quote: If I wanted to be doing something with my body, then I'd go outside and get some exercies. For example, why would people buy Wii golf if they could go out and play the real thing?
If you don't understand why, you do not understand the premise behind any sports game.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
ps3\s 399$ canadian here in ebgames now.
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Blayne Bradley
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posted
quote: On June 5, 2007 Square Enix's Shinji Hashimoto disclosed information to to Japanese company Nikkei BP that they are not currently planning on releasing any Final Fantasy titles on the Xbox 360, which was the likely destination of Final Fantasy XIII had it been a multiplatform title. Hashimoto stated that while Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers is currently in production for the Wii, plans to develop a Final Fantasy title for the 360 are currently "a blank page"
-Anoop Gantayat (2007). No Final Fantasy For Xbox 360: Square Enix has nothing in the works.. Retrieved on 5 June 2007.
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The PS3 is only $399 at EB Games after you've traded in 10 games with a minimum trade-in value of $8. Still a good deal (relatively) if you have 10 games you don't mind trading in. To get the best deal you'd have to trade in games that were right around the $8 mark. If one of the games you trade is worth $24, then it won't count as three of your trades. So you'd have to have a pretty good selection of games to make the most of the deal.
Posts: 1855 | Registered: Mar 2003
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quote: On June 5, 2007 Square Enix's Shinji Hashimoto disclosed information to to Japanese company Nikkei BP that they are not currently planning on releasing any Final Fantasy titles on the Xbox 360, which was the likely destination of Final Fantasy XIII had it been a multiplatform title. Hashimoto stated that while Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers is currently in production for the Wii, plans to develop a Final Fantasy title for the 360 are currently "a blank page"
-Anoop Gantayat (2007). No Final Fantasy For Xbox 360: Square Enix has nothing in the works.. Retrieved on 5 June 2007.
That is so incredibly stupid. Also if FFXIII bails out Sony just like FFVII did I will be supremely pissed. I don't know why Square is throwing in with Sony all the way. How do they lose by developing for Xbox and PS3? The only people who stand to lose by that arrangement is Sony.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:On June 5, 2007 Square Enix's Shinji Hashimoto disclosed information to to Japanese company Nikkei BP that they are not currently planning on releasing any Final Fantasy titles on the Xbox 360, which was the likely destination of Final Fantasy XIII had it been a multiplatform title. Hashimoto stated that while Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers is currently in production for the Wii, plans to develop a Final Fantasy title for the 360 are currently "a blank page"
-Anoop Gantayat (2007). No Final Fantasy For Xbox 360: Square Enix has nothing in the works.. Retrieved on 5 June 2007.
Final Fantasy XI is already out on the Xbox 360, so the article is factually incorrect.
In any event, "no current plans" doesn't tell us anything other than that they aren't working on one now. My guess is a timed exclusive as with the Metal Gear Solid franchise last generation; I don't think SquareEnix would leave that kind of money on the table indefinitely. I think crossplatform titles will be even more common this generation (between the PS3 and 360, at least).
quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: I don't know why Square is throwing in with Sony all the way.
They aren't. The Dragon Quest franchise has moved from the PlayStation2 with DQVIII to the Nintendo DS with the announced DQIX. SquareEnix will go where the money is. In Japan, there isn't much money in the 360. North America, however, is another story, so I'm sure they'll give careful consideration to what they want to do, and if it's a timed exclusive, they probably won't breathe a word of it until a few months after the game launches on PS3.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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I don't know, I've played PS3 quite a bit, and it's got a little better resolution than 360. I own a 360 and love Gears of War and Oblivion. Halo 3 will turn me anti-social, same with Mass Effect.
PS3 and 360 are reasonably equitable in terms of actual performance, and I think the biggest reason for the higher price on the PS3 is the blue-ray disc system. I have a hard time believing Sony will recover from signing on with their Blue-ray disc system, they seem to be bottom rung with this generation of consoles, even though Microsoft isn't selling a lot of units themselves at the moment due to the utter lack of staple games like Halo 3. Once that comes out, I'm sure there will be a substantial increase in their unit sales.
Posts: 4229 | Registered: Dec 2002
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The 360 sales are actually pretty steady given that they have already sold units to a major portion of the market.
It's easier to sell consoles to a fresh market, but the sales of 360s right now are very good for a console that has already sold itself to most of the core demographic.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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Blayne Bradley
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posted
Just wait for FF7-2, White Knight, FF13 to come for the PS3 then you'll see sales increase.
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: The 360 sales are actually pretty steady given that they have already sold units to a major portion of the market.
It's easier to sell consoles to a fresh market, but the sales of 360s right now are very good for a console that has already sold itself to most of the core demographic.
Still, the PS2 outsells the 360. It's a mad, mad world. In March, the PS2 even outsold the Wii.
Intuition tells me that Sony is still in very good shape. I'm not going to count out Sony just yet. People still like old-fashioned games, without the gimmicks. The PS3 is technologically superior. Over time, it will sell just fine.
(And, I might add--there's nothing stopping Sony from adopting a Wii-like control scheme, should it prove to stick). Having played the Wii a lot, it still feels like the controls could use some refinement. Hopefully future developers will better utilize the wiimote+nunchuk.
Posts: 433 | Registered: Feb 2005
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quote:Still, the PS2 outsells the 360. It's a mad, mad world.
Why? Lots of good games out for the PS2, and for someone who's just now getting into the market, you can get a HECK of a good PS2 library for the cost of a PS3, a controller, and one game.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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I'm still waiting for a Wii Castlevania game.
I've also learned that the best thing for me is to leave the Wii at my girlfriend's house - that way I don't spend every waking hour playing it.
Posts: 3960 | Registered: Jul 2001
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Bah. All you need is a DS and, assuming you're willing to go the used-game route for Game Boy Advance games, you'll have more games than you know what to do with. And you don't even notice that the graphics are "worse" than the high-end systems once you're playing.
Posts: 781 | Registered: Apr 2005
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quote:Still, the PS2 outsells the 360. It's a mad, mad world.
Why? Lots of good games out for the PS2, and for someone who's just now getting into the market, you can get a HECK of a good PS2 library for the cost of a PS3, a controller, and one game.
It's also a decent DVD player, which means it's very appealing to college students who have no money.
Posts: 1158 | Registered: Feb 2006
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Saw two console articles on CNN.com today and figured I'd share:
Sony to sell online gamers' information to advertisers. Much-needed revunue stream or pissing off the people they need to win over? I'm actually leaning towards this one not hurting them so much. Most of the people likely to be bothered by this probably already dislike Sony for other reasons. Also, gamers often moan about how horrible something is but keep but keep buying the games in question anyway.
Wii demand still outpaces supply after 7 months on the market. It amazes me that this long after launch we're still seeing people lining up before the store opens to buy a Wii - I remember people saying things like "I'd like a Wii but I'll just wait until January or February when they're easy to find."
quote: At some point, of course, supply will catch up with demand. But some analysts don't see this happening until next year.
"I don't think by the holidays," Sebastian said. "But maybe by the middle of next year, perhaps they can add another production line."
Statements like that make me more and more glad I camped out for mine last Thanksgiving.
posted
Those statements make me glad that my wife was able to get one pretty easily for my birthday a few weeks ago.
Posts: 1336 | Registered: Mar 2002
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I'm surprised no one posted about the billion dollar hit that Microsoft is going to take over Xbox 360 defects. Unless I missed the post.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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Ewww that could actually make things worse as Sony already sells consoles at a loss, and expect to recoup costs with online purchases, games, peripherals, etc.
Unless everyone buys two more games when they purchase a PS3 then folks have previously, I don't know how this will help in the short term. The PS3 would need the equivalent of TWO Final Fantasy VIIs to pull out of this rut.
Still maybe in the long term this will place them in better stead.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Interesting. I'd figured the eventual price drop might come around the holiday shopping season, not this early. Is there anything big being released for PS3 soon? I think a price drop coinciding with a major title (like the next FF or MSG) would be a good advertising push.
Personally, the console is still not worth $500 to me unless or until some really awesome games come out for it.
posted
Ninja Gaiden Sigma came out recently, and is very highly rated by critics. It has an average critic review of 89 on metacritic, making it the second most highly rated game for the PS3. I don't know if that's enough to get you to buy a PS3 (it's not for me).
Posts: 1855 | Registered: Mar 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Enigmatic: Interesting. I'd figured the eventual price drop might come around the holiday shopping season, not this early. Is there anything big being released for PS3 soon?
posted
Wow, eros, you have all of E3 stuck in your throat there?
Anyway, that doesn't really answer my question. Yeah, they could be planning on announcing the price drop at E3, but as a consumer: So what? E3 is more about showing off new stuff prior to its release. What I was talking about was the great ads they'd be able to do if the cut the price at the same time a must-have game came out. "Final Fantasy 13 and $100 off the PS3!" is the kind of thing to win over some of the people in the "I might get one eventually but not now" camp (IMHO, of course).
The price cut itself is a non-news item (all consoles drop price at some point), the news would be the timing of it. I think most of us expected them to hold out at least a year. If they announce a cut at E3 it almost smacks of desperation- "Hey we don't have anything awesome to show off this year, but we admit that these things just aren't selling at $600! Isn't that great, guys? Guys? Why is everyone heading over to the nintendo booth?"
It is mitigated by dire market straits. This was not originally intended, not even by the hardware -- which is already sold cripplingly under cost.
What this leaking indicates is that Sony's brass are finally starting to understand that their price point was not worth the attempt at HD market penetration; the console was overpriced and did not deliver, and now it's losing.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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How well is the PS3 selling compared to how well the Xbox 360 was selling at this point of its life-cycle?
Posts: 1577 | Registered: Sep 2005
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Samp, all I meant by that is everyone knew the price would come down at some point. Every console, even those which started cripplingly under cost, come down in price eventually. That it is happening this early (if it is, of course) is the news. If Sony announced "The PS3 price will go down $100 at an undetermined point within the next 5 years" that would not be news. As I said, the timing of it is newsworthy.
0MB, from one of Twinky's links here's a chart of sales by months since launch. This only shows North America sales for the first 6 months, but the PS3's total for the first 6 months after launch is lower than any of the other consoles that they've tracked.
quote:Samp, all I meant by that is everyone knew the price would come down at some point. Every console, even those which started cripplingly under cost, come down in price eventually.
This is way too early in a console's market cycle to be standard. This is a reactionary act to attempt to recoup stickiness and market share.
When you have rollbacks on a console game plan like this, it's emblematic of the 'soft' consoles with limited, lossy cycles: Dreamcast comes to mind.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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Also consider that compared to the Xbox 360, the PS3 is selling extremely well in Japan. For some reason the Japanese aren't at all receptive to the Xbox. The biggest market is in the US, which I think makes it the best place to compare sales, if you aren't going to do it internationally.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: Also consider that compared to the Xbox 360, the PS3 is selling extremely well in Japan.
That's true, but it doesn't mean much as a metric of the PS3's success in Japan given how poorly the 360 is selling. Compared to the Wii and DS, the 360 and PS3 are selling very badly.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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True true, but it might be enough to make the system worthwhile in the end. No matter what happens, this won't be a death knell for Sony's video games division, hell, it's the only thing keeping the company afloat really.
The battle now is to see exactly how much global marketshare they lose back to Nintendo, and in America, how much they lose to Nintendo and Microsoft. This isn't Dreamcast for them, I think largely because of an extremely loyal base in Japan. Even if it takes a few years to get good games out there and thus recoup their investment and losses, they'll still come out ahead and start planning for PS4, all the wiser for it.
I guess it's just less of a loss for Sony than it is a gain for Nintendo, who comes out the obvious big winner of this console generation by any measurable standard.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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I don't think it's a Dreamcast -- I think it's a GameCube without the hardware profitability. There will still be strong first-party titles and some big-name exclusives, but not enough to keep it out of third place in hardware sales.
I do think you overestimate the loyalty of the Japanese fanbase. The Japanese market seems to have spurned Microsoft, but the hardware sales will go where the games are, as Sony's own rise to dominance in that market on the strength of FFVII demonstrates. Sony therefore needs to keep at least time-based exclusivity on its remaining flagship franchises, which they appear to be doing.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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The problem now is that if they *don't* drop the price, their sales for this month are going to hell.
Why would anyone buy a PS3 today if they anticipate that it will be $100 cheaper next week? And, if it *isn't* $100 cheaper next week, that's an entire week's worth of sales lost.
If this continues for a couple of weeks, with everyone waiting in anticipation of a price drop that doesn't come, their month's sales could plummet. What would it look like if they sold 85k one month, then 55k the next? How would that look to game designers?
Seems Sony is in a tough spot - that is, of course, if they really haven't planned to drop the price and these moles are wrong.
Posts: 3960 | Registered: Jul 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: Also consider that compared to the Xbox 360, the PS3 is selling extremely well in Japan. For some reason the Japanese aren't at all receptive to the Xbox. The biggest market is in the US, which I think makes it the best place to compare sales, if you aren't going to do it internationally.
This is not entirely true. Blue Dragon created a surge of Xbox purchases in Japan back in December as it was an exclusive game for the 360 designed by the creator of Final Fantasy and drawn by the man who created Dragon Ball. If Microsoft can pull off another exclusive deal of that type the PS3 will be in very sad shape.
The thing that worries me most however is that with all these sales of the Wii and how great it is for Nintendo, unless the capitalize on it by putting out several amazing titles and SOON rather then later, the gap will eventually close.
They need something like what Pokemon was to the Gameboy. A franchise that explodes demand for the console again and becomes a household name in the US and in Japan. Right now Nintendo puts out the best Wii games and third parties really need to start figuring out how to use the system.
Anyway you slice it, some behemoth titles are coming out for the Xbox and PS3 this summer and especially in September. Within another year The Last Remnant will be out and the Wii can't possibly compete on a graphical immersion level. But it can compete with sheer interactivity. Creating games that are fun to play is what will keep their sales high. Hopefully they learned something from the Gamecube days enough to realize this.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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I think developers are just way behind on the Wii programming because they put their eggs in the XBox/PS basket.
Prior to launch, when these systems had just been announced, Nintendo was still in the basement. Based on last generation sales, the money was to be made with Microsoft and Sony.
Once the Wii was announced, with its drastically different gaming philosophy and functionality, developers had a very different development option - but still chose to go with the proven winners.
Now that the Wii is running strong and has such popular interest, the developers are (likely) finally starting to look into games for it - meaning they are still probably several months away from strong 3rd party games.
I'm confident it will happen, though. I think Nintendo has more up its sleeve than has been revealed so far, which will be brought out as sales slow.
Why jump the gun when you still have such a good thing going?
Posts: 3960 | Registered: Jul 2001
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Well, they dropped the PS3 price... sort of. Actually, they just moved the 60GB unit down to the discontinued 20GB unit's price point (US$499), and added an 80GB unit bundled with MotorStorm at the US$599 price point.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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quote:Samp, all I meant by that is everyone knew the price would come down at some point. Every console, even those which started cripplingly under cost, come down in price eventually.
This is way too early in a console's market cycle to be standard. This is a reactionary act to attempt to recoup stickiness and market share.
When you have rollbacks on a console game plan like this, it's emblematic of the 'soft' consoles with limited, lossy cycles: Dreamcast comes to mind.
I'm sorry for the snarkiness here, but: Did you read the next sentence after the part you quoted? Because I keep saying that the big deal here is HOW EARLY the price cut is, which is exactly what you're arguing, right? I don't think we're in disagreement here.
posted
I'm with Enigmatic on the price cut simply being way to early. Usually price cuts are used as a reaction to consistently flagging sales. PS3 simply put should not be experiencing that particular problem yet. But it has, and its cutting its price.
I expect sales to double when a game exclusive to the PS3 comes out and there is a strong demand for it. As for Japan, I imagine the sales will double when Final Fantasy XIII is released. It wouldn't surprise me if Sony dropped its price so that in part at least Square would feel comfortable backing their horse with that particular game.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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It's a price cut in name if not in spirit. The price of entry for the PS3 as a platform is still US$499, just like it was before Sony discontinued the 20GB model.
quote:Samp, all I meant by that is everyone knew the price would come down at some point. Every console, even those which started cripplingly under cost, come down in price eventually.
This is way too early in a console's market cycle to be standard. This is a reactionary act to attempt to recoup stickiness and market share.
When you have rollbacks on a console game plan like this, it's emblematic of the 'soft' consoles with limited, lossy cycles: Dreamcast comes to mind.
I'm sorry for the snarkiness here, but: Did you read the next sentence after the part you quoted? Because I keep saying that the big deal here is HOW EARLY the price cut is, which is exactly what you're arguing, right? I don't think we're in disagreement here.
--Enigmatic
I know, I'm just expanding on the difference of this drop from the average console lifetime price drop.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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All you need is a DS and, assuming you're willing to go the used-game route for Game Boy Advance games, you'll have more games than you know what to do with. And you don't even notice that the graphics are "worse" than the high-end systems once you're playing.
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