From the very limited and inaccurate measures we have for sales through march (the main source being rankings on Amazon.com) it doesn't look like the PS3 has gained much of a sales benefit from the release of Motorstorm at all; and Motorstorm may not make it into the top 10 selling games for March. Now, I think there are people who would buy a PS3 for a PS2 game but I think it would be a very small portion of the population; essentially someone who already wants a PS3 and doesn't currently have a PS2 could decided to buy a PS3 to play God of War 2.

Excuse me, where did I say that? Not the industry itself is struggling, the HD plattforms have to look for their role against/with the SD plattforms where Wii and PS-2 would have to be considered. I would not involve the DS and the PSP as handhelds are more or less a different market. You can't really put their cost structures into the same category as the HD consoles. It is the same thing that happened in the Computer market several years ago. C64, ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Amiga all needed there own software. Multiplattform development was not so easy. The cost of the hardware was more significant than the cost of the software. One or two people were enough to write a program. They had to be specailists that knew more or less the internal tweaks of the system. In the console market this trend of necessary specialisation continued. Look at the development on the consoles. Multiplattform development meant you had several groups that wrote the software for one plattformn and they all got the same artwork, music and gameplay systems, but in fact they were different programs. Look at the development of the HD consoles: Most games are developped on middleware. This holds the development costs in check, but it also lowers the advantage of special hardware designs. In the PC world this lead to the problem, that the processors had to cope with OutOfOrder execution, because they could no longer expect that the software was even compiled for this processor! On the PS-3 and Xbox 360 you have the advantage that you can easily distribute the problem in two parts: One main processor that runs the general system and secondary tasks that are done by libraries. If these library calls will generate a dedicated program in one SPU or a process in one of the remaining cores does not matter. You have a more or less identical approach. Smaller teams can try to tweak the software a bit for each plattform but the main development stays the same! This significantly reduces the costs. The Wii does not fit as easily. It is not capable to handle the same middleware, so you have to write the software in a different way. Thats one of the big problems I have with the Wii as the winner of the next Generation. This is not the next Generation, instead it raises the question if people want a next generation! I wouldn't even be surprised if the winner of BluRay HD DVD battle woulöd be: the DVD! The big problem is: people expect better graphics and more features but you can't really raise the price in the same manner. So you must program more features and make more detailed artwork for nearly the same price! It's simply a general trend. First you wrote the software in Assembler. This gave you the maximum power of the system. But the hardware got bigger. It was much easier and cheaper to write first in low level, then high level languages. In fact I am a software developer and we write our software for many different environments, with the help of some powerfull low level libraries that hide most of the hardware features from the developer. Sometimes you have toi tweak some things in the lower level libraries but in general it does not matter if the software runs on Windows, Mac OS X (PowerPC and Intel), Linux or one of the Unix plattforms. You write the software one time. Only in specail cases you have to check on one plattform. A PC, a Xbox 360 or a PS-3 can handle much more problems in one second than a Wii, but someone has to write the code and you won't earn so much to add more developers (and if you have more developers in a project, this reduces the efficiency of one developer. They have to communicate with each other to really understand their job. They have more to do with their colleagues than with the software itself. It is really hard to tell someone that the work, he had done in the last two months won't matter anymore...).

Kars: what a load of BS ! What has "out of order" execution to do with the fact that the software wasn't compiled for a processor ? That's complete nonsense, there is no relation at all between these 2 things. And you're a programmer, so I don't understand how you can say so much nonsense. Sorry to tell you that library calls are not enough to hide architecture designs like SMT or SMP. And library calls are not enough to hide the difference between OpenGL and DirectX, while being efficient. If they can do that, then they can also do it on the Wii without any problem. Saying that a hardware (the Wii) can't handle the same middleware is complete BS. The middleware is the thing that is supposed to support the hardware, not the other way around. And I have serious doubts that MS middleware is compatible with the PS3. Actually, I'm sure it's not the case at all, so it's pure BS. PS3 and Wii have more chances of sharing the same middleware (they're both using OpenGL). And your thing about people wanting next generation between Blue-Ray and HD-DVD is BS. People don't buy a console primarily to watch movies. The console maker that focus on these things completely unrelated to games are bound to fail. You say a PS, a XB360 or a PS3 can handle much more "problems" than a Wii, but the fact is that the Wii has much less problems to take care of. Because it is SD, while the others are HD. And most of the work with all these 3D things, is calculating the visuals.

I keep hearing people say this, and I'm not sure why, unless it's just referring to lack of HD. The GameCube was more powerful than the PS2, noticeably so as the generation progressed. The Wii is noticeably more powerful than the Wii (though obviously most games so far aren't really focusing on that...) -- so why compare the Wii with the PS2, and especially the PSP? The PS2 was the weakest in the previous generation, the Wii is the weakest in this one, but there's still a big gap between the two...

The point is that if someone is attempting to produce a multiplatform game the technologies involved in creating content for the Wii, PS2 and PSP are similar (multi-textured 3D models without programmable shaders) so you can create one set of assets and modify them to be used on all platforms; if I was incharge of this I would target the PS2, do mesh smoothing and use higher resolution textures on the Wii, and scale back the content for the PSP.

Simple: The compiler does not know the number of parallel units and gwenral delays in the processor. How many parallel load operations are possible and so on. You don't even know the how deep the pipeline is and so on. Sure, they can't hide these differences, but in fact this is not the point. Pure libraries themselves can only handle some differences, the other differences have to be hidden by the structure how you handle the problems. Normally they use complete systems that are more than pure libraries. What in reality is used are complete development systems, that are more workflow oriented, than hardware oriented. The primary job of the programmers is to establish a suitable plattform on which other people can work. I used libraries as an example how we work, not how game developpers work! But the problemk is the same: You have to hide the plattform itself from the more game oriented people.. They don't want to see all your problems. They have their own. You don't really start the development system from the bottom up, instead you reuse big parts of your system. Everytheing else takes to much time. You are no longer in the position where you can say this plattform can't handle this task. The systems in itself are more or less capable to solve the same problems but in different ways. Sure, you can do it Look at EA. But do you really want it? You have serious trouble to synchronize them with each other. You normally want to release tiles simultaniously (Only one advertisement campaign). The Wii does not need to bother with some features and problems that the other plattforms have. It's development cycles are considerably shorter. If you want to describe the problems as a pure technological problems it simply won't work. Like it or not but there are middleware systems that are implemented on both systems and so hide the differences more or less good. Exactly this is the point of the whole system the biggest cost factors are no longer iun the hardware dependent systems. In fact one of the biggest problems why the Wii doesn't quite fit in here is its bigger and easier to use calculating power. PS3 and Xbox 360 developers need much more time to tweak their systems. And while these systems are a great help they are on the other hand a big problem in itself because they thend to limit your choices. You don't really want quite so much help on simpler systems. Its possible range of deadlock situations and race conditions is much more limited. What do they do in their spare time? Work as game testers? Well, simply take a look at the amount of hardware sales, compared to software sales on the PS-3. Better don't ask how many bought the PS-3 because it is the cheapest BluRay Player! And look at the advantages that the PS-3 has due to this decision in its design process. Bigger transfer problems, because its internal transfer speed is not in the same league as a simple DVD system. A need for a HD as an additional system cache,. HDMI 1.3. And all these desitions influenced its price and capabilities. I would dare to say that the PS-3 probably wouildn't have its difficulties without BluRay. It would have a totally different price. But what are the advantages of BluRay for games? I find the lower speed and so less noise. What else.

I would buy a PS3 to get God of War 2 I thought about it today. I don't have a PS2 and that game looks killer so for me why buy an outdated system when I can purchase something that can double as a blue-ray player. I think that is what sony is trying to push. I do have a 360 though so I decided not too. but if I didn't I probably would have walked away with a PS3

Since when this thread became techno-babble thread?? It's about the sales of the PS3.. I, personally, don't give a s*** how it sold.. fact is - It sold. (More than the 360) And given the fact that it costs more than the 360, and it's only been out for four months with not too many games to sell only proves that the PS3 is a potential winner in the Next generation of gaming. This implores you to think "If the PS3 is selling without too many killer app games, what would happen when the big titles drop?" MGS4, Heavenly Sword, Lair, FFXIII (Exclusive or not), DMC4... and freaking many more I just can't remember right now. Do you really think anyone who buys a console stops to ponder which one is more powerful in terms of specs? Well, obviously there are some people (as proven here, by Kars) but they are DEFINATELY not a majority and they are DEFINATELY not a significant enough amount to affect any sales. And I think the Wii's sales prove that. Oh and Kars, Blu-ray beats HD-DVD in everything. But it is the Capacity that's more interesting for games; 25 gb single layered, 50 gb double layered whereas the HD-DVD is 15 gb single layered and 30 double layered and to get the 360 to play HD-DVD you need to buy a 200$ external HD-DVD drive.. so far 360 games work on normal DVD's (4.7 single layer and 8.5 double layered [better known as DVD5 and DVD9 respectively]) Here you have 50 gigs discs against 9 gigs discs... I don't know, PS3 games get more stuff inside, I think.

First DMC4 isn't exclusive anymore, it will come to the xbox360. Second since the release xbox360 is outselling the PS3 WW. Only Januari has PS3 beaten xbox360 when looking at Japan + USA, and that wasn't enough to close the gap with any significant numbers.. Of course March will look better because of the EU launch. Third: I don't think the HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray will be that important this year. DVD is still alive.

I know DMC4 isn't exclusive. DMC's fan base isn't big enough to kill the PS3, and some fans of DMC will still buy it for the PS3, however there will be some who would "desert" it for the 360. But I can safely predict that the majority will stick with the PS3 because of God of War 3, being a similiar title and a 1st party game. So they know they won't be able to get it on the 360.. Never. And the PS3 is the one doing the outselling. The gap will only close in the end, when PS3 keeps selling games. (Just a reflection of the past [PS2 vs Xbox, anyone?]) Didn't you read the topic? In the first 4 months, PS3 sold more, plus it's main launch game sold more than the 360 main launch game. That's is only a sample of things to come. Just as gears of war created that big spike in the 360's monthly sales in christmas, you're gonna have more than one game that does the same thing and not necessarily in christmas, and I mentioned these games in my last post. BR vs HDDVD is just a way of saying which games will rule in the future. When you have 50 gigs on one and only 9 in the other, you can pretty much guess what games will look better in the end.