According to Phil Harrison, including Blu-Ray will be reflected on as the smartest decision Sony have ever made. And rumble is apparently a “last generation feature”.
“We have no plans to do so in the standard controller that ships with PlayStation 3. I believe that the Sixaxis controller offers game designers and developers far more opportunity for future innovation than rumble ever did. Now, rumble I think was the last generation feature; it’s not the next-generation feature. I think motion sensitivity is. And we don’t see the need to do that.”
[quote]BIZ: That actually leads into my next question, because a lot of the analysts have been making a big deal out of the fact that retailers seem to continue to sell out of the Wii while PS3s are found in stock at more stores. What do you make of that?
PH: I think you should talk to the people who are running those stores. Talk to the people who run GameStop, talk to the people who run BestBuy, and they’ll tell you that the demand is unprecedented and that they give us kudos for managing to keep a very sophisticated supply chain moving. What our competitors are doing I can’t speak to but I know we are achieving our goals of keeping the market supplied and working closely with retailers to make sure they get informed about when supplies are coming in so that they can match their internal and external communications to store managers and consumers about when to buy a PS3. If that means that for Wednesday through Friday there were a few machines on a shelf in a store in Milwaukee, great![/quote]
Or, like, how the Wii has sold almost 3 times as many units as the PS3 worldwide, 4.06 million to 1.5 million.
Phil Harrison for president. Seriously. If he can go through that interview with a straight face he can go through government.
Motion sensing is next generation now? Didn’t they mock Nintendo over it in the past?
By the way, I think we had sound in the last generation, that’s so old school now our new games should not have any sound at all and replace sound with a trully next gen technology! Ok, sound is more important than rumble but you get my point…
In all fairness, what he probably meant was that rumble was a feature implemented in previous generations… but spun it in a way that could be taken in whatever way you wanted. It “dates” the rumble feature to make it seem old (i.e. unimportant) and puts a positive spin on the tilt sensors.
It’s just PR talk. As for BluRay, we’ll see how that goes over. Sony has screwed up before (Beta, MD, UMD, etc)
Phil Harrison is a lying toss pot, we all know the real reason for the lack of rumble and its nothing to be with being last gen . Its arrogance from people like Phil that gives SONY such a bad image .
That said I think it till putting BluRay inside the PS3 will pay off over time
That’s actually one thing I’ve seen people harp on a lot that doesn’t make sense to me. While it may well be feasible to have both a solenoid rumble feature and tilt sensing feature, it makes perfect sense to me that it would NOT be easy at all.
One system is based on sensing sudden movement, the other system creates sudden movement. So that’s one thing I’ve never thought Sony deserved any grief over. They made a decision, and it honestly makes rumble impractical for that controller. It’s not necessarily a bad decision either, however, would Gears of War be quite the same without rumble?
There’s legitimacy in all three alternatives, as Abadd said it’s understandable PR BS. I mostly just get uptight about seeing actual gamers getting uptight about anything corporate figureheads say.
Sony’s rumble tech for past gen was apparently stolen (they did lose in court for patent infrigement, no?).
The company they stole it from said they could have added rumble to the PS3.
Nintendo has motion sensing + rumble.
Sony says it is impossible to have motion sensing + rumble.
One of the above does not add up. Hency why people react in that way. From this perspective it seems that Sony simply didn’t want to invest in the technology as they were too used to stealing instead of buying/researching
As for Blu-Ray, I don’t think it will ever pay off. Even if eventually the PS3 picks up, and the Blu-Ray wins the format war, I think they would have fared much, much better had they cut off $100-200 from the price and used standard DVD format for it. People would have seen a much more acceptable price (voiding half the criticism Sony gets these days) while Sony probably wouldn’t lose any more money than they do now considering the cost of Blu-Ray parts and the production problems they have had with it.
The Wiimote rumbles? I didn’t know/remember that… even so, everything is ultimately about cost/benefit. People complain for their own reasons, it’s just such a nitpick in the context of everything else right now. People know Sony is losing tons on the console right now, they complain about the price as it is, yet they’ll be called cheap for anything left out.
Maybe it just annoys me because there’s much better things to fault Sony for, they conquered the market by the power of smoke and mirrors, and it seems they’ll be humbled for illusory crimes. Maybe it’s actually poetic… shrug
When I played the Motorstorm demo and Ridge Racer 7 with the SixaxiS motion sensor cotrols … I was very skeptical about Sony’s “decision” (and we ALL KNOW that it was nothing more than Sony side-stepping giving ANY MONEY to Immersion Technologies / admitting that they had done anything wrong with the patent case.) to dump the rumble.
But after seeing how sensitive and reactive the control works with flOw … I’m a lot more open-minded about the quality of the feature.
I’m pretty sure that it’ll be tweaked in this quarter or the next, and by 2008 - 2009 we’ll start to see some real innovation with it.
And Blu-Ray is fine. I’ve got a HD TV, and it’s great to be able to watch films like Silent Hill, X-3, and The Prestige in 1080.
In the future, I’ll likely pick up a BR / HD DVD combo player (when they drop below $500).
