PS3 v.s. Xbox 360

that's only for the HD, not GT5 itself.
 
Steel X said:
PS3 has signed a deal with Xfire for the online service...that sounds good but not good enough.

That would be the only good news we hear from Sony so far.

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Stop right there. You don't even have a Xbox live.
 
Steel X said:
Who cares bout Xbox live? it's not even free as Wi-fi is. so...with Xfire, you would have to pay for ur account and other features such as Xbox live.
Click to expand...

Just let you know that release date had changed to 11-12-06 for Gears of War.
 
TGS 2006: Gran Turismo For Cheap
Sony to practically give away first PS3 entry.

- Bummed about Sony's micro transaction plans for Gran Turismo HD? Well this news might soften the blow just a bit. Japan's Impress Watch games site reports that, in comments made to the Japanese press, series producer Kazunori Yamauchi revealed that Sony plans to make GT HD available for the cost of the game disk and instruction manual. This suggests a retail price point of just a few dollars for the first PS3 Gran Turismo game.

This form of distribution is not new in the online gaming world. The PC version of Swing Golf Panya, for instance, is available for free. All monetary transactions coming when players purchase items. The PC title has thus far been a big success.

GT HD will include two main modes of play, Sony revealed earlier this week. Classic mode is basically Gran Turismo 4 running in 1080p along with a few other visual enhancements. The focus of this mode is on online play. Players race one-another online and purchase cars and tracks for a few dollars each. This mode won't include any courses and tracks from the start.

In comparison, those who want a more offline-oriented experience will be able to try out Premium mode. In addition to offering an early glimpse at the Gran Turismo 5 graphics engine (the actual GT5 won't be released until 2008), this mode will include 30 cars and 2 brand-new tracks right out of the box.

Sony clarified at TGS that Premium mode itself will have downloads. Players will be able to download 30 additional cars and a couple of additional tracks at the time of the game's release. The timing of these downloads suggests that they will not be free.

Development on Gran Turismo HD is currently at the 70% mark. A Japanese release is set for December.












TGS 2006: Gran Turismo HD Update
Details on car damage, updated AI, and more!
by Anoop Gantayat

September 23, 2006 - For our 30th Gran Turismo story here at TGS, we've got quite the update courtesy of Japanese site Gpara.com. Series producer Kazunori Yamauchi held a talk event at the show in which he revealed a number of new details on GT HD and the future of the series.

Yamauchi provided a summary of what's known about GT HD so far, including the split in modes between classic and premium. Just to avoid confusion, we'll repeat the details here. Classic mode is GT4 in high definition and with a few additional visual enhancements. The mode will be playable exclusively through downloadable cars and tracks. Premium mode is a single player preview of Gran Turismo 5, featuring a full-fledged PS3 graphics engine and detailed tracks and car models.

Yamauchi also touched upon the new Ferrari license that came to light earlier this week. Ferrari cars will not only appear in GT HD, but starting half a year from now and continuing for a period of a year, Polyphony Digital and Ferrari will engage in collaborative marketing efforts.

The focus of Yamauchi's speech was on GT HD's online aspects. "GT HD is an online game," said Yamauchi, " and a large scale one at that." While we've already written about the game's online features, from online races to car and track downloads, Yamauchi today hinted at deeper plans. "We'd like to offer users the freedom that was only available to developers," he explained, without going into further details.

While GT HD's reliance on micro transactions came to light earlier in the week, Yamauchi let slip a few specifics regarding Sony's download plans for the game and, potentially, other online PlayStation titles. Sony will host a PlayStation Store service, Yamauchi revealed. This store will be accessible from the PlayStation 3's main menu. For GT-HD, this is where you'll be able to purchase new cars and tracks.

Downloads will be included in both the premium and classic modes of play. The premium mode, as we mentioned in an earlier article, will include 30 cars and 2 courses from the start. Available for download at launch, according to Sony's official press materials, will be one new course and 30 additional cars. Yamauchi revealed at the talk event that premium-grade cars and courses will continue to be added in the future for download.

For classic mode, the number of potential downloads is staggering. Users will be able to download 770 cars, 51 courses and 4,500 items. These numbers are end targets though. At the start of service, only 51 "items" will be available for download. Yamauchi did not give specifics on how this number breaks down.

Car damage will at long last make it into GT-HD, Yamauchi revealed. However, this long sought-after feature won't be available from the start. Polyphony plans to make it available as an update some time in 2007.

Also set to become available through an update is opponent AI. Polyphony will make updated opponent AI routines available for download in the first half of 2007.

Yamauchi also commented on a mysterious new feature that was noticed by some in the GT HD demo on display in the Sony booth. The demo offered players a choice between "normal" and "professional" driving models. Professional, will offer a more realistic driving experience, explained Yamauchi.

IGN attempted to test this feature out on the show floor, but found it difficult to notice the difference due to the choppy frame rate resulting from the early state of the game. We look forward to trying out the feature in the final version.

So why are we getting this fragmented download project instead of the real GT5? Yamauchi discussed some of the logistics behind making the next Gran Turismo. "Creating a car for GT4 took approximately one month. This time, it takes half a year," explained Yamauchi, referring to the development of a car for the premium mode of GT HD (that is to say, cars at the GT5 spec level). "The amount of data for each car is approximately 20 times that of GT4."

They could have still given the game the GT5 name, of course. Yamauchi addressed this as well. "We feel that game play style is changing these days. For the first Gran Turismo, the total play time was over 100 hours. However, GT HD will probably be played around 10 to 30 minutes a day. In other words, rather than concentrating play on a single game over 10s of hours, people will play a little bit each day.. We realize that this is the type of play style that meets current needs, and hope to offer it to players."

There will be a Gran Turismo 5, though. "It will definitely be released in the future," said Yamauchi about the next numbered GT game. On separate occasions, Yamauchi has said that GT5 will be available in 2008.




w00t
 
It's good news... I'm going get PS3 in next year.
 
Good news for gamers...bad news for Ken.
 

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Will Sony go *gasp* BANKRUPT??

sonnyweathers writes
"There has never been a more perilous time for Sony than 2006. But if you think you can save the company by buying PlayStation 3 consoles, you're wrong. Analyst Evermore believes that selling 6 million PS3 consoles will make Sony a ripe target for takeover — perhaps even by Microsoft."

Slashdot | Buy a PlayStation 3 and Sink Sony





Sony has a book value of $27 billion. It has nearly $9 billion in cash. Sony's not going anywhere. Or is it?

Sony is looking at a potential for demise it has never faced before. With the failure of its TV and music electronics businesses and its up-and-down movie business, it has relied more and more on the video game business to keep profits up.

But now even its video game business can't save the company. In fact, it's the video game business that could put the whole company right down the toilet.

Here's a story of a company in trouble. Sure, you think you could help it by buying a new PS3 at the end of the year. But purchasing a PS3 this year could be the very thing that pushes Sony over the edge.


.:: ESH Reviews: Do the Math: Will Sony Go Broke? ::. Bringing You the Only Video Game and Anime Podcast and Blog Run by Sistah's
 
^^interesting article about Sony. They were doing well with the PS One and PS2, now suddenly they're hurting all because of the stupid TV and music business including the PSP isn't doing so well. I was a fan of Sony products and that's not the case anymore because they don't make good quality items anymore and they're overpriced.
 
In a February story for CNet, it was estimated that the total cost of components for the PS3 would be in the neighborhood of $725 to $905 -- and that was before it was rumored that Sony would have to put PS2 components in the box because the new chip lacked the ability to emulate the earlier PSOne and PS2 games.

The CNet story said, "The materials price estimates do not include marketing, software development, advertising or other costs, which will push Sony's total cost per console even higher."

That there is such a disparity between the price of materials and the suggested retail price for a new console is not unusual because most new consoles are sold as loss-leaders, with the game maker making up the difference with the high margin of profit they get by selling games for the console.

In contrast, the materials cost for the XBox 360 is estimated at only $501, and should continue to drop as the console ages. While Sony pays $200 to $300 for each raw Blu-ray drive, Microsoft pays only $20 for the simpler DVD drives.


at least MS isnt having that much problems as Sony is.



The Truth Hits Home

With such estimates for raw materials, video game fans should have known that the new machine would need to cost a lot more. But a huge audience that was prepared to cheer the announced price of the PS3 instead sat in stunned silence when the suggested retail price was announced at the E3 conference: $499 for the basic system and $599 for the premium one.

Of course, the single most costly item in the PS3 is the Blu-ray drive. Analysts originally figured Blu-ray would add at least another $200 or so to the price of the machine, but that figure has gone way up.

First, there's more than just the mechanical equipment to figure in. Sony must also pay for all the codecs that must be licensed.

Second, the slow adoption of high density DVD technology will keep prices high for years.

Finally, all manufacturers of the blue lasers that are required for high density DVDs are having problems getting up to speed in creating the machines. This will result in low yields, further driving up the price of the drives.

Sony Computer Entertainment president Ken Kutaragi was not ambivalent about the pricing of the console -- he kept saying it was a premium machine, sold at a premium price. Want a PS3? Work a little harder!

"Our ideal," Kutaragi said, "is for consumers to think to themselves, 'OK, I'll work more hours and buy it.' We want people to feel that they want it, no matter what."

But the consumer reaction was swift -- and harsh. Even the Official Playstation Magazine had a bold cover headline that asked, "Is It Worth $600?"

In June, a month after Sony announced its price points for the PS3, analysts at Merrill Lynch estimated Sony would lose more than $1 billion in the console's first year of existence. By comparison, Sony lost only $458 million during the first year the PS2 was available. The company followed that with two strong years of profit -- $759 million in Year 2 and $1.3 billion in Year 3.

But Merrill Lynch warned that this generation of consoles was not like the last. Microsoft beat Sony for the next generation consoles by a year and a price reduction for the XBox could result in additional losses for Sony -- $730 million in Year 2 and $457 million in Year 3. That's nearly $2 billion in losses over three years.

Sony's digging their own grave with money problems.

The Market Leader Goes Into the Cellar

Although the PS2 captured more than a 70 percent share of the previous generation of console sales, it is entering the next generation at a distant third, with Microsoft predicted to sell 10 million XBox 360 consoles and Nintendo selling 4 million of its new Wii consoles, while Sony will be able to push out only 2 million consoles to consumers by the end of this year.

That fact alone has analysts betting that Sony will introduce price cuts quickly. But price cuts, in combination with the losses Sony takes on each machine it sells, are a double-edged sword.

"By reducing the price, it appears that Sony may have prolonged its recouping period of initial investments on the PS3 by a few years," John Yang, a Tokyo-based analyst with Standard & Poor's, told the Wall Street Journal today. According to the Wall Street Journal article, Yang estimates the PlayStation 3 will be unprofitable for at least three years.

The Journal story brings up another point that may draw the most fear in the ranks of Sony -- the PlayStation will no longer dominate game developers. When the original PlayStation and PS2 were introduced, Sony had an impressive lineup of developers who made games exclusively for its consoles. That won't be the case with the PS3.

"We don't want the PlayStation 3 to be the overwhelming loser, so we want to support them," Michihiro Sasaki, senior vice president of Square Enix, told the Wall Street Journal. "But we don't want them to be the overwhelming winner either, so we can't support them too much."

So the price cuts have already begun. On Friday Sony announced a price cut for Japanese buyers (about $410 in U.S. dollars for the low-end version), there was no indication that such a price cut would be given to American customers.

In addition to lowering the price of the low-end model, Sony added an HDMI port to the machine, which further increases the price of raw materials. Sony will undoubtedly be losing even more money than ever before.

Sony's so pathetic.

Do the Math

As a result, Sony is forecasting an $862 million operating loss for the current fiscal year. But that's going to seem like chicken feed, compared to the loss it's liable to see in 2007.

How much will Sony lose in the next 12 months? Let's count it up.

Sony plans on making 6 million PS3 units before April. Let's say that they sell every one of them at full retail price. With what we know about the materials price -- particularly the price of Blu-Ray players -- let's say that they will lose only $300 for every PS3 they sell.


6,000,000 x $300= $1.8 billion

That's the same amount that analysts figure the PS3 will cost the company over the first three years. Why the disparity?

The analysts are counting on Sony making up the sales of machines with the sales of video games. But it's not going to be as easy for Sony this time. Few game developers are making games exclusively for the PS3.

Also, Sony has already said that games would be at least $10 more than the games for the XBox 360 and at least $20 more than the games for the Nintendo Wii. With everything being the same, would you pay $10 or $20 more for the same game that you could play on your XBox 360 or Wii?

In addition, Sony will be nickle-and-diming you at every opportunity -- particularly with the HDMI cable, which will likely cost between $99 and $129. (That's surely why they added an HDMI port for the low-end PS3. They'll make their money back on the cable for it.)

Surely the discounts will come quickly, but they'll all be a drag on Sony's bottom line. Let's say Sony loses $400 on every box they sell. Here are the numbers:


6,000,000 x $400= $2.4 billion

That really starts taking a mammoth chunk out of Sony's cash. Add to that the half-billion dollars of free laptop batteries they've got to give out and the losses start approaching $3 billion.

But a company like Sony can afford to lose $4 billion, can't it? Once upon a time, that might have been true, but Sony is a much different company today than it was just a few years ago.

The Japanese people who owned shares in Sony could see the value in building for the future. But, with its purchase of Columbia Studios and Columbia Records, Sony has become much more of a multinational company. Today, for the first time in its history, less than half of the company is owned by Japanese investors. Investors in the West demand more short-term benefits.

Devoting nearly half of its cash reserves to losses in the video game and computing sectors, with no guarantee of future profits for another two years, could send the company's stock into a tailspin, once its investors realize the full measure of the grave situation for the company.

In such a situation, Sony could start selling off large chunks of the company. But even that would come at a large cost. For example, selling off the movie division would result in the loss of the Spiderman franchise for the PlayStation. Without an exclusive there, Microsoft and Nintendo would gain the edge in game sales, since their games cost less than Sony's.

Sony has become a minor player in the music player and TV industries, so they wouldn't be able to make much money off selling their stake in the aging Walkman and Trinitron franchises.

When things are all said and done, the most valuable piece of the pie at Sony is its video game division. They could very well put it up for sale. And who could be the potential buyer?

Microsoft.

That's right. I said it. Just think about it.

Who could benefit the most by purchasing Sony's video game division?

Microsoft.

You might say there's no way the U.S. government would allow such a thing. Anti-trust, you say.

Just remember who's running the government. A Microsoft takeover would be treated with the same kid gloves that created DaimlerChrysler.

Who knows? This time next year you could be playing games on a PlayStation 360.

Ken would be living in the streets in a cardboard box and holding the rusty mug while begging for some yen. (japanese money)

Want a PS3? Work a Little Harder!

So you want to save Sony. What can you do?

Well, as Sony's Kutaragi says, you need to work a little harder and make a little more money.

Stop complaining that the PS3 costs $600. It doesn't. In order to cut down on its losses, Sony is liable to do the same thing to consumers that it did 11 years ago at the original Playstation launch -- it'll require that you buy two games in order to get a machine. That'll boost the price for you to around $725 or so.

But there's more! Want an HDMI cable? That'll be another $100 to $125. Now we're at $850 or so. You've got a Blu-ray player, so you'll want a few Blu-ray movies -- Sony titles only, of course. Buy six of them while you're at it! At an average list price of $25 each, we're talking another $150. That pushes our total price to an even $1,000.

That'll go a long way to saving Sony.

Now who's going to save you?


That's it. I'm done with Sony.

Sony can just rot in hell for all I care, no matter how hard they beg for more money to help save the corporation. they are just being pathetic.
 
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This one article is so full of shit to me. Using the PS3 to find a cure? Get real! :roll: seems that they are just trying to "brainwash" us so they can get our money.

PlayStation's serious side: Fighting disease

POSTED: 1:42 a.m. EDT, September 19, 2006
By David E. Williams
CNN


(CNN) -- Kids aiming to persuade their parents to buy the PlayStation 3 have some new ammunition -- donating their PS3's down time to researchers could help cure Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or mad cow disease.

This November, Sony's PS3, with a price tag from $499 to $599, will challenge Microsoft's XBox 360 and Nintendo's Wii in a battle royale for holiday dollars when it hits stores in the United States and Japan.

The PS3 uses a powerful new processor called the Cell Broadband Engine to run highly realistic games like "Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07," "Metal Gear Solid 4" and "Full Auto 2." It also has a 20GB or 60GB hard drive (depending on the model) and can connect to the Internet either wirelessly, or with an Ethernet hookup so gamers can download new programs and take each other on.

The PS3's chip is the same one IBM is using in a supercomputer it's building for the Department of Energy. That computer is expected to reach speeds of one petaflop, or 1,000 trillion calculations per second. (Full story)

"It has so much horsepower and, of course, when you're playing a game all that horsepower will be used for the game. But there are a lot of times during the day when somebody's not playing the game," said Sony's Richard Marks. "It seemed like a good idea to be able to use that horsepower for something else that is, in this case, good for mankind."

Sony worked with Stanford University's Folding@home project to harness the PS3's technology to help study how proteins are formed in the human body and how they sometimes form incorrectly.

Improperly formed proteins are linked to a number of diseases, including Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gherig's disease, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad-cow disease.

"What you can imagine is that if a machine was assembled incorrectly, it can do damaging things," said Vijay Pande, who runs the Stanford project. "You can imagine a car that's screwed up and someone tries to drive it, then maybe it crashes into things and causing problems."

Proteins start out in the body as long strings of amino acids and have to assemble themselves into complex shapes -- a process scientists call folding -- before they can do anything. The challenge for scientists is that folding is difficult to observe because proteins are so small and the process is so fast -- about 10 one-millionths of a second.

Scientists are using computer simulations instead, but that has its own limitations. It takes about a day for a computer to simulate a nanosecond (one-billionth of a second) so it would take about 30 years for that computer to complete one simulation.

Folding@home uses a network of about 200,000 personal computers to simulate how proteins assemble themselves. Dividing the complicated calculations into smaller packets enables the computers to do jobs that would strain the most powerful supercomputers.

"These calculations that we have to do are very challenging. Even if we were given all of the supercomputer resources in the country we still would not be able to do the types of things that we can do with folding@home," said Vijay Pande, who runs the Stanford project.

A network of PS3s would run even faster. Pande said that a network of 10,000 PlayStations would increase speeds by a factor of five, and 100,000 would be 50 times faster than what they can do today.

"It turns two years into one month, and that's a huge thing for us," he said. "It's more than us just being impatient, there are calculations that we don't run right now because any calculation that would take more than two or three years, we don't even start it."

To participate, users will just download a program into the PS3's hard drive. Then they just need to leave the machine on when they're not playing. The Folding@home team will divide their complex calculations into manageable chunks and then send it to the participating machines. The program and data will take up 10 to 20 megabytes - or about the size of a handful of MP3 files, Pande said.

When the PS3 is done processing its chunk it will send the data back.

Makers say the program won't run when someone is using the PS3, because it might bog down the game.

Sony says it plans to sell about 2 million PS3s in the United States and Japan before the end of the year, and 6 million worldwide by next March.

Since all of those units are pretty much the same, developers did not have to make compromises that would slow the Folding@home program down.

"You don't really know what you're getting on any given PC, so you have to write the program in a general way so that it will run on weaker machines and stronger systems, Marks said. "They have to write programs sort of to the lowest common denominator, whereas on our system it can be finely tuned to completely leverage what we have."

The PS3 also has a graphic chip that lets users watch the protein as it folds and from different angles, said Klaus Hofrichter, another Sony developer.

"These interfaces are very nice looking, very scientific in a certain way. ... You can use the controller and navigate around," Hofrichter said.

That might make people more likely to download and run the program, Pande said.

All PS3s connect to the Internet, and Sony plans to make it easy for gamers to get the program when they go online, Marks said.

"What we want is for people just to have to make the decision to contribute electricity and benefit mankind," Marks said.
 
This may not be part of this thread, but you know Dead Rising, developed and published by Capcom and sold exclusivly for the Xbox360 was tested on HDTVs? Well if you have a SDTV and you cant read the text that well on ur SDTV, thats why the game is best compatiable with HDTV but the good news is that another game coming for the Xbox360, Gears of War, is being tested on SDTV so that's good news for most gamers that dont even have a HDTV so no hard feelings for ppl who dont have a HDTV anyway.
 
Here's what Sony said so far from 2005 to now.

what sony said...

''ps3 will recognise emotions and movements"

"ps3 will be twice as powerful as xbox 360"

"ps3 graphics is 1.5 times of xbox 360"

"performance of ps3 is 1000 times of ps2"

"ps3 abilities are 35 times of ps2"

"ps3 will always maintain 120fps"

"ps3 is not a games console. ps3 is a computer. we dont need a pc"

"ps3 is different from 'xbox 1.5' "

"ps3, consumers will work hard to get 1"

"hardware size of ps3 will be smaller than ps2"

"ps3 will be released on spring 2006"

"ps3 will be sold at a price anyone can buy"

"ps3 and ps2 has life cycle of 10 years"

"ps3, it never copied wii"

"ps3, it may be too cheap"

"ps3 aims to sell 2 billion units"

"there is no difference between 60gig and 20gig 'phil harrison' "

"ps3, we wont be able to catch up demand for blu ray"

"ps3 softwares are evolving every day"

"ps3 is premium restaurant meal, 360 and wii is cheap meal"

"rumble is too ancient"

"assasin's creed running on 360 with ps3 usb pad"

"2d games are not suitable for ps3"

"when asked about launch titles for ps3, 'enjoy ps1/2 games first' "

"ps3 will still sell 5million units without games"

"kutaragi, who is 54 himself, sacks employees over 40 for innovation of sony"

"xbox live anywhere is simple concept"

"GTA wont have sales effects on ps3"

"ps3 power consumption 500W"



and did any of them become true? not very likely.
 
120 fps in games is useless because most humans cannot see the difference running at 120 fps. The human eyes can see up to 30-60 fps, depending on human. We'll see the truth when Sony PS3 comes out this fall related to what they said on the list above.
 
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