Gears Of War

[Red Finesse]

also found this one! COG TAG LOCATION PICS

Happy huntin

[Spud55]

I agree that the Xbox was technically slightly better than the PS2. The PS3 however is leaps and bounds beyond the 360, as I've stated above. They won't be competing on the same playing field because the PS3 is a 5 year console... the next Xbox which is planned for late 2008 might give it a run for it's money but I doubt it.

Why not? It's sales figures that count. The more units you ship the more backing you get from games companies. The original Xbox came out nearly a year after the PS2 and got no backing from games developers because the PS2 had already shipped an obscene number of units so the target audience was bigger. There were something like 35 million PS2s in circulation when MS released the Xbox.

The 360, like the Xbox, sells extremely poorly in Japan which is the biggest market for games consoles. In fact it's sales figures are't impressive at all. To date only 9 million 360s have been sold worldwide. PS3 will double that easily inside a year and by the time the 2008 xbox comes out there will be 40 million PS3s in circulation already that are technically comparable and the PS4 will only be 2 years away.

The only problem Sony are having is that their supply chain isn't big enough to meet demand - but that demand won't go away. Inside a year from now it will be twice as profitable to make a game for the PS3 as it will for the 360, and you can bet your bottom dollar from that point on the only games that will come out first on the Xbox are the ones where Microsoft prop up the development of them.

The PS2 was one of the real driving forces behind making the DVD format so popular, Sony aren't relying on Blu Ray - they're ensuring it's success. The Xbox HD-DVD add on will bring the price to over what a PS3 will cost as well.

The overall thing to bear in mind overall is that Microsoft only entered the console market to try and stop Sony positioning the Playstation such that it damaged PC sales and hence Microsoft revenues. They lost masses of cash on the original Xbox and stand to lose more cash on the 360. Sony made more out of the PS2 than many small countries make in taxes. There will be only one winner in the console war and it won't be Bill Gates.

Sony made huge losses on the PS2 as well, only Nintendo Gamecube made a profit per unit, same as the Wii will probably be the only one of this gen, for every single PS2 unit sold Sony lost about 80 quid, MS lost a bit more but not much per Unit, the PS3 unless sony have done something seriously special, they simply can't make a profit on the units themselfs, a blu ray player as it stands costs a minimum of 900 quid on it's own, the tech in the PS3 is incredibly expensive, which is why the PS3 is going to be seriously expensive. The amount Sony loose per PS2 sold means that they are going to have to ship even more games to make the money back, as thats where the money is in the console market, it's the only way they can afford to put the amount of tech they do into a console.

As it stands the only firm (ish) price you can get for PS3 is £550 quid for the console and 3 games, (which looking at prices on the net are likely to be 60 qid in shops, as they are stuipdly expensive to develop.) If game developers were so sure of the sucess of the Ps3 to the extent you are predicting, then they wouldn't be ploughing so much into the 360, why in the name of god would Namco not be putting PES6 out on the PS3 asap ? The 360 will not dominate in any way the console market, however that isn't the point of the 360, never has been never will be, what it will do and what is is intended to do is to grab a significant part of the market share that sony has at the moment. This is MS second console it's going to take them time, and if MS wern't in it for the long haul they would not have bought Bungie, they would not have just bought peter molineux's company (can't remember the name). MS will not have sucess in Japan, but then there is nothing they can do about that, and there is nothing Sony can do to remove Nintendos absolute dominance of the market over there either, The DS sells vastly more units in japan than the PS2 or 3, or probably 4 ever will.

Ms didn't get involved in the conole race because they were afraid of PS taking over from Pc, as frankly MS doesn't give a monkeys about gaming on pc's you can't write a letter on a games console, most people do not own pc's for gaming, Why would MS be worried about a company that makes all sorts of electronics, yet can barely turn over a profit in a year that is even half of what Ms can turn over in a single quarter. Ms made 3.1 billion dollars or 1.5 billion stirling, while Sony made a stunning 7.6 million profit between july and sept 2006, in a good year Sony made only 125 million quid profit, so where you get this idea that Sony make masses off the Ps2 is beyond me, and how they are going to with the ps3 which had caused the gaming part of sony to LOOSE 200 million quid which was a year ago september, so the chances of that getting higher, especially with the 20% price drop they had to put in in Japan (where sony is massive) just to sell the thing. If the japanese are more reluctant than ever to buy a PS how are they going to do with a console that costs over 100 quid more then the 360, and MS are going to cut prices next year, meaning that sony has to cut their prices a lot to compete, loosing even more money on each Ps3 sold. Ms can afford to loose money, they make more in a year than Sony do in 8/9.

If MS can make big enough inroads into the market with the 360 and their next console, then they can take the gloves off and it's a simple matter of a company making well over 4 billion quid competing against one that makes a few hundred mill a year.

PS2 had little do do with the sucess of DVD, sony mabye, but not the PS2 as well even people with PS2's wern't stupid enough to watch dvd's on the POS that was the ps2 dvd player, companies like Phillips, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba, Hitachi, they made dvd a sucess not the sony PS2.

[bh_red]

christ where to start........agree with what your saying, Sony have taken soo long getting the PS3 out that many (myself included) former PS2 owners have been so impressed with the development and quality of the 360 that it far lagged behind what the PS2 could offer, the fact they also have a special deal on one of the PS2 biggest games series in GTA is going to convience alot of other to make the switch, you can now pick up a 360 prem with a game or two for less than £300.

Another good thing is MS went straight in with the original xbox and made live a major part of it where as with the PS2 it was an after thought, Xbox 360 live is a MAJOR part of the system and has now been tried and tested for years, whether PS3 can match it and have it running well right away, still has to be seen.

As for Japan.......that is Nintendo's domain, no one can match them there, the Wii will probably without doubt dominate that area of the world, Sony are trying to break Japan and have done it well, but will never dominate, MS have tired but not made a real breakthrough yet, however if they can win America and Europe........I doubt they will mind.

personally...got a 360, but seriously considering getting a Wii after christmas.......Ninetendo might not have gone for HD quality, but they sure know how to make gaming fun again!

[Nibor]

Sony made huge losses on the PS2 as well, only Nintendo Gamecube made a profit per unit, same as the Wii will probably be the only one of this gen, for every single PS2 unit sold Sony lost about 80 quid, MS lost a bit more but not much per Unit, the PS3 unless sony have done something seriously special, they simply can't make a profit on the units themselfs, a blu ray player as it stands costs a minimum of 900 quid on it's own, the tech in the PS3 is incredibly expensive, which is why the PS3 is going to be seriously expensive. The amount Sony loose per PS2 sold means that they are going to have to ship even more games to make the money back, as thats where the money is in the console market, it's the only way they can afford to put the amount of tech they do into a console.

As it stands the only firm (ish) price you can get for PS3 is £550 quid for the console and 3 games, (which looking at prices on the net are likely to be 60 qid in shops, as they are stuipdly expensive to develop.) If game developers were so sure of the sucess of the Ps3 to the extent you are predicting, then they wouldn't be ploughing so much into the 360, why in the name of god would Namco not be putting PES6 out on the PS3 asap ? The 360 will not dominate in any way the console market, however that isn't the point of the 360, never has been never will be, what it will do and what is is intended to do is to grab a significant part of the market share that sony has at the moment. This is MS second console it's going to take them time, and if MS wern't in it for the long haul they would not have bought Bungie, they would not have just bought peter molineux's company (can't remember the name). MS will not have sucess in Japan, but then there is nothing they can do about that, and there is nothing Sony can do to remove Nintendos absolute dominance of the market over there either, The DS sells vastly more units in japan than the PS2 or 3, or probably 4 ever will.

Ms didn't get involved in the conole race because they were afraid of PS taking over from Pc, as frankly MS doesn't give a monkeys about gaming on pc's you can't write a letter on a games console, most people do not own pc's for gaming, Why would MS be worried about a company that makes all sorts of electronics, yet can barely turn over a profit in a year that is even half of what Ms can turn over in a single quarter. Ms made 3.1 billion dollars or 1.5 billion stirling, while Sony made a stunning 7.6 million profit between july and sept 2006, in a good year Sony made only 125 million quid profit, so where you get this idea that Sony make masses off the Ps2 is beyond me, and how they are going to with the ps3 which had caused the gaming part of sony to LOOSE 200 million quid which was a year ago september, so the chances of that getting higher, especially with the 20% price drop they had to put in in Japan (where sony is massive) just to sell the thing. If the japanese are more reluctant than ever to buy a PS how are they going to do with a console that costs over 100 quid more then the 360, and MS are going to cut prices next year, meaning that sony has to cut their prices a lot to compete, loosing even more money on each Ps3 sold. Ms can afford to loose money, they make more in a year than Sony do in 8/9.

If MS can make big enough inroads into the market with the 360 and their next console, then they can take the gloves off and it's a simple matter of a company making well over 4 billion quid competing against one that makes a few hundred mill a year.

PS2 had little do do with the sucess of DVD, sony mabye, but not the PS2 as well even people with PS2's wern't stupid enough to watch dvd's on the POS that was the ps2 dvd player, companies like Phillips, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba, Hitachi, they made dvd a sucess not the sony PS2.

Spud there is so much misinformation in here it's unreal. I don't know where you're getting your information from really but it's mainly b***ocks.

Sony didn't make any kind of loss whatsoever on the PS2, they made truly massive profits on it over several years and it covered up the holes in their underperforming electronics business rather nicely. They obviously recorded a loss on it up until it started shipping in volume because of the up front development cost but as a whole they got many times their money back and are still making more. Microsoft lost vast amounts of money on the Xbox that they never got within an order of magnitude of recouping and they'll be lucky to break even on the 360.

The PS3 will cost around £400 in the UK which will be significantly more than the cost of manufacture and it will be profitable taking into account cap ex once they get above 10 million units worldwide - everything after that will be be unit costs only and you'll likely see a price drop then. The rubbish you've been reading has been written by someone that doesn't understand R+D budgets. Games will be £50 for new premium ones in the high street (less on the net) and are no more expensive to make than PS2 ones other than a slightly more expensive (we're talking pence) media.

MS do give a monkey's about gaming on the PC, they have spent billions on it by backing multiple software houses in the US as well as buying several and investing hugely in directx, but that wasn't the thrust of my comments - they got into the market because they were scared that the PS2 would end up being the media hub of choice in the home as TV, audio and internet converges and they see that as a big threat to PC sales which directly affects their largest bottom line contributor - OEM Windows licensing. Sony makes $68 billion a year by the way (few hundred million ) which is 50% more than MS, and they take more money out of Japan in one year than Nintendo did in 10.

Seriously scary the amount of bull that people read in a magazine and believe like gospel - just think for a moment about who owns them and where their income comes from...

[Spud55]

Umm where the hell are you getting sony's net profit figures from, as for the second financial quarter of this year was 1.76.billion YEN, which is 14.3 million dollars. This is mainly due to their worldwide recall of laptop batteries but SONY themselfs have posted an expected net profit of 675.5 million dollars, they made just over a billion dollars profit in 2005.

I don't know where you get your ideas from, that somehow Sony dominate the market, considering sony with all it's products are going to (again according to them roughly make a 675.5 million dollar profit, while in HALF A YEAR Nintendo have just posted profits of 566 million dollars. Nintendo completely dominates the Japanese market, the DS holds something rediculous like a 50%+ share of the console market, throughout the time they were onsale gameboy incarnations have outsold every other console in japan, which is why the gameboy (on it's own) is the biggest selling console of all time, leaving everything else miles behind. Nintendo own the japanese console market.

Oh if you are looking for where i got most of this information, a large amount came from the Register, and that hugely known anti-sony publication The Times. A quick google search turns up many stories about sony's profit figures, yet none say they make a profit of 90 odd billion dollars.

How are you working out that the PS3 will make money per unit, the PS2 didn't, and that is common knowledge, the GC was the only one that if for some obscure reason everyone bought consoles but never bough a single game Nintendo would have been the only ones to make a profit. Overall Sony made a profit from the PS2 but that was because of the games, the money isn't in the consoles it's in the games. Prey tell my how they are making a blu-ray drive so cheap if they are going to make money on it ?

They can't if blu-ray drives were that cheap to manufacture they wouldn't cost a grand to buy, unless Samsung are putting a minimum 50% markup on the tech then it simply can't cost in any way less than 400 quid to manufacture. I don't know where you are getting your figures from, but it isn' the land of reality.

Sony's PlayStation 3 games console costs the consumer electronics giant at least $840 to make, $241 more than the $599 asking price, market watcher iSuppli has claimed. Its figure is its estimate for the cost of the materials and manufacturing, but Sony's R&D and marketing expenditure will surely push the console's unit cost much higher.

Like a number of reporters, iSuppli disassembled both the 20GB PS3 and the 60GB model. The cost of making the 20GB console comes to just under $806, iSuppli said, almost $307 more than the $499 asking price. Both iSuppli figures do not include the console's controller, cables and packaging, the company said.

Compare the numbers to iSuppli's estimate of how much it costs Microsoft to make a hard drive-fitted Xbox 360: $323, $76 less than the $399 retail price. Don't forget that in both vendors' cases the retail price is more than the company itself will receive, inflating Sony's loss and reducing Microsoft's profit margin. And Microsoft has had a year to drive up volumes and lower production costs.

Back to the PS3, the most expensive component appears to be not the Cell processor but Nvidia's Reality Synthesiser - as Sony calls it - graphics chip, at $129. The Cell chip, on the other hand, costs $89, iSuppli estimated. The Blu-ray Disc drive costs $125, it said.

Fitting the PS3 with an EE+GS chip to ensure backward compatibility with old PS2 and PSOne games - well, it's almost compatible - costs Sony $27 per console, iSuppli reckons. ®

[Nibor]

Spud, in the context of who carries weight in the market, profits aren't relevant, revenue is. I got Sony's revenue figure of over $60bn from their website and it's significantly above Microsoft's and leagues beyond Nintendo's $4bn.

As for the iSuppli report, it's produced by taking a PS3 apart and looking at the shelf prices for components. Sony aren't paying shelf prices, they're not even paying wholesale prices. In many cases they're paying less than cost prices because they funded the initial R&D of those components. It's the difference between making a cap-ex R&D investment and pretending the same is unit costs, iSuppli don't seem to understand that. Wanna guess where the Xbox cost in the same report comes from? Oh - and even the report you quote says the blu ray drive costs $125 so obviously Samsung are making a massive markup on them - or possibly they're trying to recoup their R&D investment before lowering the prices? .

As for it being common knowledge that the PS2 lost money, I'm astounded that you believe something that's so obviously false. I'm afraid what you're doing is reading parts of some reports and not understanding what's going on behind them.

[Spud55]

to continue, as the edit wasn't working.

SO where are you working out that they are goin to make money out of the base units, and the 360 does make ms a profit every time it's sold, irrespective of games. Not a massive amount but Sony loose shedloads on the PS3.

Please if you can back up your wild claims, then mabye i will take you seriously but until you can proove it i'm sadly going to have to take people who know what they are talking about word's for it.

Just because frankly your fanboyism is now ammusing, if Sony did manke 68 billion dollars a year, you are aware that they would be over 40 BILLION dollars ahead of their narest rival ExxonMobil, who are the company with the largest profit figures IN THE WORLD, while sony are simply not, lagging way behind the likes of Microsoft who in profit terms according to Forbes (obviously another anti-sony publication, in now way one of the most respected publications in the world) are the 12th largest, while in total terms they rank them at 47th biggest company in the world, with sony somewhat lower at about 140 odd. making in 2005 again according to Forbes, a massive 0.85 billion dollars, i suppose that's only less than a 10th than what Ms makes a year, so roughly MS make in 1 year what sony do in a decade.

So for you to say things which you clearly have absolutely no idea about, is a bit rich mate, game developer my arse, this is what a real game developer had to say

Being a video game developer (I develop for both, Playstation 3 and XBOX 360) people ask me almost daily which platform I think is better. These are my personal feelings, in no way does this reflect my employer.

Short answer: XBOX 360.

Long answer: Price, performance, visual quality, game selection and online support. I think the XBOX 360 wins in every category.

Price: This is obvious; the XBOX 360 core is only $299. The PS3 is around $499 for the 20GB version. It comes with a hard drive, but you don’t need a hard drive to enjoy a lot of great games on the 360 so I think it’s fair to compare both core systems.

Performance: On paper, the PS3 is more powerful. In reality, it’s quite inferior to the 360. Without getting into too many details, the three general-purpose CPU’s the xbox360 has are currently FAR easier to take advantage of than the SPU’s on the PS3. I suspect a few years down the road some high budget, first party PS3 exclusive titles will come out that really take advantage of the SPU’s and do things the XBOX 360 can’t, but I don’t think the console is worth buying based on this speculation (for some it will be though, we'll have to wait and see how these games turn out).

Graphics: The XBOX 360 is a clear winner. The GPU is more powerful. It has more powerful fillrate, and far more pixel and vertex processing horsepower. Part of the reason is their choice of memory, and architecture of pixel and vertex procesing. I can’t get into details but the same vertex shader will run much slower on the PS3 than the XBOX 360. The 360 also has a clever new way rendering high definition anti aliased back buffers. To accomplish the same effect on PS3 is prohibitively expensive. For this reason I think many games will have no choice but to run in non-HD resolutions on the PS3 version, use a lower quality anti aliasing technique, or do back buffer upscaling. The end result in all cases is going to be noticeably worse image quality.

Game Selection: The XBOX 360 has a huge head start here. 1 year is an eternity in gaming. Almost all multi-platform developers have made the XBOX 360 their primary platform due to timing of release-to-market, this means the games will look and perform better on the 360. The PS3 versions will be ports of the 360 versions. (The opposite was true for XBOX 1 vs. PS2). The XBOX 360 is also far faster to develop for due to better development tools (massively popular Visual Studio .NET vs. proprietary, buggy PS3 compiler and debugger), better documentation, and easier architecture (3 general purpose CPU’s vs. 8 specialized processors that require DMA). Timing has also caused all next-gen middleware developers to make XBOX 360 their primary platform, and they will ‘add ps3 support’ as needed. This support will probably be inferior to the XBOX 360’s due to manpower and more importantly, demand. It’s this catch-22 now that will continue to drive the 360 forward and hold PS3 back.

The other obvious point here is that right now the Xbox360 already has a very impressive line-up of titles on store shelves; the ps3 just launched, and has virtually nothing of interest. Also, many 360 games are already discounted ($35 for Fight Night 3 on Amazon). PS3 games are all full price since it just launched.

Live: Microsoft’s online support with XBOX1 was phenomenal. They built in-house experience, user base, facilities, $$ commitment from executive level (since it proved successful), and most importantly, feedback from 100,000s of XBOX Live subscribers. Playstation 2’s online support sucked. They are now playing catch-up, trying to emulate Xbox’s model. But they had their hands tied just trying to make the PS3 work, it was incredibly ambitious (blu-ray etc.). I haven’t seen it yet, but I seriously doubt the quality will be anywhere to the level of XBOX 360.

HD Content: The PS3 comes with one built in (blu-ray). The XBOX 360 offers HD-DVD as an add-on for $200. You probably don’t care about HD-DVD right now. But you will soon (The quality between DVD and HD is comparable to VHS vs DVD, if you have the right TV) so I suggest paying attention to the war that’s begun. There are two formats: HD-DVD and BLU-RAY. Basically if you rent a BLU-RAY DVD from Bockbuster, it won’t play in your XBOX 360 HD-DVD, and vice versa with the PS3. The implications of this format war would require another article on its own. But as far as the consoles are concerned, the XBOX 360 wins because the DVD player is a separate unit. Playing movies is very taxing on the DVD reader, and let’s face it. In 3 years when your PS3 DVD drive goes out due to playing lots of movies (PS2 was notoriously bad about this) you will have to go buy another PS3. With the 360, you’ll just chuck your HD-DVD player, and go buy another one at the store. In 3 years standalone units wlil probably only cost about $99-150. Another point for the XBOX 360, is that I don’t know who will win the format-war, so I would rather wait with purchase of a HD player. The PS3 doesn’t give you this option.

Oh and as for not knowing about the development costs of games, i may not have the "obvious" (or lack thereof) expirence myself but a man who may know these sort of things has said that the dev cost is big, you are looking at 8 million dollars min, it's more expensive than the 360 by some way, a couple of million dollars. the Wii is by far the cheapest, but the PS3 is the most expensive, it's scaring off some game developers, some have already chosen not to develop games for the PS3 because of the cost, and are developing for the other consoles or PC. But as you obviously know so much only someone who doesn't know anything would be slighly worried about the development costs, i give you that moron, the president of that little known games company NAMCO.

A Playstation 3 title has to sell at least half a million copies to make a profit, the president of Namco told Bloomberg.

President Takeo Takasu went on to say that graphics for PS3 games cost about 1 billion yen to create, or more than double what it costs to create graphics for Wii titles.

``We have to sell at least 500,000 copies per title worldwide to make a profit on PlayStation 3 games,'' said Takasu. He said titles for the new Sony console are ``selling well.''

The story goes on to quote a bunch of analysts saying that game developers might be hesitant to start making games for a console that is so expensive to develop for if it is having shipment issues. Brian Crecente

Namco Bandai's Takasu Says PS3 Game Titles Must Sell 500,000

Nov. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Namco Bandai Holdings Inc., Japan's second-biggest maker of video-game software, must sell at least half a million copies of a game for Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 console to make money on the title, said President Takeo Takasu.

Graphics for the high-definition games cost about 1 billion yen ($8.6 million) to create, more than double that for Nintendo Co.'s Wii titles, Takasu said in a Tokyo interview Nov. 28.

``We have to sell at least 500,000 copies per title worldwide to make a profit on PlayStation 3 games,'' said Takasu. He said titles for the new Sony console are ``selling well.''

Shortages of the PlayStation 3 may also make it more difficult for software makers to sell enough games. Tokyo-based Sony halved shipment targets for the console this year and delayed the European release amid a dearth for some parts. The company may have missed its goal of shipping 400,000 consoles in the U.S. earlier this month, according to analysts including Jeetil Patel at Deutsche Bank Securities in San Francisco.

``Game makers may hesitate to make games for a console if its shipment is being delayed,'' said Yuuki Sakurai, who helps manage $6.02 billion at Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance Co. in Tokyo. ``Some game makers may wait until a console becomes popular because of increasing production costs.''

Tokyo-based Namco Bandai expects games for the consoles introduced this month by Sony and Nintendo and a year ago by Microsoft Corp. to account for 10 percent of software sales, or 3.15 million units, this fiscal year ending March 31, Takasu said. The company sold about 26,000 titles for Microsoft's Xbox 360 last year, when it was introduced.

but we must remember that you are more knowledgable than these people.

[Nibor]

Spud I don't know why you're taking this so personally, I'm merely disagreeing with you on the basis of what I know.

First off I was talking REVENUE not PROFIT as I've already said. If you want to dispute their reported earnings figures I'd suggest you do so with the Japanese Finance ministry and the Nikkei. If you think that profit is indicative of muscle in the marketplace then feel free to explain why every stock exchange in the work ranks by capitalisation?

The first report you googled and copy/pasted was already linked above by someone else and I've already responded to it and elaborated on my background in games development - have you ever worked in games development or any sort of software development? Did you miss the bit about who ultimately owns that site?

I wouldn't dispute Takasu's information on the cost of games development because I didn't run projects when I did it but I rather suspect that it's a figure for producing games completely from scratch and that the motivation behind it is to get cash backing out of Sony. What actually happens in the real world is that people use see toolkits like Unreal Engine and Speedtree that will massively lower this cost, and they build on top of a codebase they've already invested thousands of man hours in. Not one games development house that produced titles on the PS2 has decided not to for the PS3 on grounds of cost. Are Namco not producing a Tekken title for the PS3 then eh?

As for fanboyism, that's pathetic crap. I have no reason whatsoever to claim the PS3 will be better than it is, I'm just giving you my honest opinion and backing it up with some experience and some facts. I could level the exact same pointless accusation at your love of the other consoles but that would be pretty silly. All you've done is google a bit and make the classic mistake of taking whatever shows up that supports your view as gospel.

Let me explain why you see all this rubbish about "losing money on consoles".

To develop a product you have to invest lots of money over several years which gives you a massive up front cost.

The idea is that you end up with a design for product that you can sell for significantly more than the unit cost.

What companies then do is pick a number of units over which to recoup the R&D cost, say the first 10,000,000 in the PS3s case. So although each unit itself sells for significantly more than the manufacture cost, when they add the R&D to it it doesn't.

Once they've hit their number every unit they sell is gravy because they've paid for the design in totality, and usually at this point they knock down the prices a bit. Microsoft never reached that point with the last Xbox.

The component prices in the iSuppli report are the prices including R&D, which is done to deliberately mislead. The same sort of figures that spawned this false information about the PS2. They compare it to an Xbox figure that does not contain R&D because Microsoft do not release that information.

You are extremely naive to think that that approach will give you an accurate picture, have you any idea what these companies spend on marketing? Do you think them ignorant of the value of flooding the internet with the information they want you to have? Do you honestly think that iSuppli just came up with a cost analysis of the PS3 out of the goodness of their hearts or could it (shock horror) have possibly been commisioned by someone?

Frankly I don't give a toss whether you take me seriously or not, so if you want to carry on believing whatever google and the register throws up I'd suggest you start wearing tin foil hats to protect you from aliens and go and live somewhere in the mountains before the black helicopters come for you!

[Spud55]

How can you say that profit doesn't matter, in pure terms of market share it doesn't, but MS aren't going to or expecting to dominate the console market, (at least for the time being) yes Sony may well be selling more consoles than microsoft, and the PS3 will outsell the 360, however the fact that Sony simply aren't making vast amounts of money their gaming section was only making a tiny (in big company terms) profit even when the PS2 was dominating the market.

And in business terms it doesn't matter if they are selling a trillion dollars worth of playstations, the point is that they are making simply not making vast sums of money out of it, If they were Sonys profit would show more of it. They will make money out of the Ps3 but then they have to while MS can again afford to loose a lot on the 360, Ms aint in this for a giggle they are in it to win and like they have done with pc's not just beat their opponents but crush them, and this is where profit comes into it, sony is a billion dollar per year company, MS is 10 times that, so therefore can afford to put more money into this section of the market, if anything MS will find it easier to do so over sony as Ms has a market it dominates and nobody will touch, Sony doesn't their market outside consoles is much more competitive, they just about manage to make some of the best tv's out there, but they are lacking in other areas, which i think is the thing that scares me about the blu-ray drive in the Ps3, the Ps2 dvd drive was rubbish, the current blu-ray drives aren't that good, especially when it comes to dvd's they are cack, and as both Phillips and Samsung from what i have seen make better drives than Sony, this doesn't fill me with confidence. My main problem was that you were saying that sony were making vast sums of money from the PS2 when clearly they wern't, they aren't making huge amounts of money out of everything, they are making less than a billion dollars per year, while Ms makes 10. They may get 70 billion odd in sales, but then they are loosing 69 of that somewhere along the line, which isn't good.

The PS3 will not do anything to ensure the sucess of blu-ray if it's as bad as the DVD decoder they put in the Ps2, if blu-ray goes wrong then the PS3 will struggle as it is a console built to last but if one of it's major components looses backing then it's knackered, who will want a console that is out of date, and can't even play most hd movies.

Also Sony have the problem that they have and by almost everyones accounts neglected the graphics when it comes to the PS3, the GPU's in the PS3 are somehow inferior to that of the 360, this isn't oppinion this is what is, and 7 FPU calculators ain't going to do anything for a long time (if ever) to do with graphics, get me a PC with a top of the range processor and a naff graphics card and games won't look good, the cell processor is a stunning piece of kit, but they seem to have bottlenecked it for some obscure reasons with GPU's that aren't as good as they should be.

The development costs are not just from scratch they are widely expected to soar, for all formats, as it stand it's between 6-8 million dollars, this is expected to soar to between 15-20 for the PS3 and a little (but not much) less for the 360.

I don't dispute that the PS3 will outsell the 360, If i have anywhere then that wasn't my intention, Sony could release a brick with Playstation written on it and sell huge numbers, because it's a sony playstation, but the 360 should claw some of the market share away from Sony, and thats what Ms want, they can afford to play the long game so to speak, they have the money and are one of the biggest 100 companies in the world.

I'm not trying nor have i ever said that the PS3 is a bad console, hell give it time and it will be great but that is going to take time, until programmers can get to grips with the cell processor, (it's going to take a long time) then it's a sad fact that all the PS3's processing power is going to waste with inferior GPU's. The Ps3 has massive potential, but i requires a lot of work that hasn't really been done before, if they can somehow get the Cell to take some of the graphical load then they are on to a winner, but CPU's don't take graphical load, thats why you have a graphics card, and if they can't do this then they have a 10 year console that is in some ways already inferior to the 360.

If Sony can get the package right, From the console it's self, to most importantly the games then they will do well, but no matter what MS will grab some of their market share off them. They however from what i can see have not got the games at the moment to entice a lot of people, this will be the first console that i haven't bought at time of launch for a long time and that saddens me as i love sony's consoles.

The thing that irritated me about your first post was that you claimed that the PS3 pisses all over the 360, it does in processing power, but graphically there is basically no difference, except that the 360 can display better textures, and from tests looks better running side by side the Ps3 at the moment.

IN time this may well be the case, but for that to happen something special has to happen to the Ps3 while nothin happens to the 360, if people like Carmack are telling the world that Ps3 is a pain in the arse to code for, then i'll take that. As it stands at launch time the 360 is the far better buy for me at least. When the Ps3 drops in price i will buy one, but i aint paying over 400 quid for one.

I appologise for geting a bit arsey, but i misunderstood some of the things you wrote like sony making 68 bill per year, they didn't make that, i now see that that isn't what you meant but a company doesn't make 68 billion dollars because that are it's sales, it makes whatever profit it makes, and sony dominating Japan which simply isn't true, thats nintendo country.

And i'll take your word about the costs, as you have more first hand expirence than I, are you sure that those isuppli reports were likely to be comissioned by MS, being that their one a year before pointed out the costs of the 360 over the retail price, wasn't that much difference in margin than with the ps3, would be strange for Ms to tell a company to do a report pointing out the loss they were making on the 360 at launch.