The Next Generation video games magazine is predicting that console peripheral developers won’t be obliged to pay any licensing fees to Sony like Microsoft will be doing with the Xbox 360.

Sony’s stance has always been that game console peripheral developers could create a peripheral that works with the PlayStation line of consoles and not have to pay Sony anything. Of course, they wouldn’t get to use the PlayStation logo, but their peripherals would still work. This won’t be the case with Microsoft and the Xbox 360, so people have been wondering what Sony’s stance will be once the PS3 hits.

Industry sources close to the issue have indicated that Sony is likely to keep the status quo for PS3 and not require a license and not lock the system with encryption, with the exception of its memory card format. Obviously, this is subject to change, but the best information in front of us from developers and peripheral companies today indicates Sony is happy with the status quo.

I think this is good news both for developers and consumers. It gives a wider range of options to consumers and lower prices too. If you want to avoid a dud peripheral, just research it online first. You don’t need a seal of approval to figure that one out.

Next Generation - PS3 Accessories Likely to Stay ‘Open’

Ferrago is complaining about the lack of any PS3 appearance at the recent Leipzig video games fair. They bemoan the fact that everything was PSP with hardly a word about the PS3.

Get a life.

So Sony doesn’t mention the PS3. The launch of the console is still over half a year away. I think Sony has enough to do to prepare for the PS3 launch than to attend every single game fair and say something. Sony’s already attending the Tokyo Game Show next month, but for some reason that’s not good enough for Ferrago. They want Sony to dole out info on their timetable, not Sony’s.

Sure, it’s nice to be thrown a bone here and there, and PS3 info has been hard to come by as of late, but I’d rather see Sony working hard on a great PS3 than to see them constantly pandering to the media.

What do y’all think?

Ferrago - Sony snubs Europe again

Personally, I think that bifurcating the market and making the HDD optional was a mistake on Microsoft’s part. Core game system buyers will have to get at least a memory card anyway to save games, bringing up the 360’s price to $340. Microsoft couldn’t have included a HDD into the Core system and sold it for $340? But no, they had to hit that $299 price point for bragging rights. Developers can no longer count on the HDD being there, and one of the large advantages that the XBox had over the PS2 will no longer exist for the Xbox 360 and PS3. In an industry as cut-throat as this one, I don’t think it’s a good idea for Microsoft to give up this advantage.

1UP.COM has gathered some reactions from big gaming industry folks, and many of them don’t seem to think Microsoft’s move to split the SKU will matter. But there are a few who agree with me, like David Perry from Shiny Entertainment:

One word: Blunder. Developers will almost always cater to the lowest spec’ed system when it comes to consoles, so as to maximize the customer base. So, my guess is that few games will truly make significant use of the hard drive, given that it’s an option that cannot be counted on.

In the end, I think the Xbox 360 will still be an enjoyable experience. You’ll still be able to play great games. (As was true of the PS2 without a HDD.) But that grass-is-greener syndrome that Sony fans were subjected to looking over the fence will be gone. This generation, Sony fans will have nothing to apologize for.

Next Generation - 360 Price: The Industry Reacts

[Update: They’ve taken down the price.]

A strange thing happened over at the Amazon store. They found themselves a crystal ball, peered into it a bit, and came out with a numer. Two hundred ninety-nine. Two hundred ninety-nine dollars, that is, and that’s the price they stuck on the PS3.

Early days yet, subject to change, of course. But I found it amusing, so I thought you might too.

Amazon.com - Amazon PS3

The first game in this series, The Getaway, was a visual tour-de-force. It actually mapped a section of London in painstaking detail for you to explore as part of the game. The graphcis were amazing, and people ogled the screenshots long before the game was every released.

Well, the stunning visuals are making a comeback in The Getaway for the PS3. At E3 there was a tech demo, showing off what kind off stuff the PS3 might be capable of. In other words, no actual gameplay. Just a bunch of nice visuals. But they looked great! Cars and buses moving about. Pedestrians walking down the sidewalk or pausing at a railing. The purpose of the demo was to show street life, and it did so very well. The demo placed the camera in the middle of a daytime street setting, and while it was obviously a computer simulation, it was also obviously very good.

Not much more is available at this point.

PS3 IGN - The Getaway PS3 - Main Page

PS3Blog now supports Gravatars next to your names, check it out. Gravatars are fun and free, so sign up and create one now!

Just go to Gravatar.com, create an account, and upload a picture. You’ll have to wait some hours for them to approve it. Then anytime you use the e-mail address you registered with them on a comment, we’ll look up your gravatar and use it. Don’t worry, you’re e-mail address won’t get exposed. But if you’re worried about that, you can always create a new one!

I’m no artist, so my gravatar is just a photoshopped version of me. If anyone can do better, I’d like to see ya try!

What would you say if I told you that the Xbox 360 would retail for $299 without a HDD, and with a wired controller? And what would you say if you’d have to shell out $399 clams to get a wireless controller and HDD (and a headset, remote, and Ethernet cable)? What would you say? (Beyond the obvious: is your source for real? In this case it’s the L.A.Times, but I don’t know where they got their info.)

I know what I’d say. I’d say that Sony is vindicated for warning of a high price for the PS3. Everyone was assuming that the Xbox 360 would sell for $299 with the wireless controller and HDD. Now it turns out (again, according to L.A.Times at least) that this won’t be the case.

Conclusion? I think that the price of the PS3 versus the price of the Xbox 360 will be more comparable than everyone had thought.

Link: L.A.Times (free subscription) - Microsoft Sets Price for Xbox 360 Versions

Update: SPOnG says that Microsoft has confirmed these details and more.

Core Xbox:

• $299.99 in US, £209.99 in the UK, €299.99 elsewhere in Europe
• wired controller
• faceplate
• standard av cables
• Xbox Live Silver membership

Deluxe Xbox:

• $399.99 in US, £279.99 in the UK, €399.99 elsewhere in Europe
• wireless controller
• faceplate
• component HD AV cables
• Xbox Live Silver membership
• 20GB removable HDD
• Live headset
• an Ethernet cable
• Xbox 360 media remote

With all the emphasis Microsoft has been putting on HD support, I’m surprised that the HD cables are only coming in the more expensive version.

Link: SPOnG - Xbox 360: $299 and $399 Pricing and Hard Drive Mystery Explained
Link: Gaming 360 for pictures

You may not have noticed, but I’ve created some special quick references for all of you. PS3 specifications, PS3 pictures, and PS3 games. You’ll find these references on every page for quick access. I’m going to use the games section as a quick reference to find info, movies, and screenshots of PS3 games, and I’ll be constantly adding new game profiles to that section. If there’s any game you’d like to see in particular, contact me or reply here and I’ll add it.

Link: PS3 Specifications
Link: PS3 Pictures
Link: PS3 Games

If you’d like a little bit of Xbox 360 history, how it was made, and who was behind it, then today is your day. The Mercury News Interactive has just such a story. One of the most interesting bits I found was this:

But this time, the critical hardware is done. IBM “taped out,” or finished its chip design, on Dec. 8, 2004. ATI finished its graphics chip in November.

The design for the PowerPC Xbox 360 core was finished last year. The design for the ATI graphics chip was finished last year. Those are the kind of lead times you need when building a console. It’s pretty safe to say the Cell is done now, but what about NVIDIA’s RSX? Is it done now? I know it’s not really important, but I’m curious.

Of course, they couldn’t getting in digs at Sony:

This is why Microsoft has been able to ship several thousands software development kits with prototype hardware to game developers. Sony recently said that it had only delivered around 450 kits to developers for the PlayStation 3, which debuts as early as next spring.

Since Sony is releasing a half year later than Microsoft, this is a problem how?

Link: The Mercury News - A Walk Through The Xbox 360 Evaluation Lab At Microsoft

Not that it really matters that much who makes the Xbox 360, as long as they make it well, Microsoft has announced their hardware partners. Celestica, Flextronics, and Wistron will manufacture your beloved Xbox 360 is mass quantities to fulfill gamers dreams everywhere. Flextronics and Wistron are old Microsoft buddies from the Xbox days gone by, while Celestica is a new addition.

Link: Gamasutra - Microsoft Announces Xbox 360 Manufacturing Partners

Microsoft’s Allard has confirmed that the Xbox 360 could be coming out in multiple versions during its lifetime. Mr. Gates has already said that the Xbox 360 may be released with an HD-DVD drive sometime in the future. (Though, as I always have to point out, he suggested the possibility that the 360 may use a different drive than HD-DVD. Blu-ray anyone?) Now Allard is confirming what we already knew: developers can’t count on the existence of an HDD in the 360.

So when it comes to usage of the HDD, Xbox 360 games may be no better than the PS3. Hold your horses! Notice the word ‘may’ in there. We’ll have to see how things turn out. With the addition of a memory card to the Xbox 360, it might become the lowest common denominator to which developers write. My friend Todd always mocks saving on my PS2 because I have to use a memory card, while his Xbox’s HDD is faster and has a gazillion blocks free. The same problems I face may now end up on his Xbox 360. But even though I put that out there, I kinda doubt it. Saving to the HDD is so much nicer than saving to a memory card, developers will surely support it, right?

Link: Prodigious Gaming - Allard confirms multiple Xbox 360 versions

Carmack has spoken out about the next generation of consoles from Sony and Microsoft. He is quite dubious about all this multi-core stuff that both Sony and Microsoft are touting for their respective consoles. He think that they will be very hard to develop for, and thinks that maybe “we might have been better off this generation having an out-of-order main processor, rather than splitting it all up into these multi-processor systems.”

On the PS3, he has this to say:

There’s sort of this inclination to believe that — and there’s some truth to it and Sony takes this position — “ok it’s going to be difficult, maybe it’s going to suck to do this, but the really good game developers, they’re just going to suck it up and make it work”. And there is some truth to that, there will be the developers that go ahead and have a miserable time, and do get good performance out of some of these multi-core approaches and CELL is worse than others in some respects here.

On the Xbox 360:

…the intention is I’m probably going to be spending the next six months or so focusing on [Xbox 360] as a primary development platform, where I’ll be able to get the graphics technology doing exactly what I want, to the performance that I want, on this platform where I have minimal interface between me and the hardware, and then we’ll go back and make sure that all the PC vendors have their drivers working at least as well as the console platform.

Link: Next-Gen - Carmack Explores Next Gen Challenges
Link: C&VG - CARMACK ATTACKS NEXT-GEN SUPER STATUS

I got to thinking about pricing a little more. The other day, Marc Ninthly wrote an article basically saying that the PS3’s eventual high price won’t deter people from buying the PS3. This is for a couple reasons:

1. Steep prices don’t mean much to those who are gadget obsessed./li>
2. It includes a BD (Blu-ray Disc) drive which alone is more than worth the price.
3. Kids will just use every trick in the book to get their parents to buy them one anyway.

I can’t really speak to (3). The demographic of PlayStation players is much more than just kids, and I have no clue if their bargaining power is that good. I know my parents were very good at saying ‘no’.

(1) is an interesting one. Witness the iPod. Also an overpriced gadget. Yet they’re selling really well for Apple. But while I’d really like to own an iPod, I couldn’t justify the cost. So I don’t have one. Even so, the 60GB iPod goes for $399. Which could be the price of the PS3. When compared that way, the PS3 looks like a bargain.

(2) is really alluring. I have an HDTV, so seeing HDTV movies on it will be sweet. The closest I get now is Pay-Per-View, but they rarely have the HD movies I like. So $400 or $450 for an BD player sounds fantastic.

And while we’re comparing prices, did you notice that Nvidia GeForce 7800 GT GPU-based graphics cards are selling now for $449? The 7800 has an Nvidia chip in it that is less powerful than the RSX will be in the PS3. And for $449, you’re just getting a graphics card! Not a whole gaming system. This, again, makes the PS3 look like a bargain.

So if you look at what you’re getting for your money, a high price like $450 doesn’t look so bad after all. Comparing it to other high-tech $450 stuff, the PS3 also comes out smelling like roses. Bur you know, that doesn’t change the fact that $450 is $450. That’s a lot of money for me, because not only do I have to spend the $450 on the PS3, I’d also need to get three more controllers and some games, plus maybe a HDMI-DVI video cable. That’s pushing $800. I need to set up a ‘buy Henning a PS3′ charity fund!