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PlayStation (Games) Businesses

Eidos May Have Set Bad PS3 Precedent 82

Posted by Zonk from the still-working-out-the-kinks dept.
Ars Technica opines on Eidos' decision to hold off on PS3 games until 2008. Though they make a point of mentioning all of the great steps forward Sony and the PS3 have taken in the last month or so (LittleBigPlanet, Home, the EU launch), they feel this decision may have ramifications for the console. "Though Eidos isn't the most prominent European developer--noteworthy releases for 2006 included the surprisingly decent Just Cause, Tomb Raider: Legend and Hitman: Blood Money--this may set a dangerous precedent for other developers. If Sony doesn't step up to become more proactive at keeping the flow of good games steady, the installed base may not continue to grow quickly enough and developers may begin to pull support, creating a lack of games. This vicious cycle is hard to escape, as Sony has previously learned with the PSP's port problem."
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Eidos May Have Set Bad PS3 Precedent More

Eidos May Have Set Bad PS3 Precedent

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  • Careful with the Headlines (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <akaimbatman AT gmail DOT com> on Monday April 02, 2007 @02:00PM (#18576681) Homepage Journal
    The actual article says "dangerous" precident, not "bad". In this particular case, there's a world of difference. This news may be "bad" for Sony et al, but it's actually quite "good" for the shareholders of these companies.

    It's well known that the opening weeks of a game's release are the most important, as the period that follows causes the game to be overshadowed by competitors. If I were a shareholder in Eidos, I wouldn't want them releasing hot properties (e.g. Tomb Raider) to a system that can't sustain record or near-record sales in its opening week. Better to delay the games by a few months, then announce them to a much larger fan base.

    • Re:Careful with the Headlines (Score:5, Insightful)

      by j00r0m4nc3r ( 959816 ) on Monday April 02, 2007 @02:12PM (#18576843)
      You're right. It's not Eidos's responsibility to worry about Sony's bottom line or the success of their console. They only need to worry about their own shareholders. Sure, Eidos wants to sell software for Sony's hardware, but they would be just as happy to sell software to XB360 owners if the PS3 fails. It's also not Eidos's responsibility to worry about whether or not their business decisions will set a precedent for other publishers to follow. They make business decisions with their own bottom line in mind, NOT Sony's or any other publisher's.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by flewp ( 458359 )

        It's also not Eidos's responsibility to worry about whether or not their business decisions will set a precedent for other publishers to follow. They make business decisions with their own bottom line in mind, NOT Sony's or any other publisher's.

        While I agree on the first part of the quoted comment, and also the second, the two may be at odds with each other. Okay, so that may not make sense. What I mean though is that by setting a bad precedent, it may hurt their bottom line. For example, if they hold off on PS3 releases till 2008, and others look at that and follow suit, it could hurt the PS3's sales, and therefor Eidos' bottom line. If they create games with a 2008 release schedule, and others do the same, and it then affects the sales of t

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by iainl ( 136759 )
          That depends, though, on whether they plan on selling games next year to PS3 owners who would not buy them on any other platform. Judging from the upcoming Tomb Raider: Anniversary, all they're actually doing is saying that the PS2 has plenty of life in it. And if PS3 owners can play those PS2 games as well, then so much the better.

          If anyone wants to buy a shiny graphics version, then there are a lot more 360s out there at the moment.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mgblst ( 80109 )
        if they spend money working on a title for the ps3, you don't think that they have a vested interest in how many PS3 are sold? So, they don't care, as long as they haven't spent any significant resources in developing for the PS3 already. If they had, then they do really care how many PS3 are sold. This does affect their bottom line.
    • Eidos has to weigh the larger returns in later releases to an increased market against the loss of all revenue until then from holding back.

      They should release whatever they can now to make what they can now, while rolling out the next generation game for 2008's expanded market. The development and marketing resources aren't both needed for each of those tasks by the company. Unless perhaps the current market can't return enough profit to pay to market to it. Which would really mean Eidos has terrible marke

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by flitty ( 981864 )
      The reason why this is news, is because the PS3 is lacking in titles as it is. If there were a dirth of titles for the ps3 coming out, then this wouldn't be news, and would be seen as a delay for development time, not waiting for the customer base to grow.

      If every company keeps waiting for a customer base, there will never be one.
    • Ummm..so on the news that the PS3 has actually now sold 3 million consoles worldwide [vgcharts.org], this really looks like a dumb decision by Eidos, especially when considering that in March 2006, the 360 had sold less than half that [vgcharts.org]. This idiotic "PS3 is dead" banter from the Nintendo and 360 fanboys is kind of old. To say that a console isn't selling well and stop releasing titles at this point is a dumb business move, especially when the growth rate of hardware sales is trending upwards and the big selling points ar

  • This is very much what we have been speculating about for weeks now. If Sony can't keep developers interested, then they can end up in serious trouble. One mid-rank games developer (as an aside, I remember when I would see Eidos' name in the intros and actually get excited) holding off for a year does not mean a whole lot - yet. But it may indeed be a sign of greater things to come.

    The PS3 is an exciting system but it's looking more and more like Sony has reached too far in a variety of ways, not least the many indignities they've inflicted upon their customers over the last several months.

    I'd have to say that the continued failings of HD-DVD and the success of Blu-Ray, inflated as it is by the media and certain individuals with an agenda to push, is looking like the only saving grace for the PS3. It remains to be seen if Blu-Ray is indeed going to win the HD video race; even if it does, can it save the PS3?

    • If most people think that stretched SD shows on their new HDTV is HD, then no, Blu-Ray won't save the PS3.

    • Re:This is precisely what we have been talking abo (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Cadallin ( 863437 ) on Monday April 02, 2007 @03:00PM (#18577523)
      This isn't a "sign" of things to come. It's just another event in the continuing trail of tears that has been the PS3 launch. Sony has already lost several third party exclusives, to developers announcing they are going cross platform or even 360 exclusive. Sony has two real holds at the moment. The Blu-Ray/HD-DVD war is still very much undecided, and may swing in their favor. The other is Final Fantasy. Sony is hoping at this point that the launch of Final Fantasy XIII is going to sell 10-20 million PS3s. If *I* were head of Microsoft games division, I'd be offering Squeenix a deal, FFXIII goes cross platform, or 360 exclusive, and they get a blank check on which to write the biggest number they can think of. The rushing sound heard immediately afterward would be Sony's future swirling down the proverbial toilet bowl.

      Sony really needs to get in gear. Playstation HOME and LittleBigPlanet were a *Start*. They need more announcements of top tier exclusives, not defection and waffling on the part of developers.

      Mass market HD video is a very dangerous thing to bet on. Most people are not videophiles. DVD is "good 'nuff" for the majority of people. Communicating the benefit of ever escalating resolutions when most consumers are still squinting at a 25" to 30" screen from 8' to 10' is really, really hard. Big Screens just don't have the market penetration to make HD an easy sell, and if the people backing the HD formats don't watch it, DVD and digital distribution may eat their lunch before breakfast time.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 7Prime ( 871679 )
        Just a heads up, since it seems from your post that you haven't heard. FF13s exclusivity has already been called into question, with the president of Squeenix's European division stating that the title's exclusivity is not assured. Although, if I were S-E, I'd probably be more interested in talking with Nintendo than with Microsoft, due to the much higher sales of Wiis in Japan. Sure the graphics might take a hit, but the game would still be about 10x prittier than FF12, if it were on the Wii. Both systems

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by cbreaker ( 561297 )
          You do realize that the Wii is basically an overclocked GameCube?

          Final Fantasy has always been about the graphics, as well as progress-quest style gameplay. If you put it on GameCube, I mean Wii, it will only look marginally better then older GameCube titles.

          It just won't happen, unless they say "screw the graphics" and go for the easy cash that might blemish the entire franchise.
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • You do realize that the Wii is basically an overclocked GameCube?

            NO, I DIDN'T REALIZE THAT. I HAVEN'T BEEN HEARING PEOPLE VECTOR THAT SAME FACTOID FOR THE PAST YEAR AND A HALF.

            Final Fantasy has always been about the graphics, as well as progress-quest style gameplay.

            You must not remember Final Fantasies I through VI. The graphics of the first few games were blocky even by NES standards!
            • Yea well the reason I re-hashed the same "factoid" is because it REALLY is not fast machine. It's $250 and what are we really getting for that money?

              But it's not about the price, it's the fact that yes, FF has been about graphics as much as any other big title for years now. I don't think the original games were any worse off on graphics then other games - in fact I remember Final Fantasy for the SNES being really cool in terms of graphics and sound.

              I think it could be a mistake to release it for the Wii

          • Re:This is precisely what we have been talking abo (Score:5, Insightful)

            by 7Prime ( 871679 ) on Monday April 02, 2007 @04:23PM (#18578635) Homepage Journal
            Actually, seeing as though the GameCube is about twice as powerful as the PS2, not to mention that the hardware anti-aliasing made it look even more than that, an FF game on just the GameCube would be a huge step up. All people really care about is progress in graphics, and having the next FF game on the Wii would be exactly that, and by quite a bit. Actually, the differences between 8-12 have all been fairly minor, even the graphics of FF9 are not too far behind that of FFX. FF12 looked extremely glitchy, because the PS2 was fairly inferior, graphically, that an "overclocked GameCube" (of which the Wii is actually quite a bit more than just that), would be a huge sigh of relief. FF12 sold JUST FINE, just 6 months ago, on a system that was able to produce graphics that were about the quality of the GameCube's launch titles.

            I think you underestimate the jRPG playing community, graphics are really not as important as you might think. This is a genre that began with text-based gameplay and progressed to sub-standard NES and SNES graphics, and on to extremely block and subpar 3D graphics (FF7 was a hit, but no one claimed that it was a graphical wonder). The important thing is immersion, and that comes from a host of things, but mostly: story, characters, writing, design, music... and yes, graphics. But the graphics of an overclocked gamecube would be more than suitable for the next release. You can bet that if it went to the Wii, people would snatch it up like you wouldn't believe, I don't think you'd hear much complaining. Remember that this is largely the same audience that snatched up Twilight Princess and, for the most part, absolutely loved it.

            People remember the graphics of a game, mostly, for its most dazzling graphical moments... all of which are done with pre-rendered CG that will look identical on all consoles (under ED resolution). Snazzy real-time graphics are far more the baby of the FPS community than of the RPG playing community. After all, a lot of the time we're content being burried beneath menus, or reading text boxes, anyway. You're just putting way too much stock in it. Yes, an OverClocked GameCube will more than suffice.
            • Games are quickly moving away from the pre-rendered cut-scene plot advancements in a major way. If they had to supplement bad graphics with big CGI cut scenes it would be a big step backwards.

              You shouldn't assume that I don't know what an RPG is, or where they came from. Final Fantasy is no longer one of them. They've become action-adventure, where you advance from one scene to the next, in a very linear fashion. This game is still fun to play, but it's not really roll playing anymore then a Super Mar
              • Games are quickly moving away from the pre-rendered cut-scene plot advancements in a major way. If they had to supplement bad graphics with big CGI cut scenes it would be a big step backwards.

                Oh, the irony of implying that because cut-scenes are moving away from pre-rendered graphics, that a Nintendo console is insufficient to produce them.

                Nintendo has *never* done pre-rendered cut scenes to advance a story. There are a couple of shitty videos at the beginning of stuff like Mario Party and some of the Mari

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by miro f ( 944325 )
                  just to be the devil's advocate, Metroid Prime: Hunters had pre-rendered cutscenes (and it's really obvious too)

                  never is a big word ;)

                • Re: (Score:1)

                  by KDR_11k ( 778916 )
                  Actually Wind Waker and Metroid Prime use videos but only for e.g. quick scene changes that would take too long to load or scenes with too many characters in them (e.g. MP2's Ing assault on the Federation troopers cutscene).
        • Hironobu Sakaguchi mentioned in passing in an interview that he believed that Squenix had ported the White Engine (the engine behind FFXIII) to Xbox 360. Granted, he left the company, but as the founder of the whole franchise and essentially the only reason that Square survived the NES era at all, you'd imagine he probably still knows some of the Square team.

          Additionally the other FFXIII (Verus) is running Unreal Engine 3, which as we're all aware is running quite nicely on 360 hardware too.

          There's another

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by 7Prime ( 871679 )
            People mistake "not first place" for "not doing very well". Yes, Dragon Quest is Japans favorite jRPG series, and Final Fantasy is the favorite jRPG of the rest of the world, but don't mistake that for "Final Fantasy doesn't do as well in Japan". Final Fantasy does extremely well in japan, at something like the 5th best selling games in the country (mostly after DQ, Pokemon, and Mario).

            Per capita, Final Fantasy does even better in Japan than it does in the rest of the world, it just so happens that one othe

      • Sony really needs to get in gear. Playstation HOME and LittleBigPlanet were a *Start*. They need more announcements of top tier exclusives, not defection and waffling on the part of developers.

        I think you're spot on concerning HOME and LBP. They are a start but little else.

        However, there are two factors relating to games that can push systems: Quality and Quantity. The AAA titles push systems, but so does the security of knowing there is a vast selection (even if most of it is crap).

        Eidos may not have GTA4,

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by cbreaker ( 561297 )
        I don't understand all the doomsday talk of the PS3. The Xbox 360 had extremely mediocre games at first, and not too many to choose from. The PS3 is selling better then the Xbox 360 did at the same time since release.

        So I don't get it. They've sold an assload of PS3's and they're still selling an assload of them. Just because one game developer, that only has a couple titles anyways, is going to wait doesn't mean Sony "needs to get in gear."

        The PS3 is a captive market and any company that doesn't relea

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by amuro98 ( 461673 )
          The biggest problem is that even without Sony's hype, everyone expected the PS3 to surpass the PS2 and once again dominate the market.

          That hasn't happend.

          Worse still, it probably won't happen.

          The PS3 isn't a bad machine per se, but again, it's the games that sell the hardware. Sony has forgotten this by mainly emphasizing the PS3 as a Blu-Ray player to a market that doesn't quite care about that. Meanwhile, the PS3 suffers from a lack of good exclusive titles. Most of the good games for the PS3 are also
          • I mustn't be as much as a gaming freak as .. apparently everyone else, because I don't really remember Sony hyping the system any more then any other system or company.

            I also think it's naive to believe that the PS3 would be able to capture any big market this quickly. Think about it - the original Playstation was like a sleeper hit. It came from nowhere and stormed the market because nothing could touch it's performance or capabilities, and it wasn't too expensive. Sony stepped in and captured the marke

        • I don't understand all the doomsday talk of the PS3. The Xbox 360 had extremely mediocre games at first, and not too many to choose from. The PS3 is selling better then the Xbox 360 did at the same time since release.

          The reason you don't understand that is that you don't understand this: Selling better than another console did at the same delta from the release date is utterly and completely irrelevant. It matters to NO ONE. What matters is where the PS3 is compared to the Xbox 360 and the Wii today. If it

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by antek9 ( 305362 )

            Selling better than another console did at the same delta from the release date is utterly and completely irrelevant. It matters to NO ONE. What matters is where the PS3 is compared to the Xbox 360 and the Wii today. If it's not there today, then the market isn't there today, and game developers will be planning to bring out their titles for a console that actually has been adopted by players today.

            Riight, leaving aside your relentless anti PS3 flamebait rants on slashdot for the last X weeks now for the time being (what is your mission anyway, crusader?), how stupid do you suppose game developers are? Do you honestly think any company would base their development plans on a momentary snapshot of installed base numbers alone? Development plans stretching one or two years in the future are something that our wise drinkypoo would solidly anchor on TODAY'S cosole sales numbers. Which is (concerning PS3

            • Riight, leaving aside your relentless anti PS3 flamebait rants on slashdot for the last X weeks now for the time being (what is your mission anyway, crusader?

              Dude, if you've been paying attention to my endless rants then you surely have seen the explanations. I am simply anti-Sony. They have shit upon me for the last time - well, probably not. They will probably continue to shut down businesses doing entirely legal things by filing enough lawsuits against them that they cannot stay in business. They will p

          • Well then you're a complete moron, because if it were ALWAYS and EVER about TODAY, then the only games produced would be on the fucking Atari 2600. There's a shit load of them out there! Or the SNES!

            A product needs to be produced and sold. Sony is doing that. What I don't understand is how you don't understand that you can't magically produce 20 million of ANYTHING - it has to be produced and sold, which IS HAPPENING, and stronger then the 360 did.

            That doesn't tell the whole story surely, but more sale

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by wiremind ( 183772 )
        >Most people are not videophiles. DVD is "good 'nuff" for the majority of people.

        People looked realistic back on broadcast tv at 440 x 480.
        Jumping the resolution up doesnt make games more realistic, good texturing does.

      • In a big way. Not that i'd expect FFXIII or XIV on the wii, but theyre doing another crystal chronicles game for the wii, they already released the highly successful FFIII remake on the DS (which they chose over the PS2), and theres a sequel to FFXII coming out on the DS later this year. Also outside FF, the next full dragon quest game is going to be a DS exclusive.

      • If *I* were head of Microsoft games division, I'd be offering Squeenix a deal, FFXIII goes cross platform, or 360 exclusive, and they get a blank check on which to write the biggest number they can think of. The rushing sound heard immediately afterward would be Sony's future swirling down the proverbial toilet bowl.

        And that might work if Square-Enix was an American company. But it's not. It's a Japanese company run by Japanese businessmen. And you know what one thing Japanese businessmen hate the most?

        Sugg

    • "Developers! Developers! Developers!"

  • Maybe by then the tools will be finished (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Monday April 02, 2007 @02:20PM (#18576973) Homepage

    Remember, porting to the PS3 is a huge pain, because of the weird Cell architecture, with very limited memory per CPU. As the tools get better, the costs of porting decline. From a developer perspective, it makes sense to wait.

    • The problem is that the PS3 had the same problems the PS2 had in terms of difficulty to develop for. The big difference is that there was an incentive to develop well for the PS2 because it released first, thus having the largest userbase from the get-go and Microsoft banked well on that fact this time around. All multi-platform games designed today are for the Xbox 360 in mind first and the PS3 is an afterthought. There will be little reason for developers to "work extra hard on PS3 games" if there's no o

      • Re:Maybe by then the tools will be finished (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Animats ( 122034 ) on Monday April 02, 2007 @07:12PM (#18580585) Homepage

        The problem is that the PS3 had the same problems the PS2 had in terms of difficulty to develop for.

        Actually, no. On the PS2 and its predecessors, the wierd hardware was mostly devoted to graphics. On the PS3, the graphics hardware is relatively conventional; there's an NVidia GPU inside. It's the non-graphics part of the machine that's non-conventional. This is new in consoles.

        Worse, the wierd hardware didn't make it cheaper. Which is the killer. Always before, the wierd hardware on game consoles has been there because you couldn't get equivalent price/performance with conventional hardware.

        This wasn't Sony's intent. The original plan for the PS3 was that the Cell processors would do the graphics work. If you see IBM demos of the Cell processor, they actually show it doing graphics. But it didn't really work out. Without enough memory per Cell CPU for a frame buffer, let alone texture maps, the graphics pipeline mapped badly to the Cell architecture. So Sony had to add in an NVidia GPU, which pushed costs up and slipped the schedule.

        The Cell concept isn't all that bad, but it needs maybe 16MB per CPU to get programmers out of the streaming straitjacket.

        Early in the Cell life-cycle, I went to a talk at Stanford given by IBM's architect for the thing. There was kind of a "build it and they will come" attitude - he didn't know how to use the thing effectively, but that was someone else's problem. That's always a bad sign. Years ago, I went to a talk by a lead Itanium guy, and he said much the same thing - it requires a near-omniscient compiler to get the scheduling right, and they hadn't been able to develop one yet, but he was confident someone would.

        Both the Cell and the Itanium share the property that they make it easier to design the chip by pushing work onto the compiler people. That's usually not a good sign. On the other hand, if you let programmers design the CPU, you get something like a VAX, which has a clean, easy-to-program instruction set that could never be made to run fast. Amazingly, x86 is actually a good compromise.

    • porting to the PS3 is a huge pain, because of the weird Cell architecture, with very limited memory per CPU.

      You mean "per SPE". The Cell has only one CPU (in the classical sense), which has access to all 256MB of system memory.

      Each of the 7 SPEs has only 256KB of local memory, which would have been enough for 40% of anybody back in 1980.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by amuro98 ( 461673 )
      "but it's hard to develop for..." yeah, yeah. The developers always complained about this, but it was never an issue for the PS1 and PS2, despite the competition having better hardware and better development tools than Sony.

      Of course, once games started selling a million copies, the developers got oddly quiet about how "difficult" it was to deal with the PS' architecture...

      This time, however, the 360 has proven to be a solid competitor, and arguably, this is the first time Sony's had to deal with such a th

      • Re:Maybe by then the tools will be finished (Score:5, Informative)

        by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Monday April 02, 2007 @05:29PM (#18579499)

        "but it's hard to develop for..." yeah, yeah. The developers always complained about this, but it was never an issue for the PS1 and PS2, despite the competition having better hardware and better development tools than Sony.

        Of course, once games started selling a million copies, the developers got oddly quiet about how "difficult" it was to deal with the PS' architecture...
        Just because the developers figured it out doesn't mean it wasn't a bitch at the time. I was fortunate to jump to console development fairly late in the PS2 life cycle when most of the tools had matured quite a bit, but I knew a few folks that developed release titles, and so had the toughest time. Our company's engine was cross-platform among Xbox, GC, and PS2. Easily 90% of the optimization work was done on the PS2 version of the engine, trying to get it up to speed with the other two consoles.

        One thing many people don't realize is that the PS2 is largely a to-the-metal programming job. Abstraction in the OS is pretty minimal, unlike the Xbox and GC APIs (which are DirectX and OpenGL derivatives, respectively). Early PS2 developers were writing vector unit programs in a custom assembly language (custom C compilers came later). Threaded programming is pretty tough to do in the best cases, but threaded programming in assembly on custom hardware interfacing with C/C++ code with minimal documentation (early docs were all Japanse) and scant samples? Yeah, that's pretty damn hard.

        The fact of the matter is that the toughest job for developers is very early in the console's life cycle - constantly changing APIs and hardware revs, poor documentation, lack of mature tool support, etc. The reason you heard developers get "oddly quiet" is because things eventually get figured out and better supported, and they moved on to bigger and better things.
      • You, sir, are clearly out of touch with the highly advanced quantum issues involved. I shall summarize:
        • Console A has been on the market for a healthy period of time. Let's say, five years or so. This is our baseline.
        • Consoles B, C, and D are released. All consoles are very different in architecture from Console A, and each is moderately different in architecture from its "peers".
        • Console B is a runaway success, with developer after developer after developer (developer) jumping on the bandwagon to code ga
    • Programming for the PS3 isn't a problem because of open APIs and standards-based implementations of graphics, audio, shaders, physics, etc. The problem is optimizing your logic code for the CPU. Actually writing working code for a PS3 isn't that hard. Taking full advantage of the PS3 is another story altogether. Remember, there are a boatload of APIs already available on the PS3 and working. If Sony's smart, they'll be continually optimizing those API implementations to improve performance for develope

  • All in the presentation? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kelbear ( 870538 ) on Monday April 02, 2007 @02:29PM (#18577105)
    Lots of games have been held back for a year. Usually because of development deadlines having to get pushed back for a year. It's a different reason here, but the same effect. If the PS3 does badly over the course of its lifespan I don't think people will look back at Eidos's announcement as a key event. It already comes after a succession of games going multi-platform, which may be bad for the console, but good for the gamers.

    The problem between development and install base has been discussed pretty thoroughly.

    The Wii has some pretty nice games out, but it has a similar gap in games coming up. Though there was much speculation on how good the Wii would be, it doesn't seem like anyone had bet on it being the success that it is. Nintendo included, in light of the tight supply. So while it seems that there are a lot of developers interested in making Wii games, they would have had to begin developing a year or more ago to have a chance at filling the upcoming gap. But at least the games will come someday.

    I'm imagining a 33%-ish share for each console after 4 years.

  • fair play (Score:2, Funny)

    by nephillim ( 980798 )
    Sony delays the consoles release 6+ months in Europe (we'll ignore hardware differences)
    so developers there delay games 6+ months more... sounds fair to me.

    • As a European currently in the US, I'm also looking at the forex rates, and I wonder how European developers may teach Sony that a dollar is not worth an euro.
  • Marketing takes a key role in how well a game sells, and so if they stagger their releases, they'll either have to split the marketing budget up, or just not do any marketing for the later release. Either way, it's better to avoid multiple release dates. The only exception is if a product isn't ready, but if they don't have the resources, then it's the next best thing.
  • I'll repost my reply from the linked story as well:

    By 2008 both Final Fantasy and Metal Gear titles have been released. Also in a shorter time frame: Assassin's Creed, Heavenly Sword, Ninja Gaiden Simga, Lair, and a dozen other AAA titles will already be out there on shelves. I don't think anyone will care much about Edios not publishing PS3 titles in 2007. Other publishers are already launching 'big name' titles in the mean time.

    I still find it odd Team Ninja don't get as much flak as Capcom did for being
  • According to a friend who works for Eidos: Sony want games that aren't ports and eidos specialises in simultaneous multi-console releases (sometimes with crap PC ports).

    So:

    • Sony don't like this - they want exclusives.
    • If they can't get exclusives they want the best version which is difficult as the PS3 graphic capability is currently on par with the Xbox360

    So basically Sony have shot themselves in the foot with their ridiculous pricing and then they proceed to blow their (few remaining) brains out of

    • In spite of the swirly that your post degenerated into (do we STILL have to argue about pricing for heaven's sake?), the point of exclusives is to set your system apart from the "rest" when you're not using something else.. Sony (right or wrong) is banking on the success of Blu ray to help the console get an installed base that will eliminate the need for exclusives. The PS2 has a masterfully huge base, yet there were plenty of titles that were fairly mainstream that weren't exclusive (sure the Japanese RP
  • Those games suck. As long as Namco, Capcom and Square keep kicking out the jams we should be fine for the next year without them.

  • In the world of politics (such as presidential campaigns), there are candidates who foolishly believe that winning news cycles is the key to winning elections. Of course, the key to winning elections is campaigning effectively through your territory and talking sense to voters rather than nonsense to newspapers.

    Ars Technica is saying that this is 'bad' because Eidos ruined a 'good' news cycle for the PS3 (GDC announcements). But, of course, good or bad news cycles won't make or break the PS3. What will make
    • I think your analogy is a little flawed in that the media does play a HUGE part in politics. I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of the population has never gone to listen to a political speech. Most of them get their opinions by listening to the sounds bites presented by the various media outlets.

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