January 2007 - Posts
Just saw this interesting post from Matt Pace of Compete, a company that specializes in collecting and analyzing online traffic metrics. The company collected data this holiday tracking US video game console demand, and the results are pretty interesting (if somewhat predictable).
I won't quote the entire article - it's worth a read. However, as anyone who has tried to find a Wii can attest, the platform has had significant demand, outstripping both the PS3 and the 360. The PS3's launch was reasonably strong but quickly fizzled, with the PS3 and 360 running neck and neck toward the end of January. If that trend continues, it's going to make it tough for the PS3 to catch up to the 360's headstart.
Also of interest is their analysis of cross-shoppers, or people who were initially shopping for one platform who then sought out another (likely because the first choice wasn't available). It's clear that momentum shifted from the PS3 to the 360 for buyers of those two platforms. It's also pretty obvious that the lower price point of the Wii seems to be appealing to a different audience, one who is less willing to consider shifting their purchase to a higher-priced platform.
More conclusions are available at the original post. Note that there is a typo in the URL (playstation is spelled wrong), so let me know if they fix it and the links in this post break.
Some of you might remember I pinged Bruce Dawson (one of our senior software design engineers here) earlier with some questions around 1080i and 1080p. At the time I was trying to understand where Sony was coming from with all their "TrueHD" talk, especially as the 360 had just enabled 1080p output as well.
Anyway, last week we heard the news that the PS3 had fixed scaling on 480i PS2 titles running in backwards compatibility mode. This is a good thing. But we also heard that the PS3 SDK had been updated to allow PS3 titles to scale their content, but only horizontally. This is a weird thing.
I couldn't wrap my head around all the technical implications here, so I asked Bruce for his thoughts. Since there's nothing confidential here, I thought I'd share what he sent me. He knows his stuff, so if you find something you strongly disagree with or just want to ask a question on, add a comment to the discussion. I'll ask Bruce to swing by and answer as he has the time. Bruce's thoughts follow:
I see no sign that the PS3 contains a chip that can do vertical scaling, and this new feature (horizontal scaling) is a poor substitute for a true hardware scaler. It is a step forward for owners of 1080i only HDTVs, once PS3 games support it, but it is nowhere near as good as the Xbox 360’s scaler.
This recent announcement is just for horizontal scaling, and horizontal scaling is easy. To do high quality horizontal scaling you just need to buffer up a few pixels and intelligently average between them.
Cheap horizontal scaling is even easier: you just send pixels to the video output a bit slower (or send pixels at the same rate, but read them from memory slower). It’s the sort of thing that consoles have always been able to do. This new horizontal scaling feature just sounds like they are adjusting the video output rate.
Vertical scaling, on the other hand, is much harder. You need to be able to buffer up (or sample from) two or more lines of data, and then intelligently average between them. For high quality scaling you want to be sampling from a half-dozen lines or more. The Xbox 360 can do this. I don’t know whether the PS3 can do this, but if it could I think we would have seen it by now.
This new feature means that games that have previously only supported 720p can now, sort of, be modified to support 1080. When these games detect a display that can’t support 720p they can switch to using a 960x1080 buffer. This is only 12.5% more pixels than 1280x720 so the increase in fill rate and memory consumption should be manageable. Then they can tell the PS3 to stretch this buffer to 1920x1080 at display time and voila, 1080 support.
Except, it will be pretty weak 1080 support with an odd and substandard result. The horizontal resolution will be worse than with 720p (960 across instead of 1280), and the images will be twice as blurry horizontally as vertically. 960x1080 is going to look worse than 1280x720 (although it’s certainly an improvement over having to drop back to 480i).
Just thought this was funny. Check out Sony's PSP Connect site and you (currently) see the following:
Now check out this screenshot from Bizarre Creations website (makers of Project Gotham Racing 3):
Just to be clear, this isn't Sony trying anything dirty. It's likely an artist just taking a shortcut, and the company has no idea. Expect it to disappear pretty quickly. But it's pretty funny that an Xbox 360 launch title is being used to represent Gran Turismo HD. ;)
No, not being sarcastic - it appears there's finally some unabashedly good news for PS3 owners out there. According to Arstechnica (and many other sites), the new PS3 1.5 firmware update has resolved the jaggies issue when playing PS2 titles. Means I can finally play Okami!
In the spirit of fairness, I'll link back to an earlier post where I stated I didn't expect they'd be able to fix this issue due to the lack of a hardware scaler. Apparently they were able to clean up the scaling in software - at least for older titles. We'll see if that work can extend to PS3 native titles as well.
About the only "negativity" I'm seeing on the web around this update is that some people seem to think the output of a PS2 title running back compat on a PS3 is "softer". You can judge for yourself from the images below (with thanks to Dot50Cal from NeoGaf). Frankly, I don't see a difference - do you?
Resident Evil 4 - PS2 (running native on PS2 hardware):
Resident Evil 4 - PS3 (PS2 title running in back compat on PS3):
... and if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.
According to this article quoting Game Informer magazine, SCEA's Jack Tretton is stating Sony won't consier a price drop until 2008 at earliest. To quote:
When asked by US magazine Game Informer whether Sony would cut the price of PS3 as soon as they did after the PS2’s launch, Tretton replied: “No… There’s a heck of a lot more under the hood and it costs us more money to make it.” He added that “it will be a lot more difficult” to reduce the recommended price of PS3.
I'm totally with him on the fact that it'll be a lot more difficult to cost-reduce the PS3. The Blu-Ray drive isn't going to be helping things any, Cell is still expensive to make, and the hard drive (much as everyone loves to have it) just doesn't cost reduce well either. The problem for Sony is that cutting the price this early in the console generation means they accelerate the price drop curve over the life of the console. And that means hundreds of millions of dollars gone from the bottom line - which just isn't tenable for any console manufacturer.
However, I still stand by my 2007 predictions, and believe we'll see a price cut by Thanksgiving of this year. I'll even be more specific and lay out the likely path. First we'll continue to see pricing weakness ($100 rebates from EBGames if you trade in a PS2, Japanese retailers cutting 20% off the price on their own initiative are examples). By March/April, if sales aren't picking up significantly, we'll see a new PS3 bundle deal become available. Price points will remain the same, but Sony will attempt to improve the perception of value by bundling in games, Blu-Ray movies, or peripherals (or some combination of the three). If by late summer that doesn't help turn sales around, we'll begin to hear rumblings of a price drop which will hit around the Thanksgiving holiday. And I'd expect to see at least $100 cut from the price of both SKUs.
I'd hate to be in Sony's shoes right now - they're caught between two huge rocks. On one hand they need to keep selling the PS3 at as high a price as possible to have a chance to recoup costs over the life of the program. On the other hand, they can't afford to fall off the popular interest train and become irrelevent. Ugh.
Noticed (thanks to Loraan) that the spam filter tagged about 40 posts in the Live suggestions thread. I'm actually pretty happy about the low number - 40 out of over 1000 posts is a pretty reasonable percentage. Anyway, just wanted to let you know that if one of your posts didn't seem to get through, it's probably there now. I approved all of them (although I only approved a single instance of posts that had multiple attempts for obvious reasons).
Just wanted to share a cool little web script with you called Andromeda, by Turnstyle Software. This script allows you to set up a personal web server to stream your music library to any web-connected device. I use it to access my music from whatever internet-connected PC I happen to be working on.
What's really slick about Andromeda is that it parses your music directory structure and displays a simple menu to let you navigate your library, play albums or tracks, or even create playlists. I used to use this back in California with compressed music files (due to my limited upstream bandwidth). Thanks to a higher upstream, I'm now able to stream my lossless music. Very cool - check it out if you have a chance!
Oh, and you may also find Turnstyle's Bitty Browser interesting if you end up using Andromeda. It's described as picture-in-picture for the web. I think of it as a great Live.com gadget that allows me to access my music from my home page. (Just wish Live.com worked with Safari on the Mac, but that's a whole other story.)
[Edit: Resized image to fit the page better.]
Just wanted to write a quick post to thank all of you who had suggestions for us about the future of Live. While I can't comment on specific suggestions, I can say that many of your thoughts are already being thought about. There were also some new ideas or spins on others that have sparked great conversations here at the office. Now the hard part - time to sit back and see what comes out of all that. Should be a fun year!
I'm doing some thinking around the future of "Xbox Live". I put Xbox Live in quotes only because Live will be stretching beyond the console this year with the release of Live on Windows, and we're looking at a future where multiple devices will all be able to connect into the same service. My question to you is what big features would you want to see out of Live in the future?
Imagine a world in which your account can work with different devices, each with different capabilities. Some might have a keyboard, some might not. Some might connect to your TV, some might be mobile and fit in your pocket. Some might be built from the ground up for gaming, some might have gaming as an ancillary function. The common thread across all of these devices is internet connectivity and Live, with your single login (Gamertag), your single friends list, and the ability communicate and share with those friends and the community.
What do you want to see? Think big here - ideally, think about what you want to see over a five-year period, and how your ideas evolve over that time. What's the crawl step for your idea? The walk? The run?
It's important to say that I'm just one of many people who will be working on this, and I will not be able to commit to anything being done, or even confirm that many ideas might even be considered. On top of that, you should assume that any ideas discussed publicly here are just that - public. Microsoft may use them in product ideas, and for that matter, anyone might use them. If you have some ideas that you want to keep private because you think you might do something with them yourself one day, you should not post them here.
That said, if you're ok with the above, we'd love to hear your thoughts... and remember, think big, think long-term, and think stages to get there. That's how we can get this sort of thing done.
[Edit: you'd think I'd know how to spell "publicly" by now. <sigh> Fixed.]
Or not you, as appears to be the case.
Apparently a combination of production costs and Sony not allowing pornography to be released on Blu-Ray media is leading pornography producers to release their high-definition wares solely on HD-DVD. You can find a couple of interesting (and family safe) articles here and here if you want to read more.
What fascinates me about this discussion is the question of whether the availability of pornography is critical to the success of a format. Some argue it was one of the reasons VHS succeeded over Betamax back in the 80s. Whether you approve or not (and I'm not soliciting opinions here), porn is easily available on the web today, and one wonders whether this might mitigate any potential balance-tipping effect this interest might have.
Looks like a guy with all three consoles took some measurements of sound output of all the next-gen consoles with an SPL meter. The results were interesting to me as they don't have the 360 as the loudest (as conventional wisdom seems to say). I certainly wouldn't point to this as being definitive as there are all sort of things that can make taking a reading difficult. The different sizes of the enclosures for each console is a big one as reflected noise can throw off the readings. But hopefully this'll spark some more measurements out there!
Found an interesting article over on Wired about a gentlemen who is seeking to expose fraudulent psychics. Quick quote:
A skeptic since his teen years, Randi launched his challenge in 1964,
after growing outraged with fake mediums and fortunetellers using
simple conjurers' tricks to prey on the public. A challenge was an
efficient alternative to trying to prove a negative: Instead of
traveling the world investigating and debunking miracle workers
one-by-one, an unclaimed cash prize stands as a fact on the ground --
an immovable obstacle around which anyone purporting supernatural
powers must eventually navigate.
What I love about this is that he's got a million dollars on the line, and is approaching this both scientifically and fairly. What that's done is drive the more famous "TV psychics" running, as it appears they would not be able to prove their claimed abilities. Great angle, and I found it a fun read. Check it out if you've got nothing better to do!
... or at least my PC does. Just a quick post to point you toward the Electric Sheep screensaver. What's sort of cool about this is that you can vote on popular screensavers and have the "genes" of that saver influence future versions. To quote:
Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver run by thousands of people all over the world. It can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers "sleep", the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep". The result is a collective "android dream", an homage to Philip K. ***'s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
I came across this when looking for good, multi-screen screensavers for Windows. Found some great OS X screensavers while I was at it, but didn't have any luck on the Windows side (specifically, multi-screen). Anyone have any you particularly like?
It's not Kaz speaking up and defending the box that surprises me; it's that the statements are just so obviously wrong that I can't believe he actually thinks people will take him seriously. You can go over to IGN to read all the text, but I'll highlight a couple of fun quotes. Won't even comment on them beyond simply posting as you can fill in your own commentary at this point.
"I have heard many people say our competitors' systems are just as powerful as the PS3. That simply is not true," said Hirai. "No other next generation entertainment system pushes the envelope on advanced technology like PS3.
<snip>
Hirai said that PS3 titles like Resistance: Fall of Man already utilize some 16GBs of storage space on Blu-ray Disc. "That game simply wouldn't be possible on any other system without using multiple discs."
<snip>
He also seemed to suggest that had Sony gone the Nintendo route and released a marginally more powerful console, the launch would have gone much smoother. "A worldwide launch for any console is quite ambitious. In fact, it has never been done before.
As suspected, Apple announced their iPhone. More can be found at Engadget (including sexy picture) and other sources on the web. You guys know I'm also an Apple and OS X fan, and I have to say this is a pretty slick looking device. Lots of questions in my mind - the fact that it runs OS X makes it potentially interesting as a game platform though the hardware specs will help determine a lot there. I'd buy this tomorrow if it syncs email to an Exchange server as the Microsoft Smartphones do. Not clear whether it does or not - anyone know?
[Edit: My phone lust just got dampened by the price: $499 for the 4 GB, $599 for the 8 GB model. When will people learn that $600 is not the new $300? (Thinking consoles here, of course.) Lots of potential to the device, but is it worth as much as a PS3? (And I'm specifically talking about the PS3's hardware and future potential, of course - not the PS3 as it stands today.) I bet we'll see a $100 price drop by holiday.]
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