New response from Scriv, and a link to an article from MTV that supposedly supports some of his claims, which he made prior to the article being published (
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/15...?headlines=true ):
Normally I'd ignore a post like this, but other people asked nicely so here we go...
First, if everything is so fine and dandy, why did he not mention that the PS3 has not even started manufacturing yet. That isn't rumor, that's straight out of the mouth of Kaz "Riiiiiiiiiiiiiidge Racer" Hirai. I want to know how the fuck they're going to manufacture 2M of the most complicated console of all time in 2 months.
The "manufacturing process" does not happen all at once. The individual components are collected for months before final assembly occurs (about a month before product ships to retail). Furthermore, the operating system itself won't be loaded until just before the assembled systems ship and tweaking will occur to the very second that happens. All of Sony's manufacturing power is behind this, going so far as to halt production of other Sony products in favor of PS3.
Killzone - Its no secret that Sony bought out Guerilla Studios and hopes to make this the Halo killer. They've said as much. However, holding back till closer to launch is bunk. We're two and a half months away from launch and you have zero good press for your system. Meanwhile, the big N has been doing the slow burn on its PR and has the fanboys whipped into a frenzy. Yeah, this doesn't jive at all. I would understand if it was more like the situation of the PS2 launch where they had everyone poised on their every breath, but its not.
The game isn't being held back (it's not coming out any time soon), but marketting is. There's no point in advertising now when it isn't really going affect sales. However, closer to launch, when the Killzone screenshots and videos start popping up people will think "OMG, look what the PS3 can do!" It's just logical marketting.
Supporting a game in 5.1 is one thing, but supporting it in 5.1, 6.1, and 7.1? Bullshit. That's a lot of licensing fee to DTS, Lucas, etc. plus most people have 5.1 if they have anything at all. Its simply not worth the time and money right now for them to do any more than that.
The mantra here is "no holding back." There is a daunting parade of logos on the chassis, and for good reason.
And now the major bullshit, BluRay. What a load of wonky garbage. Game devs need more than 9 gigs of space right now? Um, there hasn't been a 360 game to my knowledge that required it.
Maybe because devs don't ship games that physically won't fit on the media they are required to use?
I certainly didn't see any dev having a problem publishing games over multiple discs. Even if they did need this space, can you imagine the cost involved with publishing a game that takes up 20 - 30 gigs?
Except that MS has a policy against allowing games to span multiple discs. The only exception is "special features" content, such as Making-of DVDs, soundtracks, etc. There are other problems to spanning a game multiple discs. Take, for instance, Oblivion. If it spanned multiple discs the devs would have to decide what content to put on which discs to balance seamlessness with as little disc swapping as possible. The 360 is certainly capable of handling better textures, there just wasn't room for it. You also have to consider standardization of content... which means you can't have some highly detailed textures and some lower resolution textures in the same scene. It would look out of place.
Let me rephrase that, can you imagine publishing a game that takes that much after its compressed and optimized for the processor? How the hell is that going to work exactly? BD-ROMs are only up to x2 speeds. The HDD of the unit is only 40 or 60 gigs, depending on model. If you do a full install, you're only going to have room for 1 or 2 games at a time. If its a partial install, you're still not looking at a lot of games. If it used the HDD as a cache, then you're going to thrash the shit out of it and kill it lickity split. That's if you ONLY use the HDD for games. Remember, there's supposed to be Live-ish functionality and PVR capabilities.
PS3s comes in a 20GB model and a 60GB model. Games are not installed like PC titles, but content is cached onto the HDD in the background to speed up load times. The hard drive under no more strain than if it were in a PC.
The thing about the HD-DVD vs. BluRay is also crap. There are about 50 BluRay movies out and about 100 HD-DVD. So much for no support. On average, HD-DVD is hovering around $20 a title while BluRay is about $24. Not a huge differece. For movie quality, experts agree that thus far HD-DVD has just slightly edged out BluRay and that's with a player that only have 1080i output. Sony needs the extra space because they refuse to use a modern codec and all their movies are MPEG2. In truth, most high-def films could fit onto a DVD-9 if H264 or VC1 is used. Remember T2 Ultimate Edition? Out long before either format and its 1080i on a DVD-9 with room to spare.
Studios are free to use whatever codecs they like, Sony Pictures and their affiliates haven't exactly been choosing the most efficient ones for their own movies, but it's no fault of the format. The number of currently available movies dosn't even factor into it (especially since HDDVD has a lead). Read my OP for the reasons.
There's no 1080p component TV sets because component doesn't have the bandwidth for it, genius. 1080p needs 186MHz of bandwidth to get to +/-3dB and component only pushes about 150MHz. Even if it could, you think Hollywood wants to widen the analog hole? Fuck no.
I asked the same question and I only conveyed what I was told. The way it was expained to me is that 60 fields per second (30fps interlaced) and 30 frames per second (progressive) use the same bandwidth. Regardless, both systems are capable of outputting a 1080p signal even if the TV in question dosn't use it (and so far, none do - with only one mid-range Sony TV on the way that will). Sneakyish marketting, but not inherently untrue.
The whole concept that Sony has a Xbox Live killer done and ready to roll seems remarkable to say the least. Didn't MS state they've put over $1B into Live thus far and how long has it taken them to get there? How the hell did Sony build up a comparable network over the last couple of years and no one noticed? Maybe that's what the rootkit was for, distributed computing!
Who said Sony has been building up a network over the last couple years? The service hasn't even be released yet. I stated some of it's features and what functionality to expect. Nothing you said here amounts to anything but filler text.
The PSP has outsold the DS? WTF? DS/DS Lite have sold 21.6M units as of June 2006. That's sold ... as in ... someone bought them. Sony doesn't publish "sold" numbers, only shipped numbers, meaning units they've manufactured. Really doesn't matter if you make it if no one has bought it yet. If you watch the sales carts, DS has been outselling PSP on a weekly basis of something like 10:1 or 9:1.
Wow, that DS number doubles every time someone posts. Sonys numbers are
not published, and I never said they were. In fact, I made several posts in this thread commenting on how amusing internet statistics were due to this very fact.
My favorite is that UMD movies failed because of studios. Bullshit once again. They failed because the only player for them is the PSP, they're expensive, and they're lower quality than DVD of lesser cost. The extra cost is the Sony licensing fee there. Sony is the only company that makes UMDs so if you want your movie pressed on it, you have to pay them royality for using their media AND pay them again to manufacture it.
UMD is a proprietary format used by PSP. I also need to point out that SCE and Sony Pictures are not inherently linked. They are run entirely independant of one another, which is why Sony Pictures UMDs (and affiliates like MGM) are also offenders. Another problem is that studios were releasing some really aweful UMD movies (in conjunction with the high price and missing special features), which would consume space at retailers like Target and make sales figures look bad. UMD movies continue to be successful at Best Buy...
but their buyers are very selective about which movies they allow in their stores. Unlike Target and WalMart, they don't just buy everything that gets thrown at them. Maybe UMD movies aren't totally salvageable... but it's not going to stop SCE from trying.
If they were smart, they'd ditch UMD entirely, release a PSP2, and have it run entirely off flash memory.
You can run videos off flash memory already. An iTunes-esque download service will be launched for both PSP and PS3 that allows legal downloads of movies, TV shows, music, games, etc. No PSP2 needed.
Now, the biggest telling feature here that reeks of bullshit ... anyone with this level of insider knowledge has to be under NDA. Sony NDAs are strict as hell. Much like the PS2 stuff, they like to hold info close to their breast until they're ready to go. Don't think they won't go after someone who's leaking company secrets. If you're going to leak, why the fuck would you leak to Genmay of all places? At least leak to a trade site and get paid for it.
I haven't said or revealed anything that I'm not allowed to. In fact, it's the very reason it's taking so long to get photos posted. Everything has to be approved. Finally, you'll see my statements corroberated soon enough. You just got the chance to read them here before anywhere else.
Why Genmay? Because I love you guys.
And here's his response to another guy that asked about the MS 1-disc policy:
It's not just a MS policy, actually. It's the reason multidisc games have basically been nonexistant since PSOne*. There's a number of reasons. From a technical standpoint, it's difficult to split a game onto multiple discs unless it's very linear. It also requires special packaging (usually stacked or snap-in flap). The packaging isn't so much the problem as swapping discs is incredibly annoying for consumers and creates all kinds quality assurance nightmares... especially with todays large nonlinear games. Hence, MS and Sony generally require that the title fit on a single disc. There are exceptions, but they are very few and far between. *Nintendo had a similar rule for N64 - but not for GC. In that case it made sense, since GC discs have a lower capacity than normal DVDs and are cheap to produce. You'll also notice that the GC games with multiple discs are fairly linear with clearly defined "break points" that require minimal disc swapping.
