So the PS3 costs $600 or 600 Euros

Other Games
41

I remember Betamax. My family used to use it prior to VHS winning the last format war. Nothing wrong with it. It just wasn’t popular.

I think Blue-ray or HD-DVD will catch on eventually even if the casual viewer doesn’t notice. I was perfectly happy with VHS, but DVD lets me get a whole season of a TV series on a few discs, taking up much less space and costing me significantly less to buy. Blu-Ray/HD-DVD stores even more information, so that same TV series would take even less space. Maybe we’ll have boxed sets containing several seasons of a TV series instead of just one. :anjou_happy:

Space saving alone might not be a great motivater, but space saving, better quality, and affordability (when that happens) will make it more appealing. Regardless of whether or not people will repurchase existing DVD collections, I don’t think we’re going to see a phenomenon where nobody switches over to the new format (whichever becomes the standard). It just may be a slower transition this time. Maybe people will only buy things they don’t already have. A casual buyer might not want to upgrade right away, but they probably will once the technology becomes cheap enough and make the advantages of the new format affordable.

If Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are still fighting it out by the time the PS3 drops a couple hundred bucks (or more :P) I’ll probably end up going with Blu-Ray just because the game system has it. Which is presumably what Sony is hoping for; that whoever buys a PS3 will use the Blu-Ray format because they already have a player for it.

42

The big difference, however, is that from VHS to DVD, there was a good 15-20 years. From DVD to HD? Only about 6-7 years so far of any level of mainstream popularity. And the cost of Blu Ray discs right now is so high that it would be extremely difficult to make them attractive to the average consumer.

Another thing is that while $300-400 for a game console (regardless of additional functionality) has always been the traditional “top end” of the spectrum. Heck, even for normal electronics. But $600 gets into the realm of specialist electronics. How many people do you know that have paid $600 for a single piece of electronic equipment? PCs notwithstanding, of course.

43

Oh sure, no doubt it was a solid format. I don’t think I’ve ever actually watched anything on Betamax (maybe when I was younger), so I can’t comment too much on it, but I do remember that it was more expensive than VHS, and that ended up not helping it sales-wise. This might happen again with HD-DVD and the more expensive Blu-Ray, but who knows?

But, if we’re talking about space saving, one has to wonder if HD-DVD/Blu-Ray is actually the way forward. If we look at the music industry, greater capacity discs haven’t become mainstream. The audio CD is still the dominant physical format. MP3-CDs haven’t taken off that well, compared to MP3 files themselves. I think after DVD, the next evolution of video will be a non physical format. With the exception of people who would rather have slightly higher quality music, or simply haven’t adapted to new technology, the MP3 has become the next media format for listening to music, and the same could well happen with movies. Imagine having 60 DVD quality movies stored on a portable media device. This would save a lot more space than a stack of 60 DVD cases, and is a lot more portable.

Although I don’t partially like the trend myself, people seem to want smaller storage devices, even if that means sacrificing quality. In the music industry it was Vinyl -> CD -> MP3. If the movie industry goes the same route it will possibly go VHS -> DVD -> AVI/MPG (or some other format).

44

It will still be a while before that happens with video, though. The drop in quality from CD to MP3 is undetectable by most people, particularly given the fact that most people don’t play their music on high end systems, where the differences are most prominent.

But, with movies or anything with video content, you could reduce the quality, but the files are still going to remain enormous. The majority of people won’t have the bandwidth to be able to download entire movies on demand until we have a better broadband solution. As it stands, it’s simply easier to run to the store and purchase a DVD rather than spend a few hours downloading a video.

45

gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=17034

Retail sources in the UK have told GamesIndustry.biz that Microsoft has intimated to them that the HD-DVD add-on for the Xbox 360 will be priced such that console and peripheral combined are cheaper than Sony’s PS3.

46

I still don’t get the HD-DVD “add-on.”

I mean… how is that an add-on? There’d be no point in building games on the HD DVDs, simply because you’d be developing for a smaller portion of the overall market. And at that point, you’re pretty much only ever going to use it as an HD DVD drive.

I dunno… doesn’t feel like you’ll need the X360 to do that. I mean the drive pretty much does what it does.

47

I suppose some developers might release the collector’s edition of a game on a single HD-DVD, while the standard edition would come on several normal DVDs. A bit like how games like Half-Life 2 and Quake 4 on the PC came in CD and DVD versions, with collector’s edition costing slightly more.

To me, it basically seems like Microsoft’s way of countering the PS3’s Blu-Ray playing capablities while giving them a chance to back HD-DVD at the same time, but nothing more than that. Still, if HD-DVD becomes the standard, and the drive is cheaper than a standalone HD-DVD player then it may be worth purchasing the add-on if you already own a 360.

It would be good the HD-DVD drive could do more than just play movies though. Perhaps enable it to be connected to a PC to be used as an external HD-DVD-ROM drive, so that you could just take the drive and collection of 30 gig (or however much they hold - I can’t remember exactly) discs and copy the data off them straight through another computer’s USB port. Or how about letting you download updates to your movies from the Internet through Xbox Live? Perhaps an update which allows an imported movie to become region-free after it has been released in your part of the world.

48

HD-DVD is unnecessary. If developers would stop being so damn stupid and stop using pre-rendered movies, we wouldn’t need all that space. High Definition textures for an entire game can be accomplished using the in-game engine on the new consoles without a problem and use less than 2 GB of space, since most of the textures are redundant - that leaves 6 GB+ for other media in the game such as sound. The problem is, most companies like to take shortcuts and don’t bother learning the technology correctly (which is why 99.9% of all the games in the past 10 years have sucked major ass.)

Optical drives are very stupid anyway…the fact that the industry adopted that technology is the reason why the other better alternatives (i.e. NEC’s HU-Card) never improved. Human stupidity, especially in the corporate world, is infinite.

49

MS have stated that tthe HD DVD drive won’t be used for games, just movies.

Bingo. That’s what they’re going for.

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When was the last time you saw a multiple DVD game? Perhaps on the GC, but that’s because each disc could only hold 1.5GB of data. The whole point of a console setup vs a PC is that it’s a static machine.

That’s the only real value I see in it. But my question at that point is: what is the X360 doing? The laser and machinery and all that is located in the actual disc drive. Perhaps the drivers and whatnot will reside on the X360, but you could easily put that on the actual drive. At that point, why not just sell it as a cheap HD DVD drive?

Updates to movies? Do you really want to go that path? Also, the reason for region encoding isn’t because “it hasn’t been released in other regions yet.” A huge part of it is to stop grey market sales (imports), because it can negatively affect the sales for local markets. They want to discourage imports, so why would they issue unlocks for region codes?

o_O

Pre-rendered movies take up maybe 1/8th of the space of a normal DVD at max. Most of the space is actually taken up by sound/voice files, since gamers demand on having every character/line of dialog/etc be voiced over nowadays.

I don’t think I know a single developer that actually wants that much space. Filling up 25GB of data is simply an enormous undertaking, and doesn’t necessarily add value to a game.

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[quote=“Abadd”]

o_O

Pre-rendered movies take up maybe 1/8th of the space of a normal DVD at max. Most of the space is actually taken up by sound/voice files, since gamers demand on having every character/line of dialog/etc be voiced over nowadays.

I don’t think I know a single developer that actually wants that much space. Filling up 25GB of data is simply an enormous undertaking, and doesn’t necessarily add value to a game.[/quote]

Spoken dialogue is definitely a plus if used correctly…and I lay emphasis heavily on ‘if’. The only game I can think of, off-hand, that actually benefitted having spoken dialogue for every character in the game was PDS…and this probably would not have been a good thing if they had used shitty English voiceovers. However, the only reason why the dialogue takes so much space is because companies absolutely refuse, in most cases, to use adequate compression technology; in fact, most of the spoken dialogue used in videogames today use regular old PCM!

The fact that we have excellent high-bandwidth compression technologies such as H.264 for HD-Video and sound compression technologies such as OGG which acts as a ‘container’ (meaning you can put Japanese and English languages into the same sound channel, and can switch between them at the flick of a switch) and that they aren’t being used in modern or next-gen consoles is a travesty, mainly because we’re still using crappy optical drives with shitty load times, and the fact that most games don’t even max out most of the drive space! It’s a complete waste of resources. What they need to do, especially if they insist on keeping the ridiculous prices for games where they are, is to release 4-8 GB Hu-Cards - the advantages of the Hu-Card are:

-small size
-no moving parts
-can’t be scratched
-fast loading times
-‘padding’ and LBA in games will no longer be required
-easy to store and don’t take up alot of space.

Basically, this is the same stance that Nintendo had before their worthless gamecube…their problem, however, was that cartridge based games a decade ago were uneconomical, didn’t have enough space to do anything with, and were too expensive to manufacture. This is not the case anymore!

But this argument is moot anyway, considered most content will be streamed directly to the console in a few years anyway. But still, the fact that the industry is still in the dark ages when it comes down to how the media is stored and distributed is enough to make my blood boil.

52

Here we go again.

[quote=“Kadamose”]
Spoken dialogue is definitely a plus if used correctly…and I lay emphasis heavily on ‘if’. The only game I can think of, off-hand, that actually benefitted having spoken dialogue for every character in the game was PDS…and this probably would not have been a good thing if they had used shitty English voiceovers. However, the only reason why the dialogue takes so much space is because companies absolutely refuse, in most cases, to use adequate compression technology; in fact, most of the spoken dialogue used in videogames today use regular old PCM![/quote]

Oh yes, I forgot that you think human actors will be replaced by digital ones.

But, to your point about compression, a lot of compression is done nowadays. A lot of the audio is recorded in 44.1/16 bit, but is compressed to a reasonable point so as to not affect the recording quality. Any recording will be lossy, as is any sort of compression, but the point is to find the sweet spot that will allow you to maintain a level of consistency that will still retain any textures from the original recordings.

Optical drives are used because:

  1. They store as much data as you need
  2. Are cheap to manufacture

Hu-Cards are even more expensive than cartridges at this point. And they are also very specific in their usage. The optical drive in a game console allows for multi-usage, which does have appeal. That, coupled with the fact that there are no high-capacity hu-cards (to my knowledge, at least), and they are extremely easy to pirate (oh, I forgot I’m talking to you), who in their right minds would switch to those?

And it’s not the discs that make the costs expensive. It’s the generation of all the technology and content that does. The price of development from last gen to this gen has doubled, without even changing storage formats. How is it that the format, as you say, is making games expensive?

Streamed content will potentially be the primary mode of distribution at some point, but the problem isn’t storage, it’s bandwidth. People simply don’t have the bandwidth to regularly download files that are several gigabytes a piece. They would rather just drive to the store and buy the game than wait several hours for it to download. Until we can get faster, more reliable broadband, I don’t see it as a reality.

53

Bullshit. The only reason why development costs are going up is because:

-They keep increasing team size which actually SLOWS down development (an interesting note: 90% of the development team consists of artists)
-Development takes too long (3+ years)
-Inflation
-Lazy developers

Did you know that PDS only had 3 main artists? Did you know that the majority of TA were programmers? Did you know that PDS only took 15 months to create and finish? Did you know that PDS only took 66 million yen (600k) to develop? I’m using this as a watermark because PDS was the perfect game that was only limited by the hardware - changing the hardware and using different devkits would NOT have increased the development costs. Your claim is baseless.

54

Bwahahaha, now this is actually getting fun.

[quote=“Kadamose”]Bullshit. The only reason why development costs are going up is because:

-They keep increasing team size which actually SLOWS down development (an interesting note: 90% of the development team consists of artists)
-Development takes too long (3+ years)
-Inflation
-Lazy developers[/quote]

There are 3 pillars in development: schedule, quality, and budget. If you want to improve one, the other two must suffer. Increasing team size increases budget, but shortens schedule. So, I’m not sure where your claims of increasing team size = slower development. If you have a larger team of programmers, per se, then you can build more faster (though with programmers, if you have a large team that isn’t managed properly, it can affect the overall quality and stability of the code). Artists, on the otherhand, you can have an army of and not affect much. Once parameters are set for number of polygons, texture size, etc, you can build assets until the cows come home.

And is the 90% artists figure taken directly from the Department of Imaginary Numbers? How are you figuring that?

Lead artists. I don’t have the number of actual artists on the game offhand, so I won’t make any guesses, but you have to remember that each of these people commanded entire teams of artists.

Can’t argue or support the first claim, since I only know a handful of the actual team, but most games at the time only took about that long to create. That’s also 2 generations ago.

Again, I ask you where you get your numbers from.

So you mean to tell me that if the hardware was more powerful, that the team wouldn’t have needed extra artists to build the models and textures (the higher quality the model/texture, the more time it takes to build)? That’s just a single example of why you are wrong :anjou_love:

55

Eh, with the primitive state of 3D back then it’s easy to believe PDS was made in such a short time. I imagine the high quality cut scenes were what delayed it as well. The kind of art assets used are piss easy to create consisting of like 10-500 (probably saying too much) triangles depending on the object and having 128x128 (at best?) textures.

Nowadays a well designed and detailed level can take over a month(s) (that’s probably being easy on the numbers too) to finalise while an up to standard character model weeks, if not more. That’s why a lot of artists are needed…

I also wouldn’t call developers lazy. More like underpaid and overworked as is the case with most employees anywhere these days.

Actually the numbers above may already be way out of date as I’m talking about the UT2004-Doom 3-HL2 era. Unreal Engine 3 and other engines of similar 3D capability will have increased them once again with the need to create several varieties of textures (and normal maps) for every single surface and object.

56

Hey, Abadd, since we’re talking about development in this topic, could you answer a question that’s been bugging me a while? When creating a game, what’s the very first thing that gets done? Like, the story, or the character design.

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Sorry I beg to diff voice over really added to the Lunars (jaw struck when I 1st heard Lunar and the White Dragon speak), MGS, Popfulmail, Max Payne just to name but a few and having chacaters speak in text in games like GRAW would just take away from the Realism they?re trying to create .

No it wasn’t the perfect game and changing the hardware would cost more. Shenmue Budget went out of control when moved up to DC development . When the Team have new hardware they will want to do more things, that the older hardware couldn’t do. Back in PGR the X-Box couldn’t really handle Cockpit views or spectators Onthe 360 it can, and that takes a army of Molders and artist adding to the overall cost .
GT car models have gone from taking 2 weeks to model each ear, to now over 1 month to model Tthanks to the extra detail the PS2 offered over the PS all that must add to the cost

Games were costing millions back inthe old days . I remember Lunar II coasting GameArts 2.500,000 dollars to make , god only nows what the production costs of a next gen Lunar would take

58

That’s a good question. Perhaps we should ask that to the Sony fanboys who have been claiming that Blu-Ray is going to make their games “better” somehow.

Because Microsoft can use it to lure people away from buying a PS3. That’s really the only reason why they’re releasing it as an add-on, as far as I can see, unless the drive can do something else besides play HD DVDs through the 360.

Unless the movie was significantly cheaper by importing it, why would allowing movies from other countries to play on the HD DVD player negatively impact local sales? In some ways, it could actually increase sales. As a real life example, my sister sent me some standard DVD movies for my birthday which won’t play on my 360 because of region lockout. The movies are set to region 2, but my player will only play region 4, so I can’t play them until I get around to getting a crack for the DVD drive on my computer. It’s anti-consumer and encourages piracy. Why not provide a legal solution? With the simplicity that is Xbox Live, this would be possible with a simple firmware update.

59

Differs from project to project. The first thing, in general, that gets made is the concept document. It outlines the general gameplay, style, tone, etc and gives descriptions of the characters (if necessary) and likely a short outline of the story.

What usually gets fleshed out from there is really dependent on what matters most. What does the developer have to prove out? Story can often ben adjusted and changed later on in the dev cycle, but it’s usually in pre-production that it gets hammered out. Character designs are crucial, so that’s when testing and whatnot usually occurs.

But, like I said, it differs from project to project.

Situations such as your own are an extreme minority. Most people don’t care about foreign films. The majority of major DVD releases originate in the US, so what movie companies are most worried about is not the importing of, say, Chinese movies into the US, but the exporting of US movies to the other territories. What happens is that if they don’t attempt to discourage that, you see a much higher level of purchasing of US movies overseas than the opposite, so you have a fairly big grey market.

What that essentially means is that when the studios try to set up distribution deals with publishing companies overseas, the overseas publishing companies are either less enthusiastic about the product simply because there is such a big grey market, so they don’t bother taking the title, or if they ignore the grey market, their sales end up getting hurt by it.

If you really want to play movies from other regions, then buy a DVD player from that region (or find a region free DVD player if you can).

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[quote=“Abadd”]
If you really want to play movies from other regions, then buy a DVD player from that region (or find a region free DVD player if you can).[/quote]

Or, better yet…get a modchip or flash your firmware! There’s a really cool DVD firmware hack out now for the Xbox360 which allows you to play pirated copies of games, as well as run region free DVDs. I can’t wait until the 360 can run unsigned code…when that happens, the console will be worth the purchase.