back to article Retailers: Xbox 360 to win next-gen console war

Retailers think the Xbox 360 is most likely to win the next generation console war, but they're still pi**ed with the ongoing Wii shortage, according to a survey. The poll, which questioned 100 independent videogames shops and was commissioned by trade paper MCV, found that 49 per cent of retailers believe Microsoft’s Xbox 360 …

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  1. Chad H.
    Flame

    More proof, if any was required

    That games Retailers know crap about the industry they claim to be in "Oh, it wont win the console war, I mean, have you seen any on the shelves... No? Must be noone wants one..."

  2. Matthew LaShure
    Boffin

    Pushing factors

    While I would personally agree and hope for the Xbox 360 to win the console wars, I don't think that games alone will decide there fate. Microsoft while making the Xbox 360 went with a backwards compatabile strategy and HD availability. Sony on the otherhand went for a bold move that has been tried before.. Blue Ray. For some reason, every time I think of Blue Ray, BetaMax enters my mind. IF the Blue Ray tech manages to suprise everyone and beat out HD DVD, Sony will have a good shot at staying in the game. But if it doesn't... can we hope that sonys reign of terror is at an end?

    I know comparing Sony and Microsoft is like comparing satan and the devil, but atleast MS went with full backwards compatability. Can we say the same for sony? Especially when looking at there most recent budget version of the PS3....

  3. Rosco

    Maybe I'm cynical but ...

    It seems to me that the XBox 360 is aimed at a the market segment most likely to represent people who work in videogame shops. Accordingly, they're the people most likely to say that since they believe the XBox is the best console, it will win the console competition.

  4. James
    IT Angle

    100 retailers

    The PS3 has only just entered a price that is seen to be affordable by most, christmas sales may well change this. We've seen playstation brand pull it out the bag before.

    Also, the chip designers, IBM, recently gave a talk at their UK headquarters saying, I quote;

    "We designed the chips for the wii, the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3. The Playstation 3 has more power, more capability and more room for growth, hands down it is the best machine by far."

    So it seems if they can get their marketing right, leverage the PS2 fan base, and get some developers on their side, they aren't out of the running yet.

  5. Chris Morrison
    Flame

    Game

    I was in game the other day, you would think ti was an Xbox shop. The Xbox 360 stuff was everywhere, whilst the Wii (the most popular system this year) was stuck down one corner. The PS3 was in another corner gathering dust.

    Does ye olde Billy Gates have a stake in game by any chance?

  6. Ian Yates
    Paris Hilton

    Next-gen my ass

    Why do people STILL insist on calling it "next-gen"... it /was/ next-gen, now it's current-gen.

    But I'm a Wii man, myself.

    What does our regular blonde bare-ess use?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hang on...

    That's all three consoles given the winner's thumbs up, by various stories around the reg recently. Hedging your bets, much?

  8. Karl Lattimer
    Thumb Down

    Why the wii will win

    Everybody loves wii! Nintendo have captured a market that went unnoticed by the other contenders, and that's the everybody games console. Old (>50 as opposed to the OLD > 25 in previous years) and young people love wii, they love the kind of games you get with it like wii fit, sports and brain academy and many other titles which aren't aimed squarely at the point and shoot market... (My personal fav, is the best game ever, mario galaxy, its for 3+ but entertaining for all!)

    Xbox 360 is a microsoft product, so I hope they do sell a lot of them... because they make a loss on every one of them sold :) With the Xbox 360s non-play issues such as the ring of fire bug and the halo 3 fiasco that coupled with the tendency of xbox's to just simply explode in a ball of flames/sparks/whatever else is being reported. Consumer confidence in the product will go down sharply over the coming year.

    The wii will get the majority market share by opening up to new customers. PS3 will satisfy the hard core gamers and those who want the ability to play bluray as well as games without having multiple devices.

    Sony and Nintendo both have their core markets mapped out, but since the original xbox I'm yet to see a real attempt to spot a real segment of the gaming market and develop their products in that direction. Seems like Microsoft are still monkeys at the cookie jar feeling hungry.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I wonder if they'll discount Vista

    HD DVD didn't do well, and so we had deep discounting of the players (and lots of discs being bundled for free as elReg says).

    XBox360 has had a couple of deep discounts, but still Wii outsells it by 50% margin despite shortages. That MS divisions loss increase, suggesting it selling at a loss which doesn't leave room for further discounts.

    Zune is sold well below iPod price, but it's 10th (with 9 iPods above it) on the Amazon chart.

    You have to wonder if Vista's next for the price axe.

  10. Dirk Vandenheuvel

    Logical

    Well based on the current trend it certainly looks like the Wii and 360 are the only real contenders. The 360 needs to sell even more to fend of the Wii of course. I think most people are expecting the Wii sales to go down soon. Maybe... maybe not.

  11. Edward Rose

    Xbox360 fully backward compatible?

    That would be a first, especially for Microsoft. It may be intended as compatible, but due to a completely different architecture there will always be some bugs. Also, HD-DVD availability won't help sell the Xbox, people are more likely to buy a stand alone (although some will buy the add on).

    Blu-Ray and Betamax? Didn't you forget the mini-disc, great format, no advertising. Had it's fad of being 'in' but never big time. If Sony don't start putting countless adverts on TV telling everyone that Blu-Ray is the true way forwards and that they want it, they will be screwed.

    Biggest thing HD-DVD has going for it is the latter part of it's name, despite being meaningless. Don't get me wrong, it has a more complete spec, and is cheaper and I'm sure has other benefits, but average joe will see HD-DVD and think the latest DVD style. People will see Blu-Ray and envisage complicated new technology.

    I wonder who is blocking the production of dual format drives. We have the technology so they should exist. Cost is never an issue at this stage in the game, even if it costs ~£500/$1000 enthusiasts will buy and the cost will drop. Something fishy going on here.

    Okay, completely OT but meh! Boils down to Sony must push the adverts and the HD war shouldn't exist anymore and should therefore never have been a factor in games console sales. Seems it is though.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Hmmm...

    Having played on a Wii several times I do like it, but I it has now longevity for me. It's a novelty, a gimmick and appeals to the "retro" trend at the moment for cutesie graphics and daftness. Give it 12 months and they'll be elaborate paper weights.

    The Xbox 360 has a huge variety of games, lots of support, and the tech issues aside (RROD) it's technically bloody good. Best all-rounder by far.

    PS3 - Whilst powerful is FOOKIN' expensive. Even with the drop in price and budget version coming out. Sony tried to outdo the Xbox with power and tech forgetting that not everyone will want to pay through the nose for it. The games are, having played most of them, very .... lacking. That's about the nicest thing I can say for it. And it's online presence ? About as good as the PS2's, which is to say, dire.

    MS hit the nail on the head with an upto date, versatile, affordable, appealing, supported and fun console for offline and online gaming. They all have strengths and weaknesses, but the 360 has fewer and less extreme ones - when they work.

    But MS sorted that by extending all the warranties and then changing the hardware.

    What did Sony do ? Introduce Betamax ... sorry, BluRay. Wow.

  13. Mark W
    Flame

    Karl Latimer you are a fool

    ...ask the nice man in the white coat to increase your meditation next time he passes...

  14. Nick Stallman
    Happy

    Wii

    Nintendo has proven that they are the leaders at making games which are actually fun.

    The other two brag about high polygon counts but the games are very ordinary in comparison.

    That Greenpeace article shows the difference better: ~100 watts of power for the other two consoles while the Wii chews 15 watts.

    Thats bloody awesome.

    Not to mention the price difference and all the old favourites you can play.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    the winner of the next console war is ...

    ... unknown.

    I wouldn't expect the average video game shop manager to be able to tell us this. Nor the average reg reader. Most people's views are biased for one reason or another. It is amusing to see people adopt loads of analyst-speak to try and justify their bias though.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Maybe there isn't a war to win

    Perhaps this is a good example of a market where no single company will dominate.

    There are plenty of complaints about the abuse of monopoly in the desktop PC market, so it could be a good thing if there are a bunch of heavyweight game console makers slugging it out for our hard-earned cash.

    For sure, a standard platform is a good thing when it comes to watching your HD movies and so on, but computer games are different (and always have been).

    Variety is the spice of life and all that.

  17. Lickass McClippers
    Boffin

    RE: Everybody loves wee!

    No they don't, just chicks'n'kids.

    I do concur that Game is geared entirely toward the M$ GX150. My local Game has given over about 75% of it's shelving to M$ GX150 games. Wee, PC and Poos3 get the other 25% to fight over...

  18. calski

    re: Why the Wii will win

    "Everybody loves wii!"

    This is true, but apparently "Everybody loves Raymond" and that got cancelled so necessarily the key to success... ;)

  19. /\/\j17

    Why the won't and can't win the 'next gen.' console war

    Simple - it ISN'T a next gen console.

    Sony and M$ both dropped their pants and started fighting over who had the biggest dong (highest definition/fastest CPU/etc/etc).

    Nintendo went... sod spending all that cash and either making a high-tech console no-one can afford (a-la Sony) or a high-tech console you have to massively subsidise (a-la M$). No, lets build something cheap, innovative and, well actually fun to play that we can make money selling.

    So Nintendo can't win the 'next gen' console war because they had more sense than to fight it!

    Humm I seem to have compared Nintendo to Switzerland.

  20. Arif Rashid

    Missing key points

    The console wars aren't over yet, however, we can see that Microsoft is winning the hardcore gamers market and wii is capturing new markets. The PS3 cant even capture their old markets properly at the moment.

    Its really sad, the PS3 had so much potential, in fact i really wanted one. But Sony tried to cram too much into it a device that while may be technically superior, not only misses its' target market, but also manages to price it out. In addition to this, Sony took forever and a day to bring out the console, then took even longer to bring out a technically inferior one to europe and charge them more (talk about slaps in the face Sony!). The games are at least £10 dearer and take longer to come out than the 360 and there has been no noticeable difference in the quality of the graphics or playability between the PS3 and 360. The final problem with the PS3 is that it is difficult to program for due to the symmetrical nature of its CPU.

    All of these factors don't spell the end of the PS3, but it definitely means it wont make it to first place anytime soon. The PS4 is going to have to be something special....

    As for the Wii, this is really the true winner, even though it's technically not next gen, (more like 1.4 gen instead of 2.0) its unique controller and 'fun' type games make it very accessible. Its also cheap. I can still buy (when in stock) a Wii and a 360 for the same price as a PS3 and still have change left over for a game and the bus ride home.

    So to sum up:

    PS3 is too expensive, to buy and develop for. Identical games are cheaper on 360 and Wii is much more fun. Sony may have got away with the higher pricing, but it didnt offer anything new other than Blu-ray, which is still fighting the next-gen-video format war.

    Sony when are you going to learn....

  21. Highlander

    Um...couple of small questions

    Where were these retailers? USA? Japan? UK? Europe? Australia? The Moon?

    It's all find and well to quote numbers when we have no source. Where's the link to the survey results?

    So, assuming for the moment that this is UK retailers, may I ask why it is that El Reg is publishing a story quoting retailers 'thoughts' when actual sales numbers suggest that Microsoft and it's FPSBox 360 isn't exactly burning up the charts in the UK?

    In fact, it seems like the 360 is following a path oddly similar to that of the original Xbox. Strong sales in the US, truly horrible sales in Japan and mediocre sales throughout the rest of the world. As much as a lot of commentators want to write off Wii as a fad it's still kicking everyone's collective arse in every market. And as for the arch-rival of FPSBox360, the PS3. Notably it is selling relatively well in the US, Japan and the rest of the world. Rather than having a particular market in which it does great and being sucktacular in the rest, the PS3 is doing OK in all it's markets. Not great, but OK.

    Kinda leads one to consider that with stronger sales in Europe and Japan, PS3 might be well placed to oust the FPSbox360 from the second slot in this console race. Of course some suggest that there are two races, the race that the Wii is in, and the race that everyone else is in. I kinda agree, Wii is a different kind of console from the others. That said, a game console is a game console.

    Which brings to mind the PS2 game console and it's still strong sales and software line up. Interesting eh?

  22. Paul Clancy

    Winner?

    Why do people assume there will be a 'winner' of the console wars? They all have their pros and cons. The Wii is the most popular because it's innovative and appeals to different generations of 'gamers'. However, this demographic is unlikely to spend a fortune monthly on games for the console. They will have a number of titles that will appeal to mass audiences but not the volume of sales that the 360 or PS3 will have. Therefore, it can't be classed with the 360 or the PS3 and should be taken on it's own.

    The PS3 will take off when the games are available for it, no doubt about it. I have a Wii and a 360 but I would have bought a PS3 over the 360 if it had the game support that the 360 does. Both consoles will have their exclusives but most of the games will be available for both. Hence, no winner!

  23. ben

    Best comment here

    "The console wars aren't over yet, however, we can see that Microsoft is winning the hardcore gamers market and wii is capturing new markets. The PS3 cant even capture their old markets properly at the moment."

  24. Risky
    Boffin

    We do we care?

    Surely the reg-readership will ignore these kiddie consoles and stick to the alternative: trying to get a hour freeto fix up that half-built gaming rig in the corner.

    Now I'm sure I had a waterblock for that card somewhere and who's taken my dammed screwdriver.....(yes I've failed to play a pc game this year despite much of the hardware purchases being to that end).

  25. Dave
    Gates Halo

    360 preference in GAME? Maybe...

    But only because the 360 has the widest selection of good software. This is what the game shops want to shift because it's what they make the most money on. The 360 has loads and loads of games out, lots of them great, lots of them OK, and some of them crap. IMO it's got the largest amount of great games to choose from though. Thus they have loads of shelf space.

    The Wii has loads of games out too, but most of them are just crap. It's got its fair share of gems of course, but most of the available software is mini game collections or bad ports with motion sensing tacked on.

    The PS3 doesn't have much in the way of software at all, so it doesn't get a lot of shelf space either.

    I'm not a frothing 360 fanboy either, I have a Wii and I love it. But as with any Nintendo console, the truly great games are few and far between. That's just the way of things.

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Consoles...

    I personally hate the Wii i think it's graphics are awful the game play is just as bad and the controling of the games is a let down, if i wanted to excersie i'd go to the Gym, if i want to veg out and play games i'll play a console, something that can't be done on the Wii!

    I personally have a 360 purely as i had a modded xbox and wanted to see how the 360 compared... the modded xbox wins hands down btw... I Wish i had gone for the PS3 as gfx and cpu power it trounces both the Wii and the 360...

    To me games consoles have always been about vegging and enjoying game play... The wii doesn't do this, ok the 360 and the PS3 do it on par but the PS3 is a better machine by far..

    When all is said and done tho Consoles < PC's when it comes to games!

  27. Highlander

    Risky

    I see you're really with the times.

    Waterblocks? Pah! Who needs them? Maybe if you're still running an Intel Presc-hott core, but all the spangly new 45nm chips need is a little cool air and some copper and they will sit up and bark madly at the moon.

    The point is, oh overclocking God from the stars, that game consoles are not for kiddies any more. The demographics of console games have taken a decisive and permanent shift towards grown up gamers. Your 'kiddie consoles' line might have played 5 years ago, but it's kinda out of place now.

    Game consoles have to either play to the adult audience, play to the kiddie audience or play to both. FPSbox360 does an excellent job of pandering to blood-thirsty FPS junkies (aka grown up gamers in the USA), Nintendo is doing a fantastic job of appealing to younger gamers, and non-traditional gamers, the Wii is however less of a hardcore or grown up game console than the FPSbox360. PS3 is trying to appeal to both ends of the market. It may, or may not succeed, time will tell. However it does have a wider range of games than either Wii or 360, with a good range of FPS/combat games as well as a range of titles that are more suitable for younger gamers and titles aimed at the 'casual gamers'. However as a jack of all trades, PS3 could end up being master of none.

  28. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    English

    > they're still pi**ed with the ongoing Wii shortage

    - You seem to have slipped while typing 'pissed'

    - In English (as opposed to American) we say 'pissed off' to mean 'annoyed at'; 'pissed' only means 'drunk'.

    HTH etc

  29. J.Butler
    Thumb Down

    Until...

    ...the media sections of all the consoles are better than XBMC, they're all non-starters.

  30. John Parker

    Xbox 360 too loud

    From what I've read around the net, the new xbox 360's have improved cooling, so they sound like aircraft taking off. So they're a crappy choice for watching HD-DVD movies with, cos ya can't hear the film over the machine noise.

  31. Highlander

    Dave

    Not to be too much of a pain in the neck, but that argument that PS3 doesn't have any games is a little stale now, ya know? It's almost as bad as the same argument applied to the PSP. For years people have tried to carry on the myth that there are no games for the PSP. Trouble is that the PSP library has more titles than the DS library, and has done for most of the last year.

    PS3's library of games is expanding fast. I wonder how many actual titles Wii has if you exclude the virtual console games? Of course 360 has more titles, then again it should it's had a whole year longer in the market for titles to be created.

    The Wii and PS3 catalogs of games are numerically comparable at this time, it's simply untrue to claim that Wii has loads of games and PS3 doesn't.

    Don't let the truth get in your way though, inconvenient though it can be.

  32. Anonymous Coward
    Gates Halo

    Ask the indies

    For pities sake, do people just not read the article before posting replies?

    How will an independent rate the consoles? By sales of hardware and the winner, those punters coming back in to buy games.

    I'm guessing that those shops had more 360 owners coming back in to buy additional games than Wii owners or PS3 people.

    Ask the BluRay film vendors and I bet they are quite happy with PS3 sales, because I expect PS3 owners have bought or rented more BluRay movies than they have games. You can have the best CPU in the world but it means jack if you haven't got the games or the potential sales to justify coding specifically for that platform. It's going to take a lot of investment by Sony to catch up.

    As for Wii, it's a brilliant idea, a real "why didn't anyone make this before?" moment with the wavy joystick. But I guess owners have bought Wii Sports and Mario and..er..

    360.. It's a decent platform, and Live is done just so right. It has great games which people keep going back into those shops to buy. So I expect these shops are going on sales and profit for them, simple as. 360 wins.

  33. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The Wii wins with non-gamers, but who asked them?

    So the Wii is cheaper and sells better. Big surprise.

    Have you ever noticed there are more non-gamers our there than gamers? I mean, in general only a fraction of the people I meet play console games.

    So there are two markets here... gamers and non-gamers. We've established the non-gamer market is bigger. The Wii appeals to non-gamers, and therefore a larger market. So the Wii wins the non-gamers.

    So the question becomes, when you are discussing who won, are you asking who won among the gamers? Or who won against people who in general are non-tech and non-gamers?

    I *am* a gamer, and personally don't care what non-gamers think. They seem happy with Atari Flashback 2. I personally find the graphics on the Wii to be lower than on my original XBOX (which on some games managed full 720p and 1080i output) and certainly nothing compared to my 360 or PS3. But non-gamers don't care about that. I also found the joypads motion tracking to be sloppy and inaccurate. But non-gamers also aren't as picky about the accuracy of the controllers.

    So congratulations to Nintendo. You won a market I'm not in and don't care about. Good for you.

    As for 360 vs PS3, the results of the survey were probably more dependent on which console's fanboi happened to answer the phone at the time.

  34. Ian Sneyd
    Gates Horns

    My 2p

    My thoughts, having bought all 3 when most palatable to my wallet, the 360 gets the most use (for now) because it has the best games and even when they are ported to the PS3 they are often only 720p instead of full HD (oh and 5-10 quid dearer for some reason)

    Gears, Bioshock, Halo3 (slightly disapointed by the flakey slowdown on Halo3, maybe it'll get an update)

    PS3 has a couple of good games but won't take off until someone developes specifically for it and actually uses it's power, GRAW2 for example is utter shit (graphically) on the PS3 compared with the 360, I hope to compare CoD4 on both soon...Bluray discs are pretty cheap second hand, I'm happy with upscaling ordinary DVD's rather than replacing my collection.

    And the Wii, in a different league, still having games of bowling a year after purchase now that's longevity... oh and lego star wars using the wii controller as a lightsabre.... it doesn't get much better than that ;-)

  35. Jim Baker

    Replacing XBMC

    The PS3 is getting fairly close to XBMC these days. It talks quite happily to my MythTV back end over UPnP and it'll already play back all the recordings and music that it indexes. Granted, most of my stored video is Xvid, so it won't do that yet, but the codec is coming in a firmware update quite soon. XBMC still has a considerable edge on file type support and navigation, but the gap's narrowing - and the PS3 can play back full HD content. I've got a dedicated front end HTPC as well, but it's usefulness has been eroded somewhat by Sony's recent firmware improvements.

    On games, the Xbox360 undeniably has a better range for now, but the exclusive titles for next year don't make brilliant reading for the Microsoft evangelists. The PS3 may yet come good - the previous generation consoles shifted something like 125M units over their lifespan (and the PS2 is still selling well) - no vendor has got much of a share of the likely final install base just yet.

    The Wii is a lovely device, very well thought out - but I think it is likely to have expanded the overall size of the console market as much as taken sales away from the more traditional units. Most of the "serious" gamers I know with a Wii have got at least one other console as well.

  36. Jason

    "Next Gen" consoles

    Am I the only one that doesn't see Wii as a next gen console?? Yes, it's the new evolution of the nintendo consoles, however it in no way competes for the same market as the 360 and PS3. I love Wii, It's a great system with great games, and is an excellent innovation. However it is aimed mostly at a different market: it's the party game system. It's one that while played alone at times, is far more fun played as a group. Most of those games also don't need as good of graphics to enjoy them.

    The 360 and PS3 however, are aimed at the traditional "gamer" market, folks that want full dolby surround sound, and super high 1080p style graphics. Much more of a single player market, and while there are some good multiplayer games, the ones with the most draw are games such as Bioshock (which won the Spike Awards Game of the Year), that you can get immersed in due to the awesome graphics and sounds, with a solid story. Unfortunately without the graphics power, Wii will struggle to accel in that market, which is why I have a hard time considering it a "Next Gen" system.

  37. PIB
    Alien

    Other Points

    This article is entitled, "...win next-gen console war."

    Yet to quote the artcle, "found that 49 per cent of retailers believe Microsoft’s Xbox 360 will trounce the Nintendo Wii and the Sony PlayStation 3."

    49 per cent does not make a majority.

    A bit sensationalist Reg?

    For my two cents; it's ridiculous that some are comparing BluRay to Betamax... BluR is currently trouncing HD DVD in the States.

    Also, everyone seems to be forgetting PS3 'Home'. When that is launched expect people to 'want to be a part of this online community. XBox Live can never offer this sort of experience.

    Onefinal aspect which indicates to me how my subciouncious mind is working is where I have my systems set up: The Wii is in the bedroom, XBox360 sits beside the main computer and the PS3 I have in the main stand, with the Sky box etc. I guess I view it as an overall entertainment 'tool'. Which I think was Sony's aim. Not just a game machine.

  38. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    PS3 made loads of mistakes

    from a developer point of view. While MS went out of their way to make programming the Xbox360 as similar to programming a pc as possible, thus allowing programmers to adapt quickly to the new kit, with useful tools and documentation, Sony took forever to deliver SDKs with very little support, all in Japanese, basically seeming to say, it's wonderful, you don't deserve to develop on our machine unless you can figure it out. That's why it's taken so long for any decent games to come out in comparison to XB. As it is the new gen consoles require so much more development work than before just because of the number of assets required, without the manufacturers trying to obfuscate it further with overly complex development environments.

  39. Highlander

    @AnonCow - Developer point of view

    You know, the world does not revolve entirely around x86. You say that it is a mistake that Sony did not do as MS did and make their programming environment as similar to the PC as possible.

    Granted several key PC game developers have made the transition to console games primarily to the Xbox360. However, you come off as extremely arrogant saying that it is a mistake not to ape the PC environments that Microsoft has. You know that before this current generation of consoles there were other game systems. PS2, GameCube, Playstation (One), N64. It was only with the original Xbox (itself little more than a PC in a closed box) that PC development standards and tools became part of the console development cycle. These PC tools are not inherently better. <icrosoft chose to make the original Xbox essentially a closed box PC because it was *easy* for them. MS is after all a PC OS company.

    As for the rest of your post, I think you're utterly wrong. PS3 has been available in final form for just over a year in the US and Japan, and about 8 months in Europe. Really good games started to appear for the 360 in the last 12 months or so. Yet you are saying games have taken a longer time to appear for PS3? It seems to me that we're just now hitting the beginning of the second wave of PS3 games, and they are largely excellent. It has take no longer for this to happen for PS3. In fact one might say that in Europe it's taken less time since they are getting these second wave games after only 8 months of console availability.

    Your anti-Sony bias comes through strongly, so you can be assured that your buddies will not think otherwise of you. No company tries to obfuscate the function of their system from the developer. That's simply nonsense. So Sony chose to go with a new high performance architecture. Microsoft chose to go with a more general purpose and lower performance architecture. IBM designed both processors. Sony and Toshiba had a hand in Cell and Cell's design is targeted squarely at games and media. It so happens it's also an excellent HPC device. Comparing Microsoft's approach to Sony's here is like comparing an off the rack suit to one that has been custom tailored. The custom tailored suit is more expensive, fits better and will likely last longer. The off the rack is easier to get and fits right away. In the end both suits work, but most people would rather have a custom tailored suit.

  40. Dave
    Thumb Down

    @PIB

    What's with the Reg bashing?

    49% does make a majority if it's the most popular of 3 choices... Given the percentages in the article, the question wouldn't have been "Will the 360 win?," It would have been "Which of the following 3 consoles do you think will win?" The other answers got less votes, and therefore the 360 voters are in the majority.

  41. Highlander

    Dave & Wii library vs PS3

    Dave said that he thinks that the Wii has loads of games out like the 360, but PS3 "doesn't have much in the way of software at all". He's wrong. But instead of simply firing bac that he's wrong, here is some actual information to back up my statement.

    Have a quick look at Metacritic.

    PS3 - 116 games withs scores (205 including games not yet released or scored)

    http://www.metacritic.com/games/ps3/scores/

    Wii - 134 games with scores (206 including games not yet released or scored)

    http://www.metacritic.com/games/wii/scores/

    Notable details. PS3 has 55 games with scores of 75 or more (111 games with scores 50 or more). By comparison Wii has 25 games with scores of 75 or more (113 games with 50 or more).

    Also notable is that only 5 PS3 games have scores below 50, while the Wii has a rather higher 21 games with a score below 50.

    In the interests of fairness it should be noted that the FPSbox360 has 315 games listed, with 134 games scoring 75 or better, and all but 22 of the 315 games have scores of 50 or more.

    I you look at the lists of games you can see that there is a rather sharp drop off in review scores for Wii games when you get past their premier titles. Both Xbox360 and PS3 scores hold fairly stable.

    Of course we can all draw whatever conclusions we wish, but to me at least this demonstrates that the Wii game library is no better than that of the PS3, and may in fact be worse based on aggregated review scores.

    One thing I am not keen on Metacritic for is that they do not have much in the way of quality control on their reviews. So a game that is almost uniformly praised can have it's score severely dented by one rogue negative review. Since that is something that affects all their scores, I guess that in a relative sense it evens out. Still you see games sometimes getting amazing reviews everywhere only to find one obscure fanboy who gave a negative review manages to drag the game's score below 90, even though it clearly deserves 90+ based on the vast majority of reviews.

  42. Andy
    Happy

    War, what is it good for

    Can we please have a pretty graph, time along the bottom, release dates of consoles, and vertical showing total sales. If the war was over today, it's probably the PS1/One which is the winner. :-)

  43. steve
    Flame

    The winner of hte console wars will be.......

    No one. There will be no winner. There was no winner last time. There will be no winner this time. There is only ever a loser (sega dreamcast, panasonic 3d0, atari jaguar) and this time around i don't think there wil be one. If the Wii keeps getting supplied with innovative, fun games it will keep selling. If the 360 keeps getting supplied with solid, good looking action games (bioshock, halo3, GoW) it will keep selling. If the PS3 drops in price and has good games made for it, it will sell bucket loads. As long as BluR doesn't drop out of the market, cuz then sony would be buggered.

    In conclusion, we have three good consoles. Fanbois, keep your hands to yourself and walk out the building. You are not required.

  44. Risky
    Boffin

    @Highlander

    Absolutely, one can air cool, but w/c does sometimes lead to obsessive behaviour liek this. Actually on the last rig only the GPU was on water as the coolers are a bit shrieky. New rig will be back to all water cooling (and thus possibly not finished until the parts are already obselete.

    as for consoles, I'm not convinced that I'd see anything better for my preferred game-types (either strategy or space-sim). Neither of these lend themselves to the big-screen and gamepad approach.

  45. Anonymous Coward
    Dead Vulture

    same old, same old

    I note that in a recent reg reg articale it announced that PS3 sales in Japan have now exceeded Wii Sales, (does FPS360 even figure in that market?) this is part maybe due to supplies or as the articale pinoted out the Japanese ahve got baord of the cutesy stuff with only gimmicks the the wii-sports or the new wii-fit package making much headway?

    There is a rumour that PS3 Sales may exceed the last-gen sales of the PS2, which is alleged to still be the best selling console! - and next year will proabably be given away free with teh "daily mail" newspaper following the collection of 15 coupons!?

    The american retailers and market is going to be biased to all things American, thats pretty much teh case in all markets. I remember going to the states a few years back and going to some real shops in non-tourist traps and it was like a time machine.... although there was some slick looking electronics from japan and homewares from Eruope the big sellers were still the GE industrial scaled and designed products that looked liked Queen Victoria or the Kaiser where on the design board!?

    The real winner is IBM, the guy in charge of the unit charged with getting the contracts for the game chips but have got some hell of a bonus and share option package!!

    and i am sure if he gets the next nintendo contract he will retire very early and very rich (based upon teh reg articale indicating that if the wii bubble burts early next year they will have to engineer a new machine for 2009 where as the ps3 will easily last untill the end of time!)

    as for games..... why is there preoccupation with the "number" of games? its quality that matters? do you really need 10 football games, 30 racing games and 40 beat-em ups? you may end up with multiple varients of each genre inyour collection but inavriabel you only play one of each genre at a given time?

    as for HD trouncing BR? the articales on the reg conflict with themselves on almost daily basis - like UK house price articles in the summer they where up or down more times than you could shake a stick at!

    It would appear HD are giving away more disks with players sold than the BR camp do - are these "freebies" counted as sales? the fact they have to entice people with such loss leaders encourages one to think its not going as sweetly as the HD boys make out?

    The only think i find bizarre with both formats is the lack of quality films on either? keeping in mind that the networks and producers have been recording their shows in various HDTV formats for some time, surely more should have percualted to disk by now?

    I am sure all those BBC Eatrh,BLue Planet, coast etc look great, the studios seem backwards in coming forwards. Still I suppose if they just remastered and repackaged old dvds on to the new disks people would moan too - i rememebr the old AAD/DDD type markings on CDs in the "early days"

    get teh content out there!

  46. Shakje

    Re: From a developer's point of view

    Actually, Sony have been traditionally bad with supporting developers. The PSOne catered only for C (mostly to save on runtime space I guess) and the tools included with the SDK were pretty bad. I learned to use it with Codewarrior (the IDE of choice for black boxes) which is one of the most disgustingly bad IDEs I've ever seen.

    When the PS2 came out, the main reason you didn't get high performance games for a while after release was that Sony didn't actually release performance monitoring tools until about a year and a half (iirc) after the console was out. With multiple processing units, balancing the load is essential.

    The other thing to consider is that with the 360 being essentially a port of DirectX, porting games between PC and Xbox is ridiculously easy. While OpenGL was nice enough, I've always preferred DirectX. It's a lot more straight forward, and once you get your head round the architecture it's simple to whip up most things. Add to this that MS are constantly improving the tools that they give developers. You should have a good look at XNA and Game Studio Express if you want a proper insight into how easy it is to bring together PC and Xbox developments, bearing in mind that the professional version of the software will be on sale, with more tools, next year. The possibilities of this are, quite frankly, staggering. That I can take code I've developed for Windows in C# (which I now love), create a new project and throw it in, recompile and run it on an Xbox..

    As a developer I'd always prefer MS over Sony.

  47. Chris

    next gen console war......

    So it's a war.....

    Interesting.

    Maybe we should really be asking how we define a winner, before even considering who will win. What does make a console a winner? Is it the number of units shifted off the shelves? Is it the profit from hardware made? is it profit from software made? Is it overall profit?

    If you consider any of these factors then the current leader is the Wii (well possibly except on software profit which may well come to be the 360). Which is very good going considering the Wii was released a year later than the 360. Even the ps3 is doing pretty well taking into account it's US release was a year later than the 360, and europe has only had it 9 months now.

    Really, naming a winner can only be done once we have ratified what makes a winner.

  48. PIB
    Coat

    @Dave

    "What's with the Reg bashing?"

    One post makes me a Reg basher? Besides, my point was that I thought the article title was a tad sensationalist.

    "49% does make a majority if it's the most popular of 3 choices."

    I understand your point but the fact is that 51% of retailers do not think it will 'win' (Whatever that means, exactly.) That is the overall consensus from the source of the poll quoted in the article.

    I take it you're a first past the post rather than a proportional representation, kind of guy? ;-)

  49. James Pickett
    Happy

    Why bother..

    ..to ask the retailers when sales figures are widely published? I tried to buy a Wii in Game, but they didn't have one, so I went to HMV, who did. Nintendo aren't macho enough for hard-core game shops, who are now grumpy about losing sales they're not trying to make!

  50. daniel mackie

    who cares about format

    The format war is interesting because i dont many people who give a toss. The disc as a format is dead it will all be about mass storage media in the future and emulators to run any HD media you like.

    Based on this I would give XBOX 360 the edge because I dont wont a HD player I have a PC with an internet connection and Broadband this is where it's going sod the disc format.

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