Blue Dragon was the first game to ship on 3 discs. Lost Oddessey is said to have moved from 3 to 4 now. Just saying that your statement is flawed.
PS3 Strategy/Confidence Retrospective
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Blue Dragon was the first game to ship on 3 discs. Lost Oddessey is said to have moved from 3 to 4 now. Just saying that your statement is flawed.
Whoa whoa, where did I say I was surprised?
Or if you were referring to Sony/Toshiba, well... stars in their eyes it seemed.Well, just as Sony made decisions based on the info they had back then, it's hard to look at this scenario and know that'd actually be better or not, but on the surface I would think that Fall 07 with stronger hardware would have secured the 'hype' for PS3, and although the every-man would not have been able to tell the difference, the press at least might have been pliant in crooning about it. Also, a lot has changed in the past year in terms of how people view 1080p, high-def formats, etc... thus the marketing around the console may have been more cohesive in general. But of course there's obviously a flip side to it, and for Sony's purposes I think retrospectively it would be could BD have fought back starting in 2007 on the heels of a more popular PS3 launch vs having emerged and led all year in 2006 based on a less-successful PS3 launch?
That said a 2005 launch on DVD would have been a viable solution as well, but given the leadership shake-up that year and Sony's plans for the console in general, I don't think they would have been able to turn on a dime like that.
(By the way people, it's BD, not BR - c'mon, we're a tech site here!)
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XBOX had that advantage and saw no appreciable benefit for the majority of titles. I can think of a handful that actually utilized the HW advantage.
As for HW sales: you know the story.
I think it's clear that Sony launch plan with PS3 was disrupted by Microsoft's early launch of the 360.
Whether that was a devilishly cunning by Microsoft or just pure luck, as a result of MS scrambling to get next gen out the door thinking Sony would launch PS3 in march '06, I don't know. But it certainly affected Sony in two clear ways:
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 think 2) is substantiated by the schmoo plot of CELL at the 2005 ISSCC showing SPUs running up to more than 5GHz, ie not being wire limited at all. - And by the fact that some of the critical timings of the PPE are rather lax, especially the 6 cycle (1.87ns) load-to-use data cache latency looks peculiar compared to Intel's 4 cycles (1.1ns) in 3.6GHz Prescotts or AMD's 3 cycles (1ns) in their 3GHz Athlons 64s, both in 90nm.
Sony would likely have liked to have spent more time ironing out production issues of CELL and the laser diodes before ramping. As it is they ended up with a slightly lower performing money bleeding system.
In retrospect I think it's clear that the PS3 launch was a knee-jerk reaction to MS launching early, and hence whatever original strategy Sony had for the PS3 launch got scrapped.
Cheers
Whether that was a devilishly cunning by Microsoft or just pure luck, as a result of MS scrambling to get next gen out the door thinking Sony would launch PS3 in march '06, I don't know. But it certainly affected Sony in two clear ways:
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 think 2) is substantiated by the schmoo plot of CELL at the 2005 ISSCC showing SPUs running up to more than 5GHz, ie not being wire limited at all. - And by the fact that some of the critical timings of the PPE are rather lax, especially the 6 cycle (1.87ns) load-to-use data cache latency looks peculiar compared to Intel's 4 cycles (1.1ns) in 3.6GHz Prescotts or AMD's 3 cycles (1ns) in their 3GHz Athlons 64s, both in 90nm.
Sony would likely have liked to have spent more time ironing out production issues of CELL and the laser diodes before ramping. As it is they ended up with a slightly lower performing money bleeding system.
In retrospect I think it's clear that the PS3 launch was a knee-jerk reaction to MS launching early, and hence whatever original strategy Sony had for the PS3 launch got scrapped.
Cheers
Agreed, but I think that was more a side benefit for them than anything else. MS knew that if they launched after or even beside ps3, they had no shot.
Good post, but remember, MS didn't know what Sony would include in their box or their BOM.
Sony didn't decide on hdmi standard until last minute and same for hdd as well.
MS was forced to be flexible in their design becuase if they weren't, Sony could adjust their plan accordingly and exploit a weakness. But yes, MS had a very high priority on cost control. They learned a lot from Sony w/ ps2.
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Did Microsoft really have anything to do with that? Even if they had chosen HD DVD, that would just have delayed them also.
Nonsense. Using 7 SPEs instead of 8 was done to improve yield. Higher than 3.2 just didn't make sense in terms of performance vs heat production. Getting the PS3 cool and silent was a challenge that was very hard to meet, and they just barely managed it (unlike Microsoft, by the way)
I think you couldn't be more wrong. Sony's original (and publicly announced) strategy was hurt by the diode yields, which were setbacks, not things Sony planned all along and suddenly didn't have time for. They were planning to release in March if there were enough games, and otherwise wait for November. In the end the games definitely weren't ready in the first half of the year and particularly the diodes posed a problem right until the end of the November launch and even then made very limited numbers available and caused the European launch to be postponed.
You can argue that a March '06 launch was bluff to try and force Microsoft into an error, but the idea that Sony had planned to launch the PS3 later than November 06 but were forced to launch early because of Microsoft is *very* far-fetched.
I think Sony decided on the HDD standard a little before it was publicly announced at the beginning of 2006, but they wisely kept this secret until after the 360's launch. I'm pretty sure that they decided on HDMI way, way before that. But Microsoft didn't partly because they also dropped HD DVD, partly because it was way too expensive at the time. Even when the PS3 was about to launch it still added about $50 worth of hardware and licencing. It wasn't as clear back then (i.e. when Microsoft finalised their hardware) yet either which standard was going to make it. These costs have come down considerably now, and HDMI is widely adopted.
Microsoft had to make a lot of sacrifices for the two goals I mentioned in my other post. Some of those can be repaired or have been repaired, some of them turned out very costly, and on some of them the jury is still out.
A device not only has to work at a given operating frequency, it also has to work within a power envelope, thank you for emphasizing that. And again at 3.2GHz the PPE in particular looks thoroughly unambitious.
Nothing was publicly annonced until after Microsoft released the 360. Microsoft very clearly feared that Sony would launch spring '06 and perhaps even as early as the holidays '05. It wasn't until after the 360 release that Sony started announcing release dates.
Well, some error that turned out to be, PS3 is now the trailing platform. As for far-fetched, please substantiate. Sony released with a high BOM, in limited numbers and with poor software support, those are facts. If they planned it that way, no wonder there was a shuffle of executives at the top afterwards.
Cheers
I don't think it's far fetched. Both Sony and Nintendo went on record as saying they thought MS were rushing things. Plenty of software developers agreed. If MS weren't desperate to drop their money-losing XB and rush into a potentially profitable, and certainly not financial bomb-hole, platform, with PS2 sales remaining upbeat I think Sony would have happily planned to launch around mid 2007, perhaps postponing if 65nm wasn't up to speed, and at $400 to boot. Putting it another way, what does Sony have to gain by wanting to launch end of '06 with a $600 device? The only benefit is immediate market share, which is only important regards competition. Certainly launching earlier hasn't landed them more profits. Launching later would have been better for the bank balance. If the current 5 million PS3 buyers weren't buying until 65nm was out, Sony may be looking at $200 a piece savings, or $1 billion more in the bank then they have now. No XB360 in '05 would have meant no PS3 in '06 IMO.
Maybe if a key part of their B-r strategy wasn't PS3 you'd have an argument there. But since it is, it seems to me not so much. Another six or more months of HD DVD lead and a handful of $999 B-r standalone players? Another holiday season where HD DVD was essentially the only HD movie game in town? Launch window wasn't all about console gaming and responding to competitors --they had allies on the movie front they had to answer to as well.
Good point. I forgot about the BRD trojan. Although would a delay have mattered that much? Whatever head-start HD DVD had, PS3 sales would eclipse it in little time. I suppose the concern would be keeping studios 'on hold' before they can start selling content, but then the studios don't seem to be in a huge rush to fill out the HD catalogues at the moment anyway.
I agree. IMHO, the whole HD-movie thing is a distraction. BluRay isn't up against HD-DVD it is up against DVD. The few PS3s sold are a drop in the bucket compared to the >100M DVD players sold every quarter.
As long as people are buying movies on DVD, studios have no incentive to push HD in any big way.
Cheers
The PPE was never meant to be ambitious. The Cell was designed for the modern data streaming world. It's the right decision for the future . For the shorter term the 360's triple uni-core setup pays off because it is a little easier to handle and port legacy code to. The Playstation was never a console that you could port PC games to easily, a quality that hasn't been important for the platform in the past, but has become more important today. RSX was partly a necessity, partly a concession to make it easier for PC cross-development.
In the future though game engines that require high performance will all be optimised for data-streaming and the Cell will come into its own. The only question here remains how important these early years are, where 360 versions of multi-platform games end up looking better or having a better framerate. This will ultimately determine whether or not the Cell was the right decision.
Emphasis on now, though. And if Sony didn't go for a better hardware setup, do you think they could have competed with Microsoft more easily if really all the differences had been ease of software development? Even if that would have worked in the short term capitalising on the Playstation brand name only, it would also have made them weaker against the Wii.
If Sony fails now with the Playstation 3, it is because we have entered an age where the qualities that Sony has no longer matter. But I happen to think that their model is still superior ... in these early years, sure, ease of development and getting the price down fast is important. But if Sony gets the price down fast enough, then its superior hardware will pan out. Choosing DVD over BluRay is a short-term profit that is going to cost Microsoft sales in the future. It will become more visible as the PS3 is easier to get quieter and therefore smaller, the games already show the benefits (even if that still has to penetrate the public consciousness), and as HD tv continues to spread like wildfire, BluRay movies are becoming more mainstream (certainly in stores and commercials over here) and BD-J and BD-Live will make their entry. You may question the value and future of the latter all you like, but it won't be long before the differnece in cost between the BluRay components and the DVD components in the 360 will be insignificant enough to make any benefit virtually free.
I never said they planned it that way. The diode problem was a major and painful issue, but it wasn't foreseen, it was costly, and it screwed with their planning. Software at launch wasn't bad at all, probably one of the better launches for a Playstation so far. It's one of the setbacks that the console suffered, but the shuffle of executives would have happened regardless with these long console cycles, just as Peter Moore moved to EA because a cycle had been completed and that is a natural time to look for different work both for the employer and the employeed.
Well, I can tell you that there is evidence that when some studios announced for B-r they specifically cited PS3 as a factor in that decision. In fact, I believe Paramount was one of them in Oct 2005, when spring 2006 was still what was being expected for PS3 launch. Paramount that's now jumped ship. Maybe they'd have jumped ship earlier, or not joined in the first place, if they were expecting a mid-2007 launch instead of a year earlier. It's hard to say for sure, of course, but I think it's clear that pressure from their allied studios in the HD wars was there on Sony as well.
Definition:
-overbearing pride evidenced by a superior manner toward inferiors.
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
-Arrogant (pronounced ) is an adjective that may refer to having excessive pride in oneself. A person who is arrogant may exaggerate one's own worth or importance in an overbearing manner.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrogance
Im sure you can find numerous Sony quotes from the gaming division that collectively fits quite nicely with those definitions.
Thats all irrelevant now as who cares what got Sony to this point, its what Sony does going forward that is of the upmost importance.
Im glad the current situation for Sony played out the way it has so far. If it hadn't, Sony would have no realization that regardless of the past market position or the overwhelming strength of its brand, it has to compete as fiercely and as focused as its competitors and that it can't bumble and stumble its way to market leader.
Like others have been saying before: the jury is still out on that. And the way things are looking at this moment, we could have the same argument a year from now.
MS needed an early launch and it didn't cost 'm any sales so far. As long as they keep their software quality up, they'll be fine.
archangelmorph
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So a couple of presumptuously arrogant quotes from a few PR execs who are, in effect, "paid" to be "proud" of the platform/company they are affined to means that, somehow, Sony's entire strategic division share the same inability to acknowledge the possible risks associated with their own strategy & the accuracy of their assumed strengths of consumer sensitivities over brand loyalty?
Do you really believe that..?
Seriously...?
Studios jumping ship probably isn't a concern anything like selling players. I mean, if Paramount released on HD DVD in 2006, and not until 2007 does a cheap BRD player in Ps3 appear, if PS3 then goes on to outsell HD DVD by 5 fold and maintains far larger sales, eventually it'll be the market share that decides. If BRD becomes the dominant platform, those HD DVD only parties will jump ship themselves.
Quite what the board room felt like though could be very different! When the decisions were being made, I'm sure there was pressure from all sorts of sectors. I'd be very surprised if any CEO or executive were to confront a project with the attitude of 'sure, take you're time. Launching later probably won't have a negative impact in the long run'. It goes against their DNA!
"We want it yesterday, like the marketing guys promised!"
There's plenty of holes in that theory. If anything, the Wii slowed PS3 sales down. There's no problem with launching a console at $600 because initially, that's what people will pay anyway. The only thing I can agree with is that if there was no competition at all from any platform, then perhaps they would have only launched in Japan first, to test the waters, as they have done in previous generations (but if they could have I think they would have done that in Japan in March 2006, as I think was their original plan).
If the blue laser diode hadn't been an issue, then I'm fairly convinced the $600 PS3 would have cost about that much to make, which would have been fine. Now, I think that the $399 model actually costs $399 to make. The difference is that if they didn't have as much competition, they could more comfortably have dropped the price of the PS3 depending on whether or not the PS2 was still doing well and/or whether or not production/demand no longer matched the current price, potentially opening up possible pockets of periods with hardware profit. There are always people who start buying at $600 (like me, and I feel like I got excellent value, some of the best value I've ever gotten from any hardware purchase so far), and even if the 360 launched late 2006, why would Sony have voluntarily left that market to the 360 all by itself if it would have been *relatively* painless to launch that same year.
Another big hole is just looking at the time at which software development started. Each year of development costs considerable amounts of money, and I'm very sure that each year of software development before a console's launch is progressively more expensive, while many third parties would have either killed you, or if they had known, simply started their development a year later also, a disadvantage which would have been the exact same advantage that the 360 has capitalised on in todays reality.
Also, if you look at the progression of sales success of the PS2, then a holiday 2006 launch would have resulted in a natural transition period from PS2 to PS3, something which would have been pretty much perfectly timed even now if it weren't for the Wii, which has been messing things up there a bit. Having a Playstation model around for 5 years as the major platform, and then another 5 years as the minor platform is a fine and tested model that Sony must have been aiming for from day one.
Unlike Nintendo could for some stretches of time with the Gameboy, Sony has never been in the position to play this game as if you're going to assume that at no point in time there is going to be any competition. Sure, some of your points would hold if there was never going to be any competition at all, but then Sony could have done pretty much anything it liked and who knows only have started supporting the HDD slot of the PS2 instead, and that would make this discussion completely pointless and irrelevant.
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