This is japanese release date, we still don't know for sure about US or european release dates. GOW is pretty much nonexistant in Japan, I believe GOW2 only sold 40k copies there.
Firmware updates don't help much. Hardware drivers are already extremely optimised so firmware updates won't make performance any better (at best they could have around 1-2% effect in performance and even that is pushing it). 99% of the firmware updates are about increasing features and removing bugs, performance updates are extremely minimal and usually only about single occasions. Heck, some of the firmware will make consoles SLOWER. Hardware is what it is, firmware updates can't change har...
I am suprised that so many people think that Age of Conan has been successful. In fact, it has been a horrible flop and I doubt servers are even up for much more than 1 year from now (right now there are around 200k active accounts). And 360 version is just vaporware which is never going to be released. Just think, PC version requires 35 GB from HDD. I doubt they could release so big game on 360 (even 20 GB 360 owners couldn't even play the game). And if it gets released it will not even get ...
DS is bigger than Wii everywhere in the world, not just Japan. In USA DS sold almost as much as Wii, PS3 and 360 COMBINED in July. Here are july 2009 figures from NPD:
Top 10 Hardware Sales, July 2009
1. Nintendo DS 538.9K
2. Wii 252.5K
3. Xbox 360 202.9K
4. PSP 122.8K
5. PlayStation 3 121.8K
6. PlayStation 2 108K
I doubt this is a threat to consoles in several years. First of all you need extremely fast broadband to stream all that data. Second, lag is going to be horrible unless there are hundreds of servers and all of them have to be extremely fast.
These new features sound nice. The trouble is that most europeans won't probably get them in years. Even movie rentals of XBL are still not available in most of the europe (here in Finland there are only music videos).
Article isn't even talking about MW2, it is about MW1 Wii which is only now coming.
These figures are badly inflated and not real failure rates. Failure rates should be calculated based on YEARLY failure rate. Otherwise numbers would be completely useless because every old model would have high failure rates even if they would be very reliable. If you would use failure rates like this, every electronics would have 100% failure rate in the end.
Of course, this doesn't make 360's result any less catastrophic. Even considering 360 is 4 years old console these numbe...
ape007: Check the picture... Arcade is going to remain same according to picture. I doubt they could afford putting 60GB HDD in Arcade. Anyway, making 60 GB HDD costs practically just as much as 120 GB HDD so increasing HDD size costs next to nothing for MS.
Only very few games in Japan reaches 1 million in sales. Remember, Japan has only 1/3 of the population of USA. So 1 million would still be great sales. It's much less that DQ9 but it is the biggest game of the year, even much bigger than FF13 (it is impossible for FF13 to sell more than DQ9, even reaching 2 million in Japan would be improbable). With 1 million it could even top 10 sales of the year in Japan.
immortal84: VgChartz are still rough estimates and are sometimes off a lot. Japanese sales are almost directly copied from Famitsu and MC so those are quite accurate but other charts are very inaccurate. Their estimates have been many times off 20-30% or even more. Even 50% difference isn't rare.
Apple is mostly popular in USA but in rest of the world Apple computers are almost unheard of. Actually, I would say Apple PC's are ONLY popular in USA. Last year Apple couldn't even reach top 5 of the PC makers in Europe and market share i Europe is still less than 5%. While Apples market share in more than 10%, worldwide share is much less than 5%.
1.1: EU would still have english-language server (or servers) because of people in UK. And most people in smaller countries use english-language servers and even use english while gaming. For example in scandinavia people normally use english-language servers even in WoW because there are no servers for swedish, finnish or norway or danish-talking people. And I've seen several americans in WoW in EU server. So people in EU don't automatically use different language as people in NA.
But Japan is not a huge market anymore in gaming except couple of genres. Nowadays Japan is only around 10% of the world gaming market. Even UK is bigger market in gaming than Japan currently.
USB 2.0 speed is 480 Mbit/s which would make much more than 480 MHz. So perhaps clock speed and transfer speed were accidently mixed.
Wii Fit had only 250k first week and it still has sold 3.5 million. And this is better start than Wii Play, Wii Sports or Wii Music. Wii series has never had huge first weeks.
Kingdom Hearts 1 sold 3.5 million in USA and just 1.2 million in Japan. With Kingdom Hearts figures are 2 million in USA and just over 1 million in Japan. So Kingdom Hearts is actually much bigger in USA than it is in Japan. It is only released first in Japan because it is developed there.
People forget that distance is most important about quality. For example 20 inch screen from 3 feet distance looks exactly as big as 40 inch screen from 6 feet distance. If you are watching TV from 7-8 feet distance you need at least 40" TV to even in theory recognize between 720p and 1080p.
There are actually some games on 360 which require HDD for online gaming (Burnout Paradise at least). Sure, those work without HDD but only in single-player mode. And Final Fantasy XI requires HDD as well as all upcoming MMO's (FF XI is currently only MMO on 360). MMO's require constant updates so those are impossible without HDD.
Sounds strange that they talk about 300 games when metacritic has 400 PS3 games already. Are they only talking about PS3 games in Japan or something?