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| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=10862 |  RedRay (345) Jun 26, 2006 - 11:22 am
| | Agreed. Btw, there seems to be good availability of the X360 now at retail outlets. I heard one industry rag indicating X360 sold 300k units last month. That seems to be terribly low - you'd think they'd want to be at a run rate of over 5mm per year at least. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=10859 | RedRay (345) Jun 26, 2006 - 11:22 am
| | There just isn't a big market for it on the PC. You don't have the input devices for split-screen and so co-op on the PC winds up only being for those with 2 PCs - a much smaller market. That's why the PC games opt for deathmatch and versus play. Then you can take advantage of the wider installed base for the title. Not as good for social play tho. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=10862 | RedRay (345) Jun 26, 2006 - 11:13 am
| | Agreed. Btw, there seems to be good availability of the X360 now at retail outlets. I heard one industry rag indicating X360 sold 300k units last month. That seems to be terribly low - you'd think they'd want to be at a run rate of over 5mm per year at least. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=10807 | RedRay (345) Jun 22, 2006 - 05:39 am
| Sony will sell out all of the PS3 units they can make for at least the first 9 months. That is why they can go with such a high price. Now part of the reason they will sell out is that the unit production will be slow initially. That's just an unavoidable side-effect of including the Blue-Ray drive. As an aside, when Sony announced their high price(s) pundits mistakenly seized on that as an indication of high unit cost. That's a red herring. Sure unit cost is high. But the high list prices are really an indicator that initial unit supply will be LOW. You have to think about this stuff like a business person would, not like how a consumer would.
I think what you will see is that about 9 months after introduction when supply increases Sony will be much more aggressive with price cuts than traditionally has occurred for a new console. Take X360 for example. We are now nearly 9 months after intro and there isn't a price cut in sight until Xmas - if even that happens. But Sony will need to stimulate demand, and that means price cuts. So the real battle will start around Summer 2007 when I project Sony cuts its prices to around X360 levels. MSFT then has two options: (1) coast on its MUCH larger installed base, around 15mm units at that time vs. 5mm for Sony or (2) reduce its prices to maintain its price advantage. I would assume that MSFT would pick door #2 in an attempt to bury Sony. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=10596 | RedRay (345) Jun 07, 2006 - 02:09 pm
| | what happens if one player has a new weapon and another player hasn't paid for access to the new weapon? Can the player who hasn't paid, pick up the new weapon from a dead corpse after a kill? Seems like there could be some issues here. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=10592 | RedRay (345) Jun 07, 2006 - 10:23 am
| | Was always a fan of Victoria, although that game was terribly unattractive to most of the market due to the massive amount of micromanagement. Surprisingly that Paradox would have an expansion to a game that sold that poorly. Good for me tho. :) Flag this | Edit this post |
| Siteseeing Link » /news/siteseeingarticle.asp?searchid=2899 | RedRay (345) Jun 07, 2006 - 06:07 am » Edited on Jun 07, 2006 - 06:04 am
| Agree with you. Modern day atti*tude of the populace seems to be that whatever happened to me is the most important thing ever. No ability to place their own experiences in a historical context. It's cognitive dissonance on a mas*sive societal scale.
To be fair tho - it's just human beings displaying their normal self-centered att*itudes. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=10569 | RedRay (345) Jun 06, 2006 - 04:56 pm
| | INTC price sheet shows Core 2 (2.4Ghz) at $319. Don't get too excited about the Core 2 Extreme (2.93Ghz) tho - that part is at $999. The interesting thing is how far down the pricing drops for the unloved Pentium D chips. The D 820 (dual core 2.8Ghz) drops to just $133! This is like throwing chum at the overclocking crowd. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=10569 | RedRay (345) Jun 06, 2006 - 04:43 pm
| Slightly? It's a full 10% faster at 800x600. That's pretty good for a change only in the CPU subsystem. Sure the results are closer at the higher resolutions, but that's because the bottleneck in those tests gets shifted to the GPU subsystem.
Good job by FS to run these tests. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=10573 | RedRay (345) Jun 06, 2006 - 03:32 pm
| | I can't see this being a real factor in the market. Perhaps for casual users this will be of interest, but those guys typically don't pay for their software anyways. They're running a duplicate copy of an old version of Office at best, and a direct pirated copy at worst. Most people that actually are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for multiple seats of Excel/Office need to have API support for 3rd party data feeds from the likes of Bloomberg, etc. And you aren't going to see that in Google. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=10567 | RedRay (345) Jun 06, 2006 - 03:21 pm
| | Where are INTC & AMD in this mess? The one subsystem that has extra processing power to spare is the CPU in a dual core setup. It's cheap, its functional and it's already there in most new PCs. By abdicating their traditional role as technology evangalists, the CPU makers are basically ceding market share within the box to GPU or PPU guys. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=10547 | RedRay (345) Jun 05, 2006 - 12:23 pm
| | What you are seeing is the diminishing returns to new technology and the corresponding hunt for alternative ways to maintain or at least come close to the old power growth curve. We've already seen this in the CPU subsector. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=10547 | RedRay (345) Jun 05, 2006 - 06:35 am
| | Sorry if it was in the article and I missed it, but it would be nice in hardware reviews it it was stated about how big a power supply is needed to run a system with these types of cards. For a review of an entry level card, I could see how that would be superfluous. But for these high end cards that draw a lot of power, it's an issue. I have older PCs with 300W power supplies. Can it run this card? Would be nice to know... Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=10534 | RedRay (345) Jun 03, 2006 - 08:29 am » Edited on Jun 03, 2006 - 08:30 am
| | Well a typical amount of time from the game code going gold to retail release might be a month. That's the time it would take to finalize doc*umentation, print it and the packaging, make disks, as*semble components and ship to retail. For a larger product (ex. a Windows version release) the timeframe might be longer. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=10513 | RedRay (345) Jun 01, 2006 - 06:45 pm
| | From a business standpoint backwards compatibility is at its most important at the time of launch. As the product ages backward compatibility becomes less and less important. It would be pretty surprising if they ceased efforts on it only 8 months after product launch tho. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=10504 | RedRay (345) Jun 01, 2006 - 10:16 am » Edited on Jun 01, 2006 - 06:48 pm
| | Again, I'll wait and buy them all when they come as a bundle. It's not like I've already done all the quests in the game anyway. So why pay more now just to lengthen the queue of stuff I haven't yet done? Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=10494 | RedRay (345) May 31, 2006 - 07:13 pm
| As a PC user, PC gamer and PC fan, I can still take his words as an objective criticism. Let's face it for many (most?) people the cost/value ratio for entertainment applications is higher for the PC than for a console. The sole remaining gaming advantage that the PC holds is the greater power of its interface, in particular the keyboard over a gamepad. That's really about it.
Where the PC does have a tremendous advantage is in non-gaming applications. Do you really want to key in your TurboTax data into a console using a gamepad? Ugh! I therefore find it tactically naive for Sony to think that the console can replace the PC in the home.
As an aside, if I was a strategist for a PC firm, I'd be more worried about Wii than PS3. Wii directly attacks the one advantage the PC has over consoles, its interface. If the PC loses that, then it really will be game over for PC gaming. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=10485 | RedRay (345) May 31, 2006 - 07:06 pm
| | Honestly, I really could care less how a computer looks. It just sits under my table after all. As for the laptops, I'm not a big fan of the heavy desktop replacement type computer. I went that route back in 2000 and all that happens is that within a year you are using a newer, faster desktop and the laptop gets relegated to mobile use - and then you wind up hating how much it weighs for the next 3 years. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=10485 | RedRay (345) May 31, 2006 - 03:17 pm
| | $8500 for Quad SLI. Down from $10K for the Renegade. And those were with slower GPUs. Seems like $7k is a possibility by the 4th quarter. Maybe $6000 (again with faster updated GPUs) by the middle of 1st quarter 2007. Right in time for my move to Vista. That doesn't sound too bad actually. Flag this | Edit this post |
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