Nic Jones (![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} nicwrites) wrote,@ 2009-01-23 21:00:00 |
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Playstation 3
There's a piece up at Ars by Ben Kuchera titled "Four things Sony can do to turn the tide for the PS3 in 2009".
The PS3 has been the also-ran for 2008. It only just managed to sell more units than the PS2, and was trounced by the other consoles. The four things he lists are "Drop the f*$&#*%^ price", "Let's get serious about online", "Stop making us wait for Thursday" and "Remember that games are for fun"
I have a different set. They can each be applied to the other console makers to greater or lesser degrees. I don't really follow gaming press beyond Penny Arcade and Zero Punctuation. Nor do I even own a current generation console. For a while though I've been eyeing the PS3 and now that I'm job-enabled the prospect of laying down some hard-earned cash has become more real. So, here are my current stumbling blocks to buying a PS3:
"Drop the fucking price of games and movies"
When I wander into an EB and see the PS3, I do get the geek techno-lust. It's been a long time since Sony was considered a quality electronics brand but the PS3 is unquestionably a fantastic piece of hardware. (Perhaps it was something of a hail-Mary pass by the engineers?) So the sticker price (~$700) doesn't turn me off. I know I'd be getting hardware that could be an excellent game console, media centre, personal computer, home controller, and render / compile node all in one.
What gets me is the little projection I do in my head of how much it's going to cost me over time. With a typical new game happily waltzing past $100 I find it difficult to believe I'll get sufficient enjoyment for my money.
And I don't get the feeling that money is going to the game developers, either. When I see a title on the shelf I do a little pie-chart in my head sectioning off the fraction that goes to the retailer, the fraction to manurfacturing, the publishing rights, the costs of getting the game approved and the costs of the development kit and licensing. I have no idea what these fractions are but I have that niggling feeling that the fraction left for the developer after all the bullshit is miniscule. The TV advertising of the PS3 is meant to make me want the console but instead makes me wonder how many millions of dollars they spend on it that could otherwise be returned to developers. Maybe I'm just being cynical but that's the emotional response I get.
This also relates to a point I'll make later, but it fits better here: When I look at the titles it seems to me that there's no room for low volume. To survive a game studio seems to have to sell tens of thousands of units for every title they develop. This indicates to me that there are huge barriers to developing a game for a console like the PS3. I want to see these costs removed so there can be a much more lively ecosystem. There should be more games available for the console than can fit on a shelf at EB.
I know that Sony has the classic video game console revenue model. The consoles are sold at less than they cost and games are jacked up to compensate. I'd prefer to see the price of the console stay about where it is and as Sony manages to bring manufacturing costs down for them to be reducing and removing the costs to developers. Sony's marketing calls the PS3 more than a game console, trying to sell it as a pseudo-personal computer. That's fine, but I'd like to see the revenue model also reflect that of a personal computer. I want to see any code monkey with sufficient skill to throw together some code and a website have games and apps for the PS3. There are sufficient AAA titles for the console but I want to see many many more less-popular titles too. There should be more titles that aim for something more specific than mass-market appeal. Sometimes all it takes is one obscure game that you truly love to make a console worth the $700 you paid for it.
A broad, varied game ecosystem would give me much more confidence that I'd get use out of the console and that it'd be worth my money.
"Stop trying to nickel-and-dime be to death"
The purchasing decision for games is rapidly becoming as complex as that of mobile phones. You don't just buy a game. You have to consider the ongoing cost of online access (more applicable to the 360 than the PS3), whether there'll be new "episodes" released for it, whether you'll have to pay for items or upgrades to get the most out of the game and if there are other hidden costs.
All the downloadable content can't be returned or resold. You can't hire it for a week. The value of a game bought in a store includes your ability to lend it to friends or to trade it in for new games or when the next console generation comes around. The online economy doesn't have those freedoms.
I object to in-game advertising. I object to constantly feeling like somebody is trying to monetise me. I object to having to crawl through fine-print just to make sure I'm know what I'm actually going to be charged.
"Stop being arseholes"
Sony is not a well-liked company. They've acquired a reputation for pushing formats onto people that then failed and left users stranded (Beta fell to VHS, Minidisk held out in Japan for a little while but fell to CD-R and MP3 players, Digital-8 fell to Mini-DV, Memory Stick fell to compact flash and SD, SACD fell to DVD-A and UMD is looking grim) Notably they won in Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD, which is a lucky exception but like SACD vs. DVD-A it's not really clear if it was worth the effort: by the time people get around to having high-definition TVs everywhere they might be getting all their media over the internet anyway.
Sony is also one of the big media companies hiding behind organisations like the RIAA and MPAA.
The rootkit debacle is just the most infamous of the pains Sony has been causing with DRM. HDMI encryption that makes hooking up your console to your TV a crapshoot benefits nobody. Restricting high definition content to this dodgy standard is just a dick move.
This attitude permeates the games Sony publishes, too. Little Big Planet is a flagship game for the platform and I was pretty excited about it. First it got pulled from shelves for religious reasons, then it turned out that all user-created content would be moderated for decency and to remove any copyrighted material. Nobody wins when Sony gets its lawyers involved.
Region-locking on DVDs sucked for everybody but publishers like Sony. The region-locking on Blu-ray is no less sucky. Australia has once again found itself in a region different from the US and Asia, the two places most of the content I'm interested in comes from.
Backward compatibility was an important part of why the PS2 did so well. The PS3 had backward compatibility on some models, but Sony really fucked the PAL regions on that score.
Sony management and corporate policy have so often been so objectionable that I'm loathe to buy even the best of Sony's electronics. The Bravia LCDs and Vaio notebooks are both reasonable pieces of kit but I walk straight past them.
"Tear down these walls"
Kuchera complains about the price of the PS3 saying it's expensive for a game console. I'd agree with his conclusions if I agreed with his premise. I take the opposite tack: the PS3 is hindered because Sony have made a range of choices that prevent valuable features from being implemented.
For example, while the PS3 could be an excellent part of a rendering or compiling farm, it has only 256MB of memory. That's really not enough. The sad thing is that there's another 256MB of memory hanging off the GPU, but Sony has locked it down and you can't get to it. Even 512MB is paltry, but 256MB is extremely limiting.
The PS3's CPU is a fantastic piece of work. It presents a few interesting challenges (keeping the cores sufficiently fed is one) but it can provide impressive performance. That said, Sony locks out ~15% of the chip's parallel processing power for it's hypervisor. The PS3 also has a fairly impressive coprocessor in its GPU, but Sony prevents outsiders from using that.
I really hate buying hardware that has arbitrary restrictions on what I can and can't do with it. Perhaps that makes me one of those open source freetards, but when I pay for something I should have the right to use it how I damn-well like.
The PS3 could make a great media centre / PVR if it weren't for the restrictions on the GPU and memory. The included firmware is capable of some of this functionality, but when it comes to things like codec support you're left at the mercy of Sony. Half the stuff I have and would want to watch is MKV and the PS3 won't play it. If Sony weren't so tight-fisted with what you can and can't do, developers could have got MythTV up and running acceptably and the PS3 could really become the centre of your entertainment centre.
It's more than just that the hardware is locked out. The only way to run non-Sony-blessed code is to run a separate OS. It's the wild west out there and you lose access to all the stuff that the included OS does well. A much better system would be to open up the firmware and allow people to write their own plugins for it. You could write a Skype client, or a utility for downloading photos of a camera when you plug it in. There is even some precedent for this - the firmware includes a client for the Folding@Home distributed computing project. But what if you want to run SETI or search for primes?
The PS3 has a Vista-like stink about it. It's big and expensive and nobody seems terribly sure why they'd want it. The PS2 is still selling reasonably well and new games continue to be released for it. Everybody seems to be waiting for the next generation and a PS4 to see if Sony can pull out of its dive.
Microsoft is rushing in the next generation of their OS with Windows 7 and so far it seems to be getting a much better response than Vista did. Sony, on the other hand wants the PS3 to be a "ten-year" console. I'm not convinced it has the legs to last that long. Not because the hardware lacks capability (measly 256MB of main memory aside) but because Sony isn't letting it be.
There's a piece up at Ars by Ben Kuchera titled "Four things Sony can do to turn the tide for the PS3 in 2009".
The PS3 has been the also-ran for 2008. It only just managed to sell more units than the PS2, and was trounced by the other consoles. The four things he lists are "Drop the f*$&#*%^ price", "Let's get serious about online", "Stop making us wait for Thursday" and "Remember that games are for fun"
I have a different set. They can each be applied to the other console makers to greater or lesser degrees. I don't really follow gaming press beyond Penny Arcade and Zero Punctuation. Nor do I even own a current generation console. For a while though I've been eyeing the PS3 and now that I'm job-enabled the prospect of laying down some hard-earned cash has become more real. So, here are my current stumbling blocks to buying a PS3:
"Drop the fucking price of games and movies"
When I wander into an EB and see the PS3, I do get the geek techno-lust. It's been a long time since Sony was considered a quality electronics brand but the PS3 is unquestionably a fantastic piece of hardware. (Perhaps it was something of a hail-Mary pass by the engineers?) So the sticker price (~$700) doesn't turn me off. I know I'd be getting hardware that could be an excellent game console, media centre, personal computer, home controller, and render / compile node all in one.
What gets me is the little projection I do in my head of how much it's going to cost me over time. With a typical new game happily waltzing past $100 I find it difficult to believe I'll get sufficient enjoyment for my money.
And I don't get the feeling that money is going to the game developers, either. When I see a title on the shelf I do a little pie-chart in my head sectioning off the fraction that goes to the retailer, the fraction to manurfacturing, the publishing rights, the costs of getting the game approved and the costs of the development kit and licensing. I have no idea what these fractions are but I have that niggling feeling that the fraction left for the developer after all the bullshit is miniscule. The TV advertising of the PS3 is meant to make me want the console but instead makes me wonder how many millions of dollars they spend on it that could otherwise be returned to developers. Maybe I'm just being cynical but that's the emotional response I get.
This also relates to a point I'll make later, but it fits better here: When I look at the titles it seems to me that there's no room for low volume. To survive a game studio seems to have to sell tens of thousands of units for every title they develop. This indicates to me that there are huge barriers to developing a game for a console like the PS3. I want to see these costs removed so there can be a much more lively ecosystem. There should be more games available for the console than can fit on a shelf at EB.
I know that Sony has the classic video game console revenue model. The consoles are sold at less than they cost and games are jacked up to compensate. I'd prefer to see the price of the console stay about where it is and as Sony manages to bring manufacturing costs down for them to be reducing and removing the costs to developers. Sony's marketing calls the PS3 more than a game console, trying to sell it as a pseudo-personal computer. That's fine, but I'd like to see the revenue model also reflect that of a personal computer. I want to see any code monkey with sufficient skill to throw together some code and a website have games and apps for the PS3. There are sufficient AAA titles for the console but I want to see many many more less-popular titles too. There should be more titles that aim for something more specific than mass-market appeal. Sometimes all it takes is one obscure game that you truly love to make a console worth the $700 you paid for it.
A broad, varied game ecosystem would give me much more confidence that I'd get use out of the console and that it'd be worth my money.
"Stop trying to nickel-and-dime be to death"
The purchasing decision for games is rapidly becoming as complex as that of mobile phones. You don't just buy a game. You have to consider the ongoing cost of online access (more applicable to the 360 than the PS3), whether there'll be new "episodes" released for it, whether you'll have to pay for items or upgrades to get the most out of the game and if there are other hidden costs.
All the downloadable content can't be returned or resold. You can't hire it for a week. The value of a game bought in a store includes your ability to lend it to friends or to trade it in for new games or when the next console generation comes around. The online economy doesn't have those freedoms.
I object to in-game advertising. I object to constantly feeling like somebody is trying to monetise me. I object to having to crawl through fine-print just to make sure I'm know what I'm actually going to be charged.
"Stop being arseholes"
Sony is not a well-liked company. They've acquired a reputation for pushing formats onto people that then failed and left users stranded (Beta fell to VHS, Minidisk held out in Japan for a little while but fell to CD-R and MP3 players, Digital-8 fell to Mini-DV, Memory Stick fell to compact flash and SD, SACD fell to DVD-A and UMD is looking grim) Notably they won in Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD, which is a lucky exception but like SACD vs. DVD-A it's not really clear if it was worth the effort: by the time people get around to having high-definition TVs everywhere they might be getting all their media over the internet anyway.
Sony is also one of the big media companies hiding behind organisations like the RIAA and MPAA.
The rootkit debacle is just the most infamous of the pains Sony has been causing with DRM. HDMI encryption that makes hooking up your console to your TV a crapshoot benefits nobody. Restricting high definition content to this dodgy standard is just a dick move.
This attitude permeates the games Sony publishes, too. Little Big Planet is a flagship game for the platform and I was pretty excited about it. First it got pulled from shelves for religious reasons, then it turned out that all user-created content would be moderated for decency and to remove any copyrighted material. Nobody wins when Sony gets its lawyers involved.
Region-locking on DVDs sucked for everybody but publishers like Sony. The region-locking on Blu-ray is no less sucky. Australia has once again found itself in a region different from the US and Asia, the two places most of the content I'm interested in comes from.
Backward compatibility was an important part of why the PS2 did so well. The PS3 had backward compatibility on some models, but Sony really fucked the PAL regions on that score.
Sony management and corporate policy have so often been so objectionable that I'm loathe to buy even the best of Sony's electronics. The Bravia LCDs and Vaio notebooks are both reasonable pieces of kit but I walk straight past them.
"Tear down these walls"
Kuchera complains about the price of the PS3 saying it's expensive for a game console. I'd agree with his conclusions if I agreed with his premise. I take the opposite tack: the PS3 is hindered because Sony have made a range of choices that prevent valuable features from being implemented.
For example, while the PS3 could be an excellent part of a rendering or compiling farm, it has only 256MB of memory. That's really not enough. The sad thing is that there's another 256MB of memory hanging off the GPU, but Sony has locked it down and you can't get to it. Even 512MB is paltry, but 256MB is extremely limiting.
The PS3's CPU is a fantastic piece of work. It presents a few interesting challenges (keeping the cores sufficiently fed is one) but it can provide impressive performance. That said, Sony locks out ~15% of the chip's parallel processing power for it's hypervisor. The PS3 also has a fairly impressive coprocessor in its GPU, but Sony prevents outsiders from using that.
I really hate buying hardware that has arbitrary restrictions on what I can and can't do with it. Perhaps that makes me one of those open source freetards, but when I pay for something I should have the right to use it how I damn-well like.
The PS3 could make a great media centre / PVR if it weren't for the restrictions on the GPU and memory. The included firmware is capable of some of this functionality, but when it comes to things like codec support you're left at the mercy of Sony. Half the stuff I have and would want to watch is MKV and the PS3 won't play it. If Sony weren't so tight-fisted with what you can and can't do, developers could have got MythTV up and running acceptably and the PS3 could really become the centre of your entertainment centre.
It's more than just that the hardware is locked out. The only way to run non-Sony-blessed code is to run a separate OS. It's the wild west out there and you lose access to all the stuff that the included OS does well. A much better system would be to open up the firmware and allow people to write their own plugins for it. You could write a Skype client, or a utility for downloading photos of a camera when you plug it in. There is even some precedent for this - the firmware includes a client for the Folding@Home distributed computing project. But what if you want to run SETI or search for primes?
The PS3 has a Vista-like stink about it. It's big and expensive and nobody seems terribly sure why they'd want it. The PS2 is still selling reasonably well and new games continue to be released for it. Everybody seems to be waiting for the next generation and a PS4 to see if Sony can pull out of its dive.
Microsoft is rushing in the next generation of their OS with Windows 7 and so far it seems to be getting a much better response than Vista did. Sony, on the other hand wants the PS3 to be a "ten-year" console. I'm not convinced it has the legs to last that long. Not because the hardware lacks capability (measly 256MB of main memory aside) but because Sony isn't letting it be.