Considering how rushed and therefor supply limited the 360 launch was, selling more Kinect sensors than you did with the launch of the 360 is that hard.
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Brainiac 8Don't call me Shirley...Registered Userregular
No PSP2. Based on these announcements, it doesn't look like any announcement is coming soon either.
...so the strategy is still "continue milking the system in Japan for another few months while handing the entire western world to the 3DS on a silver platter."
Probably not the wisest long-term plan.
What kind of plan would be able to go toe to toe with the 3DS especially with Nintendo getting a decent head start?
True, the odds are stacked against Sony on this one, but a PSP2 coming out at the same time as/shortly after the 3DS would give them a slightly better shot than to have the 3DS unopposed and able to build up an insane amount of momentum.
But then they wouldn't have enough time to copy Nintendo's glasses-less 3D technology!
Sony is in a terrible, terrible position with the PSP2. The two things the original PSP had going for it (at launch, compared to the DS) were its graphics and its multimedia capabilities. The 3DS, even without the 3D, seems more than capable of handling anything the PSP2 could do. And the iPhone and other smartphones have way too much of a headstart on multimedia options for the PSP2 to catch up. The ONLY three strengths they have, that I can think of, are:
1) The original is still doing well in Japan, which means Japanese developers are still willing to support them.
2) They have a decent back catalog of games that much of the Western world hasn't had a chance to play.
3) If the rumors of their reverse-touch screen are true, developers should be able to easily make multiplatform games for both the 3DS and PSP2.
Their biggest problem is that I see no way for them to make the PSP2 look cool or amazing in an age of iPhones and 3DSes. I wish them luck though, since I don't really want to see the handheld market dominated by a single company.
15m sales target for year within reach; Sony adds that 30m PS3 consoles are now connected to PSN
Sony has stated that it’s on track to sell the 15m units it had forecast in the year ending March 2011 and that the machine is now selling at a better rate than the company had forecast.
“As of the end of August, sales look a bit better than we expected,” SCE president Kaz Hirai told Reuters.
In addition, the exec added that 38m PS3 consoles have now been sold and that 80 per cent of them – or 30.4m – are now connected to the PlayStation Network. In January Microsoft stated that 23m Xbox 360 owners were connected to Xbox Live.
No more free cases for those buying an iPhone 4 after September 30th
iPhone, iPad and iPod platform holder Apple has confirmed that it will stop offering free bumpers and cases to iPhone 4 owners on September 30th.
The free case program that was launched in July in the fallout of the Antennagate controversy where it was revealed that the iPhone 4 would drop signal if held tightly or in a certain position.
However, Apple has always insisted that the furore was overblown and that the iPhone 4 only suffered the same level of signal degradation as many of its smartphone rivals.
“We now know that the iPhone 4 antenna attenuation issue is even smaller than we originally thought,” the firm said upon confirmation of the case program closure.
The Apple made iPhone 4 bumper costs between £20-£25 on the High Street.
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Brainiac 8Don't call me Shirley...Registered Userregular
Wired's Chris Kohler has a pretty fascinating look at the state of the Japanese game market and their reaction toward western games.
TOKYO — Japanese publishers looking to import American games face a daunting task in a country that hasn’t warmed to next-gen graphics and first-person shooters.
“Japan’s never been very receptive to foreign games,” says Gwyn Campbell, who works for a major game publisher in Tokyo and is the host of a gaming podcast with other expatriates. “The term ‘foreign game’ is traditionally an insult — it means ‘low quality.’”
The anti-Western prejudice is deeply ingrained in the minds of Japanese gamers, who traditionally favor handheld devices like the Nintendo DS over high-powered consoles like the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3.
Yo-ge, kuso-ge, goes the saying: “Western game, shit game.”
Still, partly because high-def game development is so expensive and partly because they see an undeveloped market just waiting to be tapped, Japanese publishers are pushing foreign games with increasing vigor in their home country, even though the domestic audience has historically been loath to try them.
“These companies want to make money,” says Campbell. “They’ve got these games, these assets that exist, and they’re trying to bring them over.”
At the Tokyo Game Show, which runs from Thursday to Sunday here, many of the big games on the show floor are being developed outside Japan. Square Enix’s most popular franchises — like Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts, games that move millions of units in Japan alone — are relegated to a small corner of the company’s massive booth.
Instead, the majority of Square Enix’s show-floor space is given over to Western-made games it is publishing this year under the label Extreme Edges, a new brand for “mature” titles. The games include Call of Duty, Deus Ex and Lara Croft, the kind of high-end titles that do well in the United States but haven’t taken off in Japan.
Many other games at Tokyo Game Show, Japan’s biggest videogame expo, are developed here with an eye on the Western market. Most are shooters, a genre that dominates the U.S. charts but is not popular here. It’s all an attempt to reach a broader audience with next-generation games, something that Japan hasn’t been able to do yet.
“The classic, traditional Japanese formula is not a moneymaker anymore unless you have “Monster Hunter,” “Dragon Quest” or “Final Fantasy” in your game title,” says James Mielke, a game producer at Tokyo-based Q Entertainment. “It’s a real risk for a developer to make a game that’s designed specifically for (Japan). That’s not a safe strategy.”
Japanese gamers have very specific tastes, often embracing the polar opposite of what sells in the rest of the world. Open-world games like Fallout and Grand Theft Auto emphasize the player’s freedom to do whatever he wants, which doesn’t fly in Japan.
“They want a guided experience,” says Campbell. “They want their hands held. They want the familiar. They don’t want new. When you go against that, they get angry.”
Some companies attempting to sell Western games in Japan are attempting to turn that negative into a positive. Bethesda’s advertising campaign for Fallout: New Vegas features a group of Japanese youths protesting the linear, on-rails nature of traditional Japanese role-playing games.
But sales numbers don’t lie. Of the top 100 games sold in Japan in 2009, you have to go all the way down to No. 77 to find the one title not made in Japan — Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
This does seem to be changing somewhat: On the top 100 list for the first half of 2010, Call of Duty is joined by Electronic Arts’ Battlefield and Sony’s MAG and God of War.
But these are minor victories at best. The portable PSP and Nintendo DS dominate the market with games like Monster Hunter and Dragon Quest while high-definition, next-generation gaming struggles to get a foothold in Japan. Sony has sold just more than 5 million PlayStation 3s here, and Microsoft barely limped past the 1 million mark with Xbox 360. The only next-gen game that sold more than 1 million units in 2009 was Final Fantasy XIII.
The lack of success so far doesn’t mean Japanese companies are going to quit trying to woo gamers to Western-style games.
Stop into the PlayStation 3 section of any electronics store in Tokyo and you’ll likely find that most of the titles on display are either from outside Japan or designed to appeal to Western tastes.
In the next month, two Japanese publishers are gearing up to launch third-person shooters that crib from Epic Games’ Gears of War. Sega’s upcoming sci-fi shooter Vanquish adds a decidedly Japanese over-the-top flair: The main character in his superhuman robot suit can slide around the battlefield like a base runner coming in to home plate.
But one critic I talked to who had played Tecmo Koei’s forthcoming third-person shooter Quantum Theory said it was almost indistinguishable from Gears. The thrust of the criticism around the game thus far seems to be that it apes the outward form of the popular shooter, but not its intrinsic appeal.
Part of the problem seems to be a total lack of exposure among Japanese gamers — and, perhaps more importantly, among Japanese game developers — when it comes to high-end videogames like Halo and Grand Theft Auto, with their lush graphics and open worlds.
“I’ve come across Japanese development companies as recently as two years ago where the engineers, the designers of the game, owned a PS2, a PSP, a Wii and a DS,” says Campbell. “I’ve sat people down with a next-gen game, and they thought they were watching a cut scene until I gave them a controller. I was like, ‘No, this is what people in the West play.’”
Such experiences are not unusual in a country where next-gen consoles have so far failed to catch on the way they have in the West.
“The other day,” says Q Entertainment’s Mielke, “I was having lunch with a friend and I said, ‘Have you ever played StarCraft?’ And he said, ‘What’s StarCraft?’ Sometimes it’s just really shocking that their gaming vocabulary isn’t as extensive as it could be. I think Japanese game developers need to start playing other people’s games to open their minds, just like a writer might want to read classic literature to be inspired.”
This announcement of RS isn't exactly new, they basically told us back when they announced Ikaruga that it was coming eventually.
Now people can finally shut up about RS. It's frankly not that good of a game. A great game to sell though.
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Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
edited September 2010
Yes, Japan is ridiculously xenophobic. And surprise surprise, it's starting to bite them in the ass now. It should be interesting to watch what happens in the next few years.
1UP has heard from sources here in Japan that Vanillaware will be releasing Muramasa: The Demon Blade and Odin Sphere as downloadable ports. No word on which consoles, but it's reasonable to assume that they will appear on both PSN and Xbox Live Arcade.
Couldn't give a shit about Odin Sphere, but Muramasa I'd like to take for a spin.
I thought Odin Sphere was the better game.
I hear Murasama wasn't that great. Odin Sphere was okay, but really repetitive and shallow.
Muramasa had the better gameplay, Odin Sphere had a much, much better story.
Then again, one was localized by Atlus, the other by those hacks at MMV.
1UP has heard from sources here in Japan that Vanillaware will be releasing Muramasa: The Demon Blade and Odin Sphere as downloadable ports. No word on which consoles, but it's reasonable to assume that they will appear on both PSN and Xbox Live Arcade.
Couldn't give a shit about Odin Sphere, but Muramasa I'd like to take for a spin.
I thought Odin Sphere was the better game.
I hear Murasama wasn't that great. Odin Sphere was okay, but really repetitive and shallow.
Muramasa had the better gameplay, Odin Sphere had a much, much better story.
Then again, one was localized by Atlus, the other by those hacks at IGNITION.
Yes, Japan is ridiculously xenophobic. And surprise surprise, it's starting to bite them in the ass now. It should be interesting to watch what happens in the next few years.
What's interesting is that the article suggests that even the Japanese aren't buying typically Japanese games as much anymore, yet there's still a violent resistance to trying anything western.
APB has been a fantastic journey, but unfortunately that journey has come to a premature end. Today we are sad to announce that despite everyone's best efforts to keep the service running; APB is coming to a close. It's been a pleasure working on APB and with all its players. Together we were building an absolutely amazing game, and for that, we thank you. You guys are awesome!
From all of the Realtime World staff we thank you for your continued support.
The servers are still up, so join the party and say goodbye!
- Ben 'APBMonkey' Bateman (Community Officer) Read the rest »
I think that is a new record for an MMO shutting down.
Were happy to announce that our next update, 1.4.2, is going to be rolled out tomorrow!
1.4.2 brings you the highly anticipated PureSkill ruleset where upgrades are nullified and you can fight on an even playing field! The update also includes the latest weapon balancing changes based on your 1.4.1 feedback!
The servers will be offline from 09:00 GMT until 13:00 GMT on Thursday 16th September.
Full patch notes to follow shortly, so keep an eye out on the forum!
Yes, Japan is ridiculously xenophobic. And surprise surprise, it's starting to bite them in the ass now. It should be interesting to watch what happens in the next few years.
What's interesting is that the article suggests that even the Japanese aren't buying typically Japanese games as much anymore, yet there's still a violent resistance to trying anything western.
They aren't buying them (or making them) on the HD twins.
APB has been a fantastic journey, but unfortunately that journey has come to a premature end. Today we are sad to announce that despite everyone's best efforts to keep the service running; APB is coming to a close. It's been a pleasure working on APB and with all its players. Together we were building an absolutely amazing game, and for that, we thank you. You guys are awesome!
From all of the Realtime World staff we thank you for your continued support.
The servers are still up, so join the party and say goodbye!
- Ben 'APBMonkey' Bateman (Community Officer) Read the rest »
I think that is a new record for an MMO shutting down.
It's retarded how that article equates graphical quality to game quality.
Most of my friends are like that, too. If they come over and we play any Wii games I hear constant whining about how nice it would be if it was in HD. Only my gamer friends, though. Not anyone else.
... then we play games like Castlevania and Scott Pilgrim online and they don't have a problem with it.
Yes, Japan is ridiculously xenophobic. And surprise surprise, it's starting to bite them in the ass now. It should be interesting to watch what happens in the next few years.
What's interesting is that the article suggests that even the Japanese aren't buying typically Japanese games as much anymore, yet there's still a violent resistance to trying anything western.
While the article was interesting, and has a few things that I feel are true. I didn't like the bias that some of the commentators were showing.
Especially the argument of Western games being more free, since while they usually do offer more choice, I don't really think we're at the point where the choices are meaningful more times than not.
Honestly, I don't really think Japanese companies have to go as far as trying to emulate Western developers. Because a good number of the time it doesn't work.
But at the same time, broadening their markets and using other games as inspiration in idea implementation is good.
Not to mention I think that the most popular broad appeal games in Japan, tend to be the game's that have a Japanese feel to them but mix in some Western game design here and there.
But that is something I believe to be true for the market at large.
Why is anyone listening to James Mielke. What does James Mielke know about anything other than terrible games? And then the rest of the article is just "Linear games are terrible and linear games are popular in Japan so Japanese people are awful."
He is right. Nobody in the USA plays linear games like COD, GOW, Halo, Forza, Uncharted, Killzone 2, Resistance, etc.
Really, I can only think of a handful of non-linear Western games and even then it isn't so much non-linear in the "You can completely change how the game is played" kind of way.
More non-linear in the "You can go here...before you go here." fashion.
Honestly, I would say linearity isn't even a problem, just that more companies need to start trying different stuff is all.
So there have been epic hardware failures but APB has to be the biggest software bust since E.T., right?
With Duke Nukem Forever alive again it's hard to think of another on this scale, yeah.
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
edited September 2010
Really. I knew APB was probably "doomed" when they dropped the 360 port. I know that killed a lot of interest in it.
Then they adopted that crappy "optional pay" system. Which usually means you have to pay if you want to enjoy the game. Not to mention it didn't seem like all that great of an MMO anyway.
So there have been epic hardware failures but APB has to be the biggest software bust since E.T., right?
With Duke Nukem Forever alive again it's hard to think of another on this scale, yeah.
The thing with Duke though (from what I recall reading) was that it hasn't been super ridiculous expensive. Sure they've taken a hilariously long time developing it but they weren't burning money each day. I personally wonder how much money they've spent on Duke and how big their dev was (on average)
APB on the other hand spent upward of 100million atleast and they can't even afford to keep the servers running. Atleast HellGate London kept the servers running. How much trouble do you have to be to not being able to do that after you've let everyone else go?
I'm pretty sure ABP will end up having cost far more money to develop than DNF.
Yeah DNF is epic in how long it's been "in development," but I too remember reading that they really haven't burned that much money on it. I'd be completely shocked if they've spent 100 million dollars on it. Something like DNF in its current form probably cost about 20 million to develop, and the defunct iterations prior certainly cost them less than that.
The really sad part is that, more often than not, we prevented or discouraged such people from helping out by building these bizarre internal divisions between groups. I think this was a misguided attempt to imitate how other big online games run things. For example, I once heard one of our fine QA staff being berated for – wait for it – emailing a summary of forum activity around QA. This guy had gone through every single forum post looking for complaints that might signify bugs, and summarised it in a plan of action for the QA team to investigate further. Commendable stuff indeed, but here he was, being told that ONLY OUR DEDICATED COMMUNITY TEAM were allowed to summarise forum activity for others (usually in the form of a number from 1-100 representing how favourable forum feedback was that week. Never found out how they computed that or what we were supposed to do with it.)
Wow. And I thought all the publishers using metacritic was crazy.
The really sad part is that, more often than not, we prevented or discouraged such people from helping out by building these bizarre internal divisions between groups. I think this was a misguided attempt to imitate how other big online games run things. For example, I once heard one of our fine QA staff being berated for – wait for it – emailing a summary of forum activity around QA. This guy had gone through every single forum post looking for complaints that might signify bugs, and summarised it in a plan of action for the QA team to investigate further. Commendable stuff indeed, but here he was, being told that ONLY OUR DEDICATED COMMUNITY TEAM were allowed to summarise forum activity for others (usually in the form of a number from 1-100 representing how favourable forum feedback was that week. Never found out how they computed that or what we were supposed to do with it.)
Wow. And I thought all the publishers using metacritic was crazy.
This is why so many businesses are run poorly. You have these heads at the top giving general directions which, by the time they filter down, you have all these guys in the middle that jealously guard their own self-importance and their own conceptions of their job duties and they won't dare let someone in some other capacity tread on that, even slightly.
Let’s start with our attitude to the investment we raised. We fell foul of some kind of modern version of Parkinson’s Law:
A Realtime Worlds project will spend the funding available to it.
When we received the initial $30m to develop MyWorld, management literally reverse-engineered a “hiring curve” (a graph of team size against time) from 3 parameters: the budget available, the desired launch date (set by the investors), and our internal figure for the maximum rate we were able to hire people at (this was the only good part of the plan – Dundee put the brakes on for us!). There are obviously far better ways to plan a project, and I could spend a whole post discussing just that, but for now I just want to focus in on the unquestioned assumption that we should set out to spend all the money.
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
edited September 2010
I swear, reading post-trainwreck reports is always interesting in a sad way.
It's like people know they are doomed to fail but kept quiet for fear of losing their job.
Posts
Haha. :^:
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Wrong answer bub. Ain't nothing bad about G Gundam.
Except the SNES game.
1) The original is still doing well in Japan, which means Japanese developers are still willing to support them.
2) They have a decent back catalog of games that much of the Western world hasn't had a chance to play.
3) If the rumors of their reverse-touch screen are true, developers should be able to easily make multiplatform games for both the 3DS and PSP2.
Their biggest problem is that I see no way for them to make the PSP2 look cool or amazing in an age of iPhones and 3DSes. I wish them luck though, since I don't really want to see the handheld market dominated by a single company.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/40897/Apple-calls-time-on-free-bumpers
Yes, and I would so buy a 3DS online enabled Monster Hunter.
Then I could really feel like I'm stabbing a Rathian in the face!
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http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/09/western-games-japan/#more-28567#ixzz0zi0jx2YS
Bastards.
Exclusive downloadable titles make no sense at all.
Now people can finally shut up about RS. It's frankly not that good of a game. A great game to sell though.
Muramasa had the better gameplay, Odin Sphere had a much, much better story.
Then again, one was localized by Atlus, the other by those hacks at MMV.
Fixed.
What's interesting is that the article suggests that even the Japanese aren't buying typically Japanese games as much anymore, yet there's still a violent resistance to trying anything western.
They aren't buying them (or making them) on the HD twins.
how long was it out?
Most of my friends are like that, too. If they come over and we play any Wii games I hear constant whining about how nice it would be if it was in HD. Only my gamer friends, though. Not anyone else.
... then we play games like Castlevania and Scott Pilgrim online and they don't have a problem with it.
While the article was interesting, and has a few things that I feel are true. I didn't like the bias that some of the commentators were showing.
Especially the argument of Western games being more free, since while they usually do offer more choice, I don't really think we're at the point where the choices are meaningful more times than not.
Honestly, I don't really think Japanese companies have to go as far as trying to emulate Western developers. Because a good number of the time it doesn't work.
But at the same time, broadening their markets and using other games as inspiration in idea implementation is good.
Not to mention I think that the most popular broad appeal games in Japan, tend to be the game's that have a Japanese feel to them but mix in some Western game design here and there.
But that is something I believe to be true for the market at large.
[edit]
Slow post is slow.
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Well. I mean if you look at it, Western developers for the most part completely ignore handhelds.
Unless it's "Quick cash-in Adventures X"
I remember going to the Gamestop this weekend and the amount of shovelware I saw in the DS section was ridiculous.
We should have started a pool on it since everyone figured APB would fail.
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/09/western-games-japan/#more-28567#ixzz0zi0jx2YS[/QUOTE]
Why is anyone listening to James Mielke. What does James Mielke know about anything other than terrible games? And then the rest of the article is just "Linear games are terrible and linear games are popular in Japan so Japanese people are awful."
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Really, I can only think of a handful of non-linear Western games and even then it isn't so much non-linear in the "You can completely change how the game is played" kind of way.
More non-linear in the "You can go here...before you go here." fashion.
Honestly, I would say linearity isn't even a problem, just that more companies need to start trying different stuff is all.
With Duke Nukem Forever alive again it's hard to think of another on this scale, yeah.
Then they adopted that crappy "optional pay" system. Which usually means you have to pay if you want to enjoy the game. Not to mention it didn't seem like all that great of an MMO anyway.
Then there was all the money blown on it.
The thing with Duke though (from what I recall reading) was that it hasn't been super ridiculous expensive. Sure they've taken a hilariously long time developing it but they weren't burning money each day. I personally wonder how much money they've spent on Duke and how big their dev was (on average)
APB on the other hand spent upward of 100million atleast and they can't even afford to keep the servers running. Atleast HellGate London kept the servers running. How much trouble do you have to be to not being able to do that after you've let everyone else go?
Insanity
Yeah DNF is epic in how long it's been "in development," but I too remember reading that they really haven't burned that much money on it. I'd be completely shocked if they've spent 100 million dollars on it. Something like DNF in its current form probably cost about 20 million to develop, and the defunct iterations prior certainly cost them less than that.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Wow. And I thought all the publishers using metacritic was crazy.
link
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This is why so many businesses are run poorly. You have these heads at the top giving general directions which, by the time they filter down, you have all these guys in the middle that jealously guard their own self-importance and their own conceptions of their job duties and they won't dare let someone in some other capacity tread on that, even slightly.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
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It's like people know they are doomed to fail but kept quiet for fear of losing their job.