Consider, for a moment, that MS just wants to make some money back, after spending so much on Natal, because they realize that its not the correct approach, and that beyond its release hype, it cannot hope to make a serious dent in the casual market.
In such a situation, would you sell the device at a loss, making tons of them and subsequently boosting your losses, or mark it up for some short-term profit from the release hype, and intentionally build a low number of units to...
There are tens of thousands of people in the games development industry, and it takes dozens to hundreds of people, several years of their lifetimes, to make a single game. Think about how much it costs to pay 50-150 people with college degrees to spend 50+ hours a week for 3 straight years, and then realize that those salary expenses are increased by building space rental to house them, equipment, expensive software licenses for everything from office apps to compilers and modelling tools, ...
Using a controller with Natal implies that the hardcore game supports gameplay without Natal, and that Natal is used in an "add-on" (a nicer word than "afterthought") capacity.
That's not going to impress people, even if it is widespread. That'll go the way of the Sixaxis usage -- i.e. no one will support it for long.
Insomniac owns two physical studios, Sucker Punch owns one.
Publishers HATE it when a studio shares the same physical space between multiple publishers, because they don't want to pay for work on some other publisher's project, via employee shuffles during crunch times.
The reason Insomniac is having a publisher other than Sony, is because they own a second physical studio. They wouldn't be doing it if they had to give up their Sony deals. The s...
The Cell is too functional to compete with GPUs -- it can do too much, which requires too much logic, and yields sheer numbers of pipes for flexibility. Lack of flexibility, and the resulting greater numbers of simplified work pipelines, is what gives modern GPUs their performance prowess.
On the other hand, the Cell, as a HPC CPU design, is downright unbeatable by any other design in existance, including the Larrabee and i7.
The i7 is a stellar general purp...
NOT like the Cell, which was a good idea then, and still is. The Larrabee relies on an automated caching mechanism, and the Cell doesn't which is one of the things that makes the Cell both "hard" (lol) to program, and shine in performance. SPUs never suffer from a cache miss -- ever. That's miles better than spending 30% of the total core time missing on a shared cache, plain and simple. With all that wasted cache die area, you could have more cores instead... oh hey, li...
Natal was never going to be cheap -- you get what you pay for, you know. Did you really want it to cost not much more than a 360 controller?
Sony just made it to profitability with the slim. They aren't gonna drop the price by $50. Sony was shifting production over to the new 40nm GPU slim, so they could actually profit, or come close.
PSP drop, maybe. PS3, no way. Not even if Bobby Kotick demands it. (lol)
Independant studios do business with multiple publishers. Since publishers don't like studios to internally shuffle teams, they tend to fund an entire physical location, of which IG has two.
I feel pretty confident that Sony will be publishing the 2 games made in IG California, and they'll be exclusives, and that EA will be publishing the one game made in NC, and it'll be a cross-plat.
This is different from Bungie's relationship with MS, bec...
Glad I picked up Little King's Story and Valhalla Knights: ES for the Wii, since I think its clear that MMV should avoid the Wii like the plague in NA from now on. 65K copies between those two? Ouch. LKS was freaking great, too.
Ratchet is freaking awesome. It may not have sold like gangbusters, but that's only because it didn't get the hype it deserved.
Ratchet & Clank is one of the greatest game IPs of all time.
Insomniac's move to multiplat is kinda meaningless, since they will still be working on Resistance and (most importantly to me) Ratchet.
It's not anything like Bungie's multiplat move, because Bungie is abandoning the Halo IP to some new MS studio.
Therein lies the difference.
I think the implication that new maps are incoming seems pretty obvious.
Note the "APC vs APC" weapon damage fix comment. There are no maps in the game where APCs can fight enemy APCs... right now.
According to him, am I a freaking amazing gamer of legendary skill, since I finished Lair before the patch, when it was "unplayable". Also, Resistance was "poorly made", and Sony will, at some point apparently, remove the PS3's ability to play music, or Blu-Ray movies, or somesuch.
This guy is the penultimate PS3-hater. The sad part is that his articles aren't even based in reality. He literally believes that the PS3 is still overpriced, God of ...
If you love balls, you're going to love Natal.
It costs millions to develop an engine, and Insomniac isn't foolish enough to blow millions mid-generation by unnecessarily switching gears. Remember the PS3 is the "hard" platform to develop for, and porting back to the 360 is supposedly easier, than the reverse situation.
I think its pretty safe to say the lead platform will be the PS3 for the rest of the generation.
It'll have to be manufactured at 22nm or lower before it hits anywhere close to 100w. At lower process sizes, the electron leakage goes up, too, which negates some of the heat savings.
You're in for a long wait.
.exactly why the "next gen" of consoles is far from being upon us.
Sure, faster technology exists. And in other news, it costs a freaking fortune, and would make for an unreliable livingroom appliance the size of a large ATX case, to accomodate all the fans.
The console market is about affordability, and low entrance price.
Until nVidia, ATI, etc. can get something like this to a managable size/power/cost, it'll never be a seri...
What a hilarious headline!
If it stops kids from frying their brains, in lieu of saving the phosphor people in virtual land, and getting a kick out of even a small portion of what it might be like to be heroic IRL, I am all for it, though.
OLED screens aren't just flexible.
One of the big reasons they are so thin is that they don't have a backlight. The organic pixels light up -- in other words, you can see it in broad daylight much, much better than a backlit screen, and the "contrast ratio" is way better than any plasma or LCD in existance.