Sony To Go From First To Worst? 224
There have been many analyst predictions in the early days of the next-gen consoles, but rarely have they been so direct. DFC Intelligence President David Cole has gone on record saying there's a very real possibility Sony could lose this leg of the race to Microsoft and Nintendo. From the article: "Sony's clear strength is the first factor: brand strength and current market position. The glaring weakness of the PlayStation 3 is price, especially when compared to the competition. However, it is more than just an issue of whether the PlayStation brand strength can justify a premium price. Of course, Sony would like to point to the hardware horsepower and extra features like Blu-ray. The problem is that is only one factor in our forecasting matrix. Furthermore, with the competition having features like Xbox Live and the Nintendo Wii controller, the PS3 may not have that much of an advantage in the elusive 'Wow Factor.'" 1up Editor Sam Kennedy has further musings on this subject, with Next Generation reporting that there may be a problem getting high yields in the PS3 production process.
Re:The Problem is ... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Sony boycott (Score:1, Informative)
Re:try this one on for size... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, in terms of total consoles sold, that's not correct. You can do the search for yourself, but here's one link to a wikipedia article on the console wars [wikipedia.org] which includes total worldwide sales numbers. The relevant set for your comment is:
- PlayStation 2: 103.69 million
- Gamecube: 20.85 million
- Xbox: 24 million
In addition to that, the Xbox number is from December, while the PS2 and GC numbers are from March, suggesting that the Xbox number is actually higher than 24 million (though probably only slightly, because of the release of the Xbox360).If you want to argue that Gamecube games are more fun, or that Nintendo makes more money on every console, that may be the case (I've no idea). But it's not correct to say that the Gamecube beat out the Xbox in the last generation of consoles.
Re:Its only a battle for the second place (Score:2, Informative)
In fact, one thing to consider is that after Nintendo produced the Gamecube in association with Art X/ATI and IBM, Microsoft and Sony choose to use IBM for their CPU, and Microsoft choose ATI to produce their GPU; the performance/cost of the Gamecube was unbeatable.
Now, the general public doesn't know too much about the Wii; some information which is public about the system is that ATI produced a custom GPU that was built from the ground up, IBM produced a custom CPU, and both were produced using a 90nm process (the Gamecube used a 180nm process). To put this number into perspective the PowerPC 970FX and 970MP both were produced using a 90nm process, the 970FX reached 3GHz and the 970MP is a dual core processor that reached 2.5GHz; at the form factor of the Wii I wouldn't be surprised to see a variation of either of those processors at 2GHz (information from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_970 [wikipedia.org]). The GPU on the Wii is a slightly different beast, a friend of mine who was a former intern at EA and is now a Peon at another gaming company was telling me that the Wii is not about Photorealistic graphics but that doesn't mean that it isn't powerful; in his (brief) explanation the other systems are designed around expending more artist resources creating content which enables the content to look more realistic, whereas the Wii is about eliminating boundries so artist can obtain their vision.
I may be doing a poor job explaining this, but what you will notice when you look at Wii screenshots or videos is that there is a lot occuring on screen (tons of objects), there are no artifacts caused by polygonalization, the textures are highly detailed crisp and clear, and there are absolutely no normal maps. The artistic style is very similar to what you'd see on the Gamecube but the Wii is in a completely different weight class.