There's general agreement that Sony stumbled out of the gate with the PlayStation 3. Months of intense hype were followed by a late launch (fully a year after the Xbox 360) and a staggering $600 price tag for the deluxe model.
Even worse, the PS3 didn't initially have any real must-have exclusive titles, and despite the power of its vaunted Cell processor, multiplatform games from third-party developers didn't look appreciably better than the respective titles on the Xbox 360.
Since then, the company's been modifying the PlayStation product line to better fit the competitive market landscape. As of August 2008, a new "bargain" PS3 is available with a larger, 80GB hard drive, and a "deluxe" model is due in November, doubling the capacity to 160GB.
Both, however, lack backward compatibility with PS2 games and do not come with flash card readers. If those features are a must, it might be best to pick up the 80GB "Metal Gear" bundle version on eBay w... More »
Engadget (linked above) writes: Hey, pal - remember that 160GB PS3 Drake's Fortune bundle we told you about back in August?
Well thanks to the totally awesome skills of one intrepid reader, we now know that they're available for purchasing pleasure at your local Best Buy (and other spots, we like to imagine).
From what we can tell based on that extremely blurry photo you see, the package will sell for a holiday-destroying $499.99, so you'd better hope grandma drops a big check on you this season.
The console market today is as tough as any industry there is, but it wasn't always like this. For the past several years the PS2 has been the console to trump, and before it there was the original PlayStation which also dominated the market.
One unclear question still remains though; will the PlayStation 3 remain atop the market? Many analysts believe that this will in fact hold true, but why are they claiming this? In my personal opinion, here are the Top 5 reasons that the PlayStation 3 will eventually re-take the lead in the game industries market.
#5 The Xbox 360 and How It Matches Up
The Xbox 360 is a great console, but it has its flaws. The Xbox 360 is a very similar console to the PS3. They have similar play and they have similar specifications. The Xbox 360 has an estimated 30% failure rate and this will cost Microsoft dearly. The Xbox 360 is struggling to maintain its position in America, and if that isn't enough it can't even ga... More »
Game installs on the PlayStation 3 have become a huge problem. We’ve seen hard drives fill to capacity already and there looks to be no end in sight.
I was pleasantly surprised when Resistance 2 nixed that huge 5GB install that most games these days require.
This isn’t to say there’s no install. The game drops roughly 350MB of data onto your hard drive, which takes about 90 seconds. Not bad at all considering games like NBA 09: The Inside use over 2.5GB of precious hard drive space.
I just wanted to give credit where credit is due. Kudos, Insomniac! Good job stepping in and putting a stop (or at least a pause) the problematic game installs that are plaguing the PS3. Keep up the good work!
The latest research from Frank N. Magid Associates takes a look at how receptive gamers are to in-game ads. It seems that price drops or free games makes advertising very worthwhile for most.
Advertising in console games (as well as PC and other games) has become increasingly common in the industry today. Even presidential candidates are advertising in games these days.
We wondered, though, how consumers would feel if this trend grew and significantly more advertising was placed in console games but the price of the game was also cut in half or, was even free.
As it turns out, most gamers were quite receptive to this idea. Very few were negative about having major price reductions or even free games in return for considerable amounts of advertising in the games.
In fact, less than 20 percent of gamers said they were less likely to purchase a game, at half the price, but with more advertising. The plurality, 31 percent, said i... More »
Elaborating on the earlier Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box Announcement, today Criterion Games Producer Jeremy Chubb has detailed what's in store for Burnout Paradise including the Burnout Paradise Network and the Burnout Paradise Party Pack.
Phew! Another big week, here at Criterion Games, but it’s great to be back on the blog! Today, we made the first of a series of announcements calling out our 2009 Burnout Paradise content.
So first up, we’re talking about the in-game browser for the PLAYSTATION 3. We always like to embrace the great hardware innovations for PlayStation. We’re using the browser to bring you closer to your friends and also to get you the latest news on what we’re working on – it’s like having criteriongames.com inside the game.
We’ll bring you all the latest on this PlayStation-exclusive feature... More »
Sales of the PSP-3000 model in Japan have cooled considerably since it launched in the region, but Sony's portable sells far more than enough to retain the top spot on the Media Create hardware charts.
The PSP's hardware peers all took a hit this week; the Nintendo DS drops to third, with the Xbox 360 holding steady with the week's lowest decline.
The bad news continues for Sony's PlayStation 3, which suffers its worst week ever, selling just half of what its HD competition did, shedding nearly 17% of its sales week-to-week. Those LittleBigPlanet bundles can't come soon enough.
PSP - 60,467
Wii - 24,292
Nintendo DS - 22,965
Xbox 360 - 7,844
PlayStation 2 - 6,962
PlayStation 3 - 3,931
Tonight I was downloading some content I had been missing out on the last week due to band rehersals and some light work here and there...
Now normally I would've just background-downloaded all of my stuff and walked away from it until it was done - I'm glad I didn't.
A big complaint with the PSN is the fact when you download something of the store you then have to install it. This means the long process becomes longer...
Well, tonight I found out that if you que up all you want to download and individually download it from the store menu or your drop down download list, without doing a background download, it not only increased my speed from an average of 1MB every 4 seconds to 1MB every 1 second to 2 seconds, but it also pre-installs your content for you. So you don't have to go back out and manually do it from your PlayStation 3 XMB.
Now, I have a fast connection and I often average 1MB per second anyways, but a lot of times it's... More »
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