Blah blah blah… the PS3 could cost $900 to make … blah blah blah … it could be delayed a year … blah blah blah.

Another day, another analyst. I would like to see these “there are reports” that Hitoshi Kuriyama of Merrill Lynch supposedly knows about. Or at least some details. From developers? From Sony? From some fanboy in Oklahoma?

And Sony stock actually falls based on baseless rumours like these?

Sheesh.

CNET News.com - PlayStation 3 may be delayed a year

As of Friday I have pulled PS3Blog.net and HDBlog.net out of the 9rules Network. To be clear: it’s not because of the recent “purge” of sites that don’t fit at 9rules. I think there’s nothing wrong with 9rules kicking out certain sites that are not being maintained or do not fit the 9rules profile. This isn’t about that. So I was not removed by 9rules, nor was I asked to leave.

I just felt that I didn’t belong in the network anymore, and now I’ll have to see where things go from here. They’ve brought many readers to my sites, and for that I thank them.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

Slow news day today, so I thought I’d put it out to you folks. I know I have lots of lurkers who read this site and never post anything (which is fine!), and I also know I have many people who read my words via my RSS feed.

First of all, thank-you. It’s strange knowing that there’s a bunch of people out there who read the words that I type. So thanks - it gives me the warm fuzzies.

Second, what would you like to see more of? I’ve created some forums that nobody seems to use, so I’m pretty sure that’s not what you want! But seriously, I’d like to hear from all you lurkers and RSS readers who don’t normally say anything. That’s fine, but today it would be nice if you popped out of your shell for a hello, or a question, or most especially, a suggestion.

So take a chance! I can’t make this site any better if I don’t know what you guys want. So lets hear it.

And while I’ve got your ear, all of you out there who do contribute comments, I’d like to say a special thank-you. For those of you who don’t have a blog, you don’t realize the importance that us bloggers place on comments. Seeing that people respond to what you write with comments of their own is great. And those of you who do comment, please consider getting a Gravatar. They’re free, and make the site more fun.

Gavin’s cranking out those podcasts now! Here’s number 12.

PS3 Countdown - PS3 Countdown 12

Nope, just bad news. There is nothing new being shown at the Taipei Game Show.

Sigh…

Next Generation magazine thinks they’ve unearthed some goods on both Sony’s online strategy and on the PlayStation 3 release date. First of all, PlayStation HUB is to be launched with services similar to Microsoft’s Xbox Live. Chat, downloadable demos, independent games, online play, and media content such as music and movies are all purported to be part of the service. The service would also include the PSP (yay!) and would be subscriber based, hinting at a monthly charge (boo!).

I wonder if all the services will be fee based or only some of them? It’s probably in their best interest to make game demos and movie trailers and the like all free. At least so I’m hoping, because I don’t really want to subscribe to another monthly bill.

Next Generation magazine also thinks that the PlayStation 3 will be released in September - probably on the 16th in Japan and the 21st in the U.S.

What do ya think? Fact or fiction?

Next Generation - PS3 HUB; September Launch

[Edit: Sony did change their minds! The PS3 will come with a 60GB HDD.]

Click on the PS3 link, then drag-scroll down to near the bottom of the PS3 info page, and you’ll see this:

* Storage media (HDD, “Memory Stick”, SD memory card, and CompactFlash) are sold separately

So there you have it. Direct from an official Sony website, the PS3 will not include an HDD.

Doesn’t mean they can’t change their minds, though. But I doubt it.

PlayStation® Global

BusinessWeek is saying that Sony may be trying to pack too much stuff into the PS3:

The PS3 is expected to cost $350 to $400. While it has the potential to be a megahit, Sony’s message might get muddled in the process of going after too broad a market, says Deutsche Securities analyst Takashi Oya. “It would be difficult to sell PS3 initially as anything other than a game machine,” Oya says.

And:

“If Sony wants PS3 to be a hit, it has to avoid the marketing mistakes it made on PSX,” says Reiji Asakura, author of Revolutionaries at Sony, a book about the development of the PlayStation.

Another risk is that Sony could undermine software sales by positioning the PS3 as something other than a game machine. The company makes the bulk of its game profits not from consoles but from games, which can cost $50 or more. Even when Sony doesn’t design the games, it picks up royalties from each sale.

Personally, I’m not so sure this is a problem. I got a PSP recently, and I use it both web browsing and playing games. I’m not a big game purchaser, but I already have three games for the system, and I have at least four upcoming games on my seriously-consider list - Field Commander, Exit, Bust-a-Move, and Untold Legends 2. So am I confused as to what the PSP is for? Nope. Gaming and surfing.

I think the PS3 will be the same, but even more so. Who in North America doesn’t know what a PlayStation is? If you don’t know, then you’re not Sony’s target market anyway. And if you do know, then you’ll know that the PS3 will be for playing games. That it will do a bunch of other nice stuff is just gravy. Very tasty gravy, maybe from roladen for example (one of the best gravies I”ve ever had - that and sauerbraten), but gravy nonetheless. And besides, the kitchen sink approach doesn’t seem to be hurting the 360. It does about everything the PS3 will do, with a few notable exceptions.

So this week’s poll is pretty simple. Is Sony trying to do too much with the PS3?

(Poll is in the sidebar. For you feed readers, you’ll actually have to visit my site! Gasp!)

BusinessWeek - This PlayStation May Play Too Much

I gotta say I’m really digging my PSP. Yesterday I got a wireless router. (Which, by the way, works great. It’s a Belkin and works better than my DLink did.) And now I can check the email and my RSS feeds right from my PSP! That’s so cool.

I also recently bought Burnout Legends. I’m disappointed that my favourite track from Burnout: Revenge isn’t in there (at least not yet) but other than that it’s a great game. Though I didn’t realize that it only did online via adhoc mode. I wondered why nobody was ever available online to play. Duh…

And since I’m not really into the homebrew scene I just upgraded to firmware 2.6. I hope that wasn’t a mistake.

Is there a mini keyboard available for this thing? I’m getting tired of typing in letters the hard way.

Oh yeah. I have to relate this to the PS3 somehow. Um… ah well. Whatever.

engadget thinks that there may be an HDD in the PS3 after all:

However, we were struck by the statement in a BusinessWeek article about the PS3 that the console would boast “a huge hard disk to store photos, music, and TV shows.” Given that the article appears to get just about everything else right, and was written by Japan-based reporter Kenji Hall — who apparently had direct access to Sony brass — it would seem odd for this to be simply a mistake. (And Hall seems to know his Sony history, pointing out elsewhere in the article that the failed PSX did have a hard drive). It looks like the case of the PS3 hard drive goes back into the unsolved mysteries file for now.

I have to admit that I gotta take this with a huge grain of salt. Sony’s looking at an expensive machine already, and their main competition isn’t requiring an HDD. So I severely doubt that all PS3’s will come with an HDD bundled in.

But I wouldn’t mind being wrong.

Engadget - PS3 to have a hard drive after all?

Thanks to reader Aaron for pointing this out to me. The people at Kikizo games has a preview of the PS3. It’s taking forever to load, so I assume that’s because everyone is hitting the site. Also, of course, you have to take all this with a grain of salt. Who knows if this is even real, but it does seem to be. Here are the hilights:

Interestingly, developers don’t think that everything Sony promised will fit inside the PS3 mockups being shown by Sony:

“I think to fit everything that Sony wants in there AND leave space for a 2.5 inch hard drive,” explains one senior developer working on a final kit, who will be our guide for much of this report, “the machine would have to grow. The models they’re showing off are way too small for what they want.”

Regarding 1080p:

Perhaps the biggest bombshell we’ve learned in the world of PS3 development right now is that many (if not most) games are simply running in 720p - not the ambitious, bleeding edge 1080p “Full HD” standard that Sony had us so excited about. And certainly, not two of them stuck together for a ludicrous 32:9 double-1080p.

Nvidia was on the money with its President’s comments last May: resolution is indeed the enemy of graphics. Our insider explains: “Sony wanted 1080p, but we’re working at 720p and 1080i, same as on the Xbox 360. Even with [final hardware] in mind, reaching good frame rates at 1080p with next-gen graphics is almost impossible. Instead many developers, ourselves included, are reworking so they run at 720p. PS3’s output takes care of upscaling it - so no native 1080p, but it still looks killer.” Perhaps there was always a specific reason why Sony felt it should say “up to 1080p”?

So is 1080p doable at all?

It’s hard to say for sure, but the developer suggests some games will still support it. “I think native 1080p games will be in the minority. Getting the best effects and performance is easier at lower resolution, so we can offer the gamers more thrills. I don’t think this situation will change much.”

How do games look?

Particularly from a first-person or camera-only explorative view, everything from looking at natural, detailed, muddy floor to being in the shade of a tree, feels a bit closer to the being-there experience gamers dream of. A peaceful early morning sunlight scatters through leaves and floods over the darkened branches, softly rendered shadow traces all the way down to a canvas where grains of earth are visible, while dynamic range lets our eyes see it all in accurate contrast together - it’s beautiful, almost like they promised this sort of scene would be - and it seems those 100 billion programmable shaders per second are being put to good use. It really is all about dynamic range and surfaces when it comes to realistic game images.

How does the PS3 fare next to the 360?

We’re talking about a machine barely superior to Xbox 360 - not by any significant margin. It’s certainly obvious this machine is not “twice” as powerful as 360, let alone a generational leap ahead. But the gap could become bigger: “Realistically, as libraries and experience with both machines grow, I think the PS3 will start showing things the 360 will choke at,” offers the source. “But Sony will have to make available to us libraries and new routines for that to happen - something they’ve been severely lacking at so far.”

What is developing games for the PS3 like?

Sure, there’s still some framerate optimisation to go in this particular game build, but generally, framerate shouldn’t be an issue for long. SCEI’s Masa Chatani describes PS3 architecture as elegantly simple with outstanding performance, and developers say they love the streamlined Open GL environment. But our guide adds: “Cell is weird and difficult to work with… coding has progressed with high speeds and paper specs in mind, it’s one of the reasons framerate specs aren’t met yet. We’ve been anti-aliasing through software which also means a performance hit, although the 720p upscaling minimises that problem a bit.”

What do PS3 games really look like in real time?

One memorable point in another game build altogether observed some intense character based interactivity. Finally being able to control on a PS3 the sort of visual quality we realistically expect, with convincing and varied human facial expression, did feel like a moment of relief - this stuff is realtime after all. We had lighting effects and specular highlights used to great effect, shadows forming realistically on wrinkles of skin, precise colours, ultra-detailed rippling materials (though the ripple needed some work) - and that’s not even talking about the surrounding environment, which had its own moving objects and particle elements. As far as “emotionally believable” experiences go, this moment was more solid than we’ve experienced in a past generation title. It was nothing we couldn’t imagine running to the same sort of effect on Xbox 360, but it was reassuring to see it in genuine realtime and with some developer perseverance, a few required improvements seem within reach.

In hindsight, there was some stuff that looked decidedly more like what we’ve been playing now - UbiSoft’s Killing Day seeming like it was a good, honest estimate. Rewatch that below, and consider this is comparable to the technical visual quality of what we’ve played, and you’ll likely conclude that this is, for now at least, really same-generation stuff next to Xbox 360.

So no Killzone type graphics. More like Killing Day.

Finally, what about the PS3’s release date?

Based on this evidence, things aren’t exactly rocketing ahead, and we wouldn’t be the first to question the potential of some kind of delays. Our developer is first to chip in: “We think that in Japan it will most likely release during Summer, Q4 in the US, and Europe in Winter or Spring 2007 - these are our internal projections.” And right now, it seems most observers would agree.

But Spring could mean as late as late June, which is pretty much Summer. Some, including the folks at next-gen.biz, have pondered whether Sony’s recently appointed British CEO might change traditional strategy and focus an initial launch in America, where it’s argued that the most vital battle PS3 will be fought - BluRay’s battle. But the other school of thought suggests that Howard Stringer would need to have been running the show a bit longer to reasonably affect significant plans for the company’s most important project, relatively late in the day. But then, nobody seems to know for sure yet.

Thanks Aaron for the link. This sure made for some interesting reading.

Kikizo Games - Exclusive: Hands-On with PlayStation 3

Sony’s been showing off the PS3 to developers at the Sony Metreon in San Francisco.

In attendance of these demonstrations - possibly hardware related and most probably in preparation for next month’s GDC ‘06 - were also key game designers, intrigued by the system’s rapidly growing hype, who were escorted discreetly throughout the demonstrations. The extremely exclusive, invite-only event occured on Monday afternoon, with reason to believe that there could be more meet-ups throughout the week.

What does this mean for you and me? Not much, really. The PlayStation 3 is to be released this year, in the spring if Sony is to be believed. Of course they would be showing the PlayStation 3 to developers. Why wouldn’t they? Actually, I find it odd that there are only demonstrations going on. Hopefully the PS3 is much more advanced than that. But maybe this was an event for developers not already developing for the PS3, which makes sense.

AMN PSP Advanced - Sony Hosts Exclusive PS3 Event

Tsk tsk. My friends over at Gaming 360 have a scoop on the PS3 before I do. I have to get with it, man!

Anyway, they’re reporting that the PS3 will probably be shown off at the Taipei Game Show from February 16th to the 20th.

My guess is that nothing new will be shown, but you never know! Sony may surprise us.

Gaming 360 - PS3 to feature at Taipei Game Show