Eh it appears you didnt get the point of the feature. When you want to set your PS3 to download while you arent present you certainly dont want to keep it turned on after it finishes. There were times that I set it to download lots of stuff and went to bed. Who was going to turn it off for me? The tooth fairy?
PSN not profitable yet
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corduroygt
Banned
Based on PSP Go sales, PSP DD games aren't a big thing.
No, you have to separate subs from content, because the discussion isn't about how much money it generates, it's about how much games/videos are sold. So your math is irrelevant. That's what I was arguing with Scott_Arm, about how DLC and DD games sell on each platform.
You know better than that. Many people have multiple PSN accounts. I have 3 myself, and pretty much everyone on my friends list has at least 2. A better indicator would be to just look at console install base and look at revenue.
I myself have 2 PSN IDs and very rarely ever play online with my PS3...ever The most I've done with PSN is download demos, themes and experimented with Home (which was very disappointing). Despite the fact that it's free, I do not play MP games on my PS3.
I tend to buy only SP games and BluRay movies for the PS3. I mainly keep it for 1st party exclusives or for Multiplatform games with exclusive content like Batman AA.
corduroygt
Banned
Removed reply to OT reply
A good portion of why XBL generates more money is the points system. You always end up with extra points left over because unlike PSN, they won't charge you for the exact amount (as long as it's $5 or more).
Seriously what's causing all this difference? All XBL has is more demos and better grouping of content. You're still stuck with infinite loop menus (pressing up or down repeatedly will bring you back to where you started, which is a poor navigation paradigm) and 720p UI, which is ridiculous since it's not really taxing the GPU in 2D mode anyways. I felt the 360 menus looked more childish with the colors and lower resolution, while PSN is more clinically cold.
A good portion of why XBL generates more money is the points system. You always end up with extra points left over because unlike PSN, they won't charge you for the exact amount (as long as it's $5 or more).
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That is a rather huge difference, actually.
Why? It seems to me this effectively halves the maximum distance any list item can be from any other list item. In a large list this can vastly speed up the time it takes to move between two items.
How does the UI being in 720p effect usability and the ability to present and provide access to content in any way?
And PSN's presentation reminded me of a GeoCities website with all the flashing and scrolling going on. This also had nothing to do with my poor first impression of the service as in this case I believe aesthetics are of minimal importance compared to functionality.
That's responsible for a "good portion" of the difference? I find that very unlikely.
The biggest difference is you pay for one and the other is free. PSN is a bad experience...really...wow...some of you guys must work for Microsoft or own alot of stock in it. I've had XBL for three years and I don't see this huge difference.
edit: Maybe Iam reading into some of the comments too much PSN does have problems yes is it a disaster NO. I agree chat can be broken on a small percentage of games but the overall experience has been good for most of the games I've played.
I got a question does the subscription pay for? Chat? Because I thought that was a hardware/software issue.
edit: Maybe Iam reading into some of the comments too much PSN does have problems yes is it a disaster NO. I agree chat can be broken on a small percentage of games but the overall experience has been good for most of the games I've played.
I got a question does the subscription pay for? Chat? Because I thought that was a hardware/software issue.
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The estimates for Live, in that article are 1.1 - 1.2 billion dollars, with about $600 million being from subscriptions in the 1.2 billion estimate. So it's somewhere in the range of $500-$600 million spent on content, either in the forms of games, avatar junk, themes, movies or whatever. If the PSN $400-450 range is correct, then that puts the content spending fairly close together.
PSN may (I'm uniconsolar) not be the equal of Live now, but I do think the down-talking of it may be a little bit excessive here. Remember what PSN was when the PS3 launched? Remember what the PS3 was when it launched? Remember the store?
If any of you guys fall into the young PS3 whippersnapper category, you would not believe what the store *used* to look like..
If any of you guys fall into the young PS3 whippersnapper category, you would not believe what the store *used* to look like..
All PSPs can access psn for games, music and video and that's 60 million devices. There no figure breakdown on who generates how much for psn. There were 30 million ps3 connected to psn as of sept. Some users have multiple ids but some like me share 1 Id across their PSPs and ps3s of which i have 2 of each. You can not simply ignore 60 million devices because it's convenient to your argument. Unless you have a breakdown of who generates what, the ps3 psn user base by itself tells you nothing.
subscriptions are not irrelevant because gold members are essentially buying access to content no different than Netflix subscribers paying for it's streaming video services. Gold membership primarily buys you access to online multiplayer content the most important aspect of game content outside of single player. If you have a problem with gold subscription than you should a problem with video rentals which are just short term subscriptions measured in hours and not months.
"400M in PSN sales during that period is nothing to scoff at IMO. MS's $1B number for last year is roughly divided 50/50 between subscriptions and purchases, so MS did $500M of sales. 400M vs. 500M is actually better than the average install base ratio during that time, so I don't see how people are buying less content from PSN. It also does not help that a lot of PS3's are sold to countries where the online store is much more sparse compared to the US store."
Thats your qoute. People are buying buying less from psn for their ps3. even if I remove subscription for your convenience. PSN generates less revenue with more consoles connected to it's services while dividing revenue across two platforms.
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Is there a technical reason why a global chat couldn't work
I mean, the original FW had huge amounts of RAM reserved and now that that has been significantly reduced, old games shouldn't be complaining if they did implement a new feature. If anything, it'd be newer games that no longer have such tight restrictions on memory.Then again, I'm not familiar with in-game XMB access for older games. Chat shouldn't take much processing...
Is there a technical reason why a global chat couldn't work
Then again, I'm not familiar with in-game XMB access for older games. Chat shouldn't take much processing...
I don't know about the impact of memory availability, but I was thinking more of how such games would interact with a system-level party / chat system going on behind their back.
Adding party support to the PSN system but not having it be able to work with any game that came out in the last 4 years wouldn't be that great a thing for Sony to do, presumably. They added some support for launching from Home with parties, and I would imagine that could be brought into the XMB, but having 90%+ of PS3 games not support that would be.. awkward.
Cross-game voice chat, on the other hand, would seem to be fairly straight-forward, memory permitting, but whether or not the PS3 SDKs have traditionally made provision for informing a game that something like that is going on is unknown to me. With luck, it could work like background downloading does. When Sony introduced background downloading, they hooked it into the SDK so that it would automatically pause if a game did its own networking. Perhaps they could similarly have cross-game chat work unless a game started taking input from a headset / microphone.
This the first year one-time purchases outpaced subscription revenue. Durkins estimated 25 million live subscribers of which half are gold members who pay on average $60 a year (I guess everyone not investing in 12 month subscription). That puts one-time purchases and rentals north of 750 million.
http://www.next-gen.biz/news/microsoft-details-xbox-live-user-base
corduroygt
Banned
You are cherry picking quotes to help your argument, inflating XBL revenue to 1.5B. Go Team Go!
The $60/year just started and no way everyone suddenly started paying that. Also it's all analyst estimates on how much XBL is making, and it only surpassed the 1B mark last summer. Sony's number is for FY2009 ending march 2010.
In short, the article that started this thread is a horribly inaccurate translation, we do have some revenue numbers from Sony on PSN, and we don't really have a breakdown of XBL numbers directly from MS. Too many variables, pointless discussion.
If a user doesn't know what exactly he/she wants, the first thing that should hit him/her is the "What's New" section in XMB. PS3 launches into that category whenever the user logins.
The other high profile items are the keywords "Sale", "Special Offers", "Top Downloads" and "New Releases" in the PS Store. There are also user ratings and an Amazon.com like recommendation system (If you like game A, you may like game B,C,D,... also) in the store.
The Pulse (and Qore) video series is another source of suggestions if you don't know what you want.
Filtering search results or listing based on multiple criteria would be nice. I think directory listings are useful also. They should keep both. If you look at Amazon, the king of eCommerce, they have both too. All Sony need are links between the 2 systems so that browsing is seamless. They also need to surface some game specific info at the listing level (e.g., user ratings). Go learn from Amazon.
Blu-ray runs on a different stack. DVR, background downloading are all turned off in the Blu-ray world. 3D Blu-ray is even more intensive. Downloading will resume automatically once you're out of Blu-ray.
Once the demos finished d/l'ing (while I did chores around the house), I went to play the game...only to find that the demo had to be installed first. Sigh, found more stuff to do while that got done. Played Uncharted demo. This is pretty good. You guys should try it
Demoes require an extra installation step when you switch to background downloading. Sometimes I download a bunch in random/browsing order, and then install+delete them in different order one-by-one to see if I like them. You can save disk space this way.
Some titles like PSP Minis run on PSP and PS3, I am not sure if you need to install them on the PS3 first before transfering them to PSP.
If you wait for the download to complete in the foreground, the PS3 will install it automatically.
BTW, the PS Store doesn't have all the saleable items. e.g., The Playstation Home items and games are listed only in PS Home.
The browsing/selling experiences need more streamlining. I think it's also helpful to add new shopping experiences. User recommendations may sell more games than simple browsing. Hopefully they put their Jive framework to good use. I'd be interested in the ratings my friends gave for example.
EDIT:
I'm also interested in using XMB's background to play Pulse and Qore segments to users. I think giving users more info via attractive girls is not a bad idea, better than the freaking ticker tape at least. Adding meta games based on trophies/achievements (e.g., to Home and XMB) may be worthwhile too.
Finally, improving the MP experience so that more core gamers use PSN should help to increase sales too.
The MS estimates are from the fiscal year ending in June 2010 ranging from $1 billion - 1.2 billion. That is up from $800 million the year before, including subscriptions.
...only if you see it that way ! ^_^
Too many factors. People may spend on Blu-ray movies and other media services not found on XBL. XBL's point system encourages spending since people accumulate points in their account first due to point card discounts. The PSN Pre-paid cards are less known/used. If Sony wants to encourage spending, they can market and discount pre-paid cards to accumulate $$$ into the PSN ecosystem. This may encourage more sales but it could decrease margin in the short term.
If you visit the PS Store often enough, you'd see that they have only gone more pushy, in-your-face selling recently. The PS+ discount package is still very much a work in progress. I expect them to streamline their merchandizing effort in 2011.
I wonder if Sony has any major plans to improve the PSN experience this gen on PS3. I don't see how they can try go turn back the clock and incorporate a Live-like multiplayer experience given all of the existing games which would have no awareness of a system-wide party system, etc.
They could roll something out for new games, like they rolled out trophies, but they'd have a hard time charging for it without spoiling the message they've been sticking to so far.
Not that that would be a new experience for them ("rumble is so last-gen!") this generation.
They will improve PSN. Their recent moves indicate so. Whether it will become like XBL is a separate question altogether. I don't think Sony wants to go that way.
For improving MP experience, it depends on whether they have extra reserved resources in the OS. I suspect a common party system cannot be added in retrospect. A game has to be built for it from the ground up. Cross game voice chat may be workable since they can introduce audio channel concept (if there's enough reserved resources).
What's strange is why are the developers reinventing the wheel. Some games have excellent online party support. The first parties didn't share their code in this area.
It's worth noting the US and EU stores are pretty different. I find it easier to find stuff on the US store. I think for a long time the EU store didn't even have an alphabectical index, but it has now.
I disagree with the like of Joker who feel the store front is enough to turn people off buying content. If I want to buy a game or film, it's easy enough to find and choose buy. Purchasing is transparent, just entering my password to confirm the transaction. I could even choose to ignore the password and always buy. So there's absolutely nothing making it hard to part with cash.
I'm also not sure features like demo's help. I've bought content I wouldn't have bought had I tried a demo. Considering most demos don't present a game terribly well, I wonder if they do more harm than good in many cases, and PSN sales have a net gain from people taking a chance on a £5 title? The topic of demo effectiveness is one for another thread.
I think the big issue with PSN may be lack of consistency or predictability. eg. When I went to rent Up, although listed among the films there was nothing to say it wasn't available to rent until you selected it. Tried this with a couple of other films until I found one that could be rented. That having to dig around is unfriendly and will discourage people. With something like LoveFilm, chances are people will use that instead, decreasing PSN revenues for the same content. And also lots of us experienced PSN in the earlier years when it was pretty crap and empty, and like Home, felt there was nothing there for us and lost interested, never to try again. Things may have improved considerably, but telling that to customers who have already formed a negative opinion is hard. Sony's fault for not having everything in place from the beginning. Live by comparison was already a generation established. Next gen, PS4 can offer a clean integrated interface (I don't think PS3 will get such an update but instead will remain a LittleBigPlanet mash-up of features and services!) and consumers will start again.
The question then is, how does Hirai expect things to improve? What exactly is going to change over the next 3 years?
So if we are to compare PSN revenue to Live then:
1. What are we comparing? Console only or the whole service?
2. What are the real revenue figures and do we go by the entirety of Live revenue inclusive of subscriptions or do we go by downloads only?
Numero 1 is important because now we have Windows Phone 7 which is tapping into that same marketplace and we already have PSP tapping into PSN with PSP2 and PSP phones on the way.
3. What is the actual active userbase online? We may have shipped numbers, we may even have accurate sales numbers if we are lucky. However after 4-5 years of this generation what are the post attrition numbers of active and online users relative to active install base sizes?
As far as I can tell all we have on Live really is Microsofts statements that they have increased Live revenue by X% over the previous year. Are these statements actually continuous backwards to some hard numbers which were released which we can extrapolate forwards?
I.E. $400M in 2007, increase 80% 2008, increase 70% 2009, increase 50% 2010 = $1.8B
1. What are we comparing? Console only or the whole service?
2. What are the real revenue figures and do we go by the entirety of Live revenue inclusive of subscriptions or do we go by downloads only?
Numero 1 is important because now we have Windows Phone 7 which is tapping into that same marketplace and we already have PSP tapping into PSN with PSP2 and PSP phones on the way.
3. What is the actual active userbase online? We may have shipped numbers, we may even have accurate sales numbers if we are lucky. However after 4-5 years of this generation what are the post attrition numbers of active and online users relative to active install base sizes?
As far as I can tell all we have on Live really is Microsofts statements that they have increased Live revenue by X% over the previous year. Are these statements actually continuous backwards to some hard numbers which were released which we can extrapolate forwards?
I.E. $400M in 2007, increase 80% 2008, increase 70% 2009, increase 50% 2010 = $1.8B
Whole service. The interview is talking about all Sony network revenue as it's to be rolled out across devices, and not just sales to PS3 (+PSP).
All revenue, as the question is how much do the network services provide the companies with profit.
That's where MS and Sony are both tryingto extend their network into new areas, so sure, Live! will be the total revenue across devices too.
No-one knows! To complicate amtters, over the enxt three years, Qriocity user will also count towards 'PSN' revenues, but not be PSN accounts. Sony really need to change their network structure to a full SonyNet that hasn't got a PlayStation moniker.
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