When it comes to gaming, I’m not one of those guys (nor have I ever been) who is particularly loyal to any one single manufacturer. I buy what I like, regardless of who makes it. You could say in regards to specific gaming brands, I’m “gaming agnostic” — I own a PlayStation 3, an Xbox 360, and a Nintendo Wii. This is the disclaimer one has to give if a person plans on saying anything for or against a gaming company — and even then, most public responses will quickly spiral into a pile of fanboy mudslinging.
Sony’s PlayStation 3 is a powerful piece of hardware. In fact, despite belonging to the same generation of consoles, it could be as much as 10x as powerful as the Nintendo Wii. The PS3 plays Blu-Ray movies, has better graphics, and more online games than the Wii, but what it doesn’t have is that silly little Wiimote, the controller that launched a thousand “waggily” mini-games (and broke almost as many flat screen televisions …) To date, the Nintendo Wii (which originally sold for $249 and now sells for $199) has outsold the PS3 in the US two to one (I originally paid $599 for mine).
So what’s a console maker who is being outsold by the Wii to do? The answer is, imitate the Wii.
This week Sony introduced the “PlayStation Move”, their answer to the Wii. For gamers such as myself who already own a PlayStation 3, getting “Moving” will cost you/us. At a minimum you’ll need a PlayStation Eye Camera ($39.99) and a Move controller ($49.99). Realistically you’ll also need the PlayStation Move Navigation Controller ($29.99), Sony’s answer to the Wiichuck.
That’s $120 without a game. Sony plans to offer a bundle that contains one Move controller, the PlayStation Eye, and a game (Sports Champions, which sounds a lot like Wii Sports) for $99.99. You’ll still need to drop another $30 for the Navigation controller, which puts the total back up to $140.
Keep in mind this is all for one player. If you wanted to go nuts and get four sets of controllers (the maximum the console supports), you’re looking at $320 in controllers and another $40 for the camera. Note that you wouldn’t be able to charge all those devices at once via the PS3’s 2 or 4 (depending on the model) USB ports. Fortunately Sony also plans on offering a charging station — another $30 (or $120 in our four controller scenario).
Or, you know, you could just go buy a Nintendo Wii …
ya well ps3 and 360 are trying to gather the idiot casual gamer market not understanding most HURRAH CHICKEN SHOOTwii owners have it in a closet or attic by now.
Odd… I posted pretty much the exact same thing on someone else’s thread. Sony FTW!
The thing that worries me with the trend of doing me-too gimmicks is that they end up being actually widely adopted by game makers. I couldn’t care less about Project Natal/Kinect and it would suck if it became the standard for 360 games.
On the other hand, who knows if it won’t be the opposite results for both Kinect and PS Move — that, aside from Microsoft and Sony’s games using the technologies, third party developers/publishers just won’t use them. See such Nintendo gimmicks as the GBA-GameCube connectivity (used only for a handful of games, like the GCN port of Sonic Adventure 2 and Zelda: Four Swords) and the eReader…
That’s one of the problems with introducing new (and expensive) hardware later in a console’s life cycle. Many people won’t invest in the hardware until there are several games that support it, and most third party game developers simply can’t afford to create dedicated games for new hardware before the user base is there. Without some stellar first party games to get these things flying off the shelves, they will die in obscurity and live on in collectors’ closets and trivia books. This is exactly what happened with the PS2 hard drive setup. I “think” only one game officially supported it. If they hadn’t bundled it with th ethernet adapter, I’ll bet they wouldn’t have sold a fraction of what they actually did.
The only reason Microsoft didn’t get my ire this round is because I haven’t read enough about their system (Kinect, is it?) to fully blast it. I just think the cost of admission is too high on Sony’s. $140 for the hardware for one person plus another $60 for a game is too much for a gimmick — plus, anyone with friends or more than one kid is going to end up buying two or more sets.
Kinect is rumored to be 150 and 60 for games.
I don’t have a problem with 150. I’d rather it be 100, but 150 isn’t crazy to me. It’s not like you’re buying a Wiimote or a Movemote, if it ends up doing all the things it’s supposed to do, it’s friggin bananas.
But 60 dollars for the games they’ve showed so far? The vast majority of them looked like nothing but Xbox Live arcade games. They should be 20 bucks at the most, charging 60 would be idiotic. Hell, you should get all those games bundled with the thing. One of the games was Joy Ride and that was announced at last year’s E3 as an arcade game, they never released it, added in Kinect controls and are now trying to sell it as a full game.
The third party games that were showed looked way better, but the Microsoft games were nothing but Live arcade rip offs of Wii games.
“That’s one of the problems with introducing new (and expensive) hardware later in a console’s life cycle. Many people won’t invest in the hardware until there are several games that support it, and most third party game developers simply can’t afford to create dedicated games for new hardware before the user base is there.”
See also: Intellivoice (approx. $100, 5 games supported), The Voice Of Odyssey2 (approx. $150, 9 games supported).