The Shrine

http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?optio ... 7&Itemid=2

So, what's the over-under on the game hitting the 360? I'll be 4 months

Too bad it didn't come out this holiday season, with the PS3 price-cut it probably would have easily broken that number.

There is absolutely no way it would have sold over a million in one day if it was launched now. Maybe 200K tops. MGS is a fairly big series, but not THAT big. Did any of the previous games even get close to 1 million on their day of release?

Dutch wrote:There is absolutely no way it would have sold over a million in one day if it was launched now. Maybe 200K tops. MGS is a fairly big series, but not THAT big. Did any of the previous games even get close to 1 million on their day of release?

The GC remake sold about 400,000 in its first week..then dropped off FAST afterwards :-)

I say it gets at least 500k worldwide in its first week. It'll be huge here and in Japan at least, not sure about Europe. By then (where "then" means "at least August") with the PS3 price drop you're gonna have a HELLUVA lot more system sold (and maybe even another price drop) so there'll be a much larger userbase. Heck, the only game I really want for the system is MGS4 and I may get a PS3 by then if it drops enough.

Break out the MGS Game Fuel.

Day one? Not going to happen, and I don't see why whether they get a million sales in the first day, or the first month, makes a huge difference.

This is an interesting quote, from Peter Dille of Sony:

We understand publishers are needing to recoup their investment. From our perspective, as long as the games aren't going exclusive to other platforms, PS3 gamers are not actually losing anything.

Man, Sony are a heck of a lot humbler than they were even a year ago. Good stuff.

Metal Gear Solid 3 sold 290,376 in November 2004, it was released on the 17th of that month.

http://www.psxextreme.com/ps2-news/3106.html

So if they expect to sell 1 million at full price on the first day on a system with 1/15th the userbase, they're in for a very rude awakening. Though I doubt they expect anywhere near that, they were just stating what they needed to sell to break even.

Didn't I say that MGS4 was going to come out to the 360? Well, I told you so. Granted, this isn't an official announcement of that, but it's pretty damn close.

I predict the same thing with DMC4, and possibly FF13 proper, but Square has had a prior history with the PSP, so I can't be sure on that one. (Heh, or I could be wrong and DMC4 goes to the Wii, but that game is going somewhere besides the PS3 alone.)

I thought it was old news that DMC4 was headed to the 360? Is I crazy? It rubs the lotion on its skin. Or else it gets the hose again.

Yeah. Months ago.

Not when I say the DMC4 trailer. But, I'll still say "I told you so" on that one, too.

A requirement for telling someone "I told you so" is a disagreement, which no one has. I think most people figure PS3 exclusives will come to the 360. It happened with many PS2 big name exclusives. The real question is will it happen soon enough to cannibalize the sales of the PS3 version?

Kupek wrote:A requirement for telling someone "I told you so" is a disagreement, which no one has. I think most people figure PS3 exclusives will come to the 360. It happened with many PS2 big name exclusives. The real question is will it happen soon enough to cannibalize the sales of the PS3 version?

No, hence my prediction of 4 months. Sony will definitely have paid for an exclusive period hoping that and FF13 give it a huge boost next year. If God of War 3 comes out too, they're hoping to have a "killer lineup" campaign like the 360 did this year.

Don't forget, a long time ago they were saying that they expect the PS3 to start slowly and to grow later one big-time with a drop with the PS2 still going strong to compensate. That's what's happened so far but they can't get another Xmas like this. So expect them to have a huge lineup next year.

But, I think you people are thinking too short-term here. It's a question of console sales and console population. Many people haven't bought any console or they are looking to buy a 2nd console. If I compare the 360 to the PS3, I would get the following:

PS3: A few good games that will be exclusive for 4 months
360: All of those exclusive games 4 months later plus a shit-ton more games

So, if I'm in the market for a console, which one would I pick? The one with the most games, despite any potential for getting a game early. By losing the complete exclusiveness of titles, they are losing any real reason to purchase their console, if their competition has more games, more EXCLUSIVE games. This was the reason the PSX and PS2 was so successful, and it's the reason why the 360 is successful.

At this rate, I will never ever buy a PS3. Even in the previous generation of consoles, I bought a GameCube later on because there were a ton of exclusive games that I wanted to play and weren't available on the PS2. (The modded XBox was a bonus, but at least I got to be able to play the few good games on it, like Ninja Gaiden and KOTOR.)

I actually quite agree with Sine here, it really seems like Sony has fucked themselves with their grand plan of using the once immensely popular Playstation brand name in an attempt to push their blu ray media. You know, if they would have left the drive out and instead pulled what they did back in 1994, things would be A LOT different now than they were then. They essentially defeated Sega with just one word "$299". I am more than just a bit amused about the complete lack of irony that caused their downfall =)

I'm sure 1 million in first day is just because they have a usual model of how much 1st day sales accounts for in terms of total sale (which is probably a lot). So let's say first day accounts for 50% of sales, then that's basically saying it'd need 2 million to break even.

And I'm not even sure MGS can sell 1 million total let alone first day.

Again, Sine, no one is disagreeing with you. If third parties port their time-limited exclusives to 360 quick enough that it can't move PS3s, Sony is in trouble.

Sony definitely did fuck up PS3 with the Blu-Ray... I said it back before it came out that they threw it in there so they could jam it into the market. Then there's also their cell processor... which I would blame for why they lack a lot of exclusives-- no one wants to work on the PS3. They tried to go too outside the norm and that damned processor is too specialized (a programmer friend of mine explained it better... something about the threads being designed to excel at some things and then suck at others whereas the 360 threads are just as good at doing anything) hence why games like Assassin's Creed look better on 360 than PS3.

What a squandered system...

The 360's processor is an IBM PowerPC with three cores. If PowerPC doesn't mean anything to you, then just know that it's the same family of processor that Macs used before they switched to Intel. Basically, the same programming techniques and models that are used for typical computers work on the 360.

The Cell is also PowerPC based, but very different in architecture. There's a PPE and 8 SPEs. The PPE is a PowerPC based core, but it's stripped down; you don't want to run much code on the PPE. The PPE exists to run the OS and (ideally) to farm out work to the SPEs.

The SPEs are basically vector processors. Let's say you have a bunch of data, and you want to do the same operation to all of them - multiply by 2, for example. On a typical processor, you would have to do these operations one at a time. * On a vector processor, it can do that multiply by 2 operation on many data elements at once. Graphics code benefits from this kind of parallelism; it's basically all vector and matrix operations. But here's the catch: the PS3, like all modern computers and consoles, has a specialized graphics card (that basically is a vector processor as well). So the Cell is not handling the graphics code. I'm not a game programmer, but I doubt that the kind of code that's left over benefits much from a vector processor.

But that's why I'm not sure why Sony put Cell in the PS3. The reason it's so damn hard to program for is the SPEs have 256k of local storage. They can't communicate with main memory the way the PPE and typical processor can. If code on an SPE wants to read or write data from main memory, the programmer needs to explicitly request that data. This is not the normal state of affairs; normally, the programmer just says in his code what locations in memory he's concerned with, and the hardware loads or stores it for him. Doing this by hand is tedious and error prone.

Consequently, it's a non-trivial problem to figure out best use the SPEs in a non-trivial application (which games certainly are).

Anyway. I know all of this crap because my research has shifted to Cell. I'm basically doing code generation to abstract away a lot of this mess so the programmer can pretend they're using a normal processor.

ADDENDUM: Note that IBM makes the processors for the PS3, 360 and Wii. No one really mentions this on games sites, but all game consoles now have IBM processors. I think this is part of the reason why they didn't make a great effort to keep Apple.

* I'm simplifying things a lot. Processors like Pentiums, Core Duos, PowerPCs and the like use instruction level parallelism to do multiple operations at once. Intel also augmented their chips to do some vector operations with SSE and SSE2

Yeah there you go... Kupek explained it much better than I could have and even goes into more depth than my friend had. This is why in Assassin's Creed there are more people and a larger draw distance on 360 than PS3, for example. Sony would rather just claim programmers don't know how to use their system... which is a great way to piss them off more.

You know, it seems like if the SPEs had access to RAM, there wouldn't be this problem. It would basically be a 8-core system with a parent PPE process to delegate the work.

It's a design tradeoff: usability for performance. The SPEs have access through DMAs (Direct Memory Access), it's just not through a typical memory hierarchy like on a normal processor. Programmers can issue DMA requests on the SPE, which is how some hardware devices access memory on a typical computer.

On a normal processor, the hierarchy is registers, L1 cache, L2 cache, L3 cache, RAM, disk. If a program tries to access a memory location in L1 cache and it's not there, the hardware will do the work of fetching the memory. (Although once a miss is experienced in RAM, the OS has to help out to find it on disk.) But this functionality isn't free: it takes more complex hardware, which eats up transistors and die space, leaving less room for execution logic of the SPEs.