was the goal. They also hoped that multi-player games would drive sales organically as friends of 360 owners would buy 360s to be able to play with their friend. Sadly for Microsoft, their focus on the bottom-line caused them to put up the one biggest obstacle to this organic growth in the form of exorbitant subscription fees for online multi-player play.
By not allowing online play to be free, Microsoft stunted it's own growth and allowed the PS3 to establish itself in terms o...
2008 Sales(Jan - Aug)
PS3: 6.0M
360: 4.5M
Consumer research suggests that the PS3's stronger first party and exclusive franchises, broader consumer appeal, and richer feature-set as a multimedia device have spurred 2008 sales to a consistent 33% average month over month delta in sales relative to the 360.
Based on these numbers it's estimated that the PS3 will have outsold the 360 by 3M in 2008. If trend of increasing sales disparity in favor of...
YTD 2008 sales:
PS3: 6M
360: 4.5M
Projected 2008 year end sales:
PS3: 10M
360: 6.7M
Factors that can change these numbers:
-price drop
-significant change in features
-key software releases
-economic or other factors that affect consumer spending
with the PS2's memory and it was because some developers figured out how to use it properly that we have games like GT4, Jak3, and God of War. Unfortunately Sony did a poor job supporting developers (most of whom were used to traditional PC architecture and nothing else) with this new paradigm. This is where Microsoft did a superb job. They practically write the code for you.
from someone named "insane" cobra. Here's a little counter-point regarding LBP in particular.
LBP does benefit in some ways from having a limited draw-distance and fixed planes of interactivity however it also has a lot more continuously interactive objects with multiple non-scripted multiple on-line user-input dependent cascading directional inputs, and the quality of the lighting, shadows, textures etc (on all objects, because unlike the other platformers, everything...
LBP obviously looks much better than anything else out there (amazingly looks like a real puppet show of the sort filmed at PBS) but I wouldn't say Ratchet "looks" much better. Is it better technically? Maybe. That depends on whether they can get Banjo running at 60fps.
If not, then obviously Ratchet would be technically far ahead since running at 60fps is literally twice the performance of 30fps. It's the difference between 60mph and 30mph.
But if Ba...
I'd say it's roughly on par with Ratchet and clank in terms of textures and geometry (except character models are a little blocky, conveniently explained away as "artistic" choice, yet it looks good anyway so I'm ok with it). Unfortunately it has the same problems as R&C with shadowing.
The questions are 1) if they will be able to get it running at 60fps and 2) improve the animation.
I can understand the difficulty of having to work around the 360's re...
however, the practice of buying titles from independent developers is a an expensive but potentially effective practice because by buying off titles that would otherwise have made it to your competitor gives consumers less reasons to buy your competitor.
It's also an anti-free market and monopolistic practice. A good analogy would be Toyota paying off Mobil and Sunoco so that only Toyota cars can fill up at those Mobil and Sunoco gas stations. In such a situation it would be ve...
then it will happen sooner than that. If MS drops it's hardware price but keeps charging for Live they'll only gain a short term recovery.
due to a lack of supply during the model changeover. Now that many places like Amazon have been able to restock you can see (by looking at the daily sales details) that PS3 sales have gone up again.
Despite the supply interruption the PS3 still has a 31% lead this year. That's a sales massive advantage in the next-gen wars (Wii outsells both but isn't a direct competitor). What's more, retailers like Best Buy prefer to push the PS3 over the 360 because it adds revenue in multi...
... but not demand. Demand (total number of people who willing to pay hundreds of dollars to own and use a 360 and Xbox Live) is fixed unless either the consumers change or the product and/or it's image changes. When price-cuts result in an increase in sales it's easy to mistake that for increase demand but what's actually happening is that consumers who were waiting for a lower price (who were a part of existing demand) will start buying.
We saw with the gamecube (which, like ...
360 sales have been slower than PS3 all year long, not just recently. In fact, if anything 360 sales have improved in the last month.
because as I and others have stated a long time ago, the 360 is only appealing to a small segment of the population. The others would rather have the Wii or PS3.
The only way to change the demand for the 360 is to change it's image. However, in doing so they risk losing their current customer base.
is something that Microsoft is known for and this is yet another one of those cases. Predictably it's moved some hardware in Japan but for Microsoft to truly win over all those tens of millions of gamers who are simply waiting for the next PS3 price drop Microsoft will have to pay for a lot more exclusives.
Sony, meanwhile, are surely in a bit of bother because unlike Microsoft they cant afford to just hand out $20M+ to every other developer out there. This is where issues of m...
Turns out they were using a BladeCenter H chassis. If we assume that all the bays filled, the numbers need to be corrected.
If all the bays were filled, then the numbers I gave for the PS3 Cell should be corrected downwards from 45M polygons per second to 38M polgons per second.
This means just 3 SPEs should be able to churn through 38 Million ray-traced polygons per second at 720P.
but here's a reality check:
The rack they've got is capable of processing atleast 50 million polygons per frame (which equals 1.5B polygons per second at 1080P) but it's also got as much as 32 times the power of the Cell processor in the PS3 due to the fact that it has between 10 and 12 blades or between 20 and 24 Cell processors, each with 8 SPEs available for processing graphics.
Having said that the single single Cell processor (6 SPEs available for graphics) in t...
Either it's easy or it's hard to make racing games look good. Let me know when you decide. Better yet, don't bother.
There's also lots of nonsense about the PS2 in your post so I'll make it simple.
1) PS2 didn't have "lowest specs" last gen. In case you didnt know, graphics capability is not measured by mhz, MBs, or directx number.
2) PS2 was the first hardware platform that had unified shaders (unified shader=combined vertex and pixel shade...
1) The Wii hardware is based on the GameCube hardware but with higher clockspeed so it is, in fact, very very late in the lifecycle, ie., because developers have had many many years to get to know the hardware.
2) Because the PS2 hardware was so complex and unique with all kinds of fancy vector units and EDRAM with and unprecedented 48GB/s texture and frame-buffer bandwidth, developers took more than twice as long to come to terms with it. In contrast, the GameCube was maxed out...
Theoretically, the Wii should have noticably better graphics than the PS2. Then why is it that some PS2 games like God of War, Jak 3, and GT4 are visibly far superior to anything on the Wii, some even sporting next-gen effects like real-time self-shadows, physics based cloth simulation, bump-mapping, etc?
Why aren't we seeing this level of graphics on the Wii? Simply for the same reason that games like Need for Speed, Grid, Dirt, etc do not have realistic physics. Those who buy...
1) HD-DVD was never cheaper to manufacture than Blu-Ray. In fact, the primary hardware component (the blu-ray diode) is one and the same. The only reason why HD-DVD players cost less was because Toshiba (with the support of Microsoft) were selling those at a loss. Furthermore, there was a very limited supply of usable blu-ray diodes (high defect rate) and neither Toshiba nor Microsoft had first dibs on those. Due to the declining cost of this component it would have cost Microsoft signifi...