Nintendo overtakes Sony in Console Wars.

Seems like Nintendo may have done it this time, I may have to get round to buying one... Although the measure they are using is hardly definitive if they are still outselling Sony so strongly it's going to have an effect.

I've still yet to see a "must have" game for the Wii. Obviously somehting with swords or sports is an application for the controller but most of the games I've seen in this vein have rubbish reviews.

Couple of articles here:

http://www.dailytech.com/Nintendo+Overtakes+Sony+in+Market+Value/article7831c.htm

http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7007752736

Darkheart

Well, I bought mine 5 days ago - I've never bought a console within 2 years of launch (I always wait for the games to emerge, and prices to drop). It's fab! I got Play, Zelda and Mercury. The latter is pretty cool, much better than the brief stints I played on other platforms. Will get Paper Mario soon, probably Galaxy, Metroid and the Guitar Hero 3 after that. So "enough" games for me, but hardly over-flowing with choice.

Not only are the rates of sale better, but the Wii sales total is also catching 360 quickly. While I can believe that Wii and PS3 will have different sales curves, and that PS3 may ultimately beat Wii in 2010 or whenever, I'm finding it increasingly more difficult to see that 360 will stay ahead of Wii...

There is no system seller yet. And there won't be in the near future. Online play sucks and the tech is massive overpriced.

I think MySims will be a killer for girls and kids, and maybe res evil 4?

I am waiting till there is a large amount of games to choose from, and some decent online ones before i get mine.

Yeah, I have had a Wii since right after Christmas. I have not been to impressed with it due to the lack of games. My kids enjoy it, we only have a few games, Zelda, Sports (comes with it), and Super Monkey Ball.

I only want to get games that make good use of the controller. I have a 360 and if I want to play normally controlled games, I will get them on my 360 since it has much better graphics and sound.

I can't stand FPS games on other consoles. I feel like a big refrigerator with a gun mounted at the front. :P
Can't understand why people keep complaining on how things are controlled on the Wii. It feels so natural to just point where I want to shoot. Almost as natural as a keyboard and a mouse.

I'm not a nintendo fanboy, but I might sound like one sometimes. ;P

Heh, right, the only FPS games on the Wii that I know of, is Far Cry Vengeance, and Red Steel, and FC: V is rather dirt cheap at $20, may look into that.

Outside of that, it's about plumb time that Nintendo finally gained back the respect that they've lost over the past decade... Sony really thought that they had it made, and Ninty was gonna be on the back burner forever. Not so anymore... Now Nintendo's goal is to surpass Microsoft's units sold by the holidays, from the way things look, that may just happen.

Well its nothing of a miracle considering theres currently hardly any Wii games to go crazy about. But its simple concepts: Create hype to build intrigue and curiosity about the new controls schemes, constantly advertise so everyone sees a commerical about it every 2 hours each day, and make the console half the price of the two competitors and you easily got yourself a winner.

Keep in mind FC: V got utter crap reviews from everyone incase you weren't aware.........

Only decent FPS I've played on the Wii so far has to be Call of Duty3, which imo has the best FPS-style control integration with the Wii remote so far, not to mention it doesn't look half bad compared to the current Wii games out.
(worth mainly a rental though imo, as the thing has no replay value once you beat it, no extras, no multiplayer, nadda)

Anyhow, consoles wars, should only be a couple more months before the Wii overtakes the 360, as I'm actually starting to see the bloody things in store (didn't Nintendo ramp-up production of them recently?) where-as I've not seen one mid-day since I got one back on launch day....

Regarding PS3, I seriously can't see it coming out on top until the price on that thing drops at least half of what it is, Sony needs everyone to purchase that thing to come on top, and if they can't get the likes of average-joe me to purchase it, that ain't going to happen.

I am expecting to see "Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing" on this machine any day now.
Games on the Wii seem to be either absolute gold or absolute trash. Unfortunately, there is a lot of trash, but the fantastic stuff (Rayman!) hits home every time. When the hardware is used properly, it works.

I have a feeling that the Wii's first real "killer app" is going to be a homebrew title.
Those people are trying really hard to get access to the system, and unlike most developers that are inexplicably winning Nintendo's seal of quality, they actually respect the hardware and have the independence necessary to create new ideas that have some danger of not working, or of not being 100% accessible.

PS3 by 2010? By 2010, it will be obsolete by an upcoming XBox² 1440° (With Direct X XI).

I wish Nintendo would release something official, instead of people having to find out by themself how to make games for the Wii.
Some things may be left for paying big corporations, but how about limiting the games to X mb in size, using at most Y kb/s if it's an online game or something similar.
I could even tolerate them selling homebrew games on shoppingchannel and keepinmg 95% of the profit. :P



Don't forget the Wii Lite, now with the power of 2.5 gamecubes. ;)

Ya mean something similar to what Microsoft's doing with XNA?

Exactly. Forgot the name, but something like that. :)

The source is likely screwed up, considering the PS2 is still outselling -everything else- in all regions except maybe the US.


Nothing's changed. Nintendo have another Game Cube on their hands and Sonys PS3 will be selling a good 5 years from now, if not closer to 10.


The raw processing power of ~100,000 PS3s is roughly equal to that of ~20,000,000 PCs, if you use Home as a benchmark.

XBox has a lot to live up to - although since MS has signed up to use the Cell in its next gen, it may just get there.

Of course by then PS3s will be cheap enough to own two of them and use them in tandem (and I think games will start using this ability the near-instant prices come down the first, or maybe second time), thus continuing to kick ass.

With Unity2 you'll be able to publish games for the Wii but as far as it's known today you'll have to go through all the money&licence stuff so technically this is an easy route but for indys too expensive unless they are serious about what they do.

The best thing i've seen so far for doing console stuff is XNA plus an XBox360. $99 a year for the licence to do private stuff and you're ready to go just with the retail version you can buy everywere.

As for the PS3 i would wait till they start releasing nice games like LBP.

> thus continuing to kick ass.

I think you meant to say "Continuing to get their asses kicked", Sony is currently losing the next Gen console sales race. The PS2 has one or two years of life left to it, after that new games will dry up and if Sony does not have it's act together by then it will lose.

Well, I dunno the Wii seems to have more M-rated titles in the first half a year than the GameCube had during its entire lifespan, and you're telling me that the Wii's gonna pull another GameCube? After 8+ million units sold already, and looking to surpass Microsoft by the holidays?

I doubt that Wii's current success will be sustainable in the long term. I expect to see continuing decent sales for the next twelve months or so and then a steep decline.

Both Microsoft's and Sony's consoles will eventually outsell the Wii, gradually increasing the numbers of units sold per month as their software catalogues expand and their prices drop.

I don't know where you pulled your figures out from, but the PS2 is being (and has been) outsold by the DS, the Wii, even the PSP in Japan alone. Then you've got the Wii or DS being top seller in Australia, Canada, USA, etc. Even with limited supply of both DS Lite and Wii hardware, they're still winning by a huge margin. The only thing the PS2 consistently outsells is the PS3.

Yes, nothing's changed except for exceptionally high sales, and being sold out everywhere. Whereas the PS3 can't even outsell the PS2, and it's not a supply problem.

The Cell CPU is almost perfectly designed for getting high numbers in Folding@Home. Almost perfect because the newer ATI and nVidia programmable GPUs are way better than it, cost the same or less (and continue to get cheaper) and plug right in to most PCs.

You've got Quad Core CPUs soon becoming standard on PCs which are also better than Cell at Folding@Home, and impressively loads of other stuff too.

Of course by then, prices of newer ATI and nVidia GPUs will come down, and quad core CPUs will be commonplace, thus continuing to kick ass.

Also, I don't know where you heard that Microsoft would be using Cell in their next system.

That said, I'm sure sales of the PS3 will pick up whenever all the rabid Final Fantasy fans can get their fix on it. I'm sure the 360 will also get some sales when Halo 3 comes out. In the meantime, in spite of the Wii apparently having no clear "console seller" it's doing better than everyone else.

I tried the RT/Render plugin for 3dsmax which does its rendering on your GPU instead of using the CPU and was impressed. I have a A64 3000+ with a 7800GS, took 2 minutes to render a scene on the CPU v's 11 seconds on my GPU.

I'm just waiting for it to do texture baking and be able to render ambient occlusion maps for my shaders.

As for wii, I still see it as a novelty item at an affordable price. The controller is kind of cool but the games are somewhat lacking. That and the lack of proper shaders in this day and age limit the system for me in several areas.

I like the Wii, but it's true that there aren't that many games that are must haves. I prefer my 360 in many ways.

One thing I've got to say is though I'm pretty sure all the Wii games run in 480P ... Red Steel looks miles better in 480P mode with the HD cables than it did using the standard def cables that came with the system. Additionally, the Wii does seem to have shaders but perhaps not very powerful ones indeed. I've seen it do a number of effects that I first saw in Doom 3 such as heat distortion, glass refraction, and what appears to be per pixel lighting. Of course I guess all of that could be done software side, but I've seen it being used in too many games so I'd imagine there's some degree of programmable shader access.

Did the wii not have Gforce3 level hardware? That had the very first shaders IIRC.

The Wii has a custom GPU made by ATI. There aren't many clear specs on what it's capable of, other than it being clocked faster than the Gamecube Flipper chip and being "enhanced" from that chip. Apparently the Flipper had something like a pixel shader on it, so the Wii chip would have at least that.

I've seen plenty of wii games do depth of field effects and refraction and other stuff so it must have some shader functionality.

Regarding Wii's GPU, all I've ever found regarding shaders were that the GPU has 16 shader pipelines, but has a fixed-function design, so you can't just program your own shaders and plug-them to the GPU.

Trying to find that page I read, Google not turning much up atm aside from "he says she says" blogs/editorials.

I mean what I say. Current gen counts for squat if every platform is being outsold by old gen.


Sale rates already started declining back in March. Couple that with Nintendos silence (which likely translates to no fantastic new titles to shout about) and a poor range quickly going stale...

As opposed to a console that has sold a much more steady flow since its launch (likely limited by factory output), actually has a higher average rate of sales since launch compared to some of its competitors, has an enormous range of titles spanning 3 generations and 100+ new titles expected in the next 12 months, includes actual next gen technology (still waiting for the games to catch up) and is upgradable similarly to nVidia's SLI tech. It will hardly be going downhill in the next two years, which can't be said for some of its competition.


I prefer actual statistics from the likes of NPD to the fanboi hype of kotaku etc. My views are subject to change after having a look at their June reports.


Except ~500,000 a month is roughly 2/3rds that of what the PS2 achieved over 6 years ago.


You're saying that ATI and nVidias GPUs are now better than CPUs? Regardless of how you wish to try and make that sound sensible, the PS3 has one of nVidias GPUs in it anyway. Kind of an odd point to bring up really.


Let us assume those 20,000,000 PCs were all quad core running Folding 4 times each. That's still 100,000 PS3s for 5,000,000 PCs. You may be a little over-eager about quad core CPUs, I'd say.

As a side note, what do PCs have to do with consoles?


Nintendo, too.


People love internet on their fridges. Gimmicks are great. The zanier the better.

Kotaku reference those same reports. They don't pull the numbers out of the air. I don't see how you can knock Kotaku when you've failed to reference anything you've said.

Sales numbers are limited by production. Some people still can't find a Wii on the shelf. DS Lites are consistently sold out in Japan. Nintendo can't make them fast enough.

By your gold PS2 standard though, the PS3 is clearly failing.

Also, the Wii has been out for 7 months now, and sold at least 8 million units.

Because your whole argument about Folding@Home scores from the PS3 is entirely meaningless in saying how good a general processor Cell actually is. The fact that GPUs can consistently beat Cell in Folding@Home performance doesn't make them outstanding CPUs to run something like Windows on or even necessarily better at being a CPU than Cell tries to be. I'm just pointing out that Folding@Home is a benchmark that suits the way Cell works, but even considering how good it should be at it, Cell's performance isn't that outstanding either.

Cell is a terrible general purpose processor, by design in fact, and comparing it to common PC CPUs as you did, based on a single benchmark metric isn't exactly fair when it's more than likely a low-end Intel Core chip beats the pants off of Cell in most other benchmarks and otherwise averages overall better performance. FYI the PS3 performance is weighted by Folding@Home on the basis of the calculations it is capable of performing. PCs may seem slower, but they are capable of more complex calculations that Cell and GPUs don't do. Relatively the PC can run some calculations faster than Cell does too.

You actually brought up this comparison, not me. I think you may be a little flattering with your figures there too, every PS3 is standard whereas there are loads of different specced PCs contributing.

So where's the proof?

So the PS3's gimmicks, Blu-Ray and that motion sensing controller aren't zany enough?

I still haven't gotten my Wii..erm...I mean my son a Wii yet...

I'm waiting for them to come in at the BX (the on base military department store). I may have to break down and buy it off-base. :(

Right, the announcement of WiiWare to develop games make me appreciate my Wii purchase even more... I always wanted to share my own talents on that console, and hope that would prove worthy.

I think WiiWare may just increase sales even further and possibly even open up new markets for Wii. I know for sure that I'll be buying a Wii more sooner than later because of this....

Sure, and WiiWare looks to be cheaper than XNA, hopefully.

This leads to me wondering why Sony doesn't want to revive the Net Yaroze idea? I mean, now that Microsoft and Nintendo have ways for you to develop games, Sony should go back to some old roots here. I know that designing a game on Blu-Ray can be somewhat pricey, too. I'm guessing that would be at least a $3K machine if Sony were to ever revive that with Blu-Ray writing technology. Either that, or maybe revive the original Net Yaroze to have games that'll run on all three consoles of the PS line, just as long as they can guarantee compatibility on all three consoles.

Well you do have Linux on the PS3. They could always spend a bit of time opening up the hardware there, which would at least improve things for homebrew games, SDL ports, etc.

They're also meant to have their own XBox Live type interface, so you could download games through that rather than needing Blu-Ray mastering done.

I think probably the architecture of the system would cause more problems than anything though, unless Sony have a great compiler that can automatically parallelize code for the SPUs, get around the lack of OOE and minimise branching, it's likely more careful coding than most indies are capable of or would find affordable. I believe they've done a lot of good work recently with their toolkits though, so things may have changed.

Has anyone even tried running BMax on PS3 Linux? How does that go for you, knowing the hardware that the PS3 uses?

There's no PPC Linux version of Max, so nobody could even try it.

If only bcc were opensourced too.


I'll hit you up with my findings after the June report. Kotaku spin their numbers in much the same way MS tried to make Vista look good.


All current gen is failing miserably compared to previous gen. PS3 only has leverage over its direct competitors for being a long term product which is questionable, but not imporrsible for the 360 too.


Actually the numbers released were based on the data collected, not the presumed data collected.


That's some lovely heresay there. Shame there's no PCs using the Cell to benchmark against.


Not one of my brightest moments =]


Well, duh. I didn't just pull random numbers out of thin air though. ...


... <sigh> That will require me to go digging for stuff I read and didn't bookmark. You'll just have to wait for that. Maybe after the w/e...


What other gimmicks are we talking about? At least the motion sensing is part of an ACTUAL controller. BD has proven itself to not be just a gimmick. Um, wait, it's a storage medium, how is that a gimmick again?


Linux = free development?


Everything is open. There are some libs that need conversion to Cell, which isn't Sonys fault and the GPU is closed, which is nVidia's fault. Opening the GPU is obviously the biggest step... but with nVidias policies that won't be happenning until THEY release Cell drivers, which could be never.

Linux runs on the PS3 virtualised, so the hardware isn't exactly open. Sony control what bits of the hardware you really get to see or access through Linux by giving you a controlled representation of what hardware is available, as opposed to what's really there. You do at least get good access to Cell and the SPEs.

That's not to say performance is bad either (think Parallels running Windows speed.) Video is unfortunately unaccelerated as you mentioned, and it's probably the biggest drawback.

On Folding@Home, you could always read up about it. Cell can't do all the calculations the PC does or at least can't do them very fast. FLOPS numbers are actually derived based on how quickly the client completes working units. Since the PS3 doesn't do all the possible working units (it only does the ones it's really good at) the FLOPS numbers are weighted in the PS3s favour. The PC numbers may look worse than they are because Folding will run on real low end PCs, and any interruptions to the processing (ie. actually using your PC) will make the FLOPS from the PC be lower than they actually are. Since Folding doesn't give peak results, and the PS3 processes less types of work units than the PC, the benchmark comparison between the two, even WITHIN just Folding isn't fair.

I'm not going to bother arguing anything else with you, since I've provided enough links with what I've said for anyone else to make fair judgement on it. If you think for example Kotaku has some magic way to spin hardware sales numbers directly from other sources, I doubt any of the other multiple sources I can find agreeing with me are going to change your mind.

I have a Wii, but I'm not opposed to actually owning either of the other systems, even if I'm rather skeptical of the hype. If one of them ends up having the bulk of the good games, I'll go with that.

I don't have a Wii, yet, but me... I mean my kids may well end up having one at christmas. The new Harry Potter release where you cast different spells with the Wii wand smacks of a killer app...... just from the fun factor.

I wanted to get a wii just to play with the controller, but couldn't justify the price when there were no games I was interested in. Nothings changed today, only I'm less interested now since I got to play with it a few times.

I like to have my cake and eat it, which means cool controller, great gameplay and modern pixel shader graphics. Wii can only ever get two of those, in a year or so if the price drops $100 I'll seriously consider getting one, and would buy one before a PS3 any day.

But Vista does LOOK good!

Both the WiiMote and Nunchuk are actual controllers. You use them to control things.

Yes. Too bad it sucks.

Whether the system devices are virtualised or not, if the hypervisor grants full access over those devices it's still open. The hypervisor's biggest job is preventing access to retail PS3 media and the PS3 OS partition. So far as Linux is concerned, you have full reign. As I said the only device you are barred access from is the GPU and that is the work of nVidia (excepting of course Sony's oblgation to bar access to it via the hypervisor). Actually prior to firmware 1.80 GPU was open too - just left undocumented. The recent leak of Sonys SDK had people find the way to accessing it, but until another hole in the hypervisor can be made it's no longer much good to anyone (all games using it would rely on people not having updated to 1.80 or later).


I'd still use the words 'try to'. As with anything, visual beauty is open to personal preferences. =]


Good for you. Pat yourself on the back. Yes, a remote control is still a controller. Hence the word 'control' in its name.

I don't give a stuff about Folding on my console I just want to play some good games that are very different from PC games , typically that means (at least going on my collection):

Fighting Games
Shoot-em-ups
Puzzle games
Sports- Games

So far the only console that seems to have a good variety of these games is the PS3 but I just can't justifiy dropping nearly £400+ on a games console and then you've got games + extras.

IMHO the Wii or Xbox 360 are at the upper limit I'd pay for a console given the limited lifespan they have.

Darkheart