Gaming Nintendo 3DS vs PS Vita thread.

MacMUFC said:
I find it very hard to believe they took a loss on their £600 PS3's!
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The thing had a bill of materials (BOM) around $820 at launch. They have only just moved into profitability on the hardware.

Christ, stand-alone Blu-ray players were retailing at around 1000 quid at the time.

PS3 never cost £600 at retail by the way, $599US is a different matter.
 
Olly said:
What is it?
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It's a development and execution environment that runs Playstion games on top of Android, currently I believe PS1 and PSP games and anything new a developer wants to come up with. So as time goes on they could also add the ability to run PS2 and PS3 games in this environment when there is hardware powerful enough to do so. So the PS3 version will be able to run PS1, PSP, NGP games. The NGP version will be able to run PS1 and PSP games. The Xperia play will be able to run PS1 and PSP games. The Nokia Z75VX748 will be able to run PS1 and PSP games.

The best way that I can describe it is that it's sort of Java for games for Android. But not quite, but sort of.
 
WeasteDevil said:
The thing had a bill of materials (BOM) around $820 at launch. They have only just moved into profitability on the hardware.

Christ, stand-alone Blu-ray players were retailing at around 1000 quid at the time.

PS3 never cost £600 at retail by the way, $599US is a different matter.
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I'll have to see these facts for myself.

WeasteDevil said:
In any case, what I think people have totally glossed over within all of this is the PS Suite initiative. It will either be a total flop or a game changer.
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WeasteDevil said:
It's a development and execution environment that runs Playstion games on top of Android, currently I believe PS1 and PSP games and anything new a developer wants to come up with. So as time goes on they could also add the ability to run PS2 and PS3 games in this environment when there is hardware powerful enough to do so. So the PS3 version will be able to run PS1, PSP, NGP games. The NGP version will be able to run PS1 and PSP games. The Xperia play will be able to run PS1 and PSP games. The Nokia Z75VX748 will be able to run PS1 and PSP games.

The best way that I can describe it is that it's sort of Java for games for Android. But not quite, but sort of.
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..So its essentially an emulator?
 
MacMUFC said:
..So its essentially an emulator?
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And a development environment, yes! The idea being that developers can work within it to do new stuff even though it emulates older stuff, yet it will run on any Android device over 2.3 made by any certified phone manufacturer and connect to PSN. That's prong one. Prong two is the NGP which will have games that will not run through PS Suite on any other mobile hardware. Prong three is that the PS3 will run NGP games.

So basically they are attacking the gaming space from three directions. Home console, powerful console on the move, and generic smartphone devices. PS3 will run the lot, NGP will run everything apart from PS3 games, and your Nokia or Motorola Z68HXC will run PS1, PSP, and anything new built on the platform.
 
WeasteDevil said:
And a development environment, yes! The idea being that developers can work within it to do new stuff even though it emulates older stuff, yet it will run on any Android device over 2.3 made by any certified phone manufacturer and connect to PSN. That's prong one. Prong two is the NGP which will have games that will not run through PS Suite on any other mobile hardware. Prong three is that the PS3 will run NGP games.

So basically they are attacking the gaming space from three directions. Home console, powerful console on the move, and generic smartphone devices. PS3 will run the lot, NGP will run everything apart from PS3 games, and your Nokia or Motorola Z68HXC will run PS1, PSP, and anything new built on the platform.
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That actually sounds quite interesting. Maybe, i'm reading it wrong, but are you saying developers could almost tweak or add new things to older games?

WeasteDevil said:
It's not complicated to find the numbers.

iSuppli releases BOM report on PlayStation 3 costs - AfterDawn
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Fair enough, i'll have a look at that.
 
MacMUFC said:
Fair enough, i'll have a look at that.
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I thought that it was well known that SCEI as a division have bled in the region of $4,000,000,000 on the PS3 project. However, as I said before, it doesn't necessarily mean that Sony Corp as a whole has lost that amount of money (it has driven HDTV takeup and Blu-ray sales), and I don´t believe that it's a 10 year project, more like a 30 year project. PS4 will use Cell (they spent at least $600,000,000 on this alone - it's a very high end CPU even today, nothing much can touch it), TVs will use it, and it goes on.
 
WeasteDevil said:
I will suck Elvis' cock when the price point gets unveiled and it's more than 3DS or PS3
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He's looking forward to it.
 
It's a handheld with PS3 graphics. Impressive, but not innovative and it doesn't excite me that much - if 3DS manages to succeed with the 3D feature I'll most likely end up buying it first instead, though the whole market of handhelds doesn't appeal to me that much as I can as well use an iPad to watch movies or read books on a Kindle while on a travel and be entertained for a good amount of time, I don't think there'll be need for either of these but I'll probably end up purchasing them when the price drops down to an acceptable level just to try it out.

Besides, I still have my PSP and barely use it because I don't feel comfortable playing on that screen at all, I will play it from time to time but it's not as fun as I thought it'd be at first. Game Boys were cool because they offered a completely different type of games from the ones you'd play on video systems at the time, not the case with a PSP which is basically a minimalised PS2.
 
The innovation is that along with the PS3 it's one of the high-end bricks on the top of a pyramid with PS Suite being at the bottom and the whole lot of them capable of running Android. PS3 will probably run Android on top of Chrome OS.
 
WeasteDevil said:
The innovation is that along with the PS3 it's one of the high-end bricks on the top of a pyramid with PS Suite being at the bottom and the whole lot of them capable of running Android. PS3 will probably run Android on top of Chrome OS.
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I know that it's technically very good and has unbelievable specs, but it's essentially a PS3 that you will be able to move around with. I guess it's good to have one company that sticks to traditional gaming and concentrates on improving specs, this way we will probably have an unbelievably powerful next gen systems that will serve nearly photorealistic graphics, but I appreciate what Nintendo have done with Wii and DS, now 3DS - took a completely different path and sacrificed graphics for something completely new to a wider audience. I'm anticipating 3DS because I want to know what the 3D will be like, expecting it to be good, with new PSP I know exactly what it will be.
 
WeasteDevil said:
It might look as such, but it's nowhere near as powerful as a PS3. Within 3 years top of the range smartphones will have similar guts.
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But it will work at lower resolution though, so graphics will be similar, won't they? On current PSP they're between PSX and PS2 but closer to PS2. I imagine it will be the case with a new one too, i.e. between PS2 and PS3.
 
Sarni said:
But it will work at lower resolution though, so graphics will be similar, won't they? On current PSP they're between PSX and PS2 but closer to PS2. I imagine it will be the case with a new one too, i.e. between PS2 and PS3.
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The perception of it will be similar, yes, I don't know about effects such as depth of field, screen space ambient occlusion, etc. Animation quality, water simulation, etc. A single SPU on the Cell could probably eat the ARM CPU in this new PSP on its own, and then have enough juice to decode 150 MP3s on the side. This isn't entirely true, but illustrates a point.

Redlambs said:
You do realise Google want to be the next M$ don't you?
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I don't have a problem with Microsoft as such, they make my bread and butter after all, and would gain a seal of approval from me if they cut out bloat, were slightly secure here and there, etc. However, I think that they should concentrate a little more on their core market - operating systems and business software. They could for example put more effort and resources into Dynamics and seriously go after Oracle and SAP instead of fannying around with phones, music players, and game consoles. Providing Wndows 7 for ARM is a good move for example, at least they can see that basic mass computing is going more mobile/tablet. What Intel think of this I don't really know, but their traditional bread and butter - the Windows desktop is going to be far less common. POWER 7 (about same theoretical compute performance as Cell on a traditional multi-core OoO processor albeit with 5x the transistor count) and 8 look very tasty from the server/HPC perspective and ARM look as if they are going to take over the world from the mobile perspective.
 
So, now, the phone part of all of this.











- PlayStation Pocket: Exclusive games for the device.

- PlayStation Suite: PS1 and other games that you can buy using your PSN account and enjoy them here, in NGP (PSP2) or in a PlayStation Certified Android device (mobile phones and tablets with Android 2.3 Gingerbread). Non PS1 games are supposed to be mainly versions of major existing smartphone games (from iOS, Android, etc).

- Android games: typical stuff available in all other Android devices

Xperia Play final hardware hands-on! -- Engadget

xplay-final-hands-rm-eng-600.jpg
 
Those games actually look exactly as they do on an iPhone.
 
Crash Bandicoot is apparently the free PS1 game you get with it.

The PlayStation Pocket app on most demo units were as empty as our own model, but a few on hand were running Crash Bandicoot (the "legendary pre-installed title," as referenced in the press conference) for PS One at a smooth 60 frames per second. To compensate for only two L and R triggers, the settings menu offer six different button layouts where you can use the trackpads as secondary shoulder buttons or have L2 / R2 on screen virtually. Thankfully, jumping out of the app saves the game's state, and you can return by clicking on the app. There's an additional confirmation screen in to give you a second to get ready for resuming.
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WeasteDevil said:
I doubt that it's even as powerful as an iPhone as a device, but I don't think that's its selling point.
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As I thought, it's not as powerful as an iPhone4.

- CPU Snapdragon 1 Ghz
- GPU Adreno, 41 million triangles / second, 245 million pixels / second
- Capacitative 480 × 854 touchscreen
- Android 2.3 Gingerbread
- 119×62×16 mm, 175 gr.
- 400 MB internal storage + microSD support
- GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth
- 5 megapixel camera with led flash on the back

And it's miles off the NGP. Difference being though, unlike NGP, it's a phone, they can keep upping the specs year on year.
 
They're making it as accessible as possible for software developers. Problem is, why should these developers make games exclusively for their platform when they can simply work on Android and iOS directly to a larger audience?
 
It's one of those things where it's either going to flop on its arse or possibly be a game changer. It's an interesting departure for SCE, as they are not making the hardware, simply providing the environment, tools, network infrastructure, and presumably lots of games (they have a massive back catalogue of PS1 games to start with).

I assume that the strategy comes from the realisation that although many people now play games, most only want simple $1-3 downloads in small chunks, not necessarily what they have always dealt in, so you let them run normal Android games. However, at the same time, others do want larger and deeper experiences, and due to how Android works, quite different to iPhone, there are a multitude of devices from different manufacturers with differing performance and differing features. So, they provide a single set of development tools (possibly even a maybe a ready made game engine) and a single development environment that will run on any phone that (I suppose it's SCE that will do this, not SE) is certified to run the Playstation Suite. Then, it's not just phones is it, I'd expect them to licence PS Suite to any device that complies with its minimum standards from other phones, tablets, TVs, BD players, etc. etc. If people then want top of the range, then they have the option of NGP and PS3 which will both run everything this phone will. So as long as it's a PS Suite game, and you download it from PSN, then you can run that content on any PS Suite enabled device including your PS3. A single stable game development environment could look very attractive to developers, especially if it also allows them to easily down-port their NGP and PS3 games to Android systems without too much effort.

It's an interesting approach that as I said could end up as a total disaster outside of their own Sony engineered devices. If they can get other electronics manufacturers onboard though, it could take off. SCE doesn't really give a shit about SE in this, even though they are using them as a launch platform. SCE want to sell software, and lots of it.
 
WeasteDevil said:
It's one of those things where it's either going to flop on its arse or possibly be a game changer. It's an interesting departure for SCE, as they are not making the hardware, simply providing the environment, tools, network infrastructure, and presumably lots of games (they have a massive back catalogue of PS1 games to start with).

I assume that the strategy comes from the realisation that although many people now play games, most only want simple $1-3 downloads in small chunks, not necessarily what they have always dealt in, so you let them run normal Android games. However, at the same time, others do want larger and deeper experiences, and due to how Android works, quite different to iPhone, there are a multitude of devices from different manufacturers with differing performance and differing features. So, they provide a single set of development tools (possibly even a maybe a ready made game engine) and a single development environment that will run on any phone that (I suppose it's SCE that will do this, not SE) is certified to run the Playstation Suite. Then, it's not just phones is it, I'd expect them to licence PS Suite to any device that complies with its minimum standards from other phones, tablets, TVs, BD players, etc. etc. If people then want top of the range, then they have the option of NGP and PS3 which will both run everything this phone will. So as long as it's a PS Suite game, and you download it from PSN, then you can run that content on any PS Suite enabled device including your PS3. A single stable game development environment could look very attractive to developers, especially if it also allows them to easily down-port their NGP and PS3 games to Android systems without too much effort.

It's an interesting approach that as I said could end up as a total disaster outside of their own Sony engineered devices. If they can get other electronics manufacturers onboard though, it could take off. SCE doesn't really give a shit about SE in this, even though they are using them as a launch platform. SCE want to sell software, and lots of it.
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So what they're doing is setting up an Apple-like ecosystem for games, except the bare requirements seem to be currently slightly higher than your average android/iOS game. Is it like a higher tier, so to speak? I'm not aware about this, but what are the minimum requirements for an Android game, if any? I really can't see this taking off if there are currently none. Unless, of course, they manage to sign up flagship phone models to incorporate the PS Suite. Phones like the HTC Desire 2 or Samsung Galaxy S 2. Then yes, I can see it working for all parties involved. If I were Sony I'd pay for this to happen.
 
Yes, ecosystem is the buzzword that they keep using. I simply think that to run PS Suite the phone/device has to be certified to be of a minimum hardware standard and run Android 2.3 or later, but those devices will still be able to run normal Android stuff as well. I suppose that they'll then take a cut on the PS Suite stuff. Then, the NGP will run all of this but also its own software because it's so much more powerful, and the PS3 will be able to run the lot. Then, over time, as general device hardware gets more powerful, they'll start to include the ability to run PS2, NGP, and then even PS3 games into the Suite.

If they can tie it all together, it might just work. It's a move IMO that signals a plan to retreat from the manufacture of gaming hardware and more towards software and services. Unless they still want to keep the in the business of manufacturing high end systems at the same time. NGP seems to indicate that this is still the case, but after a while it's going to be a case of diminishing returns where you can't really do much to differentiate your hardware in the market from multiple competitors. They have to play to their strengths now, get the NGP and PS4 out, and then use their game software studios (they are second to none) to generate the revenue going on from there.
 
I've tried some games on my brother's iPhone today and I'm surprised how good most of them look, really coroful and fun to play. I got iPad ago and downloaded GTA, must say I haven't had this much fun with a portable game for a while. I thought PSP was way ahead of what mobile phones have to offer but it seems not to be the case.

By the way, with a month and a half to go from now I'm starting to consider getting a 3DS. It turns out that it won't be that expensive here and I'm really curious how the 3D is going to cope. Normally I would skip a handheld at release because of the price but innovation here makes me eager to witness it.
 
The 3DS will be a safe bet with the extensive games catalogue and 3rd party support, you won't be let down on that front.

Technologically it still remains inferior to its Sony rival, but really it presents itself as more of a 'handheld' gaming device imo.
 
It's also a lot about control schemes. DS and Wii have taught us that. Simple touchscreens can't cut it. One hell of a lot of people are finally glad that NGP will finally have two sticks. The full screen touchpad on the back of the NGP is a little bit of genius IMO.
 
Sony is a group, and SCE is part of that group. The PS3 is a Sony-branded product that SCE makes. Nowadays we have numerous portable devices out there, and Sony is making some of them. For instance, at SCE, we are not making mobile phones or Android smart phones - we don't even cooperate on any level with these products. But what if we could provide them with games, even casual titles? It makes sense for the PlayStation brand, but also as away to reach those devices as well. There is now a real synergy at play between Sony and SCE. Hirai-san is not only looking after SCE but also the Vaio division. He has a global vision for the group: running the business as we did didn't answer the fluid, changing reality of today
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we need a certain level of specifications to run our content and for consumers to enjoy it properly. There are so many devices out there - it's a very fragmented world. It's hard to see what kind of content users want to enjoy with such a variety around. By establishing this seal, users have a clear idea of what to expect. The devices that will be compatible will have a logo and access to the PS Store.
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I'm particularly interested in what new interactions would be possible with the combination of rear and front-facing touch sensors. One of the biggest obstacles to playing games on the iPhone is the 'sausage stylus' effect, where your fingers can really obscure the action. The potential to remove those issues and introduce new behaviours based on front-back pinch, 3D rotations and more is really intriguing.
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...
 
It is going to hurt the 3DS that it has a ridiculously short battery life when in 3D mode, only 4 hours or so - I wouldn't even consider getting one because of that.
 
Nintendo will be fine, as if you want to play Nintendo IP, you need Nintendo hardware, and some of their software titles sell in silly numbers. It's a company where software drives hardware rather than the other way around. It has gone pear shaped in the past for them, so lets see.
 
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