PS3: November $499 & $599 Configurations (1 Viewer)

[Ryan-G]

Remember, the PS2 was supposed to be "100% backwards compatible" and it turned out it wasn't.

Plus, the PS3 is running on an architecture that is night and day different from PS2 and PS. I doubt highly that they've managed to multi-thread all of the old games, and I doubt even more highly that without multi-threading the Cell processor can run anything even at PS2's speed.

PS3 is an "In order" processor, meaning it can't look ahead and start processing something in it's spare time. PS2 and earlier games were "Out of Order" processors, giving them a speed advantage.

PS3 is competent only when code is in order and multi-threaded. Which legacy games aren't, so I doubt they'll run at speed if they run at all.

 

[aaron campbell]

I bet these sell as fast, if not faster than the Toshiba hd-dvd players.

 

[Paul Borges]

I don't get the no HDMI on the 499 model. Is adding a connector that expensive? Don't they want people to buy a unit just for watching movies? Why should i spend more for features that gamers would be more interested in (bigger harddrive, wireless, memory stick).

 

[Jesse Skeen]

All I can say is if the PS3 plays Blew-Ray discs as well as the PS2 plays DVDs.... (can you say CHROMA BUG?)

 

[Max Leung]

I believe the HDMI organization charges a royalty per unit that has a connector.

 

[David Galindo]

Official: The add-on for the 360 to play HD-DVD will cost $200.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/...ssbriefing.htm

I think $100-150 would have been a slam dunk, but $200 is a bit harder to swallow.

 

[Greg T]

10 times faster...and as many as they can make.
I can't believe all the whinning in this thread...both prices are steals for what you get....and I am willing to bet that the PS3 will be far less buggy than the crappy not ready for prime time Toshiba hd dvd players.

 

[Pete T C]

Not sure if this was said here or not but in order to get HDMI output which will be necessary for full resolution ICT Blu-Ray titles, you need to buy the $599 model.

 

[Jean-Michel]

I don't see any pricing info in that link.

 

[TravisR]

The price was listed initially but taken out of the article soon after. Officially there is no price yet (but it's a safe bet that it'll be $200).

 

[Bob Black]

First of all, this is a GAMING system, first and foremost. Most people buy gaming systems to play games - not to watch movies. So to compare your expected sales of this overpriced game console to the Toshiba HD-DVD player is silly. I have laughed all along at BD supporters bragging that the PS3 had already won the format war. I don't know one person who uses a game console to watch movies, and most of my neighbors and friends have HD televisions.

Secondly, the Toshiba player is hardly "crappy", as you describe it. I have owned one since April 15th and it has not given me any problems whatsoever. If you had the luxury of owning one, then you would be watching the absolute best HD material available. I have 10 titles now and films like Swordfish , Serenity, and Apollo 13 look AMAZING! If you read Bill Hunt over at the Digital Bits, he has just reported that most of the glitches associated with the A1 have arisen from a faulty remote, and that the problem can simply be resolved with a universal remote. For $499, this player is a steal for new technology.

Check out the BD section at the AVS forum. There are many BD fans rethinking their stance now that the PS3 pricing has been revealed.

 

[Ryan-G]

You also must consider the implications of a $499 dollar console.

Consoles sell for 2 reasons, Cost and Ease of Use. PC's are superior to Consoles as gaming systems in almost every aspect, except cost and ease of use. Consoles are cheaper, and they require no set up or maintaince.

Developers write games for consoles for 2 reasons, Development costs, and size of market. Up until now it has been cheaper to develop for consoles because they could hide behind the ultra-low resolution of TV's. The market is larger because of the paragraph above.

PS3 breaks two of these critical factors. They are now no longer cheap, you can get a complete computer for less than the PS3. They are more expensive to develop for than any other console or PC. No longer able to hide behind ultra-low res televisions both the X-box 360 and PS3 will have graphics budgets on par with the PC market. The PS3 takes this a step further, and adds the Cell Processor. No one in the game industry has ever developed for an architecture like it before, and no one in the game industry has ever developed multi-threaded games before. Now, the PS3's programming costs will exceed even the PC.

Further, the entire architecture of Cell is completely different from every other consumer system out there. It is a processer with 1 core and 7 sub-cores, and it is an In-Order processor. All other processors are full-flegded cores with out-of-order execution. Software will have to be heavily rewritten to go exist on both PS3 and PC/Xbox 360. This will increase costs dramatically, as EA will show, it will have a massive impact on finances for any studio trying it. Most will opt instead to develop X-box 360/PC. This is already apparent because the flag-ship Grand Theft Auto series has announced it will not be on PS3.

So it is more expensive for people to buy, costs developers more to write games for it, code written for it is not portable to other systems easily, and will have longer development times.

The results will be that PS3 will bomb, badly, probably taking Sony out with it. People will not flock en-masse to purchase a console more expensive than a computer and Developers will pass on porting games to PS3 and instead stick to X-box and PC. By the time PS3 is at a reasonable price, people will pass on buying it because the games aren't there.

Microsoft has successfully forced Sony out of the console market, and possibly out of buisness, allowing them to continue to pursue the shift to PC's in every home with X-box as a gateway. Once people are used to having an X-box in their homes, Microsoft will replace it with a full-fledged closed box PC with wireless keyboard/mice taking advantage of the display parity HD-TV brings. This will capture the low-mid income market, and the high income market will have custom built multi-core home servers feeding networked displays.

This also means that the consoles are non-factors in the format war for High-Def. PS3 simply will not sell, and the add-on for X-box 360 will sell as all console add-ons have, very poorly.

This game has been played very well, and all indications are that Microsoft wins.

What implications does that have for the High-Def DVD market? None. Microsoft's support of HD-DVD is just to keep enough Movie Enthusiats guessing to insure there's no spike in PS3 sales due to BR. Once Sony and PS3 are finished, Microsoft will announce they have decided to become neutral in the format war.

 

[Benson R]

I think those are a lot of good points. But the playstation brand name means a lot. If game studios only have the budget to develop for either the ps3 or the xbox 360, I see a lot of them siding with Sony for the first year its out.

Now I would love to for Sony to fall flat on its ass, don't get me wrong. But could you provide some proof that Grand Theft Auto won't be on the PS3? I would love to find out thats true, but I am suspicious.

*update*

Out of curiousity I visited some of the popular video game sites which I havent done in forever. But apparently Microsoft didnt claim exclusivity but implied it. However Rockstar sent out a press release to confirm GT4 is comming out for both simultaneously. Still very good news for Microsoft. Even though it doesn't give them advantage it takes away a major advantage from Sony to even the playing field. And who knows, if it really is so expensive/difficult to program for PS3 maybe it could be delayed on there. I will be very interested to see where the console war is a year from now. If Sony remained King for a 3rd generation it would definetly be a first, it seems like its their turn to fail. And for anyone who doubts that, back when videogame and nintendo were synonyms, did you really think Nintendo would be a distant 3rd?

 

[Ryan-G]

I stand corrected, I'd thought it was X-box 360 and PC, it is PS3. That's what speed reading gets you I guess.

I still believe that PS3 won't be the console of choice. I'll explain why, but it'll take me a little bit of digression to get to my point, so please everyone bear with me.

In the mid-90's the PC market was healthy, easily sharing the lime light with PS1 and Nintendo, and boasting a wide variety of games. Then something occured to change the PC market for the worse. 3d accelerators. Prior to 3d accelerators PC Games requiried artists to hand draw graphics much the same as movie animators did, with some software tools to ease the effort.

But 3d accelerators changed that, in order to do graphics with 3d accelerators as time went on, game graphics needed wireframed, then textured. Then they needed to address the greater resolutions, so detail needed to be exponentially greater than previous "Blocky" generations on all possible textures. Then lighting had to be implemented, and particle effects, and all sorts of other things, all in higher resolutions.

This increased the development cost for PC games exponentially. Case in point, Sid Meiers Pirates!. I don't remember the exact numbers, but there were 50% more artists than programmers for that game.(I counted once in the credits in the manual, I want to say it was 26 artists). For those who haven't experienced this game, it isn't a very graphicly intense game compared to efforts like Doom 3 or Half-life 2. The budget is insane for art.

What this has done is created a scenario where studios were betting the farm on every game, development costs in Art had spiraled so high that a poor selling game could mean the end of the company. Studios became dependent on Publishers as they couldn't afford to bankroll the efforts on their own. Publishers, in turn, became gun-shy and the majority of what gets green light in games is some version of Doom or Warcraft/Starcraft.

Studios en masse moved to consoles. Consoles were still on low-res TV's, they didn't need the massive art budgets PC games needed. So they still retained huge profits.

Now that changes, Consoles are running resolutions equivalent to PC's, and they'll run into the same problems. Art costs will spiral to be equivalent with PC games, and like the PC Industry in the early 2000's studios are going to buy the farm left and right.

This is coupled with, and important because of, PS3's architecture. Cell is dramatically different from PC's and X-box's. Code written for PC's and X-box's will have to be drastically changed, because Cell's single full-fledged core is useless for running single threaded code, and absolutely cannot run Out-of-Order code at speed. To run something on Cell, all code will have to be rewritten/optimized to account for Cells sub-processors and In-Order architecture. The reverse holds true as well, neither X-box 360 nor PC's can handle the code for the sub-processors as they work quite differently.

What this means is that to develop for a combination of systems developers will have to literally have a decent sized rewrite of the code base to run on either PC/X-box or PS3.

Not only will there be a huge cost increase to Studios because of the increased Graphics needs, but multi-system development will add even more. Studio's like EA and Take 2 who've released products on all 3 will take massive cuts in profits from the overhead caused by the differences created by PS3.

Compare this to the similiarity between X-box 360 and PC's, while they are different processors, they are similiar enough for code to be easily portable. Bethseda's Oblivion showed this, released nearly simultaneously for both systems, the only difference is that in some scenarios Anti-Aliasing isn't available in the PC version.

Studios will rapidly find that it is much more economical to develop for X-box/PC than trying to include PS3, and by going the MS route they still have access to two markets, while the Sony route only gives one.

Couple this with the insanely high prices of PS3 Consoles and Sony has a disaster waiting to happen. By the time the prices drop, Studios will have shifted development to X-box/PC instead of PS3 due to the low number of units Sony will be able to sell, vs the better costs/revenues offered by the MS route. Remember, Studios will now be facing the possibility that a poor selling game means that the doors close, because of the increase in costs due to graphics. Potential buyers, seeing fewer games, will be more apt to purchase an MS based product.

Sony can't recover from this, public opinion is fickle, and in the end it's the box with the games that sells. They don't have time to wait for prices to drop, because the Studios can't handle the increase in development costs anymore.

The final nail in the coffin for Sony is their complete lack of exclusive A-List properties. When PS2 released, it released on the back of Tomb Raider, Blood Omen, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy 7, Grand Turismo, Parasite Eve, and several other high profile games. But PS2 hasn't had any exclusive high profile games, Tomb Raider and Blood Omen were ridden into the ground. Resident Evil went to Nintendo. Final Fantasy has been "Ho-Hum" since 7, without generating anywhere near the fanfare. Grand Turismo has pretty much done all it can do. Sony has no A-List titles exclusive to it to bank on anymore.

Meanwhile, MS has capatilized on several PC Developers to make games for both PC/Xbox. Knights of the Old Republic, Fable, Halo, Morrowind/Oblivion. MS has a stable of A-list games. Oblivion is out. Halo 3 is in development. No one will admit to it, but Knights of the Old Republic and Fable both have sequels in development(There are no secrets in game development).

MS can release A-list title after title, while PS3 sits on obscene prices with no "Must have" games in it's stable.

 

[Fredster]

Lack of titles like Like Metal Gear, Socom, Ratchet, Jak, GT, Katamari, God of War, Shadow of the Collosus, etc? Must be golden nails in that coffin...

 

[Kyle McKnight]

Ya, no secrets, especially when they put out a trailer for Fable 2.

 

[Andrew Bunk]

FWIW, GTA3 was exclusive to PS2 when it launched, and it was the reason I bought my PS2. GTA:VC was also exclusive for at least 6 months.

Now, I own a PS2 and GC. Never been into XBOX and won't be buying a 360. That said, the likelihood of me buying a PS3 is getting pretty low. The difference between 2002 and now is that I have a kickass gaming PC I built myself, and it's more convenient and rewarding for me to play games on the PC. Especially since the games I'm into the most lately are games that are only on the PC or are infinitely better in their multiplayer capabilities on PC (World Of Warcraft and Battlefield 2 come to mind).

Although even if I did own a PS3, I wouldn't use it for watching movies. I want a player designed to be a movie player first.

 

[Greg T]

The AVS forum has a poll stating 54% of enthusiast...not gamers , would use the PS3 as a BD player...out of well over 300 voters.


Second of all...I had a POS HD-A1...and it was anything but a pleasure to own.
And if you think re-syncing the display, as well as starting the movie over every time you push enter menu,stop, or change resolution is a bug caused by the remote...I don't know what to say.
The remote does not cause hdmi errors or the clipping of both blacks/whites...or the blue screen instead of the movie problem.

I don't believe for a minute that the remote has anything to do with the freeze ups during play back...or lock ups of the player on start up....more like the discontinued Intel chip used for processing, that had already been deemed to slow for pc use is the cause.
How about the pops when certain functions were selected that would shoot through my speakers when hooked up via analog.
The broken 720p output....yep the remotes fault.

Need more...because theres more.

 

[Zach Foster]

Yeah, I think that Sony is well solidified with established A-List titles. I wouldn't be so fast to discredit them in favor of Microsoft. Microsoft may have all the money in the game, but history proves that Sony has all the experience. This will be why I will pick up a PS3 come November, and not a XBox 360.

 

[Derek Ambrose]

I have been thinking about the PS3 and Blu-Ray for a bit now and wonder about the possibility that the Blu-Ray drive in the PS3 WILL NOT be able to play Blu-Ray Movie discs.

Think about it.

1. I cannot find any official reference/statement from Sony stating that the PS3 will play Blu-Ray "movie discs" just Blu-Ray "content". This could mean only the video games could playback at launch.

2. With all the talk about digital content management rights and having Blu-Ray connected to the internet etc. Is it not conceivable that Sony could "unlock" the Blu-Ray movie function at a later date or at an additioanl cost?

3. At E3 why not even show just a clip of a 1080p Blu-Ray movie playing back from a PS3?

4. How can Sony defend the cost of the unit to other Blu-Ray manufacturers?

I have scoured a few boards and not found any talk on this possibility, but I would not be surprised to hear that the PS3 Blu-Ray function will be for games and authorized content only.

Thoughts????

Derek Ambrose