Tech.Blorge reports that the war of HD-DVD vs Blu-ray is heating up and will be a major battleground this holiday season, and both sides are firing fresh salvos:
• Wal-Mart will be having a "secret sale" on Saturday: the 80GB PS3 will be $499 with 10 free Blu-ray movies instantly - plus another 5 free movies from mail-in rebates.
• Over at Amazon's second annual "Customers Vote" sale, registered customers are voting for products they will be qualified to buy at discounted prices. In the hi-def round of voting between a Samsung Blu-ray player and a Toshiba HD-DVD player for $149 (and a HD TiVo for $89,) the HD DVD player is currently winning with about 44% of the vote. The TiVo is at about 32% and the Blu-ray player at about 24%. (See the attached image.) Does this say something about what consumers prefer?
Gary Green said: You’ll be forgiven if you haven’t heard of the Ar Tonelico trilogy. The previous two games arrived so late in the PS2’s life-cycle that they simply went unnoticed. While most were tinkering with their shiny new PS3s, Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia and Ar Tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica were being ‘returned to sender’ by your local Game stores. Luckily, you won’t need to have played them to understand and appreciate this third and final chapter, Qoga (pronounced k-yoga) tells the story of a racial war between humans and Reyvateils, a breed of biologically produced female cyborgs capable of reproduction, while still having a digital mind.
Oh my god. I kinda wish this would get a remaster on PS5, it would be awesome. One of my favorite games on PS3.
That and 3D Dot Game Heroes. It's a shame that some stuff is stuck on PS3.
Microsoft just posted the third quarter of its 2024 fiscal financial results. The software maker made $61.9 billion in revenue and a net income of $21.9 billion during Q3. Revenue is up 17 percent, and net income has increased by 20 percent.
Xbox content + services up 62% while hardware down 31%... seems about right with the way they tout you don't need the hardware to play. People can play on their phones or smart tv or other means. I don't hardly play on my consoles directly since getting devices like the logitech g-cloud and ps portal. Which is to also say I have been playing more digital than physical because of these devices.
you should apply in MS PR team buddy, I think you will do a great job in my humble opinion :)
MS: "Xbox services and content without AB up 1%, with AB up 62%. Hardware down 31%. In total a loss of 350 mill."
darthv72: "Seems about right."
MS: "Excuse m ..."
darthv72: "I don't hardly play on my consoles directly."
MS:
What he said was facts. How he plays games is no concern of you. Don't get too mad about it.
I can tell people like you are an absolute minority..
If service is up means their fans and fanboys accepted this model and subscribed to it. The near future you will see a big decline because the service is saturated.
to you it may seem like the minority... but your bubble is shrinking because more and more are following suit. convenience is a hell of a drug and its also why physical sales only amount to 30% of overall game sales. times are changing, you either get with them or you get left behind.
But that's been ms for years. When things aren't going their way they try to change the way things are said. For instance console sales are down, they stop telling how many sold instead telling us how many hours spent in halo or headshots. So it makes sense console sales down just say people are playing on more devices then previous. What they won't say is how many xbox players jumped ship to ps5.
Hardware sales are so bad that Sony and Nintendo are blowing the sales off the water with their hardware.
If Xbox are losers, others aren’t..
Xbox already tried everything with Xbox live then subscriptions went down so much that they had to find something else. Their fans subscribed then reached saturation rather quickly.
Hardware and exclusive games is where it’s at! Keep gamers excited, announce decent software and people will support you
@shin
Well keep it simple Sony 's operating income is down 26% and Microsoft's is up 32%. No MS spin there, just facts. 😉
Cheers
MS is after diminishing consoles as a medium. They want to destroy this market because they couldnt win. MS’s vision is to dissolve console gaming.
Odd that a company that touts you dont need the hardware to play is already touting another console in the works.
They are not reliant on the HW but still want to maintain a presence (no matter how small) is a good thing. It shows commitment to the craft. It reminds me of SNK and how they made games for their own hardware (Neo Geo) while also making them for others because they knew there was a market to do so. They knew they would sell more to others but also sell to their own niche fan base.
Perfectly reasonable post down voted by insecure corporation friendly folk.... But not gamers. Real gamer want accessibility and ease of acquisition for all.... Company shills are the only ones still telling us that hardware locking people from games is good for us.
In the last two years they've started exiting the consumer market altogether. All of the newest Surface products are business models only. They can't seem to work out what they want to do with it.
Too expensive hardware when others offer the same or more for less? Good work, Green Team.
"Despite some early successes for Xbox games on rival platforms, Xbox hardware is down by a massive 31 percent this quarter."
"Without Activision Blizzard, Microsoft’s overall gaming revenue would have actually declined this quarter."
"Xbox content and services would have only been up a single percent without Activision Blizzard..."
"It looks like next quarter is going to be a similar story for gaming at Microsoft, too."
That is crazy... so A/B/K is carrying the whole Xbox gaming.
Oh and Microsoft will be fine. Windows, Office and Cloud are growing with each pc purchase.
Activision: "we gonna need a bigger rucksack/backpack please"
Microsoft: "why's that"
Activision: "to carry yo' weak ass'
Top brass have also wanted to start seeing returns on the 100 billion they have put into various Xbox related moves so seeing more multiplatform games is highly likely especially from abk
It's basically saying that PlayStation is the reason Xbox is afloat right now thinks to Ps5 versions of COD
The only growth MS will get out of the console industry is if it supports it's rivals platforms. Xbox is a pointless machine now. I can see them on a big push for live next, and they won't give up on trying to buy Steam.
As of right now, there are no monopolies in the games industry, and for the sake of the medium as a whole, they never should either.
And yet the biggest tech companies in America are essentially that. They buy up all the small comps only to kill them off and steal what they have, and if they can't buy em they bleed them to death.
Eventually they’ll realize the value is with the employee not the company. Buying an IP means nothing if the people who contributed are let go. They’ll get it one day.
tech is different because they buy threats and then kill them. Twitter bought Vine and did nothing with it. Despite people seemingly liking it. Could've had tiktok a decade before bytedance. go figure.
They buy IPs not talent. That's why these buyouts never work and the IPs die. Right now it's too expensive to develop games - but I expect that to shift maybe as AI tools can make it easier. The best games have been indie games for awhile as big developers fuck their ips to death with "games as a service" -
...are backing one format or the other I don't care what consumers are expressing. To jump into any technology before its a safe bet is just plain foolish. Leading edge yes....bleeding edge no.
There is no f**king way I would buy two types of players to ensure I could watch all movies released in an HD format.
a ps3 and was smart enough to pickup a HD-DVD player when it was $99 bucks. This war really means squat. I have both formats, if I want to watch transformers, boom, I have the ability to, if I want to watch Spiderman 3, same deal, I have it right in front of me. Just like owning a 360 and PS3, if I want to play Halo 3, boom, it's there, if I want to play anything PS3 exclusive, it's there. So what if I lose money in going with both formats, it's not like I have to take a second mortgage. I know people lose more money being stupid then anything else, in this case, I don't have to wait for the stupid format war to pass before enjoying high def material.
I have a PS3 so voting for the BR player was out of the question, I opted for the HD Tivo.
I've only seen a few votes/polls over the last few months and they all point to consumers favoring the hd dvd brand or bluray, which is probably why even though ps3 gives bluray a advantage in the amount of HD players owned/in households which of course is why it sells more movies, but still not the margin it should considering how many players are in homes(ps3's) so far its still not been able to capture the market, maybe thats simply because public opinion favors HD DVD, also other hard *evidence of HD DVD standalone players being signaficantly outselling bluray standalone players seems to suggest early adopters favor/prefer HD DVD, yes ps3 does give bluray a advantage but make no mistake, the only question is will the mainstream mass market consumers favor hd dvd also as this vote suggest?, or will it be bluray? when will sales for either format really take off? this vote isn't by any means scientific so it could be that the small group of consumers who participated in this vote isn't a true representation of which format the masses want, OBVIOUSLY whenever and whichever the mainstream decide to buy will be the successor to DVD, when will that be? I have know idea, and whichever it is the greedy movie studios will simply go with wherever the money is(which is whatever the consumers prefer)= smart business actually.
JOY
Now should we open up a story on how PS3 has more preferred than 360? This is obviously not the masses voting in this poll here and Amazon is notoriously known to have more hd-dvd shoppers anyway. This still doesn't change the fact that blu-rays lead is gaining every month. Blu-ray has a better chance of winning the format war than the Patriots have winning the superbowl.