Sunday, May 8, 2005

The nature of the leeches...

Well, it looks like myO 3.0 and Premium development is soon to hit full stride. So I imagine that will occupy the majority of my time online, which certainly isn't a bad thing. It'll be nice to get knee-deep in that stuff and to have most of our construction work focused on it. I'm not quite sure where that leaves OtakuBoards, though. I am already scouting for new staff; a handful will probably be hired within the week. I expect our overall staff to increase significantly. In the end, we may end up with double what we have today. So at the very least, it should mean better Moderator coverage and so on. For those of you who are actually on staff, don't worry if there's any confusion at the moment. I'll be making a thread that deals with all of the upcoming changes. Hopefully I'll have time to do that very shortly. In other news, I went to buy Guild Wars from the local EB on the weekend. However, they'd already sold out. I was told that after the next shipment, they don't know when they'll be getting more copies. The suggestion was that perhaps Guild Wars has a lower allocation in Australia...which surprises me. As far as I know, World of Warcraft has been hugely popular here. And online gaming is quite strong in this country in general - Counter Strike still pulls massive numbers from Australia and Europe. So I basically ordered a copy and paid the entire amount there and then. It is expected to arrive this week, which is great. Hopefully it isn't as delayed as an album I ordered from Sanity (which is now in its third week of not being in my hands, even though they promised it'd arrive in one week...). If any of you follow the video game industry, you may have seen some of the nasty and semi-nasty comments flying back and forth lately. In between Bill Gates' assertion that Nintendo will only be a niche player in the next generation and Sony's comment that Xbox 360 is more of an "Xbox 1.5" rather than a major new platform, Nintendo itself has been pretty quiet. I really can't wait for E3 this year - it's going to be one of the more interesting shows within the history of the industry. Xbox 360 is probably the system that is the most known about at the moment. That's largely due to the fact that it is expected to launch later this year (so its development is obviously further along than Revolution or PS3). I think Xbox 360 will be a lot of fun. If it were backward compatible with the first system, I'd buy one on launch without question. But since it isn't, I will probably buy an Xbox when the price comes down further...and then get a 360 at some point in the distant future. The only thing that would change my mind is if Xbox 360 somehow drags more franchises away from Sony. And who knows, that may very well happen. Sony are not in good financial shape and their new CEO seems pretty disinterested in the PlayStation business. He seems more focused on building up Sony's strength in the consumer electronics market (ie: TVs, DVD players and so on). Not to say that he'll somehow pay no attention to PlayStation 3...but PS3 already has a few factors going against it. For one, there's PSP. This system is great, but in amongst its various problems are a launch that fell slightly short of Sony's own expectations and production costs that are, to be blunt, astronomical. It's not a good business model. PlayStation 3 is a big risk in some ways. Its technology is highly advanced and experimental - it will introduce many firsts. Unlike Xbox 360 and Revolution, it isn't really based on any existing or very recent architecture. Its CPU and its core components are being engineered specifically for the unit; or should I say, PS3 will represent the introduction of those technologies (Cell will debut in PS3 and is supposed to be used in other devices beyond that). While PS3 will be incredibly powerful - well beyond Xbox 360 and Revolution - that power will come at a much higher production cost. This makes me wonder if PS3 itself will be more expensive for consumers or if Sony will do the big no-no and take heavy losses on hardware. If the latter occurs, combined with a launch one year after their main competitor...well, it isn't great. And if their middleware isn't as easy as what Microsoft and Nintendo are planning, I think they're potentially hitting a brick wall. This is especially true of Xbox 360 jumps out of the gate with great sales in its first year. There's also the whole Blu-Ray/HD-DVD issue. I don't know how far along PS3's hardware development is...but it can't be good if they have to suddenly switch media format during the latter stage of the system's development. We aren't just talking a new laser here; this is something that could affect any and all games that are currently in development for the system. It may not be a huge issue for each specific game, but it's obviously one extra headache for Sony. As for Nintendo, there isn't much to say. Lots and lots of rumors and that's about it. Regardless what he says, Matt knows about as much as Aries when it comes to Revolution (maybe some if you will know what I'm talking about there, lol). If Nintendo show the actual unit and some video, I think it will definitely surprise people. But who knows what they'll show. All I can say is that ever since GameCube, Nintendo has really been snubbing conventional wisdom in the game industry. GameCube's entire design and appeal was totally different from any console that had ever been made up until that point. I think Revolution will be the same, but go a lot further. Anyway, it's going to be an amazing show. We will hopefully see the actual PlayStation 3 hardware and maybe some video demonstrations. I'm looking forward to that. Whatever happens, PS3 can't possibly be as unattractive as the new Xbox (which is not especially ugly, it's just highly bland and uninspired).

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