Honestly Entropy you are so far out in left field it's not even funny. Those 200 million aren't going to be iPhone 6 or above nor is a development house going to bet on a phone as a viable platform for games until they prove to them they can support more than games that are a cheap thrill. They are not a threat to the NGP on launch a few years down the road they might be but a phone isn't going to kill the NGP launching a few months later.
Sony's NeoGeo Pocket's (PSP2/Vita) business/non technical ramifications talk
- Thread starter Farid
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While I agree the NGP isn't dead in the water because of iOS devices, it's not hard to imagine these smart phones coming down the pipe aren't going to erode the portable games market from games first devices. It's not like 12 year old kids aren't already carrying smart phones around.
From now to June 2012, 200 million is a rough analyst estimate of how many iOS devices will be sold. They will predominantly use the processor introduced for the iPad today (already in the NGP ballpark), or something better. Tegra 3 devices will be out before the NGP. When the A15+SGX6 SoCs are out on 28nm, the NGP will be irrevocably left behind. This is not the technical thread, but when someone asserts that graphical superiority will be one of two major selling points, I have to protest.
I fully stand by my assertion that the NGP won't be able to claim more powerful hardware than phones/tablets for more than months, if at all. The NGP will sell on the strength of its game franchises and quality of the physical controls. In and of itself this isn't a problem, the Nintendo handhelds have done very, very well while at a significant DISadvantage in terms of graphics prowess. And no smartphone is likely to dedicate the space/weight/cost associated with the physical controls, so that will remain a selling point.
My impression is that many people here come from a console gaming background (well, duh), and find it difficult to adjust to that Sony is no longer competing with Nintendo only, but to a much larger extent with Apple (and Google). It's a new landscape, and consumers as well as developers are affected arstechnica article. For developers the questions are: Where are the customers? Where is the distribution? Where is the marketing? What are the margins? Where is the market heading? How much needs to be invested? Et cetera. None of these paint a particularly rosy picture for the NGP.
If you were a developer, how would you estimate the installed base of the NGP in spring 2013, a year after its introduction? It's very, very difficult to say if it will flop or if it's qualities are strong enough to build a compelling user base. And that insecurity alone, when put against alternative platforms where no such insecurity exists.... Nintendo having a year of head start, and 3D as a unique selling point on top of that, isn't helping Sony either.
The NGP seems like a good gaming platform. That's not the issue. This thread is dedicated to the business side, and there the NGP looks like it will have its work cut out for it, and then some.
Entropy i agree with almost everything your saying but for 1 thing
The hmmmmm I don't know how to describe it but mabye the culture or life style or something of the app store wont allow for games to exist on the level of what the NGP will offer.
I see it with my friends on ipads , iphones , andriod devices and they allways laugh at me when i buy a game. I bought game dev story for $5 and was laughed at by them saying you don't buy apps you get them for free .
It will take alot of time on apples/google's part to train people up the ladder of spending. Sony / Nintendo have already trained people to spend $30 plus on games for these portable systems and because of that even if sony quickly looses the hardware advantage and nintendo never really has it , it wont matter because the bugets of the dedicated handhelds will allow for better experiances and visuals.
I think Sony is going to fail with the NGP simply for the same reasons they failed with the PSP . The games they will try to sell to these gamers are not pick up and play and close and walk away from when your trian stops or bus stops or what have you. Uncharted is a game people want to invest hours in at a time. On the other hand the 3DS will have games where you can simply close the clamshel and afew hours later open it and the game is there waiting . It has games where devoting 10-15 minutes to it doesn't seem like a waste, where you don't need to block off an hour or two of your time to play the game to feel you've made progress.
I personaly stoped myself from reserving the NGP. I'm instead going to buy a tablet in sept (hopefully a llano but if not a bobcat )
The hmmmmm I don't know how to describe it but mabye the culture or life style or something of the app store wont allow for games to exist on the level of what the NGP will offer.
I see it with my friends on ipads , iphones , andriod devices and they allways laugh at me when i buy a game. I bought game dev story for $5 and was laughed at by them saying you don't buy apps you get them for free .
It will take alot of time on apples/google's part to train people up the ladder of spending. Sony / Nintendo have already trained people to spend $30 plus on games for these portable systems and because of that even if sony quickly looses the hardware advantage and nintendo never really has it , it wont matter because the bugets of the dedicated handhelds will allow for better experiances and visuals.
I think Sony is going to fail with the NGP simply for the same reasons they failed with the PSP . The games they will try to sell to these gamers are not pick up and play and close and walk away from when your trian stops or bus stops or what have you. Uncharted is a game people want to invest hours in at a time. On the other hand the 3DS will have games where you can simply close the clamshel and afew hours later open it and the game is there waiting . It has games where devoting 10-15 minutes to it doesn't seem like a waste, where you don't need to block off an hour or two of your time to play the game to feel you've made progress.
I personaly stoped myself from reserving the NGP. I'm instead going to buy a tablet in sept (hopefully a llano but if not a bobcat )
You are saying that in one year, more than 100 million iPads 2 or higher, iPhones 5 or higher and iPod 5s or higher will be sold?
That number he is quoting most likely includes first gen and up numbers
Yes.
And it's not me, it's pretty much every analyst there is, and Apple themselves.
For instance, Apple have been procuring for a 2011 production volume of 40 million iPads. Subtract the first two months of 2011, add the first two of 2012, allow for the growth rate, and what do you get?
During the last quarter, Apple sold 16.24 million iPhones (86% year over year growth), and 19.45 million iPods (7% decline, unknown portion iPod touches), and 7.33 million iPads (where you can't calculate YoY growth really). Lets call it some 35 million iOS devices for the last quarter.
The numbers are there - do your own math. 100 million over the next year would be a very low estimate, Apple would accomplish that even if their sales volumes dropped over the next year - which they show no sign of doing.
I don't blame you, I find it remarkable as well just how much momentum the snow ball has gotten, and how big it has already grown.
For 10y old pokemon kids its maybe fail, for a lot of poeple its not (myself included as a PSP owner). Just because nintendo sold more of it to kids, grandmams etc doesnt mean its better. Wii has the most sales of the new consoles and its the worst one of the three for a lot of poeple. I think sony earned a lot of money on the PSP-s to not call it a fail. The DSi and PSP were in different category each. And the same will happen to 3DS and NGP i think.
And about those casual games. DSi-s hardware was craptastic compared to PSP so maybe that was the main reason
. Now they will have games like Resident Evil and MGS which arent exactly pick up and play.
Just checking! I wasn't outright disbelieving you, but I did want you to back up the numbers and not ask me to do the work myself
.But I think you may be making a miscalculation in a number of different areas:
1. an iPhone game very rarely gets away with targeting the latest hardware. In the case of the 3GS and (which I have) and 4G, the new hardware could be used relatively easily in that for 4G hardware, games could simply use a higher resolution and spend some extra power there, but as far as I know outside of that the games that even use more power on 3GS versus 3G is tiny. I don't even know what the policy is on this for the App Store - can you offer separate downloads/games that only target iPhone 4?
If, say, the iPhone 6 would come out in 2012, and have similar hardware as the NGP (which with that size screen I'm skeptical about - what's the benefit for most iPhone users in that respect? Almost all users I know don't want more power, but more battery life. I think it is almost more likely for the iPhone to start varying screen size (rather than just resolution as with 4 vs 3GS).
Also, I think currently an iOS device will require at least twice the hardware of NGP to even come close to the same level of performance.
And finally, I am skeptical about the longevity of the growth of the iOS platform - 1 or 2 more years sure, but then I don't know. When I got my wife's 3GS, I bought it telling myself that in 2 years time, in 1 years time I would probably have gotten an Android instead for myself, and in 2 years time the platform might be ready for my wife as well. The way Android is developing now, that prediction so far seems to hold true - I would probbaly get an Android for myself today, because I want a bigger screen.
The iPad wil also get more serious competition soon, although I don't see that platform slowing down much soon myself. Heck, I may use some overtime to get my work to buy an iPad 2 for me at some point. We do actually have a legitimate business reason for it - I have a devkit for it myself, and some of our partner products have iOS clients.
Finally, a very important point is that with portable devices becoming a bigger market, there is more room for variation, and while many devices can do many the same things, that convergence may not always be convenient. If my phone had unlimited battery power, sure, I could game on it a lot, but once power is out, I also can't phone anyone, can't get my email, etc.
Nothing is set in stone and the future is hard to predict, but there is definitely still a very good possibility that the NGP corners a good market here. It has a lot more going for it now than the PSP ever had, and much more so when it comes to games, where the PSP had a disadvantage in terms of controls and UMD usage among others.
Also another point - the NGP no doubt has a suspend feature like the original PSP, as well as a game-state save feature like the PSP Go for all games, so switching games and/or shutting it after 10/15 minutes and continuing later should work just fine for any of its games, including the big ones, which will give it a leg up even against some of the home consoles.
No, I don't have that data. I don't know if anyone does, really. I'd say the line is drawn between the 3G and 3GS, the 3GS and 4 hardware capabilities are similar (apart from screen resolution). I guess developers need to take a look at hardware capabilities and installed base, and make sensible choices based on that. At this point in time, for a 3D intensive game, the 3GS may be a good baseline target. In a few months, the iPhone5/iPad2 may take that role for a game that takes a couple of years to bring to market. For not so graphically demanding games this is a non-issue, and of course you can deal with it by having different display options or different app builds - there just haven't been much of a need yet.Just checking! I wasn't outright disbelieving you, but I did want you to back up the numbers and not ask me to do the work myself
But I think you may be making a miscalculation in a number of different areas:
1. an iPhone game very rarely gets away with targeting the latest hardware. In the case of the 3GS and (which I have) and 4G, the new hardware could be used relatively easily in that for 4G hardware, games could simply use a higher resolution and spend some extra power there, but as far as I know outside of that the games that even use more power on 3GS versus 3G is tiny. I don't even know what the policy is on this for the App Store - can you offer separate downloads/games that only target iPhone 4?
Damned if I know why Apple pushes the envelope on their SoCs, but I guess that as long as the screen (and other electronics) are a major part of the overall power draw, and power saving features makes the extra hardware capabilities cheap in terms of power draw when not used, then there is little reason to hold back other than SoC die area and associated cost. Which is relatively low, in dollars and cents, compared to the whole. In comparison with their competitors, Apple has the advantage both in volume, and in royalty cost (as they do the design in-house). Increasing the hardware capabilities may be to their competitive advantage.
Don't really see why. Granted, low level access can give specific advantages, but fill rate is fill rate, bandwidth is bandwidth, and so on, and I'd wager that most of the time you are limited by basic capabilities. Besides, a lot of assets will be built using middle-ware, and won't even see the native APIs.
Well, eternal exponential growth is the economist wet dream. Us scientific types scoff in scorn. So I'm with you in that, but then again if they can keep their growth rate for another couple of years we'll be looking at several hundred million devices per year, and an installed base of over a billion. The numbers are staggering.
And that is really the relevant point in regards to the NGP - what will it have to offer to differentiate itself from its launch to eventual demise? As far as I can see, it will be the physical controls. So it was a bit disconcerting to read the responses of a number of japanese developers that almost all of them expressed interest and enthusiasm over the touch controls. Uh oh. That's not reinforcing the unique value of the platform, that's for making porting games easy. Real tactile feedback is where the NGP can shine, but then again if developers really makes use of that, porting to phones/tablets will be difficult to impossible, and if phones and tablets is where the users (and their money) is, I can see how developers would be hesitant to tie themselves too strongly to the unique interface of the NGP.
Again, I think the NGP looks like a very capable gaming platform. However, I can also see how smartphones with their ever increasing capabilities and wide utility, as well as the 3DS with its physical controls, classical game IP, 3D-capabilities, and a year head start, both conspire to make the NGP market window look very tight. Sonys demonstration reinforced that impression - it was largely targeted at PS3 users that wanted to revisit the franchises they have already played for six years in a mobile format. For the life of me, I can't see that as an approach for a healthy user base.
Didn't Sony announce a 2011 holiday season release? That should mean November at the latest. 8 months is neither "a year" nor "a few months".
In what regard did the PSP fail?
But I do think that the upshot of that, in combination with controls limitations, will end up being that the iPhone will keep getting different type of games, and that different type of games will keep being successful with gpu performance being less important. But who knows? I don't claim to be able to see the future clearly either.
Could be, but I think we'll see an iPhone light before we'll see a big increase in power. Didn't we get rumors about iPhone 'light' already? Smartphones will come down in price - they cannot stay $600+ forever.
But we do know that if anything, it is middleware that will take advantage of low level hardware, and hence the NGP's UE3 version will perform much better. In fact, Epic stated as much about the NGP themselves, and gave a factor 2 for having low level access iirc.
True, but I still see NGP owners spend much more money on games, and have a much better value from what the hardware costs versus what games get out of it for a much longer time. It will definitely be interesting to see where this goes.
But even here the NGP has both the back and the front touch and a good gyroscope. In the end it has to be about having access to both types of controls and be able to play both traditional dual analog stick games, benefitting from 10 years of dual analog stick game development.
Sure, but they don't have to. Developers who target a platform with primarily Dual Analog controls can add the NGP to their targets. This wasn't necessarily a bad approach for the PSP, but on the PSP it didn't work properly because there was a single analog stick and there were hefty UMD load-times. Software sales were further hampered by easy piracy. With some 60+ million sold in terms of hardware it did pretty well despite those flaws.
I personally think that so far, while the iOS devices have given pretty good casual gaming, apart from on the iPad there just isn't enough screen real-estate and flexibility in touch controls alone.
One part we didn't touch on yet also is that Game Center isn't nearly up to scratch compared to what Sony is planning to offer in terms of friendslist integration from the OS outwards. iOS will have to develop quite a bit there yet to be able to compete there, and this may be more important than we sometimes realise, looking at Xbox Live's successes against Sony on that front.
Mind you, the casual space is important and can be lucrative, and iOS will probably hold a decent piece of the cake there for quite a while. We'll have to wait and see if the Playstation Suite initiative can help Android devices to compete better in that area, independent of whether the NGP can be part of that market successfully.
And the 3DS targeted the 2010 holiday season.
Not to mention that Sony has every reason to try to prevent gamers from buying the 3DS - the timing of their event, the message they try to present, the release date (you can get us for christmas) - it all smelled strongly of damage control.
Agree with both points. Although I don't see that the NGP with somewhat larger screen but lower resolution provide much of a distinction, especially so if we broaden the comparison to Android phones, tablets and future models.Arwin said:
One thing one might additionally hope for with the NGP is that the extremely quick response time of OLED (sub ms) could, assuming sympathetic software on app and OS level, give an extremely direct and responsive control.
Yet this hasn't stopped the Wii with absolutely pathetic features in this respect from outselling both.Arwin said:
I really have no interest in selling iOS as Gods gift to gamers. My point is that the landscape of portable gaming has changed, enormously, since the DS and PSP were introduced, and we are entering an era when everyone in the industrial world who is interested is already going to have very capable media and gaming device in their phone, and that this will strongly affect the mobile console business.
I do believe that the extremely low barrier of entry and direct worldwide distribution offered by iOS is extremely vitalizing as far as independent developers and creativeness is concerned.
Legitimate concerns ! Some were already highlighted earlier in the thread. We actually need more info from Sony (Hopefully they have something up their sleeves).
In the mean time, GDC NGP panel live blogging:
http://www.blisteredthumbs.net/2011/03/sony-ngp-gdc-panel-liveblog/
EDIT: Started a minute ago.
EDIT 2:
No new info revealed.
In the mean time, GDC NGP panel live blogging:
http://www.blisteredthumbs.net/2011/03/sony-ngp-gdc-panel-liveblog/
EDIT: Started a minute ago.
EDIT 2:
No new info revealed.
Did Nintendo publicly state this?
Sure Sony is trying to prevent gamers from buying the 3DS - doesn't mean their announcement isn't true.
Slides from the NGP panel:
http://www.joystiq.com/screenshots/sony-next-generation-portable-ngp-gdc-panel/3940188#/1
...talks a little about the high level architecture and OS services.
(Very high level)
http://www.joystiq.com/screenshots/sony-next-generation-portable-ngp-gdc-panel/3940188#/1
...talks a little about the high level architecture and OS services.
(Very high level)
A billion? How many people in the world can "afford" an iphone or ipad?
http://www.globalrichlist.com/
According to the above website, there are about a billion people in the world who earns USD2000/year or more. Are people in the developing world going to spend months of income on an iOS device soon? Will rich countries average more than 1 iOS device per head in a couple of years?
IF there is a strong tendency for people to "upgrade" their iOS devices every year or two compared with more traditional consoles, how do you interpret "installed base"?
Apple has just now shipped its 100milionth Iphone . Thats after 4 years in the market and selling multiple iphones per person.
The ipad has only sold 15m in 2010. Your expecting them to sell 40M ipads almost 3 times the amount this year dispite apple having more competition in the tablet market than ever before and andriod itself becoming much more popular than its ever been ?
I don't see it happening.
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