08-06-2003, 05:56 PM
Quote:Originally posted by Prophet Hero
Unless the situation has reversed Microsoft is losing money for every XBOX sold.
That's been the norm for most game companies. As far as I can tell, no console company sells their systems at or below cost of the creation of the system. They hope to achieve money through software sales. XBox woes are only because the games aren't selling that much (Frankly none of the games for either XBox, PS2 or GameCube look that great to me).
As for the Portable systems, I can't see how they're going to make their system portable AND have 3d games. THe heat generated by the supposed 3d card and their processor is going to get immensley hot if it's going to be 10x more powerful than the Playstation, especially considering early playstations got so hot that they would fry their own chipsets (due to Sony's negligence, just like their negligence on PS2 contruction). I think this system has VirtualBoy catastrophe written all over it. The main problem I see with competing consoles against the GameBoy is the bigger is better creedo all companies go with it. That and trying to make their system as powerful or just like a computer. This fails miserably because not only are the systems not very portable (the damn Game Gear was bigger than most novels I read when I played it), they also are full of gimmicks and fall flat on their face when the company realizes it was a bad idea to market something so hard to maintain.
I just want to point out some of the technical flaws I can think of. Their insistance to use Mini-DVD devices is a major flaw. Think about it, DVDs spin much faster than CDs, and DVDs running at 1x isn't even enough to run a DVD at regular speed. So they're either stuck with running a DVD REALLY slowly (meaning one of the most irritable loading experiences you'll ever encounter) or you'll have a DVD Running crazy fast in the palm of your hands (which means a LOT of skipping when you're on a bumpy ride). I doubt they can make the CD player portion any slimmer than most cdplayers unless they want to run at 1x speed, otherwise it's going to be fairly thick. Otherwise, it's gonna be fairly thick, not to mention having to find a place to mount the processors, and the screen. As I mentioned before, the single PS1 processor got really hot, every system afterwards has a fan mounted into it to keep it cool for long game sessions). This system will have DUAL processors, running FASTER (Thus hotter). This fan will be pretty damn bulky inside a portable system.
In the end, my conclusion is that the system is going to be too large to be considered very portable and will be far and above too expensive for the casual gamers (ie the ideal market to push your system to).