Analysts Foresee Another Banner Year For Videogame Industry 205
Analysts observing the videogame industry forsee 2008 being another blockbuster year in sales. Sales during the month of February were considerably up, according to the NPD group. Early in the year is historically a very slow time in the game sales calendar, making the 34% jump for the month highly significant. Grand Theft Auto IV is likely to be an engine for sales throughout the year: "The game, which will be available on the Xbox 360 and Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3, is expected to boost sales of both consoles. Pre-orders have been better than expected, according to its publisher, Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan, expects the game to sell about 9 million units during the company's fiscal year, which ends in October. Roughly 6 million of this, he added, will be to Xbox 360 owners."
I hate to nitpick... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll buy that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Could be (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I hate to nitpick... (Score:3, Insightful)
Mediocrity has become the norm, and the many people who don't understand that excellence is its own reward, or that doing something at all means you should make an effort to do it well shall vent their rage at you for pointing this out. Since they lack any real power or influence, and certainly can't use reason to support their viewpoint, they will mod you down! Mwa hahaha, that'll teach you.
Not shocking.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Economic Conditions (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Economic Conditions (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Could be (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not really. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good sales? Not likely with a depression around (Score:3, Insightful)
Slashdot mindset (Score:2, Insightful)
Going strong since its launch in 2000, Sony's PlayStation 2 continued to outpace its successor. The PS2 sold 351,800 units compared with 280,800 for the PS3.
I'm sure the next GTA will be a popular game, as will Metal Gear. But c'mon, the 360 and PS3 aren't driving this train - and it's not even close.
Re:mgs4 and brawl must also be an engine (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't want to be viewed as a fanboy, it's just that unless Nintendo invests in another factory (which they won't), their sales really have nowhere to go but down.
Re:I hate to nitpick... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I hate to nitpick... (Score:1, Insightful)
Have you considered that they're intelligent enough to know that spelling mistakes happen frequently and they can easily decode what the other person meant because they have sufficient brainpower to do so? Have you considered that on a website such as slashdot that people shouldnt' be 'expectd to perform' because they get that shit all day at work and school and just want to relax? Slashdot may have its perfectionists but it's got a lot of people with a lot of life experience who know what to look for and what to mod up or down, and they're not going to discriminate like their nazi professors if it adds value to the discussion.
As you get older there is a point where you lose your substance for those who worship at the altar of aesthetics. I see basic, trivial, spelling mistakes as petty when we know what they meant. There's not a person on this earth who doesn't make mistakes ALL the time, to be irked by something so trivial on a site that exists in the real world (tm) and not in unrealistic fantasy classroom.
Can we not leave the status bullshit at work and the university and just get on with the substance of the discussion?
Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still. (Score:1, Insightful)
Then there are some significant PS3 exclusives coming out for holiday season. Microsoft has no obvious counter at this point. Then there is the noise issue, the heat issue, the failure rate issue, the lower color resolution issue, the lower processing power issue, the bungee defection issue, the older technology issue, the lack of hd player issue, the entertainment division attrition issue, the continuing losses issue, the morale issue... many issues that together bode ill for XBox 360 prospects from now on.
Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not a fan of either the 360 or the PS3, but I feel it's worth noting that the XBox has Gears of War 2 in the pipeline, and has exclusive downloadable episodes announced for GTA4. Those may or may not be enough to counter Sony's push, but they do exist and do provide an answering salvo to some degree.
There's also the E3 to be concerned about. While Nintendo is outright saying that they're holding their cards close, the other competitors haven't said anything either way. I'm fairly certain that Sony has already played their cards and are in it for the long haul, but the possibility exists that Microsoft could produce a big announcement at the show. Again, I'm not sure of the likelihood of Microsoft coming up with something big enough to stop Sony in their tracks, but the possibility definitely exists there.
Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still. (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, you see there is the fallacy. Xbox 360 is not an HD-DVD player, it's a games player. Many PS3 owners fail to appreciate this distinction, but almost every single person who bought a 360 did so for the games, not for the movies.
Counter exclusives; there's GTS IV's episodic content, Too Human, Gears 2, Ninja Gaiden 2, Halo Wars (& Halo: Chronicles?), Fable 2... but perhaps they're not "obvious" to you.
And as for your list of "issues" (color resolution? You're kidding, right?), the only significant issue to the games market is the failure rate, which is no longer a problem for new sales. The rest only seem to matter to the occasional troll like yourself.
Re:Slashdot mindset (Score:2, Insightful)
Read this article about how the Wii costs about half the price of the other toys to develop for, it's fun:
http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/features/cost-of-development-greatly-favors-wii-say-publishers/69714/ [gamedaily.com]
There's nothing marginal about 50%+ less for Wii dev cost.
And $2000 for a SDK is not an arm an a leg. Here's another link to save you the aggravation of searching:
http://www.warioworld.com/apply/wii.html [warioworld.com]
As noted by the other response to your post, the Wii shares many similarities to its predecessor, which make it easier and cheaper to develop for, especially for the studios that put their time in on the Cube. And just to clear something up, there's nothing last-gen about a Wii's performance or the tech it uses, which is 6 years more advanced.
A publisher doesn't need to sell nearly as many units on a Wii as it does on the PS3 or 360 in order to see a return on their investment. This this is do to the lower development cost and simpler hardware configuration. **Namco stated that it needs to sell 500,000 PS3 games to make a profit as an example. Compare this to 165,000, which is what I've read is needed for the Wii.
** http://www.gamespot.com/news/6162509.html [gamespot.com]
So just because a game sells more units on a 360 as an example, that doesn't mean it has made a profit for its publisher/developer. With the Wii's HUGE user base for its relatively short life on the market along with its "significantly" lower development cost, publishers/developers have a better chance of seeing a profit on a Wii game than the PS3 or 360.
OMG!! I'm using this 12 year old kid term, because you used HARDCORN -- now I must rant. First off, let me present you with a link that disproves your myth that kids that like to aim with their thumb and deem blood as mature, buy more games. The supposed hardcore gamer is a joke. I've been gaming since the age of pong. There's nothing hardcore about most console gamers, since they're used to games that have generally been dumbed down do to the limiting nature of a gamepad. Compared to the games I played in the eighties and ninteies, games now days are a walk in the park. Sure, they look way better, but they're way less sophisticated... I loved the complexity that is SYSTEM SHOCK, I hated the simpleton that is BioShock.
Anway, here's the link, read fact number "4."
http://www.theesa.com/facts/top_10_facts.php [theesa.com]
The average age of the most frequent game buyer is 38 years old. In 2007, 92 percent of computer game buyers and 80 percent of console game buyers were over the age of 18.
Also notice that the average gamer is age 33, not the teenage kid publishers have been marketing to for the past 8 years, so guys hat are in their twenties now.
Kids won't have access to a flash cart -- unless they have parents like my friends. Guys my age buy our games and on that note, buy your DS games you pirate!
<]=)
Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still. (Score:5, Insightful)
In summary, you are making up issues that the 360 doesn't have, and you are obviously a PS3 fanboy. I think the 360 is a great console, and I think the PS3 and Wii are great consoles as well. I don't see what the point of the obvious attempt at trash talking the 360 (or any console). I want all three companies to be in stiff competition so they can keep churning out some great games.
Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still. (Score:3, Insightful)
Just FYI, I've been working as a programmer in the film/video graphics industry for the last 12 years, so I'm very familiar with the difference between 8bit/component and deeper colours. "Washed out black and saturated regions" are actually symptoms of poor colour mapping, usually NTSC (16-235) video being displayed on a non-NTSC (0-255) monitor, and have nothing to do with 8bit's low dynamic range (which can manifest as visible banding in certain colour ranges).
While it's certainly true that HDMI 1.3 can support >8bits, that is of course no guarantee that all video passed along it is >8bits. The PS3 uses nVidia's RSX chip, which is based on the GeForce 7900, and like all nVidia chips of that era it uses a max 8bit per channel framebuffer (textures may be deeper, but not the framebuffer). Even potentially deep-colour Blu-Ray movies must be decoded and rendered into this 8bit framebuffer, so the PS3's output is bottlenecked at 8 bits. That's why you've never seen any articles actually confirming real deep-colour, only marketing literature and misleading online screenshots with "washed out blacks".
I always get a chuckle when PS3 fans bring up their beloved "HDMI 1.3" bullet point, because the fact is, it's only good for passing through TrueHD and DTS-HD audio. Oh, whoops [engadgethd.com]...
Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still. (Score:4, Insightful)
You're not a gfx programmer yourself, are you? Otherwise you'd be linking to nVidia specifications [nvidia.com], not consumer reviews. The relevent OpenGL extension is GL_ARB_color_buffer_float [nvidia.com], which was indeed implemented for G70-class hardware as of R75 drivers (actually, GL_NV_float_buffer.txt [nvidia.com] was implemented even earlier).
Yes, you can use this for offscreen framebuffer objects and pbuffers, which is all you need when float texture blending for HDR rendering, but this is then tone-mapped to the 32bit displayable framebuffer for output. It's still not possible to get more than 8bit RGB actually out of the chip. Apart from SGI (who patented [google.com] float rasterisation), I've only heard of an old Matrox card claiming to do real 10bit integer RGBA output (under quite specific conditions, apparently). Even nVidia's current high-end Quadros [nvidia.com] can't do it (well, unless you count 10bit 4:2:2 YUV from the SDI connector on some models). I'd welcome any comments showing real evidence to the contrary (preferably from someone who hasn't been repeatedly modded down as a troll), but I've never seen it done.
As I said earlier, the "washed out blacks" you say you're seeing is poor colour mapping, not lack of deep colour.There it is right there. Yes, the PS3 player supports TrueHD, but it does notpass it over the HDMI link - it gets decoded to good ol' HDMI 1.0-standard multichannel PCM first. Read the rest of the article - a Sony rep has confirmed this. And AFAIK the PS3 still does not yet support DTS-HD; it only passes through the DTS component. Incidentally, I found it ironic that you're accusing me of trolling :-)
You don't have to convince me that the PS3 is good hardware. It certainly has the edge in CPU power, and the Blu-Ray player is a valuable addition (though it's also the primary reason Sony released late and expensive, throwing away their lead from the PS2). Its graphics are debatable [ign.com] though, and most unbiased people consider PS3 and Xbox 360 GPU power to be roughly equivalent. More on topic, the PS3's HDMI port is more capable than the 360's (which can't even pass multichannel PCM) - but the HDMI 1.3 output is pure marketing, nothing more. Most TV sets (even those that accept deep colour) still can't actually display it [avsforum.com], only use it for cleaner tweaking. Certainly no plasma or consumer LCD panel that I'm aware of is capable.