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Weekly News Roundup (4 November 2007)

Sunday, November 4th, 2007

So another Sunday, and another news roundup. There really ought to be some rule to forbid working on a Sunday, but then it would just mean more work on Mondays. There really ought to be some rule to forbid working on a Monday …

In copyright news, in a Slysoft newsletter, a claim was made that BD+ copy protection, the additional layer of copy protection that Blu-ray owners enjoy, will be defeated soon. Everybody probably still remembers the statement that Richard Doherty, (ex?) analyst at Envisioneering Group made in regards to BD+:

BD+, unlike AACS, which suffered a partial hack last year, won’t likely be breached for 10 years

Not exactly 10 years, but 0.5 years is not bad. Surprisingly, this was the only bit of important copyright related news for the week … the RIAA/MPAA must be on holidays. Although with so many OiNK replacement sites popping up, there will have a lot of work to do when they come back.

In HD news, Fox is set to release the very first BD 1.1 disc for the sci-fi movie Sunshine. This is the first Blu-ray disc to feature picture-in-picture technology, which has been present on HD DVD almost from day one. To access the feature, people will need to have a BD 1.1 player, of which there is only one on the market (in standalone form anyway), the newly released Panasonic DMP-BD30. PS3 owners should expect a firmware update to get themselves up to at least 1.1 standard (although the PS3 is good enough for 2.0 in any case). Will the disc play properly on 1.0 players? We will find out soon enough. The news this week has all been about HD DVD’s price drops. Several special Black Friday sales have ensured that not only did HD DVD standalones break the $200 barrier, it broke the $100 barrier too. $98 for a standalone HD DVD player from Toshiba (the superceded HD-A2) that has built in DVD upscaling and comes with 5 free HD DVD movies – that’s really just too good to be true. It sure beats spending $500+ here in Australia to buy a similar player that only comes with 3 movies. K-Mart has saw the trend, and will now offer the HD-A2 as their only HD DVD or Blu-ray standalone for sale this Christmas. They will still sell the PS3 (as well as the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on) so talk of them going exclusive is not factual. The HD-A2 is not a bad player. It lacks 1080p output, but as this DigiWiki entry explains, it’s not a problem at all for people with 1080p displays while playing back film content. To continue with the HD DVD news, Toshiba has showed off their new HD DVD recorder, now supporting HD Rec, a format that uses H.264 to record to standard DVD discs, allowing 2 hours of HD content to be stored. Remember that Toshiba’s initial idea for HD was to use existing DVD/red laser technology and combine that with a new more efficient codec (H.264 of VC-1). It’s just as well then that Ritek will soon launch HD DVD recordable discs. Asus is also launching their quietest HD DVD-ROM drive yet, designed for home theatre PCs.

On that note, let’s move to gaming. Sort of. I’m very impressed with Nvidia’s new 8800 GT card as I noted in an earlier blog post. It combines the 3D performance of the 8800 GTS, with the HD acceleration of the 8600 GTS, and then makes the whole thing even more efficient as to even allow a passive cooled version for building an ultra quiet home theatre PC. Nvidia will be releasing a new GTS card too based on similar changes, so that might even more more attractive. And while ATI’s Radeon HD 2xxx series has been somewhat of a disappointment, you should never rule them out because you are only as good as your last GPU.

Now moving onto gaming properly, there was rumours that IPTV was coming to the Xbox 360 in the Fall update, but Microsoft has quashed the rumours by saying that it’s not in the Fall update, but will be here soon enough anyway. Another week and another developer, this time Midway Chicago’s studio head Mike Bilder, saying the PS3 is a pain in the ass to work with. But he does offer a solution – develop for the PS3 first to work around the problems, and then port over to the other systems. Specifically, he says:

Just, to be honest, the hardware differences in memory and processor on the PS3 vs. traditional PC and 360, it makes it a challenge, and it’s representative. Everybody’s having a challenge in the industry right now.

[And about using the PS3 as the lead development platform]

The difficulty you run into there, at least in the last generation, was that the Xbox was considerably more powerful than the PS2, and you found that people didn’t always take advantage of the hardware. Whereas with the PS3 and the 360, it’s certainly more of a level playing field, so I don’t think it’s necessarily a negative to put the PS3 first [as the lead development platform]. But it does help mitigate some of that risk in framerate, memory, technology, just the hardware differences.

That’s definitely a solution to a problem, find out what you can and cannot do on the PS3 first, and once the code is done, you can be sure that it will probably work on the other consoles too because they are a bit more flexible to work with than the PS3.  The quality will be the same too, according to Bilder, because there’s not much difference between the two main consoles (and the Xbox 360 development is flexible enough to allow ports to it to run quite well). Of course, smaller developers who don’t have the resources of Midway might simply skip the PS3 to work on platforms that have the biggest install base and with less development problems.

So that’s it then for a week that has been dominated by HD DVD news, with relatively very little news in other areas. If I didn’t know better, I would say that the HD DVD promotion machine has finally started rolling, and just in time for the holidays too. Blu-ray will come back next week with more news to counter, no doubt. See you then.

Posted in Computing, Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (4 November 2007)

Weekly News Roundup (28 October 2007)

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

Woohoo! Another weekly roundup. More work on a Sunday when I didn’t get a good night’s sleep in my hot non air-conditioned office. I’m not bitter, really, I’m not.

Anyway, in copyright news the MPAA has apparently hired a hacker to find out confidential information about the bittorrent site, TorrentSpy. I’m pretty sure hacking is illegal in the US. It may in fact be considered an act of terrorism. All those MPAA “piracy equals terrorism” posters finally start to make some sense. The big news of the week was the closure of the popular music bittorrent site, OiNK. There is already news that The Pirate Bay may start something similar to replace it. It will probably end up being something better and harder to close down too. Meanwhile on the other end of the spectrum, Amazon says its DRM free music sales has been a great success. No surprise really, considering DRM is completely useless in preventing piracy and its only purpose is to annoy consumers (and make healthy royalties for the company who invented the DRM engine). Now only if there were something similar for movies …

On to gaming news, US September sales figures have been released and it’s another bad month for the PS3 (read my in depth analysis of the figures here). I think I’ve posted enough about the problems with the PS3 over this last few days, that I don’t think I need go into it any further (although since my blog post, another developer has come out to say it’s a pain to work on the PS3). But at least Activision is standing by the PS3, saying that it is the most advanced console and that in 4 or 5 years time, people will see the difference. I’m not sure Sony can wait that long though, considering their gaming division losses taking the shine off their otherwise impressive profit figures. This week has all been about how bad the PS3 is, and I guess Microsoft is happy to just sit and enjoy the afterglow of the Halo 3 effect. But they are not resting on their laurels, and rumour is that IPTV might be coming to the Xbox 360 in the fall update (and since it’s fall already in the US, the update might not be that far away). It will probably be an U.S only affair though. Shame.

HD news now, the Transformers on HD DVD has sold well, although not as well as first claimed by Paramount. Blu-ray still held the week 51% to 49%, but how quickly that their 2-to-1 advantage shrank due to one single movie, and also the puny amount of HD discs sold compared to DVDs, means that these “figure wars” are really quite pointless. I’ve always maintained that consumers should adopt a format neutral stance and support both formats to ensure they don’t lose out, and Samsung is helping the cause by announcing more details on their updated dual-format player (which will be Blu-ray Profile 1.1 compatible, one of the first on the market to be). But if you don’t mind having two separate players, then HD DVD players have finally fallen below the magic $US 200 threshold. Wal-Mart, and now Circuit City, will be selling the superseded Toshiba A2 for under $200. That’s quite a decent price for a HD DVD player that also doubles as a fairly decent DVD upscaler (not as good as the more expensive XA2 though, but the Reon VX chip in that player puts it into the high-end class of DVD players). While $200 is tempting, I think prices will drop further. In the meantime, check out Amazon’s Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive deal (if you have an Xbox 360 that is) – you get Heroes Season 1 on HD DVD of $69.95 value, plus 5 other free HD DVD movies by redemption and all for under $180. Assuming each HD DVD is worth $20, that’s $170 worth of movies for $180, so the drive only costs $10 (and it doubles as a HD DVD-ROM drive for your PC too!).

That’s all folks from my hot non air-conditioned office. See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (28 October 2007)

PS3 doesn’t suck as much as fanbois

Saturday, October 27th, 2007

What am I doing writing three blog posts per week, especially when I have another one (weekly roundup) to write tomorrow? Well, you see, I’m a bit angry. And when I’m angry, I blog. PlayStation 3What started as a perfectly innocent *opinion* from an ex game developer for Harmonix (makers of Guitar Hero and Rock Band) on his blog about the difficulties of programming on the PS3, has turned into a fanboy fight-fest, mostly from PS3 fanbois and members of the Sony Defence Force blasting his *opinions* in the comments section. The funny thing is that Jason Booth, the developer/blogger in question, didn’t even suggest that the PS3 sucks, just that it’s difficult to programme for and that the expectation that PS3 games will own Xbox 360 games in the future might not be fully realised. Here are the points raised in the blog post:

  • PS3 has a slower fill rate than the Xbox 360
  • Multi-processor programming is too complicated to take full advantage of the Cell
  • Blu-ray is great for providing more space, but has a slower load time. It is now mainly used to store duplicate game assets to speed up load time and work around some of the other limitations of the PS3
  • Optimization for the PS3 is costly, and developers lack the resources to do it effectively
  • Code for the PS3 cannot be re-used for non-PS3 projects, so investment in PS3 coding is expensive

Now I’m not saying that all these points are valid. Some are probably not, but I can’t comment because I don’t work on game development. But the reaction to it has been, sadly, typical whenever someone says anything bad about a particular tech, in this instance, from PS3 fanbois. So what kind of reaction do we get from PS3 fanbois? That game developers, who sometimes work 18 hour days and basically live at the office, are lazy. That because Jason spelt “Blu-ray” wrong and that he started his career as a computer graphic artist means he knows nothing about programming. Some even suggested that his new work involves producing a product that will compete with Sony Home, and therefore, he is a bitter programmer who is going to get beat by Sony and is venting his anger. How could these people come out with these statements when most (if not all) of them have zero programming experience? And why personal attacks against someone who simply expressed his own opinions about a piece of tech? The comments posted are not all from fanbois though. There are a lot of anonymous postings from programmers with even more technical evidence of the PS3’s failings. As someone who graduated as a Software Engineer, but never really went to work in the field, I can understand some but not all of the points raised, but it seem to make sense. These programmers are posting anonymously because they fear this kind of backlash from fanbois, and more importantly, the spanking they will get from Sony which in turn might mean a loss of employment. But it’s not just anonymous programmers, some of the industry’s biggest names have all spoken out against the PS3’s design. Gabe Newell, the man behind the amazing Half-Life series and MD of Valve software, said earlier this year that:

The PS3 is a total disaster on so many levels, I think It’s really clear that Sony lost track of what customers and what developers wanted. I’d say, even at this late date, they should just cancel it and do a ‘do over’. Just say, ‘This was a horrible disaster and we’re sorry and we’re going to stop selling this and stop trying to convince people to develop for it.’

Then we have John Carmack, creator of Doom/Quake from ID Software, saying:

But the honest truth is that Microsoft dev tools are so much better than Sony’s. We expect to keep in mind the issues of bringing this up on the PlayStation 3… they’re not helpful to the developers… I suspect they’re not going to overwhelmingly crush the marketplace this time, which wasn’t clear a year ago.

And posted on this blog a couple of weeks ago, was this statement from BioWare President Greg Zeschuk:

If everyone’s waiting for this huge gap, it’s just not going to happen. By the end of this generation both PS3 and Xbox 360 will look awesome. Maybe 1 per cent of the population might be able to tell the difference between the two.

No surprise then that PS3 fanbois have already blasted all of these pioneers of gaming, some go as far as suggesting they’ve been bribed to say these things. I know who I would believe if I had to choose between Carmack/Newell/Zeschuk or Sony’s PR department and their legion of fanbois. What these experts are saying, is not that the PS3 totally sucks, but rather, that it’s not an easy piece of hardware to programme for. I’m sure the Xbox 360 and Wii have their own problems, but Sony seemed to have ignored the human element (ie. programmers) when they came up with their design for the PS3. I’m sure that if developers allocated more resources to the PS3, they could come up with games that will be as impressive if not more so than the Xbox 360 version. But the extra resources dedicated to make the game look good takes resources away from making the game fun to play and in the longevity stakes (see Lair, Heavenly Sword, Ratchet and Clank …). But even if you don’t believe these experts, then all you have to do is to look at reality (something that fanbois are unable to do, seemingly). The reality is that the Xbox 360 has the biggest market share, compared to the PS3’s pathetic 14% hold on the US market. The reality is that the Xbox 360 has more and better games so far, and that developers seem to develop more games and do it faster on the Xbox 360. The reality is that when cross-platform games are produced, these either look the same on either platforms, or in many cases, look and play better on the Xbox 360. That’s reality, and until it changes, nothing fanbois can say will make the PS3 a better game console.

Posted in PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | 4 Comments »

Game Consoles – September 2007 NPD Sales Figure Analysis

Monday, October 22nd, 2007

This is another regular feature that I might run on this blog. Every month, marketing research firm NPD releases sales figures for game consoles (including portables).

The figures for US sales in September has just been released, and here they are:

  • Xbox 360: 527,800 (Total: 6.8 million)
  • Wii: 501,000 (Total: 4.5 million)
  • DS: 495,800 (Total: 13.2 million)
  • PSP: 284,500 (Total: 8.6 million)
  • PS2: 215,000 (Total: 39.3 million)
  • PS3: 119,400 (Total: 1.87 million)

NPD September 2007 Game Console US Sales Figures

NPD Game Console Total US Sales Figures (as of September 2007)

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that the PS3 isn’t doing too well at all. Some have claimed that the PS3 is selling at the same rate as the Xbox 360 when it first came out last year. But this isn’t 2006 anymore – back then, nobody cared about “next-gen” or HD gaming. And sales figures are only worthwhile when you compare them to that of your closest competitors. With that in mind, September saw the Xbox 360 grab  46% of the next-gen market share, the Wii was close at 44.6% and the PS3 way behind on 10.4%. Of course, September was an exceptionally good month for the Xbox 360 due to the release of Halo 3, so sales of the console will drop in the coming months. Looking at total sales figures, the Xbox 360 still leads with 51.6%, the Wii at 34% and the PS3 at 14.2%. Sony has gone from a 80+% domination of the previous-gen market with the PS2 (which is currently still doing very well) to a minuscule share of the next-gen market and this must be worrying for Sony. The only consolation is that since the PS2 is still doing well, when it is finally discontinued, there might be a large group of upgraders to the PS3. But this is still a long time away, and there is no guarantee that these PS2 users will all grab themselves a PS3, considering many of them might have already gone down the Xbox 360 route. Cheaper PS3’s will help, but when price is the only factor, the Xbox 360 and Wii are both still in a more advantageous position having been released for longer, selling in greater numbers and have the greater chance of discounting. And obviously, the number of quality games for the Xbox 360 is what is really driving sales, and with the highly rated Mass Effect Xbox 360 exclusive coming out in November, the holidays period looks like a good one for the Xbox 360.

In the portable market, the PSP continues to sell well, even though the Nintendo DS is still selling at a 3:2 ratio. I’m sure Sony would be much happier if the PSP and PS3 sales figures were reversed, but the PSP, Sony’s first portable game machine, is holding it’s own against portable heavyweights Nintendo. The reason why the PSP is doing so well might come down to the fact that the Nintendo DS isn’t really competing on all fronts with the PSP – the DS cannot match the PSP’s music and movie playback capabilities, for example, and if Nintendo’s “games first” philosophies stay true, it’s unlikely that their next portable will be able to compete in these areas either.

See you next month.

Posted in Gaming, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, NPD Analysis, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | 3 Comments »

Weekly News Roundup (21 October 2007)

Sunday, October 21st, 2007

Time again for the weekly news roundup. Got a lot to talk about this week, so let’s begin.

In copyright related news, YouTube has launched its new anti-piracy blocker. So that’s 90% of its videos being blocked now, and the rest is made up of clips of Chocolate Rain Guy, crying Britney Spears fan “guy” and video blogs from people talking about things nobody cares about. Even the lovable dramatic chipmunk might have to be removed, since it comes from a Japanese TV show which is no doubt copyrighted. In news that I should have covered last week, a UK car repair firm has been sued for copyright infringment because their workers had a radio on while working on the cars in the background. Has the world gone mad? It’s like the story of the mother being sued because her home video of her baby, which she had uploaded onto YouTube and removed, because there was some copyrighted music in the background. I think copyright control lost all common sense. It’s suppose to protect artists from lost revenue, but how does a home video of a baby hurt anybody? Comcast has begun to block certain P2P traffic in a bid to stop piracy, and possibly (more importantly) curb network usage. ISPs sell you bandwidth when they do not have the network capacity to accommodate it if everyone was using the maximum. It has worked before because most people don’t use anywhere near their allocated limits. Unfortunately with the net becoming more and more popular, and downloads becoming larger and larger (watching 24 hours of legal YouTube videos can use up GBs of bandwidth), people are using more and getting closer to their limits than ever before. If the net is to continue to thrive, then somebody, either in the private sector or the government, need to step in and fund further network infrastructure, because there is only so much you can do to limit traffic flow before it starts to hurt the Internet. Went a little off topic here, sorry about that.

Now to change the topic entirely, in gaming news, the PS3 has seen a sale surge up nearly 180% in recent weeks in the UK. At first glance, it seems that the surge is due to the introduction of the cheaper 40 GB PS2-emulation-less version of the PS3, but sales figure show that people are actually buying the discontinued model (with PS2 emulation) for fear that they won’t be able to buy a PS2 compatible PS3 in the future. I share their fears, but I lack the money to do anything about it. This might have been Sony’s strategy all along, but it all depends on what happens after the PS2 compatible PS3 sells out – will they introduce another model that has PS2 compatibility, or do what they are threatening to do now, which is to stop PS2 emulation support altogether? If so, won’t that hurt PS3 sales even more? While the situation may be far from desperate for Sony, they are sure acting like it with the latest news that they’ve sold their PS3 cell chip production plant to bitter HD rivals Toshiba. In the short terms, this frees up money for Sony and allows them to concentrate on their core products. But in the long term, won’t this gives Toshiba control over the pricing of PS3 cell chips and so wouldn’t this mean less price cuts in the future? Certainly, it will improve Toshiba’s profile as a technology leader, and the cost of running such a production plant can be offset easily by their record earnings recently. Toshiba is also developing a close relationship with Microsoft? Will we see a cell chip in the Xbox 720 perhaps? Microsoft themselves are doing pretty well recently due to Halo 3. It has pushed Xbox 360 sales past the Wii, shipping double the normal monthly number of consoles and almost 5 times as many sales as the PS3 (which declined 8% in a month which saw gaming sales actually increase by 64%). It’s amazing to think that a single game, the third in the series in fact, managed to do all of this. Sony really needs a game like this to push the PS3 instead of relying on Blu-ray to sell consoles, but there appears to be nothing on the horizon just yet (as least no exclusives). It’s not all bad news for Sony though, – their their PSP is doing very well, not a Nintendo DS beater, but still enough of a market to sustain it for a few generations. Microsoft, meanwhile, is planning to sell a Xbox 360 that includes a built-in HD DVD drive. Personally, I think they should have done it with the Elite, but I also don’t think they will do it until HD DVD become a more established format.

On to HD news, this article goes behind the scenes to look at the development of the Transformers HD DVD and the advanced interactive/web enabled content for the disc. The Transformers HD DVD has been selling very well, in the top 5 of disc sales on Amazon (that includes all DVD sales) – it’s the kind of movie that will sell discs, not because it’s a brilliant movie (it’s not), but it’s the kind of movie to really show off HD systems. It’s also selling well because the disc is region free, and I know lots of people here in Australia that have purchased through Amazon, and with the exchange rate and the horrible pricing of both Blu-ray and HD DVD movies here in Australia (the price for the Transformers HD DVD here in Australia is $US 38, compared to only $28 from Amazon), no wonder people are sourcing their HD movies overseas. There is also the strange situation where some movies are released by different studios worldwide, and these studios differ in which HD format they support – a Blu-ray exclusive in the US might be a HD DVD exclusive in the UK. With HD DVD being region-free, HD DVD owners are at an advantage when it comes to buying overseas. Blu-ray owners, however, have to be vigilant when checking to see if movies are indeed region-free (a lot of them are), or risk buying a movie they can’t play. Region control sucks. In Australia, companies cannot enforce DVD region control due to our competition commission (ACCC) stating that forcing region control might be against the Trade Practices Act. This is why almost all our DVD players are region free, even from big brands like LG or Samsung (there is usually a code to unlock these players). I hope the situation continues with HD players, but so far, all HD players are region locked. Speaking of HD players, Toshiba has finally started selling HD DVD players here in Australia, and it looks like they’ve read my post about free movie offers and the lack of them here in Australia. Toshiba are now offering free movies too with their players in Australia, more details here. Hopefully, this will allow HD DVD to break into the Blu-ray dominated market here in Australia (it’s not hard to dominate our very small market, especially considering the competing format has zero standalone players for sale).

That’s it for this week. See you in a week’s time.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (21 October 2007)

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