Final-Fan said:
To begin with, weren't the rumors for SPRING 2006 release of the PS3? That didn't happen but as I recall it was what we thought would happen. And the assumption was also that the PS3 would rule the next gen (this one) much as the PS2 did, so it probably wouldn't take until "late" 2007 to get a decent userbase (unless I mistake what you reckon "reasonable"). Which also didn't happen but was widely assumed to be foreordained. Next, in point of fact Rockstar did always plan to have the game out on the PS3 with a good userbase. As for the argument that the PS3's first year benefited greatly from having ports from the 360's first year, well, that may be true but doesn't it kind of undermine your argument that nobody wants to develop for an HD system in its first year? The biggest effect would probably be that the PS2 would have had one more year in the sun -- and yes, that would have helped the Wii to some extent, considering the amount of PS2 ports it's gotten, but it would also have helped Sony. Just because some of those projects would have gone to the PS2 doesn't mean that a vacuum would exist on the PS3. All those people making games for the 360 in its second year? Yeah. A lot of them would have been doing it on the PS3, the heir apparent to the PS2, and when E3 2006 told us different it would be too late for them to switch to the Wii. Now, for some stuff outside the quoted post: A big factor I think gebx overlooks is the effect that the 360's year-long head start had on the 2v1 "HD vs. Wii" battle. If the PS3 and Wii were to launch side by side in that other scenario as they did in actuality, that extra userbase would not exist. Also, gebx's war analogy makes a fundamental error: The countries in the analogy are preexisting. The consoles, conversely, build up over time. The analogy assumes that every resource of the 360 -- exclusive developers, userbase, all of it -- would be arrayed with the PS3 against the Wii. In reality, of course, the Wii would gobble up quite a bit of that. Overall, I think that the effects gebx is looking at and those that HappySquirrel is looking at would more or less cancel out, but with th edge going to the Wii. (How on earth do you figure that 20-25% of PS3 buyers would NOT have bought it if the 360 didn't exist??) *(must ... resist ... joke ...) |
Why must everyone take every situation to the absolute extreme?
I never once implied that "no developers want to produce games for HD consoles in their first year" ...
What I am saying is that a lot of games that were released for the PS3 started development as early as they did, and were released when they were, in a large part BECAUSE THE XBOX 360 EXISTED. People who were drawn to the XBox 360 because of Gears of War of Bioshock may not have bought into a HD console yet because these games would not have been released for the PS3 yet; at the same time, people who bought either console to play Burnout paradise, Devil May Cry 4, or Grand Theft Auto 4 wouldn't have bought either system because these games would not have been released yet.
People seem to have this really poor memory where they forget that the PS2 launched in Japan in March of 2000 and didn't receive many (really) good third party games until Christmas of 2001; with the longer development times of the PS3 and XBox 360, along with the delays that many of these games received, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the PS3 would have had a similar delay in the release of its big games.
Without the XBox 360 you have to wonder whether Sony would have bothered to even reduce the price of the PS3 last year; how many people who bought a PS3 or XBox 360 at $400 or less would have really spent $600 for the same experience?
Beyond that, I'm just going to give up this argument ... Being that there were three times as many high quality third party games released in 2007 than 2006 for the HD consoles, I'm certain you guys are correct that third party publishers would have favoured the PS3 with all of those games and the existing 10+ Million XBox 360 owners had absolutely nothing to do with publishers choosing to make games for those platforms; after all, publishers are not for profit agencies who are only interested in making games which have superior graphics and they never consider sales or userbases.
