Sony's biggest screw up

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The PS3 for sure.


Or more accurately, their decision to push the blue-ray to the world through the PS3.


If sony removed the blue-ray player from the PS3 it would be cheaper and better than any other console and it would sell like hotcakes.

but..they didnt. they lost an insane amount of money on it, the production got delayed a lot and suppliers / game makers did not jump onto the PS3 because for many months they were waiting for the blue-ray vs HD format war to settle. At that point the PS3 lost momentum and collapsed quickly. The result is what you see now.. the game-makers signed contracts with Nintendo and Microsoft plus for most people in the market, the PS2 games are still widely available and still being produced and are almost at par with the Xbox and Wii... so why buy a retardedly expensive blue-ray player that has few games made for it?

Actually, I'm happy with the idea of the Blu-Ray. In fact, it eventually sold the PS2 (because it became a cheap Blu-Ray player). It also won the format war for the consumers - otherwise it could have dragged on for years.

It's just the incompatibility that annoys me.

There's no way I'd buy an XBOX - ever...
1. I don't like Microsoft
2. I don't have faith in Microsoft's commitment to the format

I'd probably not go for a wii either because it seems too gimmicky to me.

So, if I upgrade it will be to the PS3 (or higher) but I won't do that until/unless they restore compatibility.

Easily the PS3, but not just because of the Blu-Ray. Although the Blu-Ray is a pretty huge mistake. The Blu-Ray actually makes me think Sony as a company is insane. Why? The definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. Sony keeps on trying to pioneer new media formats so they hope to curb the market in their favor and it NEVER WORKS. It didn't work with Blu-Ray, it didn't work with Beta Max, it didn't work with UMD, and it didn't work with Mini-Disc! Why did they think it would work again?

But the Playstation 3 is quite the multi-faceted mistake. It failed with hardware, because of the whole lawsuit with Immersion which made them take rumble out. It failed with it's design, because there were like five versions all with different features. It failed with market support, because not all versions were backwards compatible with the PS2 (how do you not make being backwards compatible with the biggest console ever a priority?). tIt failed with promotion, because Ken Kutaragi seemed to think $600 was a reasonable price for a game console.

This isn't rocket science. If Sony has just released one super awesome version of the PS3 with backwards compatibility, updated graphics, online capabilities, and guaranteed it wouldn't crap out like the 360 would, it would've been huge.

I can't feel too bad for them. What almost no one acknowledges is that there's absolutely nothing special about Sony Gaming. Never has been, never will be. There wasn't one thing on a Sony console that couldn't have been done on any other console at the time. For every one Sony game that sold in the millions there were a dozen others which were absolute s**t. The PS1 in particular suffered from shovelware of the highest order and I think this just encouraged game developers to get lazy. The only reason people flocked to Sony like they did was because they were easy to make games for. Now that they're not, what do they have left? Not much it seems.

Actually, Blu-ray easily defeated HD DVD, despite the fact that HD DVD was on the market first. The reasons why they launched a console with a Blu-ray player are simple: 1. DVDs are too small for modern games. 2. They wanted to defeat HD DVD.

Sony has sold more than 40 millions PSPs. Allthough it's not nearly as popular as the DS, it crushed Nintendo's monopoly, and it has also sold more than the Gamecube and the Xbox.

Who cares who defeated who? The point is introducing a new media format while DVD is still riding high is pointless for both sides! And DVD's can fit modern games just fine. Most 360 games are burned onto dual layer 7GB DVD discs and they handle the graphics and load times just fine. The only game that takes advantage of Blu-Ray's storage capacity is MGS4 and since half of it's content is cutscenes and not gameplay I don't count that.

Also, comparing the sales of the PSP to the sales of the Gamecube and XBox is totally unfair. One's a console, one's a handheld. They're totally different markets. Combined the PSP and the DS have sold 120 million units worldwide. Compare that to the Wii, the 360, and the PS3, which combined have sold 65 million units worldwide.

Many developers have encountered problems because of the DVD's limited storage space. Allthough DVDs still work fine with movies, game size increases faster than compression quality. Microsoft are considering a Blu-ray drive for the Xbox 360 as we speak.

By the way, Resistance: Fall of Man takes 22 gigabytes. Heavenly Sword takes 30 gigabytes. This is of course without the dummy files. I just thought you'd like to know...



Stationary consoles will typicaly sell more than handhelds. Both the PSP and the DS have existed longer than all the current-gen stationary consoles.

To quote some more numbers...

NES: 60 million
SNES: 50 million
N64: 33 million
Gameboy: 70 million

Genesis: 30 million
Game Gear: 11 million

Gamecube: 20 million
Gameboy Advance: 70 million

Okay so Resistance and Heavenly Sword take advantage of the Blu-Ray. But to what end? Heavenly Sword in particular has something like 6 to 8 hours of gameplay and almost no replay value. Personally I question the point.

I'd have to agree with whoever mentioned Sony's fishy DRM scheme they tried using on CDs a few years back

Just because Heavenly Sword offers little to no replay value, doesn't mean that other PS3 games does as well. I'd prefer a game which offers 20 hours or more with gameplay, variation, great story etc. (eg. Mafia) over a simple game with high replay value (eg. Tetris) any day.

PS2: 140 millions. The Gameboy generation lasted for ten years, and Nintendo had a monopoly on handhelds, which they never had on stationary consoles. The Gameboy Advanced have existed almost as long as the PS2, but isn't even close in sales numbers, despite Nintendo's monopoly.

The problem developers are having is not disk size its the fact they are all getting very lazy. Game data size means very little in terms of making a really good game, its the effort put into making a quality game. Also Reodor_Felgen Microsoft shot down the rumors of a blu-ray Xbox 360 and I am glad they did it.

I did want to say this 30 dollars for a new movie is to much money, I don't care if it is HD it don't matter 30 dollars for a sub par movie HELL NO.

The initial pricing of the Playstation system itself I find.

A Blu-ray movie is 40 kr (that's 6$) more than a DVD in Norway. Also, movies are twice as expensive in Norway as in The States.

The games on the Xbox 360 is already compressed more than the GPU can handle, and because of this, much of the content has to be uncompressed via the CPU, thus leaving less room for new shaders. This is why you see DX10 shaders (sub-surface scattering, global illumniation and so on) on the PS3, but not on the Xbox 360.

I would think their biggest screw up would be not having enough exclusive games for their PS3. Many game companies including SquareEnix are amking their games mulit-platform.

I've read surveys where the majority of respondants didn't really care if a movie had better quality than DVD. In fact, the HD-DVD backers are realizing this and building sets that "upscale" DVD to make the picture appear better. Sure it's not the same as Blu-ray, but it's going to keep the average consumer happy with regular DVD.



If this is truely an issue, I think MS would release a non-blu-ray drive just to support the larger games. Hell, they could probably bundle an HD-DVD drive with one of the new larger/uncompressed games, call it something else, and pay little or nothing in royalties.

In the end, I don't think it really matters that much. The real issue with the PS3 is lack of exclusive content. If the 360 has the same games and the look almost the same, most consumers won't care.

There are a lot of good, exclusive games for the PS3 (eg. Drake's Fortune), just like there are a lot of good exclusive games on the Xbox 360. Square Enix never offers anything new, so I doubt that it will bother the PS3 loyalists if they release multi-platform games.

I didn't say that DVDs were outdated when used for movies, but that they were outdated when it came to storing games, as evidenced by the fact that many games won't fit on a DVD. Rockstar Games had to scrap many of their ideas to make GTA IV fit on a DVD, and it still pushes the compression quality to the limit.

Upscaling barely looks any better than regular resolution, as all it does is resize the picture and then blur it.



Most multi-platform games on the PS1 and N64 were identical--if you overlook til bilinear filtering on the N64. Still, games like Metal Gear Solid couldn't have been done on the N64 because of the limited space of the cartridges.