The famous DVD myth of the PS2. There was sub 100 dollar players holiday 2001. Also the PS2 was a pretty horrible DVD player in basically every aspect. Being a DVD player had almost no effect on the PS2 being a sales monster. It was all about pricing and basically the greatest exclusive line up in gaming history.
PS4 Neo presentation might have leaked
- Thread starter Nibel
- Start date
The famous DVD myth of the PS2. There was sub 100 dollar players holiday 2001. Also the PS2 was a pretty horrible DVD player in basically every aspect. Being a DVD player had almost no effect on the PS2 being a sales monster. It was all about pricing and basically the greatest exclusive line up in gaming history.
anothertech
Member
I'm just counting it as things currently stand. Sony has the clear win this Gen. No contest really. That can't be argued. Starting from this point in time, no matter how you look at it, Neo is getting ahead of the competition. Scorpio looks reactive. That is it.
Now, from this point of view, how is Sony playing catch up in any way shape or form? They have the market, they have the mindshare, they have the global appeal, they have a clean uninterrupted message about the new hardware, they are likely releasing Neo a year earlier than the competition, from all aspects it just objectively looks like they have the upper hand doesn't it?
How does one decide they are the ones playing 'catch up' at any point?
Consversly, MS is miles behind in market share and mindshare, with little global appeal, their messaging is a clusterfck, people on this very forum about hardcore gaming topics still don't know if Scorpio will have exclusives from Xbone or not, if they should buy it without a 4K tv, or if it counts as a mid Gen or full gen hardware release, they are releasing Scrpio a year after Neo, all this even from the most objective view, does it seem like Sony will be playing catch up to MS in any way?
It seems like MS is marketing Scorpio with power alone, which by itself doesn't seem like enough.
This is objectively speaking mind you.
bitbydeath
Member
That's how Playstation has always worked. They utilise greater genre variety so it has something for everyone and not just boring shooter #5689437 that attracts the US only crowd.
So why were ps1 and ps2 successful? And how did ps3 manage to sell faster than 360 despite all of its fuck ups? And now ps4 is dominating how long can one company keep getting "lucky"?
They built the stronger console at a cheaper price. The most popular games are 3rd party and its become the 3rd party console of choice probably due to this. Its not really that big of a conundrum. I don't see why it matters if you call it MS' fuckup or Sonys success. Its the same result either way.
PS1 ran against a far smaller competitor who killed itself with endless add-ons and then released a harder to dev for console for $100 more. Nintendo arrived 1.5 years to late and with a knife in it's leg called modules.
PS2 was the successor to the highest selling console of all time and ran against 2 competitors who started when the race was already over.
PS3 was the successor to the highest selling console of all time and had an array of advantages against the 360 that the One doesn't have against the PS4.
MatrixMan.EXE
Member
Not fucking up and making smart business decisions are not mutually exclusive. Microsoft fucked up a lot, but it's not like Sony wasn't incredibly aggressive with their marketing and pricing.
Humdinger
Gold Member
Well, if it's out 10/13, I'm guessing we will hear about it at TGS (9/15).
3 years past Scorpio people want 8k.
gundamkyoukai
Member
What advantages did PS3 have against 360 ?
360 had the two best things going for it price and release date .
Yes PS3 was coming off the PS2 but those 2 things matter more than brand.
Even more so if we talking about USA .
blastprocessor
The Amiga Brotherhood
Still staggered Microsoft beat Sony to 4k UHD. They better announce Neo or PS4 slim with UHD right away.
blastprocessor
The Amiga Brotherhood
I bought it for BluRay first then actually enjoyed the gaming side of it later.
gundamkyoukai
Member
That was not really a advantage not at $600 lol
Even if it was the cheapest blu ray player at the time .
Half a year after the PS3 launched in Europe, the 40GB version for $399 came out.
The price for the 360 at this point was $279 for the Core (aka the retard pack), $349 for the 20GB version and $449 for the 120GB version, meaning outside of the Core version the price at this point was more or less comparable.
Advantages:
- the name aka the expectations associated with it like getting 3rd party games
- believed to be the most powerful console
- Sony first party
- japanese games
- no online fee
- Blu-Ray player
- standard HDD
- 360 RROD problem
I think all he was saying was that if you assumed that consistent timeline of releases, that MSFT would have the more powerful console for 3 out of every 4 years, i.e. Sony would be "playing catch up", but specifically in regards to power. Granted, the assumption that both console manufacturers will stick to that release cycle is a horrible assumption with no real basis. In fact, at least one of the manufacturers (MSFT), has specifically stated that they would only introduce new hardware outside of their normal console life cycle when new technology drove it. In this case 4K and high fidelity VR.
Sales and mindshare is a completely different topic, which you seem to be caught up on. Not sure why as that is far harder to predict and it really shouldn't affect you. Buy the console(s) you feel will bring you the gaming/entertainment experience you want, why care what other people are purchasing unless sales drop off so far that a company decides to drop support?
Regarding another comment you made. What is it that Scorpio looks reactive to? (you weren't clear there)
Poor (at least relatively) Xbox One sales as the weaker console? Strong PS4 sales as the stronger console? Media and fan reaction to the Xbox One's inferior power? Fan's requests for a more powerful console? Some sort of leak regarding the PS4 Neo?
Definitely seems like you are caught up in the console wars, with a clear favorite, as others have pointed out.
gundamkyoukai
Member
All of that don't matter if you price your self out the market .
EU it did not hurt them as much , same with being late but in USA it did .
Plus half things you talking about are not advantages IMO so lets agree to disagree there.
Played it safe or gave the console market what they wanted?
Myth my ass..it was the first console I bought with my own money (was 15 at the time)...it was the first DVD player for A LOT of people I knew at the time...
Chaostar
Member
Non-standard being Microsoft's original Xbone vision?
Ironic considering you could say the same thing in reverse at the beginning of 7th gen. Sony and MS reversed fortunes in just a single gen.
Graphene chips will come before Quantum Computers. But if we get quantum computers with graphene chips.....oh boy, what we have right now in the the super computer range will look like what we see as phone hardware by comparison
Proelite
Member
Singularity point.
Chobel
Member
I can understand MP paywall and lack of system sellers, but a standard console is a negative now?
Eh?
PS3 didn't sell as well as xbox360 its first year without a doubt. Sony cut the price and removed barriers and it started to take off.
Original Xbox was cut short and came out late. Not sure what you expect there.
Obviously all of this mattered and what of those points aren't advantages?
gundamkyoukai
Member
That is if you are talking about the USA only .
PS3 sold more than 360 WW every year .
Which is why it was able to catch up after coming after .
For eg Japanese games .
I think you are forgetting that when 360 first came out it had loads of them.
It got bunch of games from Japanese companies and MS also invest in them early on.
In the early years Japanese games were not a problem for MS.
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
That is what brand recognition/mass appeal does, yet there are those who refuse to admit it.
It is the main reason to the PS4's success. Their mass appeal and them not fucking up all in one. MSFT fucking up for themselves has far less to do with Sony's success, than Sony being the Sony of their first two console gens.
Not for everyone, but for some it was really attractive. I paid $500 at launch and had what was one of the most consistently excellent Blu-ray players on the market for years to come. I also had reasons to believe Sony would deliver a diverse set of excellent software experiences which they did, eventually. It was definitely a slow start for the first two years or so. By the end of the generation Sony had demonstrated that they were willing to make good on their promises and keep supporting the system with late-generation titles like The Last of Us.
I'm not surprised they eventually caught up, but it was a slow burn. We'll see if Microsoft can do likewise. There's no question they're in the weaker position and have made an aggressive and risky move by unveiling the Scorpio this early (while Sony announced the PS3 18 months ahead of launch that clearly wasn't the original plan, as they had to scramble to replace the second Cell processor with a hasty GPU design that delayed the system a year.)
A myth? Man my life must have been a myth then because ps2 was my first DVD player and a huge reason as to why I bought it. And no I didn't buy it at launch I couldn't get my hands on one for months. I still can remember being so excited to watch a movie from disc. So yeah the myth is in your own mind.
When you consider the fact that Sony was selling their own stand alone BD players for like $900 at the time? The PS3 was a steal for someone looking for Bluray
gundamkyoukai
Member
I don't think MS announcing Scorpio early is risky .
From MS perspective Sony going to have 2 machines out that stronger than X1.
With 2 different price points they had to say something to the market or they would have lost more market share .
Shpeshal Nick
aka Collingwood
Who said it was a negative? By most measures, given what happened with the PS3, Sony played it pretty safe and for good reason. The fact that the paywall was introduced with little to no detrimental effect on their image/sales merely shows how much Microsoft's fuck ups played the major role in how this gen went down. That's all I was saying.
3rd console curse struck Microsoft hard.
Ditto last gen. Microsoft played it safe with the 360. Sony's fuck ups were a major contributor to Microsoft's success. Not the ONLY one, but a major. Same with this gen, but in reverse.
If Microsoft had played it safer, kept the price down, shut the fuck up about TV and not tried to introduce the DRM, there's no way we'd be seeing the gap we have now. Would Sony still be leading worldwide? For sure. But not by the 2:1 (close enough) margin they are. To this day, there are people out there that think the Xbox to be needs to be always online.
Sony made huge changes up and down their organization to address the problems of the PS3. MS made huge mistakes that hurt their own position, but Sony built their own success.
Bitch Pudding
Member
Sony when they think they lost this race to MS - and the royalties they get from MS forall those Blu-Ray drives.
Getting people excited about a product you can't ship yet can be disastrous. Honestly, the Xbox One S looks like a fairly solid offering on its own. They could well have stood behind their lineup of exclusives and UHD at an aggressive price until E3 next year.
As it is, I have a hard time imagining who more likely to buy and Xbox One before Scorpio ships as a result of the announcement. The opposite seems more probable, and what seems almost certain is that people who aren't acting out of brand loyalty are going to see Neo on shelves with a solid software lineup and jump in. Asking them to hold out for the promise of something better is a hard pitch to sell.
dragonelite
Member
Just to be clear that this FP16 stuff isn't just something that I was saying to downplay Xbox Scorpio 6TF here is my post about the same thing for PS4 Neo before we got the real specs.
I thought it would be a smaller GPU that's FP16 native that would be used to get 4K but it ended up being the full size GPU that now support native FP16.
With smart coding & fitting some of the operations that used FP32 into FP16 operations devs can get what appears to be 4X the PS4 performance out of Neo using less accurate FP16 when FP32 isn't required.
I think Neo mode is going to be a lot like having a powerful FP16 mobile GPU.
I thought it would be a smaller GPU that's FP16 native that would be used to get 4K but it ended up being the full size GPU that now support native FP16.
With smart coding & fitting some of the operations that used FP32 into FP16 operations devs can get what appears to be 4X the PS4 performance out of Neo using less accurate FP16 when FP32 isn't required.
I think Neo mode is going to be a lot like having a powerful FP16 mobile GPU.
DISSESHOWEDO
Banned
MS is paying for each blue ray drive in every xone to Sony, Pgilips and one other company that i can not think of right now.
_/¯The implications of both of these potential technological advancements appear to be mutually exclusive. By that I mean that a graphene-esque approach may speed up current technologies while quantum computers use a fundamentally different approach rendering the advantages seen in the properties of graphene to be non-applicable or even disadvantageous.
Quantum computing is designed to solve different types of problems than what most classical computers solve today. A quantum chip will likely wind up being a cooperative processing unit to today's central processing units similar to how various hardware accelerators are to today's graphics processing units.
It don't work like that yo. Modern rendering techniques rely entirely on single precision. Introducing half precision at any point during the pipeline would cause instant truncation which reduces the range of final output values placing limitations on the system we have long grown out of (color being the most prominent to come to mind).
OdysseusVA
Banned
Those royalties (less than $10/drive) are split across 20 or so companies lol
PsihoPerihelion
Member
I remember when people used this as a bullet point in favor of the PS3. Ah, the good ol' console war days.
Agreed. I hope they don't limit 4K to neo, and they also refresh the standard ps4 with a UHD drive and HDMI 2.0. But they probably won't, as they'll want plenty of KSPs lined up to persuade people to buy neo.
Bitch Pudding
Member
There are different levels of membership within the BDA. Every Corporation can join but obviously the royalties are shared around the members of the original founders Group, with certain ones getting the lion's Share.
Having said that, UHD capability is still a nice purchase driver for Xbox One S and I am sure it forces Sony to introduce a new UHD capable entry SKU as well.
Well said.
Blu-ray sales is declining with double digits every year while streaming is growing with double digits every year. There is only 5 million 4k tv's in the us (jan 2016), so I think you are exaggerating the importance of a 4k blu-ray player in this day and age. In other words who cares? a tiny market segment maybe cares
That's true for the tech, but iirc that logo is Sony's alone.