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The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

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Re: The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

#71

Post by pandaman »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #53
Keyframe wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you're saying, but Microsoft never won any console race http://www.geekwire.com/2013/xbox-360-wii-ps3-won-console-ge...

Naive interpretations of the current console generation will lead to incorrect conclusions. Microsoft unequivocally won the 360/ps3/wii console generation. Not because they shipped more consoles, no console maker actually makes the majority of their profit from raw console shipments, it's a very misleading figure. What matters more are sales of games and DLC and subscriptions to services. In those measures the 360 ha…

Why sales matter and not profits? If I go and buy Ferrari F360s for $200K then turn around and sell them for $10K I can probably get a lot of sales yet from the business perspective I am going to be in a pretty bad state.

Has MS turned in any profit from their whole Xbox affair? There had been various estimates around but I've never seen ones claiming significant profits, the best ones I'd seen claimed it broke even. They had shown some minor profit on their entertainment divisions in some quarters but the RROD alone costs them $1B not counting minor stuff like purchasing and running Rare or paying for "exclusivity".

Re: The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

#73

Post by pandaman »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #48
sliverstorm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First I will note that Sony hardware has reputedly never been easy to develop for, so the PS3 wasn't anything new there. Second, you state while they can drop prices and relax controls, it may be difficult to make their console more powerful . We still don't know how the dice will land in this regard. Microsoft managed higher-than-expected frequency yield, and nobody knows where Sony's chip sits. It also remains to b…

It was a different world then, but the original PSX was pretty straightforward. A commodity MIPS processor, relatively straightforward vector and image co-processors. In particular Sony made a bet that ram prices would fall enough to make the console profitable long term and that bet payed out. To remember how much things have changed, the CDROM format was controversial then, but was a huge win for developers. Bluntl…

And PS2 is officially the best selling console in the world [1]. But I agree - other than PS1 (which was easier than Saturn), Sony hardware was never easier than competition.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_conso...

Re: The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

#74

Post by InclinedPlane »

pandaman wrote: post #71
InclinedPlane wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naive interpretations of the current console generation will lead to incorrect conclusions. Microsoft unequivocally won the 360/ps3/wii console generation. Not because they shipped more consoles, no console maker actually makes the majority of their profit from raw console shipments, it's a very misleading figure. What matters more are sales of games and DLC and subscriptions to services. In those measures the 360 ha…

Why sales matter and not profits? If I go and buy Ferrari F360s for $200K then turn around and sell them for $10K I can probably get a lot of sales yet from the business perspective I am going to be in a pretty bad state. Has MS turned in any profit from their whole Xbox affair? There had been various estimates around but I've never seen ones claiming significant profits, the best ones I'd seen claimed it broke even.…

If profit figures were available we wouldn't be having this discussion, because the answer would be obvious. But they're not. Nintendo's figures are the most available (since gaming is the majority of their business and they are a public company), but the least relevant because we know they've been struggling. Sony has had reduced profitability and losses over the last few years. The interesting thing is how difficult it is to get numbers out of Microsoft. They fold the Xbox and console gaming part of the company in with web-based gaming and the windows phone (and formerly zune) part of the company, which muddies the waters considerably. Overall though there are many indications that console gaming has been profitable for Microsoft. For example, in 2012 alone xbox live made $1.2 billion in revenue. This is a very high-margin business for MS and that represents about 10% of the entire worldwide video game revenue.

MS has dumped a lot of money into console gaming, but they've built a business that is now generating a lot of revenue in a lot of high margin areas.

Re: The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

#75

Post by pandaman »

ye wrote: post #3

PS4 is just a PC stuck in one configuration, linked to a popular delivery system. I don't get what the hype is about. Yes, it's a pretty good configuration at a reasonable price. But that will only be the case for a few months. PCs will catch up very quickly and will become cheaper, and then much cheaper. As somebody who loves games, I don't see a reason to buy PS4. I'd rather spend a bit more on a PC, and then upgra…

PC's GPU is hidden behind layers of APIs. It does not matter when you compare different hardware on PC as any hardware there is boggled by the same APIs but it makes no sense to compare the same hardware on PC to a game console that exposes GPU directly.

It's like comparing JavaScript to native apps. Yes, sometimes JS can be pretty close and JS on powerful hardware can even beat native code on a weaker platform on some tests. Yet it would be very naive to think that JS nowadays runs faster than any native code on 10 y.o. hardware. Similarly, it will be a long while till DirectX/OpenGL apps will be unquestionably faster than native GPU code.

Re: The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

#76

Post by pandaman »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #74
pandaman wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why sales matter and not profits? If I go and buy Ferrari F360s for $200K then turn around and sell them for $10K I can probably get a lot of sales yet from the business perspective I am going to be in a pretty bad state. Has MS turned in any profit from their whole Xbox affair? There had been various estimates around but I've never seen ones claiming significant profits, the best ones I'd seen claimed it broke even.…

If profit figures were available we wouldn't be having this discussion, because the answer would be obvious. But they're not. Nintendo's figures are the most available (since gaming is the majority of their business and they are a public company), but the least relevant because we know they've been struggling. Sony has had reduced profitability and losses over the last few years. The interesting thing is how difficul…

I think your numbers are way off, the entire worldwide video game revenue is not anywhere around $12B[1]

Also margins are not as high as you seem to imagine, look at any 3d party publisher reports (they are all public corps).

[1] http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/06/10/gameshow-e-idINDEE9...

Re: The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

#78

Post by chucknelson »

fit2rule wrote: post #77

So I'm clueless as I haven't been paying attention to this market since the PS4/XBox360 were released - does the PS4 not run PS3 titles? If so, does it have some emulation or is it new hardware sitting on top of the old Cell design?

Neither PS4 or Xbox One are backwards compatible with their previous generation counterparts. Both of them went x86 this time around with no emulation layer or additional legacy hardware to maintain any sort of backwards compatibility.

A little bit of a bummer, but we'll all forget about it in a year or two :)

Re: The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

#79

Post by chucknelson »

georgemcbay wrote: post #33
ekianjo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but it does not seem to be very powerful at all. I've seen most of the upcoming games for launch (and played about half of them) and I was far from being impressed. It feels like a mid-range gaming PC kind of power at best, and many games apparently struggled to run in full HD, with the framerate low enough to make you feel you were back in the PS2 days. If they are planning to sell these consoles solely on th…

A mid-range gaming PC that's ready to play out of the box for $400 is nothing to slouch at. Also, keep in mind that the original launch titles for the Xbox 360 looked like this: http://ve3dmedia.ign.com/ve3d/image/article/655/655564/perfe... Launch titles are generally either carry-over concepts from earlier consoles and/or are drastically rushed to hit a very hard deadline, the titles hitting in the next couple of y…

Thanks for posting at least one pic of what launch games looked like last generation. I urge people to go look at some others on the web.

Anyone arguing that games don't look that much better than current gen need to remember how much progress we've made this generation, and then look at how good games like Killzone: Shadow Fall already run and look at launch.

Re: The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

#80

Post by chucknelson »

tadfisher wrote: post #11
ye wrote: post #3

PS4 is just a PC stuck in one configuration, linked to a popular delivery system. I don't get what the hype is about. Yes, it's a pretty good configuration at a reasonable price. But that will only be the case for a few months. PCs will catch up very quickly and will become cheaper, and then much cheaper. As somebody who loves games, I don't see a reason to buy PS4. I'd rather spend a bit more on a PC, and then upgra…

> PS4 is just a PC stuck in one configuration, linked to a popular delivery system. You've belied the true strength of video game consoles. A single configuration means less testing work and a streamlined experience for consumers. Not everyone is willing to deal with graphics drivers and endless installers.

Which also leads to crazy optimization against the stable hardware. Just look at what PS3 and Xbox 360 are pushing out with ~512 MB RAM and 7+ year old hardware. It's pretty incredible.
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