Be Excellent To Each Other

Full numbers here. They come from Chart-Track and are complete as of 31st Jan 2009.

For the UK:
Wii - launched Dec '06 - 4.9 million
360 - Dec '05 - 3.2 million
PS3 - Mar '07 - 1.9 million

In terms of sales/month that gives us:
Wii - 188k
360 - 84k
PS3 - 83k

The PS3 and 360 figures are a lot closer together than I would have thought, and the Wii one is even higher than I would have thought, comparatively. I suppose it's easy to forget the three console's launch dates span almost a year and a half.

I rarely buy from Game anymore, always seem a little more expensive than Gamestation (and Online, obv).

These aren't GAME's figures, they are Chart-Tracks across-all-retailers figures. They just happen to have been released in GAME's interim annual report.

In that case I'm calling bullshit on the PS3 figures.

My reason being at first I thought it was GAMEs own figures so I could understand Timmys Mum heading there to buy the shit stuff enmass.

I am surprised about those 360/PS3 features, I must say.

How come? PS3 has been outselling the 360 for ages.

Not in my house.

I'd love to own a PS3. If I could afford/justify a purchase, obv.

I'm not really surprised by the PS3 sales figures, the Playstation 1+2 built up a huge following with the masses who then just bought a PS3 as a matter of course. It's a downward trend for Playstation that I reckon will see the PS4 doing even worse. The Wii I think might as well be compared to the sales of Monopoly, Twister and exercise bikes.

It did for a while, the 360's been ahead constantly in the UK for a long time, basically since the last price cut.

For instance, the latest UK weekly figures. (Last year in brackets)

Xbox 360 - 15,287 (20,564)
PlayStation 3 - 9,774 (21,456)

And Europe

Xbox 360 - 70,769 (76,710)
PlayStation 3 - 59,978 (122,071)

It's funny how the Wii has such high sales but the games just never sell. At least not from my stall. It seems people are just happy to have a Wii and Wii Sports. I sell lots of 360 games and not many PS3. So I would have expected the 360 to be miles ahead of PS3.

It's a shame MS are being so childish about the Blu Ray situation. I know 3 people who only bought a ps3 for the BR playback skillz. If MS bit the bullet and released a Blu Ray drive for the 360, they'd make a mint

How much would it cost if they did though? Blu-Ray players still seem quite expensive, is that because they are just expensive to make or because Sony charge some kind of licensing fee?

I bought an internal Blu Ray drive (reader only) for my VMC machine for £60. I suppose Sony would make it very difficult for MS to do it though, maybe even block it. Shame really.

They won't do it because MS want the disc format to die. They want to push digital as much as they can.

I wouldn't mind games being delivered electronically, as long as I had a 1TB drive min. But movies... I like owning them and having the discs.

I'm the opposite. I'd be quite happy to download and watch a film, but like owning games. TV boxsets are something different again, though.

It's funny, I don't even keep DVDs in their boxes. I have a mahoosive CD wallet under the TV with all my discs in (and another one for games). Messing about with discs for games bugs me. I guess I got used to PC gaming *hides from JC*

Yeah, you don't need discs to play Flash games.

*chuckles* Oh you scamp.

I'm not sure I've ever bought a film on DVD. They're usually too expensive for something I'm going to watch once then hoard away on a shelf for years, before having a clean-out and chucking the damned thing away.

And I would only download a film if it was mine to keep and re-download if necessary. I'm not going to pay for a rental, wait for it to download, have it take up precious hard drive space and then only have a limited time period within to watch it. Which is why I've not downloaded any films - I'll just buy a DVD instead.

Considering how wafer-thin the margins are on a bare OEM drive you buy, that's an absolute shitload. Consider that it's three times the cost of a cheap DVD burner, and burners are in turn much more complex than the boggo DVD drive the Xbox currently has. Also consider than the base model Xbox retails for £130, again with not much markup.

Yes, I think adding a Bluray drive to the Xbox would considerably alter the economics of manufacturing it, as well as being an embarrassing u-turn.

If Microsoft were genuinely committed to the download market, they wouldn't have shipped the HD-DVD drive either. That's just a PR line to justify not putting out a Bluray 360 I reckon. The download-all-your-games market is still some way away from reality.

The bluray standard is owned by a dizzying complicated consortium of companies, of which Sony is a major, but far from the only, player. I'm not sure they could block Microsoft from doing it if Microsoft really pushed.

I paid a fiver more than that for an internal DVD drive (reader only) back in 2000. It seems comparable.

Well, it is a HD-DVD/Blu Ray combo drive that also burns DVDs and CDs. It's not exactly a boggo bit of kit.

I reckon the next gen will have to have a Blu Ray drive (or something of similar capacity). How long before the first multi-DVD game comes out, do you reckon?

Forza 3 is coming on two discs.

Wow, really? Looks like I'm going to need a bigger hard drive. When is it coming?

Rage might be coming on three. id were complaining that part of Microsoft's licencing scales per number-of-discs, so they have the unpalatable choice of further compromising texture quality on the 360 version (which is already worse than the PC version) to fit onto two DVDs, or being almost unable to make any money from the game by shipping on three. citation

Edit -- I also wonder if the NXE dash can be coerced into having an "install" disc and a "game" disc, so there is no disc-swapping during gameplay. That's still even worse than the PS3's much-maligned mandatory installs though.

I wonder if they're going to design any fun into it this time.

If you didn't like Forza 2 then you'll probably hate it. The idea of fun is pretty subjective, I remember having quite a lot of fun playing Forza 2, probably more than many other 360 games I can think of.

The Bezzie Racing nights were awesome, themed car specials were excellent.

Aye, I just haven't been able to get on with any of the other "bezzie" games since then.

I fully expect a dash update to include mandatory installs for multi-disc games.

Also, Forza 2 is excellent. I still play it now.

I fully hope anyone claiming the PS3's mandatory installs as being rubbish would be just as scornful of that.

Not that I care much either way, mind. I've never seen a ten minute delay before I can play my new game as a big deal, and I have always taken the time to do the optional install on the 360.

Strange that there's been nothing that you've enjoyed since, there's been shed loads of Bezzie games since Forza.

To be honest while I love FPSs I pretty much hate playing them in multiplayer, it just gives me a headache and I can't be arsed. Burnout Paradise was ok and that about covers it really.

Well, back in the day you'd have to rush home from school at lunch to start loading a game to play in the evening, no?

I'd rather have a mandatory install than disc-swapping.

Yes. But back in the day, I was twelve, and wanted everything to happen as soon as possible. Now I'm 31 and I understand sometimes its better for some things to happen later. Probably when I'm 51 I'll be wishing they'd just hurry up and happen so I can roll over and go to sleep.

Total agreement.

I bet you'd like Armored Core 4: For Answer.

And then you'll understand every woman you've ever slept with.



Thing is, I've got quite used to disk-swapping, so it doesn't faze me that much.

It's hardly going to be 'Amiga Monkey Island 2' style is it? Play for 8 hours, pause. Swap discs, play for 8 more hours.

The only way I could see Forza working is to split the tracks across both discs and replicate the cars on both. So you'd potentially have to swap every race.

That's not enough to play Blurays though, they'd still have to pay Sony for the rights to the video decoding itself presumably.

It just never really clicked with me. Neither did the first.

Ever since the first couple of Gran Turismo games, really, I've really enjoyed the idea of buying a pretty crap car and racing the life out of it to buy upgrades; learning every facet of the car's character and truly learning how to drive it; struggling to scrape enough cash together to buy new parts in order to keep up with the pack—upgrades that add enough of an increase in performance to keep things interesting, but not enough to drastically change the car too much.

With the Forza line, I'm given too much money too quickly so I can upgrade my car to the max practically as soon as I've bought it; there's no sense of real progress for me there. I'm forced to drive cars I have no interest in, just to unlock races and tracks further down the progression line. The car handling is quite fun, of course, and much better with a force-feedback wheel, but it has never been enough to keep me playing.

I guess the difference for me is how Forza says "Here you go, have everything you ever wanted. But you can't use what you've bought because we're going to restrict you for every race." and the type of game I like says "Your car is shit. Race in it to improve it. Do whatever you want, if you've the money."

Each to their own, mind. But I don't want to send this thread off-topic, so apologies!

Agreed for Forza. For story-type games though, it's pretty reasonable. FPS or RPGs, for example.

I've been looking into Blu Ray licencing. To do it, you need to pay cash moneys to the Blu Ray Disc Association for the disc format itself, DRM, BD-J, etc etc and to the MPEG for codec patent licences. The MPEG are an independent body (the same codecs were used on HD-DVD, of course) and the Blu Ray Disc Association is under the control of a board of directors of 18 companies, of which Sony is just one member.

So no, I don't think Sony could stop Microsoft.

So then it is MS being a bit childish? See also: Toshiba.

About December 2006, if not before.

When is the replacement xbox out..?

I'm going to make a guess at about 2012. The original Xbox's life cycle was five years, and I believe they want to stretch the 360 out for longer than that.