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Some people (like lazlow on the main page : P) seem to think that the PS3's outrageous price is justified by it's specs, and other things. Well, you be the judge. But the following certainly opened up my eyes. I would ask though, that you don't just regard this as fanboy babble, as a 600$ purchase (unless you want the 500$ one, which by the way, has no HDMI support, smaller hard drive, and no memory card support, so no PS2/1 game saves for you) is not something most people can just shell out at random.



I don't pretend to be an expert on matters technical, but this reader Crimson Angelus sounds like he knows what he's talking about (note this was written before E3 2006 started):

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At this year's E3 (or thereabouts) Sony proclaimed that their processor could achieve 200GFLOPS! However, according to IBM's white paper, only 155.5 GFLOPS was actually achieved (Table 4). BUT, IBM's tests used all 8 SPEs. The PS3 will only use 7 SPE's, due to manufacturing yield issues.

The efficiency of the Cell is 75.9% (Table 4), with of a theoretical peak of 201GFLOPs (Figure 5)--running 8 SPEs at 25.12GFLOPS apiece (Table 2). Similarly, the theoretical peak for the PS3's processor will be 176GFLOPS, using 7 SPEs at 25.12GFLOPS apiece. Assuming the same 75.9% effieciency, we could easily interpolate the PS3's Cell to be capable of 133.6GFLOPS.

The take home message is that with the PS3 being cabable of 133.6 GFLOPS and the Xbox 360 being capable of 115.2 GFLOPS, the PS3 is not nearly as far ahead of the Xbox 360 as we were lead to believe. we should expect relatively similar power coming from both consoles, processor power, and ease of programming all considered.

Not to mention that one of the SPE's in the PS3 are reserved for the OS and the bottlenecking of the data transfer between the SPE's and the on board memory. I see the 360 hand in hand with a gaming Revolution taking home this next round at least, if not the whole cake over time.

He's working off of this data . Sony has been known in the past to over-promise and under-deliver.



This developer all but confirms that, and even confirms that the 360's GPU (not to be confused with CPU) is superior to the PS3's.

Technical Director Magnus Högdahl (working on The Darkness for PS3 and 360, also worked on the graphically stunning Chronicles of Riddick for Xbox):

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The PS3 will have a content size advantage with blu-ray and a CPU advantage for titles that are able to utilize a lot of the SPUs. The Xbox360 has a slight GPU advantage and its general purpose triple-core CPU is relatively easy to utilize compared to SPUs. I expect that it will be near impossible to tell Xbox360 and PS3 screenshots apart.

Also, Sony recently announced that their controller would have some motion sensing capabilities. While cool for some games, it's mostly just an optional tilt sensor. It's not quite as sophisticated as Nintendo's Wii controller. IGN sheds some light with a comparison between the two.

http://revolution.ign.com/articles/705/705870p1.html



Now I could bore you with screenshots upon screenshots to support this. But, If you haven't already come to this conclusion, let's just say the 360 is definately not lacking in graphical power.

http://www.joystiq.com/media/2006/05/motogp1.jpg




Soooo, I hope I enlightened some gamers with this topic. The main reason I would assume the PS3's price is so high is because of it's built in expensive Bluray player.

If you really want a Bluray player (which you pretty much do not need if you don't have an HDTV) with a gaming system, or REALLY, TRULY think FF XIII is worth 660$, then this system is for you. Otherwise... well you get the picture.

That's great, but I wouldn't justify shelling out the equivalent of a month's worth of rent by it being slightly faster than other consoles, having a controller with features topped by the... *sigh*... by the Wii..., and with a lesser GPU.

I'm not a big console fan, in fact the most recent console I own is a PSX. Sony is, admittedly, what I'd support, but in this case I think they're beefing up the price a bit too much. What is it that justifies, not that excuses, the price? A beefy price tag means less sales as people wait for the prices to drop, or as non-loyal gamers settle on another console because they don't have the money for it.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Look, I don't care about obscure specs differences, I don't care about Crimson Angelus, and I don't care about the new controller, and I don't care about your inexplicable bias against the PS3 or your fandom for the XBox 360. One thing I do understand is numbers, and I'm not even talking about hardware specs.

Merill-Lynch, one of the world's premier investment firms, estimated the PS3's per-unit production cost to be between $850 and $900. The reason the PS3 costs so much is because it would be a financial blunder to price it too low. Still, if the PS3 wants to succeed then it needs compelling software, which I believe it can get. We can only wait and see, but I still think that Microsoft's hype machine that they've been thriving on is firmly in third place right now. This holiday season is going to be one of the hugest and most important in the history of the video games industry. We should stop these silly arguments.

Oh, and please spell my name right. laszlow. Is that so difficult? GAH!



*laszlow has been studying for difficult exams all week and is extremely irritable, and would like to blame the makers of Red Bull and Rockstar for any extreme acts of rudeness while posting on this message board.

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this is a blog mostly about comics and videogames
END SPOILER

Ok, I get you don't care that the PS3 has an inferior GPU when to compared to the 360, and has only somewhat better CPU, yet has a 200$ price difference.

The reason why the analyist depicted the PS3 price being so high, is simply like I said. The Bluray player. Not because of amazing graphics or gameplay. But because of a new disc format.

And Silverlance, I'm guessing you misunderstood the point of my topic.

Quote (Phunbaba @ 10th May 2006 22:08)

And Silverlance, I'm guessing you misunderstood the point of my topic.

No, no, I understood quite well. It doesn't mean I have to agree with your point of view, or can't formulate an opinion of my own, though.

I'm just saying what I think; and I think while the price can be excused by the points you've raised, it has yet to be justified. And even if it were justified, that doesn't mean it's any more worth paying its price tag at the moment...

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

No, Silverlance read my topic.

I'm not trying to excuse the price >_>.

Look at it this way. Nintendo pledged some sort of revolution but so far all they've gave us is, when you look through all the pretty distractions, a load of pish.* Ability and power matters for crap. What does matter, is that PS3 ironically levels the playing field. Sony can afford their console to get the year or so's breathing space for developers to get used to the system and start tapping the potential, just as the big guns should start arriving.

What does 360 offer that PS3 does not? Halo? Whoo, big shock. Oblivion? I have a PC you know, if I, you know, actually cared about Oblivion...

The controller being weaker is a good thing. It means that gamers don't need to get used to a whole new level of complexity and games don't need tilt. Plus, anyone ever considered that it might very well just be a dreadful coincidence the Wii and PS3 have the same sort of innovation? Like, a week after they start work, Nintendo says 'Lol Wii controller wireless'.

And, uh... What the hell graphics are they meant to be? That's not very good. That's frankly crap. Perhaps the shot is bad but everything there looks very shoddy. Honestly, though, it was a given Graphics were all going to look the same. And who disputes that it's capable of good graphics? Not me. What I dispute is, that it's capable of truly offering me anything truly different from PS3.

And it's not FF13. It's MGS4, MGS3, FF7, and every other game I already have for playstation/playstation 2 in addition to FF13 and a few other games of intrest that shall emerge in the future.

I don't think the £300 I'd pay for a 360 is worth it. But the £350 or so I'd pay for a PS3 would be. The XBox CORE system costs almost $400 here.200.00 GBP to 371.158 USD according to XE. The one that's any use costs $520... Or £280, to be correct.

PS3, when it arrives, will cost us near £350 for the proper version. So stop bleating about price in advance, people. There's always someone worse off than you, and to make matters worse, they're not as such worse off. You see, I don't drink, don't smoke, and have in the past dropped that much on airsoft stuff. What's to stop me with PS3? If I save now... hell, screw saving, I can buy it now. It's not a rip-off. It's a difference of a whole £50 or so. Two games. Just beacuse in dollars it looks closer to $100 doesn't change the fact it's not really that much of a difference.

So, in hindsight, bleat about price, but remember the UK.



*American English: Wii.

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"Only the dead have seen the end of their quotes being misattributed to Plato."
-George Santayana

"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here..."
-Abraham Lincoln, prior to the discovery of Irony.

So what you're saying is that PS3 is worth the high cost based on future prospects and some psychological reasoning that since British pounds are larger units than American dollars, so the pricing looks better?

Silverlance covered the point pretty well.

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That's great, but I wouldn't justify shelling out the equivalent of a month's worth of rent by it being slightly faster than other consoles, having a controller with features topped by the... *sigh*... by the Wii..., and with a lesser GPU.

I'll go a step further. I won't justify the cost of rent for a game system that costs more than the TV I'm playing it on. I don't need a Blu-ray DVD player, which is the major justification for the high cost. The Blu-ray is still a high-class early-adopter technology that most people simply do not ever buy until years after.

Maybe when I shell out some 2000 bucks for a TV that will take advantage of the Blu-ray, I'll get the PS3 and benefit from the dual-use nature of the media center. Until then, I have mortgages to pay off.

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Visions of Peace - Four Generals, One Empire, and the Returners caught in the middle.

I feel I have to take my party line here. I don't think any of the consoles are worth the cost. I think the Wii is closest. But cost aside, if I were to buy any of them, which I am not, it would still be the PS3. It has more of the games I would want to play, and that justifies the cost. I'm not someone who has to fall back on processing power per dollar to make my decision.

The companies, except maybe Nintendo, are not aiming for the target market that is represented by most of these forums. Many of us who could afford it will decide they have something better to do with their money - I never have bought anything newer than a PSX, and I have that and an N64 simply because they were gifts. Others who would need to scrape hard to get the money will simply wait until the cost comes down. Others will have it given to them as an extravagant present. But the people who want one for whatever reason will still get one and will justify it for their own reasons, not the ones in this thread.

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

I was figuring they were going to go high, but I certainly wasn't expecting numbers in the six hundreds. I don't care about the reasons, the simple truth is I aint gonna pay six hundred bucks for anything that doesn't offer sexual favors.

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Arts

Farts

Twarts

Quote (Elessar @ 11th May 2006 16:46)

So what you're saying is that PS3 is worth the high cost based on future prospects and some psychological reasoning that since British pounds are larger units than American dollars, so the pricing looks better?

Silverlance covered the point pretty well.

Quote

That's great, but I wouldn't justify shelling out the equivalent of a month's worth of rent by it being slightly faster than other consoles, having a controller with features topped by the... *sigh*... by the Wii..., and with a lesser GPU.

I'll go a step further. I won't justify the cost of rent for a game system that costs more than the TV I'm playing it on. I don't need a Blu-ray DVD player, which is the major justification for the high cost. The Blu-ray is still a high-class early-adopter technology that most people simply do not ever buy until years after.

Maybe when I shell out some 2000 bucks for a TV that will take advantage of the Blu-ray, I'll get the PS3 and benefit from the dual-use nature of the media center. Until then, I have mortgages to pay off.

Well, not quite, just saying it's not as such expensive by my POV. And remember, I'm a Scotsman. It's how I justify it for my closed little world, and also, to adress the plight of the poor UK gamer who spends up to 20% more than the average American gamer for some 17.5%VAT reason...

I can see why it's a sore spot for many people though. It's not as such worth it straight away, but for Sony, it is. They're making a beachead, and establishing their next gen DVD format, as well as allowing familiarisation so that when the console truly arrives in mid 2007, there's a good chance there's a lot to offer by the time people can buy it.

It's justified by potential and the fact it will grow cheaper as that potential is tapped, IMo, but for some, they're priced out of the market entirely if they cannot spend patience as well as money.



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"Only the dead have seen the end of their quotes being misattributed to Plato."
-George Santayana

"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here..."
-Abraham Lincoln, prior to the discovery of Irony.

PS3, arriving the year I leave school...
Probably by the time I get out of University and have a job the sony people will probably try out the "Silver PS2" tactic where they make some Ps3's a different colour, more expensive, and the only noticeable difference between the "Silver's" and the normal's is that they tend to break more easilly.
Then, we will be arguing about how worth it those are.
But, I don't think the PS3 will be worth it, even if it's only because I doubt it would be compatable with my ancient brute of a (vidio game use only) TV that survived a thunder storm that fried the 'new' tv at the time, made it so that we had free electricity until our meter was fixed and almost set out house on fire.


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A guy goes into a bar and gets into an argument about whether or not he should show his I.d. He leaves saying:

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Real Life The Webcomic:
Right, fine. Cause in three months when I turn 21, I'll be mature enough to drink a SODA in here

Acorrding to the comic, this actually happened.

Quote (Del S @ 11th May 2006 09:26)

PS3, when it arrives, will cost us near £350 for the proper version.

Has there been official word on the UK price? I'd be very surprised if $500/600 US translated into as little as £350 here given that we continue to pay enormously over the odds for console hardware. The PSP, for instance, appears to be selling at pretty much a $1=£1 ratio.

This whole thing makes me sad. One on level, yeah, of course it should be about the games. It should always be about the games. On another level, is it right that, based on essentially publisher support alone, one console manufacturer can enjoy a virtual monopoly in spite of producing barely superior hardware at a significantly larger cost?

I'm not excited by Blu-Ray either, and I'm a bit upset that the PS3 is designed to be a pawn in Betamax War II. I'd be very surprised if you really need Blu-Ray for games, particularly with a built in hard drive on all versions allowing the capacity to offload extra compressed media. I've yet to find a PC game shipping on more than one DVD, including Oblivion, and is swapping discs on consoles really such a hardship now? Nobody seemed to care when a three-disc FF7 steamrolled over everything Nintendo had to offer on fast-loading cartridges.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not particularly excited by the Wii or 360 either. I probably won't buy any of them until there's a game I decide I simply must play that I can't get for the PC. (And I doubt FF13 is going to be that game, somehow, considering FF10 has been sitting unplayed on my shelf for a year and a half.) It's just especially disappointing to see that all Sony is really offering, from my perspective, is third party support (fantastic, but you know it's not really anything special other than throwing money at the publishers, and publishers' desire to be affiliated with the successful brand), slightly more power and a controller which continues to keep a dated, pre-analogue base design and cram yet more features everyone else has already done into its little frame.

Quote (Tiddles @ 13th May 2006 09:37)

I'd be very surprised if you really need Blu-Ray for games, particularly with a built in hard drive on all versions allowing the capacity to offload extra compressed media. I've yet to find a PC game shipping on more than one DVD, including Oblivion, and is swapping discs on consoles really such a hardship now? Nobody seemed to care when a three-disc FF7 steamrolled over everything Nintendo had to offer on fast-loading cartridges.

Actually it wouldn't be very possible to offload the extra weight of decompressing media to the HD since that would involve repetitive read/write operations on what's a very slow medium. Ever had your older PCs making that grinding HD sound when you try to open a large website or when playing a beefy game? It's not always because it's loading resources - it's because it's out of physical RAM and has to offload to the HD (virtual memory - it swaps least-recently accessed regions in RAM to your HD.)

Here's a rather dated article describing how that used to work: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question684.htm

However you're not entirely wrong - this could be done in hardware by designing the GPU to be able to work with compressed textures, for instance.

Totally agreed on the disk-swapping bit. There was some kind of feeling of pride whenever I'd see "Insert Disk x" after a particularly intense event in an RPG. On the other hand some games really screwed up badly, like Riven (where changing disks took place nearly every ten minutes.) All things considered, it was barely a bother.

The cost of bigger and better graphics rises. Meanwhile, games' core mechanics remain the same. Someday someone'll release a $50 console with SNES-like capabilities and games only $2.50-7.50. That person will be rich.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Yeah, I know what Virtual Memory is.

Never known a hard disk to actually be slower than optical media though - hence all PC games in recent history doing a mandatory full install and only requiring the disc for authentication thereafter. Sure it'd be intensive to do it on the fly, but are initial load times now also forbidden on consoles? Or is Blu-Ray supposed to be faster than a hard disk now? THAT would make me interested.

Oh, in that sense. I thought you meant to preload content on the fly to the HD as it was needed, as in substitute RAM for HD space. As opposed to essentially installing the game on the HD. My bad. >"<

This would make console much more like PCs, not like they aren't just inches away from being such already...

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Mmmmm... munitions chips... make the machine tastier.

I wont be getting a ps3 , ff13 dont even look fun,its a ffVIIAC rip. PS: iam no fanboy,i typed this on my PSP

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"He owes allegiance to no one, and will do anything for money. He comes and goes like the wind..."

Maybe we should compare the controllers of the consoles and see which is better that way? Yes that's definately the ultimate method of finding out which one is best, OK, here we go...

Wii controller: The Wii controller is a far more useful weapon than any. If your mate or 'evil adversary' starts beating you at a Nintendo game over and over again, you're in the perfect position to wrap that wire right round their neck. That'll teach 'em for being better than you at gaming.

Alternatively, they could be used as some rather unique nun-chucks. Who would see that coming? Except someone as suspicious as me of course.

PS3 controller: And now the PS3 controller is no longer in the shape of a boomerang, it's not going to be half the weapon it could have been... such a waste.

Come on Sony, you're not putting a lot of effort in here are you? Tut tut.

Xbox 360 controller: It's big, it's heavy, 'nuff said. "Yep, this man was definately murdered with a Xbox 360 controller, has all the usual signs. These kids today I tells ya, and with controllers like that, no one can stop them."
I can see it now.

Still, I think that clears it up, the Wii wins it seems. Yikes, I didn't see that coming. And close second to Xbox 360. Sony goes bankrupt. Too bad.

This post has been edited by fatman on 16th May 2006 16:50

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'Let that be a lesson to all oppressive vegetable sellers.'

Whether or not you think the PS3's price is justified has nothing to do with the specs. The Sony fans think it's justified because it cost even more to make and because they believe that the PS3 will have what they're looking for, mostly in terms of software. The people who don't want a PS3 because they can't afford one and are slightly miffed about that fact are eager to say that the price isn't justified because it means that they can't afford one because Sony is dumb, not because they're poor. The people who don't want a PS3 because they're not Sony fans would never admit that the PS3 could possibly have anything significant on the other systems, anyway, so there's no way a specs comparison could justify the price to them--if there's no real difference between the power of the systems or the software that will be made available on them, the cheaper one wins.

I wish the PS3 were cheaper. I think it's silly to accuse Sony of quoting an "unjustified" price when they're already selling at a loss. I'm still going to buy a PS3, so I guess I fall into the first category I listed above. But at least I admit that I belong to one of those categories.

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Veni, vidi, dormivi.

nooooooo i loved the ps2 but the ps3 coming onto market for 600 dollars what are they thinking it can not cost moren than 300 dollars to create the graphics are good i will tell that, and the controller looks funkycool wich is pretty sweet but i do not think that because of what they have added they get to jack up the price that high what are they thinking i can not find a single person in my school that told me they are willing to pay 600 dollars for a system just to be able to play games on because at the same time if you shell out 600 dollars then buying games and other parts like controllers and games you may end up around 800 dollars in the hole that is so not cool.

sony i pity your horrible marketing skills

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Why is it that rpg's are now a dying breed?

It probably really does cost more than that to make. It's common for console hardware manufacturers to sell at a loss early in a console's life.

The question is whether Sony chose a good point on the scale of price versus capability. Based on past history, I'd say no, but this is the first time such an adventure in pricing has carried the Sony Playstation brand name.

An update on UK pricing: GameStation is listing the 60GB version for pre-order at £425, with the 20GB version "TBC".

Quote (Tiddles @ 18th May 2006 19:27)

An update on UK pricing: GameStation is listing the 60GB version for pre-order at £425, with the 20GB version "TBC".

And in funny money, folks, that's $800. US. Not Canadian.

I wonder if I can still buy that F-22...

If I recall right, someone estimated that it costs sony almost $1000 per unit. After we knock 17.5% off the UK price for VAT we have about £350. Still totally worth it, that's paying for our high quality police, fine NHS, intellegent allocation of military funds, government research, and the wages of our fine hardworking representatives in Parliament!



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"Only the dead have seen the end of their quotes being misattributed to Plato."
-George Santayana

"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here..."
-Abraham Lincoln, prior to the discovery of Irony.

OK, I figure, the more of these games you want to play, the more the price is justified.

Unreal Tournament 2007, Devil May Cry 4, Metal Gear Solid 4, Tekken 6,
GTA 6, Final Fantasy 13, Resident Evil 5, Armored Core 4, etc, etc.

As you may have guessed, I really want to play all of the above, thus the price is justified, simple as that. Maybe some of them will be a let down, but all of them? Not a chance.

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'Let that be a lesson to all oppressive vegetable sellers.'

To those who feel the price is justified for certain games: OK, fair enough; it's your call.

What I wonder, purely from a point of personal interest, is where you would draw the line? At an extreme, I think it's safe in most cases to say you wouldn't pay $10,000 for the console regardless of software. So I'd be interested to know at what point a price is considered "justified".

Personally, if I wanted those eight games for sure, and they were all exclusive to the platform, I might be tempted to pay £425. I wouldn't have said so two years ago as an impoverished student, but with a little disposable income as I have now I'd be a little more open to the prospect. I'd still be inclined to wait until a few of them are out, as by then there'd almost certainly have been a price drop - as much as die hard fans support the PS3, I think its price will be a tough proposition for the many more casual gamers who have contributed to Sony's success (and post-Christmas price drops are fairly common anyway).

It's a big "if" in my case, because I only care about two of them: UT2007, which I'll play on PC, and GTA4, which will be released simultaneously on the 360, almost certainly with a PC release to follow. But they were exclusives... well, I'd have to think about it.

In my case, it'd be a function of income vs need. You NEVER "need" a console, of course, short of entertainement. And personally, I have a PC, and I'm not caught up in this stupid "OMG TEIHS GAEM SI NOT ONLIEN IT SUX" fad. So in other words... I wouldn't actually pay a cent to get a new console. I have everything I need.

"Back then," when I was younger, I got systems based on my needs. Nintendo, then a GB (since it's portable and I used to go places often as a kid - camping, Vancouver, etc..), then an SNES (because Nintendo games started dwindling), then an N64 (for the same reasons), and then a PSX (because the N64's game selection was too crappy to live with; fair trade, IMO ;P )

I never paid more than ~$200 for a system, and I'm not about to start shelling out $600 for a PS3 just "because." $200 is my limit, and I think it's ridiculous that the console gaming market can't simply focus on making better use of their current hardware instead of trying to get ahold of bigger, better, costlier hardware so the football I'm throwing can be JUST a wee bit rounder, or the fireball I'm summoning into being can light up my character's nipple piercings (which, might I add, have a poly-count in the 5 digits! AND are taken into account when calculating what echos from that fireball's explosion bounce off of!) Sure, it's flashier. But the game isn't more fun than the previous system's games were, yet I'm paying double for it now?

I think there's a market for lower-end specs at a much more affordable price. Hell, take the GBA for instance - it might be nearing its end what with Nintendo's new generation of handhelds, but it had a damned good run and it was 2D. 2D!

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."