking when it comes to hardware and expanding the console market, and they have been more ambitious with the PS3 than ever before. Their primary goal was to make a console that would last another 10 years, and have the potential to further expand the market. For this, they definitely needed a next step in storage capacity, processing power, online capabilities, and multi-media functionality that the PS3 now offers, and further improve their build quailty (as PS2 did suffer from some disc-laser reliability issues, just as the PS1). In the last part of the PS2's lifecycle they also started to have trouble keeping up with the online features of Live, being stuck with a console that was not easily upgradeable and had no unified online vision. They also understand that while they have been primarily a hardware business, they need to work on their software side, hence the new role of Phil Harrison. Finally, as with the 360, it needs to be able to still compete at price, so build cost needs to be able to come down fast.

Before we go into a look at what possible mistakes they have made, let's look at where Sony and Microsoft stand right now:

Microsoft: at nearly the end of its second year, it has sold 12 million units, of which 8 million in the U.S. (same difference as last gen, by the way, where also 66% was sold in US and 33% in EU).

Sony: at nearly the end of its first year (minus 5 months in Europe) 5 million sold (about 40% US, 25% europe, and 35% others).

To be continued (including Nintendo)