Maybe you should read my posting history… I certainly haven’t railed anything anything anti-Sony. They’re reaping what they sowed for sure, and I actually agree with the vast majority of the criticisms leveled at them.
That doesn’t mean I’ve written off the PS3. It’s still in its infancy, replete with launch pains that every console faces. It’s too expensive for what you’re getting at this point, but you can say that about the Wii right now and the 360 at its launch too.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I am completely aware of the whole literary karmic vibe of Nintendo the underdog rising to supremacy while the arrogant and oh-so-rich Sony crashes to earth. What sets me apart from the hivemind is that, as lovely a fairytale as that might be, I’m not willing to accept it as hard fact.
I’m also a gamer in the old sense of the word, meaning I put gameplay first, and look down on sickeningly casual mini tech demos. The kind of guy who could enjoy Duck Hunt for five minutes here and there, but then got bored of it and went back to playing Super Mario Brothers for hours on end.
So… yeah. I appreciate you and the rest of the groupthinkers considering me worthy of being hunted down like a heretic and look forward to the inevitable name calling and slap fights between grown men that will certainly ensue.
I never ever see any meaningful arguments as to why the Wii will only offer gimmicky and shallow party games where the x360 and PS3 will offer deep, meaningful games. What’s the issue? Because you have so little imagination you can’t possibly think up a good way to utilize the wiimote apart from a half-arsed implementation of mouse-and-keyboard, no-one else will either?
The Wii has just the same chance of innovating in terms of gameplay as the x360 and the PS3. It’ll just have less cosmetic physics and lower visual fidelity. Is Nintendo’s PR to blame for that assumption, or could it possibly be a result of how little the glossy generation has actually changed the rules of engagement?
I think a lot of it comes from projecting the Gamecube’s rather meager library onto the Wii. Obviously, it doesn’t have to turn out that way, but the fear is there.
The thing is, it doesn’t matter, because it’s not January 2006 now. The PS3 isn’t comparing against some historical yardstick, it’s competing with the other things you can buy as they are right now.
(and yes, it is in a worse place. You didn’t find systems sitting on shelves by January for the 360 launch, and the PS3 hasn’t managed to ship in Europe yet while the 360 had by this time a year ago. And it costs more than the 360 did a month after launch, etc etc.)
Look, there’s nothing wrong with liking the PS3 and not liking the Wii. And I share your fundamental concern that the Wii might end up being some sort of short-lived fad. But throwing around lines like “poorly veiled tech demo drivel” makes you sound like a frenzied fanboy.
You’re not being persecuted because you are the one free thinker with the guts to defy the “groupthink of the hivemind”. You’re being persecuted because you’re posting like a fanatic, and many posters here enjoy pushing fanatics’ buttons. You’ll get a much warmer response if you tone down your rhetoric.
Regardless of what people feel about Gabe, he’s not alone in his assessment that the PS3 is a pain in the ass to develop for. If the big game houses see support for the PS3 as a giant time sink compared to other platforms there’s a chance they will not continue to develop for it. The PS3’s installed base not yet being all that was hoped for doesn’t help much either when companies look at the bottom line.
At this point, they’d be foolish to develop for PS3 if it takes a lot of time. Just put your next-gen title on 360 and call it good.
Two platforms, virtually identical end products, but one has a way nicer development environment, online service and much larger install base. I wonder.
Cost is killing the PS3 on both ends. It’s too expensive to buy, and too expensive to develop for. These two feed back into each other. Fewer console sales mean less upside to game developers; fewer games mean less reason to buy.
This has more to do with Microsoft selling half of what Sony did in the equivalent December courter, and then reducing that already-low number every month for the next two months. By February they were only able to push out 161k.
You didn’t see 360s sitting on shelves by January for the 360 launch because Microsoft followed a mediocre launch build-up with spectacularly poor initial U.S distribution rates. Just wait and cite NPD; the rest is unreliable for comparison, and misleading to cite unless you’re comparing the effects of attempting to launch in Europe earlier rather than later.
Christ, I’m starting to think maybe Sony should have engineered one of those bogus console shortages they were accused of back when the PS2 launched. Who knew the fact that you can walk into a store and buy their product without being gouged by a third party would be such a PR disaster? Better to suffer the hysterical conspiracy theories about them holding back product to manufacture buzz than ship more than enough to satisfy demand…
In other news, PC devs are crybabies. The fact is even the PC space is going to move towards asymmetrical muticore designs pretty soon. Might as well invest the effort in solving some of the basic problems now rather than wait three years only to find yourself three years behind those of your competitors who didn’t drag their feet.
The PC space already embraces multi-core designs along the 360 model: multi-core CPU’s and specialized graphics processors. There’s no indication that the PS3’s model with specialized computational cores will be successful at any level.
