DMeisterJ said: Well January, a slow month, with no real relases (exclusives or otherwise) the PS3 beat the 360 (using NPD for America) by over 250k. So when MGS4 hits in June alongside nothing for the 360 expect that number to be higher, and with all the Hi-prof exclusives coming this year (not doing that list again), it could easily catch up to the 360 this year.

DMeisterJ, I've seen you in plenty of threads discussing the shortages the 360 faced in NA in January, so you cant say you werent aware of them. Why no mention of them in this post?  Look at your sig, and 'try' harder.

starcraft said: MikeB said: kirby007 said: MikeB said: Am I the only one who expects 360 sales to slow considerably when most XBox users already upgraded? Halo 3 even had less a positive impact on 360 sales than I expected, I view this as a good sign for the PS3 platform. IMO the outlook for the 360 isn't really that great, many XBox fans jumped into the 360 without being well informed of RRoD and other hardware issues, pushed by sequels to popular XBox games and no more support for their platform since the 360 launched. I think people will also get more knowledgeable of Blu-Ray disc advantages with regard to non-existant disc scratching and noise production levels. I think to tech minded people the Cell and Blu-Ray advantage is already apparent, but will become obvious to everyone soon enough. why whould a non-techie care? More impressive high profile games. The tech gap will translate in more complex games (better AI, more enemies / events on screen, solid framerates, etc) with better audio and visuals. Lol, because no PS3 games have suffered from unsolid framerates huh? Though most analysts agree that the PS3 is marginally (and i stress that word) more powerful than the Xbox 360, general consensus is that the 360 is better suited to AI production. You'll recall that a Ubisoft executive stated the PS3 could not handle Splinter Cell: Conviction at its fullest, not because of a lack of graphical capacity, but because of its inability to handle the complex AI. As someone already pointed out, console power has never played a part in console 'victory,' last generation the weakest console thumped the competition. In any case, Sony has yet to show that Blu-Ray contributes anything to gaming other than greater cost.

That much older Ubisoft statement originates from before Ubisoft performed R&D on the Cell's potential. With regard to Splinter Cell they probably only investigated the PPE at the time and if you use up too many CPU cycles on the PPE for other things you can run into problems with regard to AI. That's the problem with porting legacy software to the PS3 without adding enough SPE specific adaptations. Ideally you process nearly all your code on the Cell's SPEs like will be the case for Resistance 2.

And yes, system power plays a role with regard to sales. IMO the gap of system potential has never been so great between consoles as this generation. When consumers see good results, many will gladly pay a little more for a much more powerful system. Note the 60 GB PS3 also considerably outsold the cheaper 20 GB version, despite all games performed near identical across both SKUs.

PS3: EUR: 5m
USA: 5m
JAP: 2m

X360: EUR: 2m
USA: 6m
JAP: 0.2m

LTD: PS3: 21m
X360: 24.5m

MikeB said: starcraft said: MikeB said: kirby007 said: MikeB said: Am I the only one who expects 360 sales to slow considerably when most XBox users already upgraded? Halo 3 even had less a positive impact on 360 sales than I expected, I view this as a good sign for the PS3 platform. IMO the outlook for the 360 isn't really that great, many XBox fans jumped into the 360 without being well informed of RRoD and other hardware issues, pushed by sequels to popular XBox games and no more support for their platform since the 360 launched. I think people will also get more knowledgeable of Blu-Ray disc advantages with regard to non-existant disc scratching and noise production levels. I think to tech minded people the Cell and Blu-Ray advantage is already apparent, but will become obvious to everyone soon enough. why whould a non-techie care? More impressive high profile games. The tech gap will translate in more complex games (better AI, more enemies / events on screen, solid framerates, etc) with better audio and visuals. Lol, because no PS3 games have suffered from unsolid framerates huh? Though most analysts agree that the PS3 is marginally (and i stress that word) more powerful than the Xbox 360, general consensus is that the 360 is better suited to AI production. You'll recall that a Ubisoft executive stated the PS3 could not handle Splinter Cell: Conviction at its fullest, not because of a lack of graphical capacity, but because of its inability to handle the complex AI. As someone already pointed out, console power has never played a part in console 'victory,' last generation the weakest console thumped the competition. In any case, Sony has yet to show that Blu-Ray contributes anything to gaming other than greater cost. That much older Ubisoft statement originates from before Ubisoft performed R&D on the Cell's potential. With regard to Splinter Cell they probably only investigated the PPE at the time and if you use up too many CPU cycles on the PPE for other things you can run into problems with regard to AI. That's the problem with porting legacy software to the PS3 without adding enough SPE specific adaptations. Ideally you process nearly all your code on the Cell's SPEs like will be the case for Resistance 2. And yes, system power plays a role with regard to sales. IMO the gap of system potential has never been so great between consoles as this generation. When consumers see good results, many will gladly pay a little more for a much more powerful system. Note the 60 GB PS3 also considerably outsold the cheaper 20 GB version, despite games all games performed identical across both SKUs.

A second ago you were talking about making valid third party references, but now on nothing more than a hope and a prayer you presume that the Ubisoft executive simply didn't know what he was talking about?  Do you have any idea how one sided and biased most of your arguments are?

Please point to where system power, that is it's graphical output capacity and physics/AI abilities, played any significant part in deciding a console generation?  You know full well the 60gb outsold the 20gb because it was easily the better value proposition of the two and from memory it constituted 80% of the stock Sony shipped.

Though I agree with your last point, there is a greater power difference this generation than ever before.  Whilst the PS3 and 360 are almost identical in their technical capabilities, they both stomp on the Wii. 

@ Starcraft

February 2008:

"Ubisoft Montreal tech director, Dominic Guay:

"The R&D revealed some pleasant surprises, as Guay explained: "One thing that we realized pretty quickly as we started R&D on PS3, was that the hardware architecture had a very nice fit with some of our technical design decisions. We were positively surprised by how efficient the SPUs (the Cell processing units) were to do such things as run our vegetation simulation, our animations or our physics systems."

Guay also expressed how impressed he has been with Blu-ray and the PS3's hard drive, noting: "The hard drive and Blu-ray are making our life easy considering FC2 is an open world continuously streamed around the player. That streaming bandwidth and disk space is very appreciated."



Technical abilities:
- Amiga vs Atari ST (became obvious when developers created Amiga specific games)
- C64 vs ZX Spectrum (was obvious from the start)
- People upgraded their PCs en masse to play Doom and Quake, many PC gamers bought additional 3DFX upgrades en masse to play more impressive 3D games. PCs have meanwhile become less of a factor with regard to gaming. In the past for playing the most impressive games you bought an inefficient PC. SDTV couldn't compete with monitors anyhow, however HDTVs can and are now more interesting due to larger sizes.

Ok so you responded by showing me something that made no comparison whatsoever to the 360. The great fear was that the size of games would be limited by DVD, but what we have found is the opposite. The high production cost of PS3 games and the low memory and installed bass have led to shorter games than those exclusive to the Xbox 360.

Moving on to the next point. Do you have any examples from console generations where the participants are recent enough to be listed on this site? In anything resembling recent times power has had no significant impact on SALES!!!! If you need to bring PC's into an argument on how power affects console sales then you are in trouble MikeB. Especially since PC's power has already progressed far beyond either of the consoles we are discussing, but PC gaming as a whole is in decline (hardcore at least).

@ Starcraft

Oblivion on the PS3 is one of the biggest console games currently available, out of the box it's even bigger than the 360 version despite offering better visuals (720p vs 600p resolution, longer draw distances).

Sony so far only experimented introducing new franchises, for such games all game assets have to be built from scratch, which takes a lot of time to develop. Uncharted at PS3 quality is already too big for DVD, like Naughty Dog's Jak & Daxter sequels became much bigger PS2 games, Naughty Dog's Uncharted 2 will probably also become a bigger game and it's not strange to assume that at similar or better quality a dual layer Blu-Ray disc would be needed (they are already using up over 90% of space available on single layer Blu-Ray disc).

The PS3 isn't low on memory compared to the 360 (it even has an overall advantage due to the default harddrive and more space available on Blu-Ray for streaming).



No, the Cell has more processing potential than currently available x86 CPUs. The bulk of PC users don't even own an ultra powerful PC. For gaming consoles are far more worry free, devs are of the opinion consoles are now starting to envolve into territory previously dominated by PCs (FPS, RTS, adventures, etc).

Oblivion came out far later than the 360 version and had extra, targeted development. The rest of your post has been covered in other threads. Several people have pointed out that Sony clearly uses a few cases where compression was clearly limited to artificially bump up the number of gb needed for PR purposes. For example, they claimed that the very mediocre Motorstorm 'required' 22gb.

As I think Shams pointed out, most competent developers naturally compress everything as they go, in order to save on server space and other expenses. Lionhead recently stated in I think their fourth developer diary that modern compression is so good that data can be compressed to one hundredth of its original size without a noticeable performance loss. And before you say that there is no such thing as loss-less compression from a technical standpoint, remember that we are discussing sales, and that your trying to falsely convince people the average casual gamer will see a HUGE difference between these two consoles capabilities.

I don't know why I keep arguing with you every time. You clearly have little perception of reality if your claiming the PS3 can match readily available high-end PC's for performance.

@ Starcraft

The 360 version had targeted development as well. But you are correct building up a game like Oblivion from scratch would have been impossible to achieve in such a short time, although the end result could have been much better.



Then why bring this up, I was just replying.



Examples?

Uncharted is well optimised in such a way that there are no install times, while in-game loading and decompression is invisible to the end user.



Motorstorm's files are compressed at a 2:1 ratio and IMO today still looks awesome. However this game does not perform streaming other than for audio, thus lenghty loading times, the huge tracks are loaded into memory in one go.



The Cell is a monster at decompression (also compared to the Xenon) that's why most PS3 exclusives are heavily compressed other than for audio, the Cell can decompress data faster than it can be read from Blu-Ray disc, thus this makes perfect sense.

I'm not convinced that it's happening at all. So far it looks like the PS3 will have slightly better exclusives in 2008, but the 360 hasn't had a single price drop yet, and we don't know what'll be happening during the second half of the year yet.

Chances are that the gap is getting a few millions narrower, but probably not by too much.