ps3 comment

[<ankh>]

E3 2006: Kutaragi Says PS3, "Too Cheap"

Yes, you read that correctly. SCE head Ken Kutaragi (right) has once again come up with a doozy of a comment. We all know the PS3 is expensive to make, but $600 isn't enough?! Take a deep breath and click for the full story...

Sony Computer Entertainment head Ken Kutaragi, known as the "father of the PlayStation," has made some crazy comments in the past, but his latest quote on Japanese website IT Media regarding the PS3 is almost too much to be believed.

After proclaiming that Sony's next-gen console would be "expensive" many months ago, Kutaragi this week went so far as to say that the PS3 is actually not expensive enough. "It's probably too cheap," he said. Apparently, he thinks that playing a PS3 can be compared to eating at a fine restaurant—you get what you pay for. Here are his words of wisdom, as translated by consumer website IGN:

"This is the PS3 price. Expensive, cheap -- we don't want you to think of it in terms of game machines. Because the PS3 is like nothing else.

"For instance, is it not nonsense to compare the charge for dinner at the company cafeteria with dinner at a fine restaurant? It's a question of what you can do with that game machine. If you can have an amazing experience, we believe price is not a problem.

"When we announced the PlayStation price, it was said to be expensive. Same for the PlayStation 2. However, when released, both had sales that were unthinkable for previous game machines. This is because both offered experiences that could not be had on previous game machines.

"With the PS3, you can have next generation game experiences that could previously not be experienced -- things like next generation graphics and various services via the network. And, as with the PS and PS2, we believe people who like games will, without question, purchase it."

Kutaragi also took the opportunity to address the launch shipment figures Sony is targeting—2 million units at launch, 4 million by year-end, 6 million by March 2007. Some in the industry have been skeptical that Sony can pull this off, but Kutaragi insisted that barring natural disasters Sony would definitely meet this goal.

"Of course, this is a number that we announced having made sure we can definitely prepare it. There is the possibility of unexpected problems like earthquake or theft, so I won't say it's absolute, but if this type of trouble does not occur, there's no problem with this number," he said.

by James Brightman

Partially true, but if this is to work I think they need to have quite cheap games for it.

/Ankh

[Xest]

It's funny actually because I was at an MS Game Developer conference yesterday and we were looking at the innards of the XBox 360 in comparison to the PS3's intended feature set, and apart from not having a Blu-ray support the XBox 360 seems to have a better hardware design to it.

The problem with the PS3 is simply that they've gone for new hardware, which does indeed pave the way for improvements in the future, it's not something we're likely to see made proper use of for at LEAST 4 years, by which time we can likely expect the next XBox iteration anyway - the Wii is going down a completely different path so can't be compared at all against the XBox/PS3 really. Blu-ray/Cell chips should've ideally been reserved for the next iteration of PS which could've been cheaper as the price of Cell/Blu-ray went down for other devices (Also the Blu-Ray/HD DVD war will likely be over so there's no risk of having an obsolete Blu-Ray drive). The PS3 should've been a cheaper interim device.

Comparing component for component, the Cell chip sports more cores than the XBox 360 but the 360's cores are much more generic, this means that although the PS3 sports more cores, it's unlikely they'll all be able to be used to their max potential or even used at all in some games, whilst the 360 can happily make use of every bit of it's cores. The Xbox 360 has more RAM than the PS3, both run at 700mhz clock. The Xbox 360 is superior in terms of graphics card, 10mb of cache for the GPU is pretty much unheard of up until now, this will really improve throughput for the 360's video.

Essentially the PS3's only advantages over the XBox 360 is CPU speed if most of the Cell cores can be made use but this is a big if, also some of this speed gain is nullified by lower specs elsewhere (i.e. graphics card). The other advantage is that of Blu-ray but we don't know if Blu-ray or HD DVD will win the war yet so I'm not sure how useful this is.

Essentially, Sony has taken too many risks here, they've tried to push out new hardware and succeded in massively increasing their production costs for no realistic gain over the 360.

Other info that maybe useful to you although I don't know the PS3's side of the story is that Microsoft is making sure all XBox games support 4x Anti-aliasing, that they're all Xbox Live compatible and that they're all HD compliant.

Still, I'm a Wii fan so I don't really care what happens either way, from what I've seen so far though the 360 does look the best bet, particularly when it's so much cheaper - look at the dev. stuff from Rare, the company that made Kameo and seeing their game being capable of rendering real-time 12,000 trolls without any drop in performance and particle systems supporting 1million particles was pretty damn amazing tho

[Ovi]

Xest,

I think you missed the point of Sony putting Blu-ray drives into the PS3. The reason Sony are putting Blu-Ray into the PS3, and selling it "cheap" is their way to help ensure that Blu-Ray wins.

If Sony sell 6 million Bul-Ray PS3s by next March, then that's a lot of extra HD DVDs to sell.

It will also probably be the cheapest way to get a next-gen DVD drive, due to the way console are "subsidised" by the follow-up game sales.

Personally I don't like Sony as a company so I hope they don't sell a single machine!

[Xest]

I'm well aware of the strategy for getting Blu-rays into the market, but I think it's a rather flawed method of doing so, I'm not convinced people buy a console for the DVDs it plays only for games really. I'm pretty certain that if someone wants to play HD stuff they'll buy it anyway, that is, whilst if someone was going to buy a Blu-ray player it certainly will save them doing so if they buy a PS3 anyway, but if someone was going to buy an HD DVD player then having a PS3 with Blu-ray aint gonna stop them.

In all I'm under the impression that Blu-ray/HD DVD/PS3 are going to flop anyway, I'll probably be proven wrong, but as with Windows vista there's a lot of people out there who don't like seeing horrifically tight DRM being forced upon them and even more who don't see any real benefit of HD over standard DVD.

Looking around the net at various polls about "Which console will you buy" the PS3 is losing by a long way and amongst those circles - the serious gaming types the Wii is winning. Add into that the fact that the Wii isn't even primarily marketed at these people we can only assume it'll do even better with the people it is marketed at - casual gamers. With the Wii's low price and apparent preferred console I'm guessing it's going to outsell the PS3 by a long way and also with it's low price it's still going to leave plenty of pennies left over to buy that HD-DVD drive.

Sony's marketing plan for Blu-ray can only work if they can sell a lot of units, the problem is I really don't think they're going to pull it off due to the fact they've tried to go too far ahead in the future with their kit leaving it with a price tag no one wants to pay. I think Sony's only saving grace can be those who have bought a PS1 and a PS2 and will buy a PS3 just because it's the next iteration.

[Ovi]

You underestimate the power of Curry's / Comet sales & Marketing.

Everyone has a DVD drive now, so sales will stagnate. It is in the interests of these companies to sell something new.

Then there is the "keeping up with the Joneses" influence. Once one person has one 2 other people have to have one too...

And finally 90% of people haven't got a clue really about what is what, making the influences above all the stronger, and avoiding the difficult question of DRM. It will either be a case of you accept DRM, or you go without the latest music/video releases.

People certainly do buy consoles because they have certain other functions. We bought our PS2 because it had a DVD drive, and we needed one at the time. Of course we were looking at a new console anyway. But the Blu-Ray, isn't the PS3 release price actually cheaper than it is possible to buy a Blu-Ray drive any other way?

[Xest]

Not sure how much Blu-ray drives will be tbh, I don't know if it is cheaper, but certainly I know the Cell processor put up Sony's production costs a ton also.

I was under the impression Curry's/Comet are pretty much a dying breed? Certainly Dixons has been whiped off the high street by internet sales now no? I think people tend to do more research online than they used to before buying, anyone who's been stung by a region locked drive will likely have learnt their lesson not to buy new kit too early.

BTW, Microsoft are releasing an HD DVD player addon for the 360 anyhow so no doubt they'll offer a bundle package to get both in one box when it's released. Also Toshiba has invented HD DVDs that can also contain a full DVD on also and work in an old DVD drive without costing anymore than a normal HD DVD would to produce - this means HD DVDs can be backwards compatible and work in both drives.

[Ovi]

Not sure how much Blu-ray drives will be tbh, I don't know if it is cheaper, but certainly I know the Cell processor put up Sony's production costs a ton also.

I was under the impression Curry's/Comet are pretty much a dying breed? Certainly Dixons has been whiped off the high street by internet sales now no? I think people tend to do more research online than they used to before buying, anyone who's been stung by a region locked drive will likely have learnt their lesson not to buy new kit too early.

BTW, Microsoft are releasing an HD DVD player addon for the 360 anyhow so no doubt they'll offer a bundle package to get both in one box when it's released. Also Toshiba has invented HD DVDs that can also contain a full DVD on also and work in an old DVD drive without costing anymore than a normal HD DVD would to produce - this means HD DVDs can be backwards compatible and work in both drives.

Prices for players start at around $1,000.They will probably be half that within 12 months, but still not a whole lot cheaper than PS3.

Curry's / Comet may not be what they once were but they are far from dying, just struggling to adjust their place in a changing world.

The Dixons name disappeared under a rebranding exercise, in order for the Dixons Stores Group to further their online sales, hardly being Whiped off the High Street. DSG are doing very well still, and are certainly the place to get your products promoted still.

I much prefer the Microsoft option, being able to buy the next gen drive at a later date, or even with it once the technology settles down. Don't underestimate Sony though.

Whatever Microsoft gets accused of in terms of dodgy business practices, my experiences with Sony suggest they are 10 times worse.

[Cernos]

The relative merits of the Xbox 360, P3 and Wii don't matter much if they're all in the same general ballpark. Even marketing hype won't matter much, consumers are pretty savvy these days. What will decide market share, as always, is street price of the console and the quality, abundance and price of the games for each platform. Push the console price too high though and it won't matter how good or abundant the games are, people won't stump up for the console. I suspect there's lots of life in the PS2 for a while yet.

[Lieva]

what /gu say




was gonna post this earlier

[Xest]

BTW, one other thing I forgot to mention is that Sony haven't even released finished off PS3 dev. kits yet making it extremely hard for developers to produce games for the PS3, with only 6months to launch that's really not good. Particularly as the 360 is currently reaching it's 2nd and 3rd gen. of games which is very important. As a general rule consoles don't reach their peak in game quality until about the 3rd game generation, so when the PS3 launches with some first gen. games (if the dev. kits get done soon! ) then the 360 will have it's top end games out their.