@1.2: March 2010 is very crowded so they may have delayed it to quieter time. Both FF13 (just announced) and ME2 are releasing at march so it may have been too big competition for Alan Wake.
EDIT: Splinter Cell and Bioshock 2 are also releasing february 2010 so Q1 2010 as a whole is very crowded on 360 (PS3 has even more crowded timetable but that doesn't count for 360 release).
You could say same thing about PS3 and 360 games. Biggest games for example for PS3 coming soon or just released are Uncharted 2, FF13, GT5 and GoW3. All of them are sequels so there is nothing especially new in any of them. Especially FF series has over 30 games already if you count all spinoffs (I didn't even count remakes yet). Yet most of them complaining about unoriginality of Mario don't complain about FF which has had same gameplay for at least last 15-20 years and dozens of games in a...
After CoD4 price of IP or even exclusive contracts skyrocketed to astronomical figures. After that, they could have only bought exclusive DLC for next game (just for 1 game) with $100 million, it wouldn't be enough for timed exclusivity. Exclusivity for next CoD may have cost $400-500 million and IP would probably have cost way past $1 billion (even $2 billion is possible). Price of exclusivity is high because revenue would have dropped by several hundred millions and they have to take in to ...
If we are using both Sony and MS shipped numbers from official reports then PS3 is still behind 360 by 6.5 million in worldwide sales (PS3 was at 27 million and 360 at 33.5 million at end of september). According to VGChartz difference is 7 million so in that way there isn't so huge difference in actual numbers. So it will take probably couple years before PS3 is past 360. Shipped numbers are only exact and true numbers (it is illegal to lie in official reports so only exact numbers can be us...
Servers and updates cost a lot of money. If MMO wouldn't have subscription, they would some other way to get money from players. Then you would have pay for every extra content (for example special sword would cost you money). If there can't get money from players constantly, servers are going to be shut down very quickly. Even if there were 10 million buyers for game, MMO servers couldn't last much more than 1 year without either microtransactions or subscription fee because server costs are...
MS has already confirmed several times that Natal is releasing for current 360, not for next generation console. They are only making new SKU for Natal (I've heard about 360+) but there won't be 720 next year and not even in 2011. MS has lost over 6 billion dollars with XBox brand so far (original XBox alone costed them more than 4 billion) so I doubt they hurry with next console this time. And there probably won't be Wii 2 next year either but it is at least remotely possible.
This is the difference between NPD and VGChartz. NPD figures are also just estimates because most retailers don't report their sales so they could sometimes be off too. For example Wal-Mart is not part of their sample because Wal-Mart doesn't report console sales to anyone, not even to them.
UC2 is a western action game and japanese don't like them much so this is just normal sales for them. FPS games for example always flops in Japan and I don't think any FPS game has ever been big there (COD4 has probably biggest sales and it only sold 300k on all platforms combined in Japan).
EDIT: Many people think Halo 3 as a flagship title for 360. It wasn't flagship title in Japan, games like Blue Dragon are flagship titles there (BD, SO4, Tales of Vesperia and several other ...
Which disc formats are faster and bigger capacity and on market? There is none. HD-DVD was slower and lower capacity than Blu Ray. HVD won't be available in many years and first models are going to cost 5-10000 dollars. It will affordable enough probably few years after that. Flash media is still too expensive but it is the only option which is possible in short term.
@2.1: This isn't download only title, this has already confirmed as full priced game. And considering NSMB DS has sold 16 million copies worldwide, you are underestimating this a lot. NSMB Wii is probably one of the biggest games this year, if not even THE biggest game.
Most likely Netflix wasn't even allowed to go to PS3 before. Netflix is hurting Blu-Ray sales a lot and Sony gets a lot of money from movie sales. MS doesn't even have movie studios so they don't lose much by allowing Netflix on 360. Sony probably hates Netflix now.
Of course they gave Little Big planet a 10. It was british game so it was automatically given higher score. They always give british games high scores.
360 has still sold much more than original XBox in Japan. XBox only sold 500k and 360 has sold around 1.2 million so far. Sales are still very bad but at least sales are better than before.
@1.4: Then how does DSi outsell Wii although there are 30 million DS and only 8 million Wii in Japan?
Edit: And PS2 has sold over 25 million in Japan. Wii isn't even near those sales either.
I wouldn't say that yet... New Super Mario Bros Wii is likely to be one the biggest games in Japan this year, perhaps even outselling FF XIII. Considering that NSMB DS has sold almost 6 million in Japan and no FF has ever sold over 4 million there it wouldn't be any suprise.
And don't compare to SMG because japanese have never cared about 3D Mario, they like 2D Mario much more.
@1.3: As a company MS still makes $15 billion dollar profits each year while Sony isn't even profitable. And PS3 has lost at least $3 billion dollars so why they couldn't bow out too. Wii is only console this generation which is profitable, others have lost billions.
@Walther: MS is still one of the most profitable companies in the world so they can afford to prop up their stocks. Sony doesn't have any money, they would have to take debt to do that. People talk about Apples "...
Original XBox only sold around 500k in Japan in four years. So they doubled sales compared to XBox. Still bad sales but getting better.
I doubt Blu Ray has anything to do with missing splitscreen, it has more to do with complexity of Cell processor and memory limitations. Blu Ray is nothing more than a optical data storage, just like DVD and CD. Even Wii could handle Blu Ray, if it had external Blu Ray drive. It just has bigger capacity and it is a bit slower than 360 DVD (although not much).
Although real cart size should be 4 Gb (gigabits) which is 512 MB (megabytes). Still biggest game on DS though but PSP has some bigger games (only few though).
Before they announced 360 FF13, SE planned to release FF13 simultaneously worldwide. But 360 FF13 caused the delay with schedule because they had to port FF13 to 360 (they hadn't even started porting before E3 2008). Then againg, 360 is very popular in USA where huge amount of FF sales comes from so it may not have been bad business choice. But it did delay PS3 release in the west...