A sign of things to come?

The Core Video Games Forum
21

SIn, I pretty much agree with you, however you are slightly off on the PSP UMDs. They did do amazingly well at the start, and then halted fairly recently. The PS3 is different from the PSP when it comes to movies in that it is playing movies in a come place (on a TV, which is what most people watch DVDs on anyway).

Hades, comparing the PS3’s launch to the XBox’s launch doesn’t really helpy your argument of it being a success. Sony has the led the consoles for 2 generations now, they have street cred and should be able to sell a shitload of systems off of brand name since their target audience should be the same as it has been for the last 10 years, which is pretty much anybody that plays games. The XBox was the new system, it didn’t have any history, so of course it started off a little slow. The XBox wasn’t coming into the market already leading with the previous system.

The Wii has a “machinegun of mediocrity?” Its games are higher rated than any of the PS3s games and most of the good games for the PS3 are also available for the 360. Hell, the whole reason to buy a Nintendo system at all is for the first party Nintendo exclusives which pretty much carried the GC and N64. Nintendo’s exclusives pretty much carry their systems. Hell, before the Wii launched, I was only going to get a Wii for Zelda and Mario and whatever other games Nintendo made. It definitely wasn’t going to be for the Wii’s features, but the Wii is doing surprisingly well, so I’ll be getting it for that too.

What I find somewhat alarming is that the PS2 was hard to find for like 6 or 8 months after launch and here we are just a month later seeing PS3s. Hell, even the 360 was hard to find for a while (I can’t say exactly since I wasn’t around to see, I do know it was at least 3 or 4 months).

EDIT: Oh yeah, RPG Dragon may have a point about people not expecting to be able to find it and not buying it as a result, but the sheer numbers of PS3s on the shelf is still fairly alarming and doesn’t quite justify that point.

EDIT 2: Oh yeah, also it isn’t necessarily that the PS3s launch line-up is weak, but that most of its launch games can be found on the 360. Hell, a person could buy a 360 and several games available for both systems for less than the PS3 costs alone, which leaves few games available to really buy for the PS3. The PS3 launched with Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, Tony Hawk’s Project 8, Call of Duty 3, and Fight Night Round 3, which are all very good games…but also available for the 360

22

I’m with SE and Sin here.

So far you guys have talked about the buyer side. PS3 does not seem like the “right choice” for most gamers, who don’t care whether the CPU clock of the gaming system is X or Y and how much RAM it has. And indeed, Wii is weaker in power but it’s more eyecandy and has a large myriad of already succesful titles. Being playable and enjoyable is what matters in the end, so people sack the wasted power of PS3 in favor of Wii.

Now, for the people who do care about what the system can and can’t do. Developers. Sony threw so much new stuff and technologies in PS3 that few companies have staff qualified enough to develop games, and the development cost is now astronomical too. I remember someone made a thread not long ago linking to a news site where the company that makes Ridge Racer said they have to sell half a million copies of it for PS3 if they don’t want to have losses. Yep, half a million just to balance income and outcome. Microsoft and Nintendo took their own smart moves to solve that problem, and are probabling snickering at Sony’s back now. I could not get data for development costs for the Wii, but I’m guessing it follows the legacy of the Game Cube for its graphical and logical system, so there must be more manpower to supply it with games. And given that it already starts off with a whoreload of games that its target audience loves and admires, it has the advantage in sales for the while being.

Speaking of which, it’s a safe assumption that lots of people from the thousands who bought Wii’s will be getting Super Mario Bros. 1-3 + Super Mario World, Zelda: a Link to the Past and so on. As for Sony, though… If one wants to play the great successes of the Playstation family, they’d mostly buy the PS2, for its price is dropping like a stone. It’s what everybody’s been doing here. The price of PS2 is ridiculous now, I’m even getting one myself (along with either a Wii or X360, still undecided).

edit: I just remembered now. There’s more stuff in play here (no pun intended). Microsoft and Nintendo have been hogging good opportunities for gaming titles too. Just one example: Microsoft has bought exclusive rights on everything videogames from Marvel. So you’ll never see a Spiderman or X-Men game made for Playstation 3. If this continues evolving like this, the possibilities for PS3 will be seriously reduced.

23

Yes, but power is nothing if it isn’t being used. What good does buying suped up sports car do you if you never go out and race it or drive fast in it? What good does a Hummer do you if you never go off road? If you never use the capabilities, it is sort of a waste of money.

EDIT: Hell, the same could be said with regular computers. If you have several gigs of RAM, a massive hard drive, the latest and greatest processor and video card, ports and drives up the wazoo, and just use it for word processing and to play Solitaire, you sort of wasted a lot of money since you could do the same on something with just a fraction of the power.

EDIT2 : It is sort of funny how Sony is boasting its 20 and 60gb hard drives over the 360s 12gb hard drive since I was looking at PS3 games and the games take several hundred mbs each. It means that several games will take massive chunks out of the hard drive, unlike the 360 where the space games need is negligible. While yes 360 hard drives are getting filled up now, it isn’t because of the games themselves, but the downloadable arcade games.

24

The only good thing I can see about a PS3 is that it is a cheap Blu-Ray player. I would rather spend the $500-600 for a PS3 rather than $1,000 for the Blu-Ray player.

25

Indeed. But how many people have the home theater tech to make Blu-Ray viable? And how many people - at this point in time - want a Blu-Ray, let alone know what the hell it is?

26

Exactly. And of those who know what it is, are they on the blu ray side or on the hd dvd side of the debate (esp with MS releasing a 200 dollar add on + movie to its 360).

27

Yep, and people who think of the PS3 as a cheap blu-ray player should be reminded that by the time blu-ray actually becomes a standard for media there will be players being sold for a fraction of the price of a PS3 too.

28

I never buy newly released consoles, anyway. Most still don’t have all the bugs worked out and the the good games are few and far between. One year is my minimum. Some folk just might be getting smarter, though unlikely. Another possible reason is that many homes buy consoles as homes, and with the Wii being more directed to people of all ages, houses with children are more prone to get that.

29

Right now though I’ll take the DS lite for the win.

Besides I’ll probably end up as a Betamax meets N64 situation.:hint:

btw, for all of you PS3 owners out there I have a quick question for you. So FFXIII and MGS4 come out. But then what?:ah-ha!: Yeah. Have fun with that one for a while.

30

When FFXIII and MGS 4 come out, i’ll be busy for a long, long, loooooooooong time.

31

FFXIV and MGS5, duh. :wink: In about 2011, most likely.

32

And by that time the PS3 will look like the GameCube.

33

Speaking of PS2, an article in Business Week claims that in 2007 PS2 will outsell other consoles on the market, including its descendant. In the fiscal year ending in March 2007, Sony expects to sell 11 million PS2s, and just 6 million PS3s. In the following year, Sony will likely ship another 11 million PS2s vs. 7 million PS3s, according to research by Standard & Poor’s.
And with some games coming out next year (Seiken Densetsu 4, Kingdom Hearts II: Final Mix Plus, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), it looks like software makers have no plans to discontinue PS2 titles yet.

**
Re: the abundance of PS3s and the scarcity of Wiis on the stores shelves.
Sony’s PR department can always put a positive spin on the current situation - unlike some of its competitors,the number of units manufactured and shipped by the company fully satisfies the customers demand.
Ha-ha.

34

I’m not done playing MGS1 yet. Well, I literally cannot get any better at it. It’s totally impossible. But I still have fun with it. I think MGS4 will last me long enough, due to my compulsive need for perfection. Really, I’ll probably have gotten as good as I’d like to be at Sons of Liberty and Snake Eater by the time 5 comes out. Then I still have MGS4, both Acids, and Portable Ops to perfect. Also, I can refrain from buying MGS4 until the PS3 is at a price human beings who do not have genitals formed out of solid gold can afford. So, my ferver of desire for things that feature characters named “Snake” is a two-edged sword for Sony. I assume there are a good deal of similar people; I want to play this game, but fuck, there is the same game with less fancy features I can play until I can afford it.
I agree with Seifer’s last post, generally.

Sin: The only disagreement I have with your argument is that the PSP had a few good games; all of them happened to start with “Metal Gear” or be re-releases of old games, but nonetheless, it had some good games, in my opinion. I liked Darkstalkers and didn’t own any versions of that, and Dynasty Warriors is always mindless fun. Other than that, your logic is solid.

35

Since a couple people brought it up, I want to emphasize that “Finally, the PSP had very few good releases”. I didn’t mean to say it didn’t have any. What I mean to say is that it has too few titles released too infrequently to generate interest in the machine.

While it does have some good titles, the problem is analogous to the gamecube and the N64: too few, too infrequently. While it does have a couple big names coming, like with FF7 Crisis Core and it recently had a Valkyrie Profile game and it had that mega man game a lot of people really liked, these aren’t as high profile as a DQ or FF game that’s part of the official series. Spin offs and remakes aren’t the blockbuster titles that push a system forward. Spin offs and remakes are supposed to keep people happy between blockbusters and not be the reason people own a system.

I would like to have a PSP because I would like to have these games. However, the absurd cost of the PSP and the paucity of titles makes it a very unappealing machine. I want FF7 CC and I want FFT’s remake, but what it has to offer doesn’t justify its price tag and by the look of the PSP’s relative lack of sales (it is literally orders of magnitude less than the DS), a lot of people feel that way too and according to some of the links below, developers recognize that.

I will admit this: I don’t have as good a knowledge of the PSP game library as some of the people here so I might be underestmating the actual number of interesting games there might be despite all this.

This article essentially says the same thing: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=15264

Developers fear Sony is abandoning the PSP: http://gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=21229

Time Warner on Blu Ray and the PS3: http://gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=21568

Even EA says next gen game costs are “crazy”: http://gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=21454

EA’s strategy: develop something on 1 platform, port it to the PSP (ie unoriginal content people aren’t as likely to purchase): http://gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=21451

36

Yeah, that’s true, I just didn’t read carefully enough, I guess. My bad.

You mean Megaman X? The one that is available as a ROM for free. Yeah.

Yeah, although all the Metal Gear games are considered part of the official canon as far as I know. Portable Ops is even a full-fledged in series game, although it’s the first direct in-series PSP game. But still, that’s three games, one of which is the sequal and almost a clone of another. It really doesn’t have any consistant gaming stability, I just wanted to point out that it did have good games, becuase I missed that you had already said that.

Yeah. I got mine as a gift, I probably honestly wouldn’t have baught it until the price dropped greatly, either.

There are some good games, but you’re pretty much nailing it on the head with the whole spin-off thing. It had its own version of Dynasty Warriors, which was cool if you like that sort of thing. It had its own version of Untold Legends, ditto. It had its own version of GTA, ditto. See a pattern? It’s mostly shit like that, a few puzzle games, the actually innovative Metal Gear Acid games, a slew of ultra-violent action titles more resembling a cross between controversy-generation-attempts and human feces than actual video games, Ashley Wood’s Metal Gear comic book portrayed as a game, and a bunch of direct re-releases that weren’t even spin-offs. For people who didn’t own the original, as me with Darkstalkers and Street Fighter Alpha 3, the last ones were kind of nice. For the majority of gamers, useless. So you’re not too far off the mark, by my estimate.

37

And Mega Man Powered-Up.

The Acid games are sperate eries and not a part of the main story and take place in an alternate thing.

38

I couldn’t help but laugh a lot about Climax’s CEO comments (in Sin’s second link) about a more ergonomically appealing PSP. The first thing that came to my mind was people getting sore thumbs for trying to get the square button to work properly.

On game development costs. Games for the XboX are coded mainly in three languages: C++, its bastard child and Java clone C#, and Visual Basic. There are a few millions of people using Visual Basic today, and dozens of times more using C++. Another whoreload of programmers who use Java need only a few hours to master C#. The cost of the tools needed to develop for XboX is ridiculously low, some of them are even free or made available for free for high school and college students. And developing for the X is exactly like developing for PC. I’m not kidding: I have used these tools, and when you’re going to prepare the game for testing or running, it shows two options, Build for Windows and Build for Xbox. A massive documentation of everything involved is also available publicly in the MSDN site.

On the other hand, and as far as I know, if you want to develop for the Playstation: there is no documentation anywhere, the tools are kept away from anyone that’s not involved’s eyes and hands, only a handful of people are qualified to handle the coding, and the only training available is directly from Sony’s staff.

No wonder Microsoft boasts that the coding costs for developing a game for X360 are aproximately 10% that of developing for PS3.

39

DS Lite, GB Pocket.

40

Console programming is done almost exclusively with C++, and you can pretty much use the same code base across multiple consoles. I’ve never heard of any console games being written in Visual Basic, and if any are using C# it’s a very tiny number and I don’t know of any larger companies that use it. Also at this point developing for the Xbox and the pc aren’t exactly the same, however that is Microsoft’s eventual intent. As for what you said about the Playstation, just because you can’t documentation on the internet doesn’t automatically mean it doesn’t exist.