I think it is. My guess is it’ll be announced by the end of the year.
Much like Resident Evil 4 not staying exclusive to the Gamecube was inevitable. The second that exclusive contract runs out there will be an announcement.
Looking over things I’m struck by a few things:
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Not a single thing announced that E3 even made me go “That sounds fun.” There were several “hot” demonstrations that made me certain that I wouldn’t want the game (Fallout 3, for example; while they were showing off the combat I was watching how poorly designed everything else was).
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If you keeping in mind that the press conferences were for corporate buyers first and the public second most of those things make more sense. Microsoft’s emphasis on trying to get in on the Wii’s marketshare at the expense of Bungie and Nintendo’s lack of push for anything beyond what they already know they can sell fit that strategy. The downside on that for Nintendo is that they only push their titles when a push for expanding the brand would have been welcome.
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Of course the real win is that the suspicions that were held for the past two years have finally been confirmed: the PS3 is dead. It was DOA, no miracle occurred to save them, and the final nail has been put in that coffin. The question now is how long will it take Sony to realize this.
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Developers are still lost when it comes to the Wii. At this point I doubt that this will ever change.
Isn’t this a bit premature? The PS3 is currently outselling the 360 by like 40% worldwide. It’s even outselling it in the United States.
Two months ago I’d call it premature but the long term sales trends has left it on a similar growth curve as the XBox360 just with half the numbers. The E3 announcements revealed that they lost their last major supporting developer, they can’t drop price to keep up with market development, the market is crystalizing for this generation, and Sony themselves couldn’t offer buyers anything more than promises more than a year off. Don’t expect their sales to be greater than the XBox this week or for many weeks to come; even without the FFXIII announcement Microsoft has dropped the XBox price below one of the psychological threshholds.
This isn’t just disastrous like the earlier problems for the PS3, this is the end. They’ll remain in the market as a marginal force similar to how the original XBox was last generation (the Gamecube might be a better comparison but I’m willing to give them a little bit more credit than that… for the moment) but its over. Sony needs to accept this and start looking toward the future rather than struggling with their anchor.
Yeah that oughta be good.
Fallout 3 and Diablo 3 are the only things I’m looking forward to right now. I seriously doubt my PC will be able to run either though. I’m probably going to skip the current gen of consoles, at least until I can get one for under $150.
Actually, it’s not on a similar growth curve at all. Here, look at this data from VG Chartz. The PS3 growth curve is tracking the PS2 growth curve almost exactly. And it’s absolutely steeper than the 360 growth curve.
Here’s a chart comparing the growth curves of the PS3, the 360 and the original XBox. You can see that the 360 has been building its install base faster than the original XBox, but it still hasn’t been seeing the sort of growth the PS3 has been experiencing.
The loss of FFXIII as a Sony exclusive is definitely a blow. But I think that it’s way too early to count Sony out.
One thing worth remembering is that the PS3 still constitutes the only real “cheap” blu-ray option. I’d be interested to see how much of a contributing factor that is to its sales now that HD-DVD is officially dead.
My personal opinion is that the PS3 is both a massive success and a failure. It just depends entirely on your point of view.
From Sony’s perspective, a significant objective with the PS3 was to use the brand’s massive loyalty base to win a format war. They’d been burned too many times with formats already and they sure as hell weren’t going to lose again. Whatever high ideals for gaming the designers had were, quite simply, secondary to that goal.
And from that perspective it has been a massive success - HD-DVD is dead and Blu-Ray is king. I’ve no doubt that many corks have been popped in Sony HQ thanks to the PS3.
From a gamer’s perspective, however, the PS3 has been a disappointment at best. Whatever way you cut it, Microsoft have run rings around them this generation when it comes to what we would traditionally define as “gaming,” and the Wii has completely stolen the “casual” market that accounted for a lot of the PS2’s long tail.
From that perspective, the console is just full of fail. I have all three consoles - the 360 gets used daily, the Wii whenever we have people round and the PS3…
…well that’s been at a mate’s house for the last year or so, because he’s a film nut who’s loving the excuse to go out and buy all the same fucking films again on blu-ray disc.
I can’t even remember the last time i thought “shit, wish i had that PS3 here right now.”
Actually, i can - it was when my review copy of Heavenly Sword turned up. After about an hour of playing it round his house, however, i told him not to worry. 
Pochacco, your charts are distorted by showing it as points from launch. When you compare in parallel Xbox 360 sales have been growing at close to the same rate as the PS3 and as I pointed out one is about to have a sharp upturn while the other is about to have a distinct flattening. You can guess which one is which.
I’ve seen blu-ray players for under $300 which undercuts their price and there are quite a few models that run at the same price as “the only real ‘cheap’ blu-ray option”.
And may I say I’m shocked that you found a videophile who would accept a game system as a primary movie player. I don’t have a lot of direct experience with the PS3 on that regard but every other time in the past consoles have done fairly bad jobs as media players (to use the obvious example the PS2 was a horrible DVD player; people who just wanted a DVD player typically went with other options). I haven’t seen a lot of the movie buffs who are willing to get blu-ray jump on the PS3 as an option for just that reason.
Which doesn’t mean that Sony won’t credit the PS3 with the success of blu-ray. It might be a situation where the PS3 kept that platform in the public consciousness long enough to kill HD-DVD.
I’m not trying to dance on Sony’s grave or be one of those obnoxious people who think that they have to support their platform of choice by attacking the one they don’t use. I’m just some guy very interested in the business behind the gaming industry and I’m convinced that five years from now when the next generation is rolling out people will look back at this moment and say, “That’s when the PS3 was finished.” It’s just an interesting story in my eyes.
Agreed on both counts. I love talking about the business of video games, I just think it’s fun. And I also agree that the PS3 is finished. There’s no way it’ll overtake the Xbox 360, but there’s almost nothing Sony could do about as any other console they would try to build would have to be less powerful than the PS3 because price and developer support are their biggest obstacles.
Does anyone know how the Netflix thing will work with XBL? I’m very curious about that.
So my girlfriend and I were discussing E3 last night.
Turns out she can get us in to next year’s expo.
One of her cousins is an investment guru, and he has a very rich and well-known client who owns one of the companies that goes to E3 (and who I won’t mention here). The cousin basically said that if we give him the word, he can get us passes to attend.
Again, this analysis is just not supported by the numbers. Here’s a chart that shows weekly sales of the PS2, PS3, and 360. You’ll note that the PS3 has been outselling the 360 by a substantial margin all through 2008. In fact for a while this spring the **PS2 ** was outselling the 360!
The 360 is certainly beating the PS3 in America. But the PS3 is beating the 360 in Japan. Europe seems to be a wash … the 360 has a moderate edge in total numbers, but the PS3 is outselling it by almost 2-to-1 so the gap there is closing.
Now maybe the PS3 will never make up the ground it lost by launching a year later than the 360. But as long as it’s outselling the 360 I think it’s premature to pronounce it dead.
Six million consoles is not a moderate edge, it’s a giant chasm. I’m not saying the PS3 can’t catch up, but it’s going to require some very drastic measures (like a massive price cut to undercut the 360) or some extremely unlikely events (LittleBigPlanet becomes the darling of the fall and sells a shit-ton of copies).
I just don’t think it’s going to happen.
It’s worth noting that total sales doesn’t tell the whole story. The 360 has almost no market penetration in Japan (630k units according to VGChartz) and extremely high penetration in America, while the PS3 is getting equally moderate sales in both countries. This is the only reason it’s staying competitive; if you’re looking at America, the PS3 has a very long way to go to catch up to the 360. Even in Japan, where Sony should be benefiting from the lack of Microsoft’s competition, the PS3 is still getting pushed aside in favor of the Wii. (Sorry, I don’t know how to prevent it from showing a third line on the chart.)
Sure, the PS3’s gaining in total sales, but in either country it’s really just ho-hum.
I feel like I’m hearing two different things here. First, I’m reading that the PS3 is dead. Then I’m reading that the PS3 can’t catch up to the XBox360 despite currently having better sales.
These two things don’t equate in my mind. Even if Sony finishes 3rd before the console makers move on to the next generation systems, how does that automatically make the PS3 non-viable?
In this case, “dead” means that development resources and market share will no longer be flowing the PS3’s way (much like the GameCube after it was declared “dead”). It will still sell a few consoles, but it will definitely end up in third place in the public consciousness.
The recent uptick in PS3 console sales also had an explanation: the impending release of Metal Gear Solid 4. With that out of the way (and an Xbox 360 price cut for July and August), it’s sales rebound will evaporate.
To simplify further, it costs money to make a game work on a platform.
There are four kinds of games.
A: Exclusives.
B: Non-Exclusives
C: Best On
D: Not Developed For
Exclusives have the smallest market of any game, they will only be sold on one system. They’re slightly cheaper to develop than non-exclusives… but that’s not the reason they exist. Exclusives are the games that people buy systems for. PS2 had a bunch of great Exclusives. GTA3. Gran Turismo. Virtua Fighter. Final Fantasy. God of War.
These games, the console makers pay the game makers to keep exclusive, because it will spike console sales.
B: Non-Exclusives. Your typical developed for multiple platforms game. No real bonus either way, but it gives you a wider market, and doesn’t cost that much more to make.
C: Best On. Did you know the 360 had Raving Rabbids? Yeah, but it didn’t have the Wiimote, and it wasn’t as awesome. Lot of Wii games, if they exist on other platforms, are Best On the Wii. It’s no big thing, but it does suggest special care on one platform and conversion to the others.
D: Not Developed For. Basically, this isn’t an exclusive, it’s just it wasn’t worth spending the resources converting it to C or B. Many Wii games are like that.
The PS3 has lost all but three Exclusives. One’s out. One won’t be out till 2010 and has competition. And the last one may be upstaged. (MGS, GT5, God of War 3)
This means some game companies will switch from C to B or D. Making the PS3 version an afterthought or just not releasing it. And for something that could be a potential A game? Would you spend all that work and awesome and put it on the PS3 now? Or would you go somewhere you could sell more copies? Especially if Microsoft will toss you a few shekels as well. Sure, Sony’ll match the cash… but not the sales figures.
Well he’s what you would describe as an occasional gamer as well - the kind who buys the latest version of Pro Evo Soccer each year and is happy just with that.
Plus i never said he was a discerning videophile. The man owns pretty much every Steven Seagal film ever made. 
Basically he’s very much Joe Average - the guy who buys one game a year, watches a lot of action movies with mates and uses the internet for email and pr0n. He did ask me about these “bit tolerants” things he’d heard about a little while back, but decided it sounded too much work and he’d stick to buying discs.
Oh, and those discs were always Blu-Ray because that was in the PS3 and his first dvd player was a PS2, so if that was the standard then, then this would be the standard now (granted the fact that he has yet had to buy a Blu-Ray player of his own and can thieve mine probably helps 
).
Generally i find that the man is the physical embodiment of “public consciousness” and very handy to have around in that regard. 
Mega Man 9 boxart T-shirts wil be sold to the public:
I’m so buying one.