@MikeB

Quote:

I am not discounting the PS2

You seem to be completely missing the point here. The comparision is not PS2+PS3 vs gamecube+wii vs xbox+360. I appear to not made this clear.. The 6th gen war of PS2 vs gamecube vs xbox came out with Sony the clear winner owning 70% of the market. In the 7th gen PS3 vs wii vs 360 the Wii seems to be the one on the path to the top followed by the PS3 and 360. In this case I don't see the Wii owning 70% of the market but being the leading console. Sony has fallen from the 70% 6th Gen market ownership to what I'm seeing will likely be half the marketshare, guessing 35-40%. OUCH! That my friend is a loss of position, loss of sales, and showing the mighty don't always retain the lead by their clear majority.

@MikeB

Quote:

January + February (home consoles) 2) Total Nintendo hardware sales: 929,000

There's no way that is right. Nintendo has sold more home consoles then any other company. My NES and Super NES still work I doubt they're counted in the marketshare if you're trying to compare company to company with all consoles sold ever Nintendo eats Sony for lunch.

@BrianK

Quote:

January + February (home consoles) 2) Total Nintendo hardware sales: 929,000

Wasn't that figure just for two months this year? Not total for all time.

_________________
/Harry

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@MikeB

Mike, why won't you post the sales figures for Japan?

Sorry Samwel for attaching this reply to your post, as it was done for convenience to introduce something else that PS3 has going for it.

That is PS Home.

Like many people I have for years been looking at geography and mimicking real life as a way of navigating and arranging the digital universe - virtual geography self organising things into related spaces, instead of the Web-verse where individual vendors lay scattered in random order only hyperlinked and googled.

PS Home is promised to be out by October with an April beta release.

The hype is grand, and other than taking it with a grain of salt and as a rough guide as to what it might actually mean in the end, I saw the most useful image to be "Second Life" with much better graphics and voice.

So I downloaded and started using "Second Life" to gauge the potential of this sort of thing. Would such things be ever useful, what are the drawbacks etc.,.

Assuming that PS Home resembles "Second Life" (with better graphics and interaction technology) my comments are in reality about SL.

It works! There is a lot of development needed for this sort of stuff, it takes a while to get a grip on how things are done and where to find them, but it works!

everything you thought could be possible with digital interaction, as a commercial, educational, cultural, social or sexual dimension is there in embryo.

After initial orientation, and still being a complete novice, despite the crude MU-type graphics the thing has huge potential.

PS Home looks like RL with bells on. A lot can go wrong of course, it could be over designed and confined, they may stuff it up, but if they keep to the form of RL and add to it - it is potentially the killer application.

If OS4 is ported, if such a thing is at all possible, then a window into PS Home (or at least the quickest form of reboot possible (perhaps freezing OSA in Virtual memory for return) would make the integration perfect.

_________________
Greg Schofield, Perth Australia

@GregS

There are indeed a lot of unknowns with PS Home. And it is interesting. If they pull it off right it could indeed be huge and force their competitors to take a long, hard look at upgrading their services accordingly (which is of course why competition is a good thing).

I too have tried out Second Life at various points. In fact I think I've made around 3-4 accounts. It was always the same result though... very quickly I got very bored and I never felt like logging back on. It's a place to be in 3D, but I already am in one. I can even arrange my furniture or build something new!

To me it just doesn't seem focused. I like that you'll get virtual trophies that you can put up. It's also nice that you can stream media and so on. But... at the end of the I guess to me the online component is about getting friends together for a game, having fun with them and then people drop out along the way if they have to do something - or others join in. That is what is important to me - that this works seamlessly. I'm trying to imagine how that would be implemented. The big question is: Is there a use for a virtual world, when you're already with your friends playing in virtual worlds? After all: do we not play consoles for the entertainment?

To me (at least) these virtual worlds with no real goals seem like a shallow reflection of reality. Here I'm of course going from what I know about Second Life and similar MMO worlds.

To put it into perspective, let's take a real world example:
I'm sitting at my machine playing Crackdown. A friend comes online and pages me to do voice chat with him. He asks me to play some Phantasy Star Universe with him as he hasn't tried the game before. I keep playing Crackdown while he sets up an account, creates a character with a bit of advice and so on. He says he's in the world now, and I swap the disc to Phantasy Star Universe. A minute or two later I'm in the same universe and we're still talking about where he needs to go and what he needs to do. We agree to meet up on one of the floors in the city and there we are - standing in front of each other and all along we have been communicating and been in 3D worlds.

That is where I have a hard time imagining what would be so great about the PS Home model. They may well have a brilliant implementation that I just can't quite imagine, but at least from the initial description it sounds more like a 3D lobby with customization and a bit of light entertainment. As far as I know each instance of the game is limited to 64 persons at the same time, which makes it lighter in interaction and indeed more lobbyesque.

I will be very interested in seeing how it pans out. Especially because I've always liked the open world games like Shenmue. The big difference is, though, that there actually *is* a story and a game behind it. So yeah... interesting.

Last edited by Trezzer on 03-Apr-2007 at 01:17 PM.

@BrianK

Quote:

Don't know what to say except the only way you can think the PS3 is somehow holding onto the marketshare of the PS2 is if, as it appears you try to do, completely negate the Wii. Claiming the Wii is not 7th gen but 6.5 gen perhaps might get you to simply a PS3 vs 360 out look and PS3 will likely hold more marketshare.

Yes, I view the Nintendo Wii more as a good competitor to the Sony Playstation 2. I hope the Nintendo Wii does well though, but I respect knowledge provided by companies like Phase5 that the Nintendo Wii technically isn't a big step up from the discontinued GameCube.

In Japan the PS2 is seeing fierce competition from the Wii, actually much more so than in the rest of the world and so PS2 hardware sales are lagging behind there, but with regard to software sales Sony home consoles are still outperforming Nintendo's home console sales considerably and dwarfing both hardware and software sales seen for Microsoft platforms.

I believe the Nintendo Wii will do well this year, next year will be much tougher for them I think. The Wii mote is quite a novelty but more traditional games are better played with a gamepad. The Wii isn't strong with regard to game complexity and graphics. Good Mario games would be able to push the Wii though, but Mario Galaxy so far seems a bit of a dissapointment to me compared to for instance Mario64.

Next Gen graphics vs Wii graphics, judge for yourself:
http://www.jeux-france.com/Webmasters/Images/57281320070402_010432_9_big.jpg
http://www.jeux-france.com/Webmasters/Images/57281320070402_010427_0_big.jpg

Wii:
http://www.jeux-france.com/Webmasters/Images/57301520070402_044619_0_big.jpg
http://www.jeux-france.com/Webmasters/Images/57301520070402_044619_1_big.jpg

Like I said before I think it will take games like Metal Gear Solid and the Final Fantasy games for the PS3 to get into the spotlight for Japan, both titles will sport graphics the Wii will not be able to match.

Last edited by MikeB on 03-Apr-2007 at 01:28 PM.

@Trezzer

I think the point has been missed. Look at the Linden Dollar transactions going on in"Second Life", the "Sun" Island, with live salespeople at the welcome desk. The information and real world services being offered along with the virtual ones.

I have written on this site some years ago now, about the importance of micro-cash and digital services. "Second Life" is crude but all the underpinnings are there.

PS3 Home is not aiming just to be gamers meeting place (obviously this will be catered for, especially when it first comes out).

It is the self-organising nature of virtual geography which is important. The principle is established in "Second Life" no doubt there are others, but the meeting of commercial, cultural, social life through a digital media is necessarily a 3D experience.

I for instance belong to several Philosophical elists, some having world leading philosophers participating scattered, as you can imagine, across the world. It is a sad fact that the world's leading Hegelian thinkers can be gathered in one room, but that rarely ever happens in the real world. It could happen daily in a virtual one.

Open University, could become Digital University all that is needed is means for doing so that is simple and cheap (relatively speaking and to become cheaper progressively as time passes).

With a user base of 3 million now, and who knows what by October, the race is over. PS3 Home is free, will download at a request, communicate with PSPs at least. It is unlikely there will be any competition, provided Sony does not stuff up, and provided it can be expanded to meet commercial and other needs.

By next February it will not be a question of competition but how other platforms will be able to nose into the environment.

This thing is not a mere commercial addon, it has had a long predicted future as the means of digital navigation.

If PS3 and Sony stuffs it up, well someone else will do it better, but if they do not, I don't think anyone will be wondering who won the console wars.

_________________
Greg Schofield, Perth Australia

@MikeB

Quote:

I view the Nintendo Wii more as a good competitor to the Sony Playstation 2

I'm a bit dubious that Nintendo's goal was to compete against an outgoing 6th gen console by making another 6th gen console. While the graphics and gameplay don't live up to the PS3 or 360 there's little doubt it's still competing for the consumer dollar against those 2 consoles.

Sure Sony is keeping the PS2 around longer then others. Why? Well it makes them cash, something the PS3 doesn't. It's a huge seller. It made little sense for Nintendo or Microsoft to continue trying to push 6th gen when it lost them money, at least in Microsoft's case, and user count was low.

Certainly the Nintedo Wiimote is a novelity. But, what it is doing is getting those people who aren't into videogames into videogames. They are a larger % of the population then those who do videogame. Of course Sony copied this novelity in the sixaxis. Certainly they saw something next-gen from Nintendo they felt they'd need to be competitive.

@GregS

I agree with all your points really. I didn't address them directly, but I'd put the same question in that direction: Is it the most optimal solution? Does it really make sense?

Only time (and the implementation) will tell.

Another thing that's required for PS Home is massive support from everywhere to achieve all of this. It's a bit of a Neuromancer vibe, but there are a lot of "buts" here.

Last edited by Trezzer on 03-Apr-2007 at 01:51 PM.

@GregS

Quote:

for instance belong to several Philosophical elists, some having world leading philosophers participating scattered, as you can imagine, across the world. It is a sad fact that the world's leading Hegelian thinkers can be gathered in one room, but that rarely ever happens in the real world. It could happen daily in a virtual one.

There is good things and bad things about vitual worlds. You mention one of the good ones. One bad one may be due to virtual daily meetings these Philosophers feel that quarterly conventions are uneeded because they are better able to get ideas off of their chests so they go to yearly meetings further diminishing the face time they spend. The other is proving out in the UK. There was a recent article on how injuries due to tree climbing for youth is down significantly in the last 5 years. Whereas the number of youth repetitive stress injuries is up significantly. It appears that the virtual world is encouraging less interaction in the real world. Now again there's still a trade off here. US youth on youth crime is at an all time low. It appears to take big dips when consoles are released. So lowering interactions with humanity is lowering hazardous interactions with humanity, this could be seen as a good.

@BrianK

Quote:

I'm a bit dubious that Nintendo's goal was to compete against an outgoing 6th gen console by making another 6th gen console.

No, but to quote yourself:

Quote:

Certainly the Nintedo Wiimote is a novelity. But, what it is doing is getting those people who aren't into videogames into videogames.

With this I agree and for younger gamers I think the Nintendo Wii is more suitable, but I think Microsoft's PR efforts are not good on this front and IMO shoot themselves in the foot with statements like these:

In the New York Times recent story on Microsoft's new Xbox 360 Elite hardware, John Rodman, Xbox group product manager takes time out to kick off another console:

" We don't feel like the Wii customer and the Xbox customer are the same thing. We think that as soon as the Wii customer turns 14 they want something else."

I think for those who can afford two consoles, the Nintendo Wii can be a nice complementary product to both XBox 360 and PS3 home consoles, Wii family fun + more hardcore gaming experiences and mutimedia features. IMO Microsoft shouldn't feel so threatened to come out with statements like these.

If today I would buy a home console for my 15 year old sister, I would surely get her a Nintendo Wii, like I bought her a Gameboy advance a few years ago. I rather have her playing Mario instead of Gears of War or Resistance.

Let's just say I don't think the PS3 without a Nintendo Wii would have performed much better in Japan at this point, but I think the PS2 would have.

Last edited by MikeB on 03-Apr-2007 at 02:05 PM.
Last edited by MikeB on 03-Apr-2007 at 01:58 PM.

@MikeB

Quote:

With this I agree and for younger gamers I think the Nintendo Wii is more suitable, but I think Microsoft's PR efforts are not good on this front and IMO shoot themselves in the foot with statements like these:

Odd, because to me it seems the opposite. The 15 year old teen wants the xbox 360 or ps3 because of the graphics, while the more adult has grown tired of the same old games and rather want a different gameplay experience. I for one know of quite a few non kids who bought the wii just because of this very reason.

Graphics does not mean a ####, as long as the gameplay sucks which sadly is the case with alot of newer titles.

And what you have seen so far on the Wii is not what it can do anyways, as most games have been ported from prev gen consoles like the gamecube, ps2 and so on.
I think we will see next year what it is capable of.
Quote:

If today I would buy a home console for my 15 year old sister, I would surely get her a Nintendo Wii, like I bought her a Gameboy advance a few years ago. I rather have her playing Mario instead of Gears of War or Resistance.

There are already a few violent FPS titles on the wii as well and more has been announced..

Last edited by Tomas on 03-Apr-2007 at 02:13 PM.

@Trezzer

No worries, we could divide it off from PS3 Home, after all we won't see that for a while yet and it may be a goodlooking stuff up and therefore only open the ground.

I agree that "Second Life" is not my idea of a pleasant time. It was interesting to experiment with, and I will go there from time to time, there are a fair few things that could be improved to make it easier and more intuitive.

The virtual geography aspect has to be really seen as a potential. Better graphics will help in many minor ways - but 90% of our sensual information comes from the eye, so this is not just a minor point.

Consider a digital University, modelled perhaps on Cambridge. The general feeling conveyed, the places of congregation, being the bars, rivers and under trees, along with formal lecture halls and small tutoring offices. All the minor things, like the stone walls, sculptures, fixtures etc.,. mean very little, for in reality the teaching would be the same if it took place in a tin shed.

However, the purpose, manners, etc.,, expected would be conveyed by the virtual space. The Library arranged on shelves perhaps, familiar imitations, that none the less help things along. The most important part is the accidental meetings with like minds..., etc.,

Now in this it hardly matters that 90% of the people in the virtual space are content with dressing up or playing virtual sex, what matters is the 10% using the space for other things.

The first software portal that does this well, will pull so much in so quickly that given a few years we will wonder how we ever managed using browsers alone.

Now the other element, is that the bugginess of "Second Life" proves is that multiple platform (HW and OS) does not help but hinders these things,. A fixed HW will be essential to not only stabilise a new form of software (I am thinking of the extensions that will be added to the portal), but squeeze the most of whatever the graphics engine happens to be and the bandwidth can stand.

It will have to be a console of some type, as a phase of coherent development (quite unlike the competitive model - the competition being not between similar things but within a given structure). Afterwards, that is a different, but I believe the first phase is predictable.

What looks like a geeks hang out for the desperately asocial in "Second Life", is something different again when the virtual world crosses the graphical barrier from polygon to fully textured.

Again the killer market in all this is the Chinese in the next few years will be buying Xboxes PS3s whatever in huge numbers. The critical bit is the Chinese language which is not keyboard friendly, yet English as a second language (spoken if badly spelled) is the most taught.

For the Chinese consumer, Web browsing throws up a number of barriers, a virtual world speaking to real people solves a lot of problems, so do micro-yen/dollars, and I will not mention traditional gambling habits.

_________________
Greg Schofield, Perth Australia

@Tomas

Quote:

Odd, because to me it seems the opposite. The 15 year old teen wants the xbox 360 or ps3 because of the graphics, while the more adult has grown tired of the same old games and rather want a different gameplay experience.

I think you are right to some extend, teens want to play adult games, but most adults would rather have them playing more innocent types of games.

Quote:

Graphics does not mean a ####, as long as the gameplay sucks which sadly is the case with alot of newer titles.

No, but most people prefer good graphics + good gameplay. For the PS3 LittleBigPlanet would be a good example, the game is simple and fun, although the graphics are like something you would expect from a Nintendo game, the graphics and physics are way beyond what would have been possible on a Nintendo Wii.

LittleBigPlanet IMO is also geared towards family fun, Rachet and Clank for the PS3 also seems like a good game for all ages, likewise are games like Fl0w and Lemmings. Although I agree graphics isn't everything, the PS3's strenghts aren't solely with regard to graphics, but also regards more deep gaming experiences and game complexity such as more interesting artificial intellegence and physics.

@BrianK

True, true - but the problems of real world interaction, alienation and health, have also other causes which I agree compound with indoor virtual activity.

However, in the case of where things are going, the digital is a given, what we do to produce a more civilized place might get solved there.

This is not a matter of a brave new world, rather it is where things will go, in terms of software development, where that may take us in the long run is unpredictable.

It is merely a means of communication, what drives us to additively use it stems from other things.

_________________
Greg Schofield, Perth Australia

@MikeB

Quote:

Next Gen graphics vs Wii graphics, judge for yourself

Except that is a particularly crummy looking Wii game. I have seen a couple of Wii games in action and they look far, far better than that... wretched abortion of a game.

Even Rayman looks better. Zelda looks much better.

@MikeB

Quote:

We don't feel like the Wii customer and the Xbox customer are the same thing. We think that as soon as the Wii customer turns 14 they want something else.

It's a statement that is - at best - idiotic.

Generally Microsoft have been pretty positive about Wii, so I don't know what this particular guy is on.

And yeah, Wii is a good additional console for the typical gamer. It's also a great single console for homes that have had no consoles in the past.

@Trezzer

Quote:

Trezzer wrote: @MikeB Quote: We don't feel like the Wii customer and the Xbox customer are the same thing. We think that as soon as the Wii customer turns 14 they want something else. It's a statement that is - at best - idiotic.

Now there is a balanced comment about Microsoft. I think it is good we discuss these openly, that is an idiotic comment from Microsoft. Link?

@Trezzer

Quote:

Even Rayman looks better. Zelda looks much better

Sure they look better, but I think we will see more crummy looking mulit-platform Wii games, as is often the case with downgrading a game to a technically much weaker platform and for the long run I think this is going to affect Wii sales.

Have a look at this HD trailer of Ratchet and Clank for the PS3, it looks really next gen. Zelda looks good, but is that really a big step up from the last-gen GameCube version? I don't think so.

Even you dissed a game like Resistance as being inferior or technically unimpressive due to its graphics (yet you haven't had any experience with the game itself), but these kind of graphics can never be done on a Wii. So graphics are still important for generating a positive first impression.

http://img488.imageshack.us/img488/9945/best3lt6.jpg
http://img338.imageshack.us/img338/489/best4ch9.jpg
http://img130.imageshack.us/img130/2776/crashedvtolmc8.jpg
http://img464.imageshack.us/img464/7941/deadchimeraza5.jpg

Last edited by MikeB on 03-Apr-2007 at 03:47 PM.
Last edited by MikeB on 03-Apr-2007 at 03:41 PM.