Over the next 18 months the 3 giants of the Games Console world
will be battling it out in stores and homes across Europe,
America and Asia for the title of the world greatest Games
Console. The stakes are high in this multi billion dollar
business, not just for the console sales but for the games sales
that go along side it. Since the launch announcements of all 3
consoles in May at the E3 conference in LA. The 3 combatants
have been vying for the millions of column inches that have been
written about the Next Generation Consoles. Each Press release
has been hotly followed by another press release from a rival
company so much so that extracting the facts from all the hype
has been nearly impossible. At the launch press conferences
Microsoft boasted that the Xbox 360 could do
9-billion-dot-product-operations per second. Sony then came out
and said that the PS3 could do 51-billion-dot-product-operations
per second however Sony had combined the CPU and GPU performance
numbers whilst Microsoft only reported its CPU performance
number. When the consumer is up against this sort of publicity
blizzard it is best not to believe a thing until you can check
the facts for yourself.
So what do we know?
Well for the Xbox 360 and the Sony Playstation 3 we have lots of
lists of hardware and specifications which actually don’t mean
very much in isolation. The main thing that need concern us are
the processor speeds and they are both stated as being 3.2 GHz
The only time that the hardware will mean anything is when we
get to run them side by side and then if experience is anything
to go by the difference in real life performance won’t be
noticeable and will just be used by the press departments to
battle it out.
Despite all the press releases and information that has been
spewing out of the headquarters of Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo
we actually know very few facts.
We know that in all likelihood the Xbox 360 will be on the
shelves in time for Christmas, Amazon are currently taking
pre-delivery orders and are quoting a release date of November
28th. The prices have been set at $299 for the Core System and
$399 for the Xbox 360, the difference being that the Core system
doesn’t have the external hard drive required to save games and
download new content or the headset required to play online on
Xbox Live! Why 2 prices? and why a version that hasn’t got
everything included? This looks very much like a product of the
marketing department trying to get a product at the historically
important sub $300 level more than anything and this may
backfire on them in the long run.
Next to hit the Shelves will be Sony’s Playstation 3 supposedly
in spring next year once again we have very few facts to go on,
Sony are continually releasing press releases and mentioning in
public that the price will be high and the figure of $500 has
been mentioned but many industry experts suspect that this is a
ploy so that when they release it at $300 or $350 it will look
like a bargain. The final console to hit the shelves will be the
Nintendo Revolution some time late in 2006 and 2007. Since the
“launch” at E3 this year very little has been said about it by
Nintendo. It seems at this time the “Launch” was just a way to
deflect some of the publicity away from Microsoft and Sony.
One fact is certain, If Microsoft do get the Xbox 360 onto the
shelves before Christmas it will be this year’s biggest selling
Christmas gift. So until you get your hands on one of the
consoles…. Question everything
Mark Thompson
http://www.articlesbase.com/art-and-entertainment-articles/next-generation-games-consoles-separating-fact-from-fiction-1225.html
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