Think the maiden UMD is UK or at least R2 only. seems to have had a quite limited release, hopefully a collectors item in the future I was bored at work today, and so went through the prices of the UMD's we stock - cheapest was £17.99, most expensive was £19.99. Fucking insane, the dvds for most of them were about £14.99, or less in most cases, particularly old ones - ghostbusters springs to mind - UMD - £17.99, DVD is about £10....crazy stuff...
Wow, those are some insane prices. I was in a Best Buy the other day and they had a huge 15 ft rack full of movie and music UMDs. The cheapest at $9.99 where some music UMDs, video comps and fan videos. The movies ranged from $14.99 to $29.99. I would love to meet the people at these companies that come up with the pricing structure. ^_^_^
I think the only hope for UMDs would be in camcorders and digital cameras. Buuut then you got UMD-Rs and that's the gate for piracy. And let's not forget that flash memory is getting cheaper every day. I've to be honest on this one: optical media in portable devices is already dead...
Wow, so the discman/general portable cd players (AKA iPod/walkman of the 90's) never existed? Optical media will take off, but not until it is less of a drain on battery life. On high quality discmans/portable cd players you can get about 40hrs - theres no reason this can't happen somewhen on a games console - if at perhaps 20hrs as opposed to 40. However, as time passes its looking more sensible to just shove a hard disk in, particularly with a higher end games device like the PSP (on the DS it would be most of the cost, with 1.8" drives running at least $100)
Shadowlayer, good point...piracy...the UMD can't be pirated. That must be it. They must have been worried about that enough to make a new format. Nintendo did it with a chip, sony did it with a disc...it all makes sense. nintendo hates discs, sony loves them. I think I am happy with this response. Any counterpoints?
Well that what I said! the problem is not that optical media is at a technological stagnation, but that both flash memory and HDDs are getting better at a faster rate. Take for example: today you can get a magnetic tape backup writer for less than $100, and tapes of 60GB and more for less than $5, buuut is slow as hell. Obviously back in the early 90s if you had one of these you were the equivalent of today's kid with an holographic driver. Plus at the time computing itself was pretty slow, so by contrast backups were pretty convenient. Today is cheap, but everybody need their shit fast, so people prefer to pay $200 and more for a portable HDD, something that was unthinkable of less than 10 years ago. The same is going to happen with optical media: in 2001 there was CD based mavicas, now none of them, and those DVD camcorders were a failure, and with the new HDD based ones getting cheaper and smaller it seems DVD and tape camcorders are doomed. The PSP is an anomaly, since no cutting edge gadgets today use optical discs as media. I bet that the PSP2 is going to be either flash based or HDD based with a DD system.
I am not convinced there will be a PSP2. Wait until the PS3 comes out...if there is another PSP, I bet it will not be a powerhouse, but a controller combo with the PS3. Their production costs have to be big, and, as I said I'm a teacher, I'm not seeing the PSPs at lunch, but I am seeing DS's...and boys and girls. It seems to me that Nintendo's objective is working, to my complete surprise.
Unless the first ends up being a complete failure, there's going to be a PSP2 for sure. That or maybe they'll keep releasing improved versions, like nintendo does. After all the hardware already kicks the DS ass badly.
As just about everything console related has proved however, hardware advantage is usually not coupled with Guaranteed success.
What I meant is that if we see a DS2 we may see a PSP2 too but with the same graphical capacity and just smaller or with better specs (better battery, internal NAND or HDD, a camera, more apps, etc...)
Both of these have major distribution problems. Where does the game data come from? Sony aren't going to be releasing games on individual HDD's or flash cards. Internet distribution just screams piracy, and what about store sales? The reason iPods and other digital media players are successful is because people already have the media, they need a player. The iTunes store is reasonably successful, but nobody buys an iPod for it, they buy an iPod so they can play their MP3s. Videogame consoles are a very different proposition. Actually, there is - CDs read in a predictable manner, games mostly don't. Doesn't mean there can't be a decent battery time (as the PSP shows), but it is an issue.
PSP users won't be happy if their UMD format for a PSP2 is abandoned. It seems as if they are cornered here. Release a new system and start fresh with a new user base, or continue down the "load time hell" of the past. This whole thing reminds me of the Gamegear. Cool system, but not enough compelling games. Don't get me wrong, I like some of the games, but why not spend less money on a DS game I know is going to have serious replay value. Not to mention since I've had my MICRO, it hasn't left my pocket. Technology apparently does not win the race, it's a whole package thing, starting with price.
Apparently you haven't heard of sarcasm... Got a post-modern wit? Doubly-reflected discourse for you then. ...word is bondage...
I dont know what's worst: he doubts or being asked what I already said. Dude, why you ask when you know the answer? DTV announced that they are ready to start streaming both movies and series and other content, all on demand. That and the fact broadband is getting cheaper everyday and then you can download games. Fuck, you can dowload them right now: just becos you cant do more than 20k in emule doesnt means that a series of dedicated servers wont deliver a higher count. And about cartridges, why not? tell me a GOOD reason why not and then we can dicuss. And yeah, it applies to iPods too: as I say before, just becos you and your friends get ipods to load their kazza-downloaded songs doesnt means that everybody else does. And you can check every market bulletin out there: the iPod sucess came just after apple bought universal and the iTMS was online. And about the UMDs, well if the systems ends up being a failure then who cares if the PSP2 doesnt use them? is like when the DC came out: nobody cared that it didnt had backward compatibility with saturn.
Games are getting bigger and that isn't going to change. Downloading an album is one thing, a game is another. There's another issue: You complain about being asked to repeat yourself, then ask me something I already dealt with? PIRACY. Writable cartridges for a videogame system are bad news. The same reason there aren't writable UMDs. I'd respectfully ask you not to imply that I'm a pirate, it's kind of rude and it wouldn't be a relevant part of the debate even if it were true. I'm up for lively debate but it shouldn't get personal. I don't own portable mp3 player, either. Anyway, you don't have much of a point, the majority of music on iPods is illegitimate and you know it. The problem is, you're blurring the lines between two very distinct industries. The part of the music industry that Apple plays in is hardware-oriented for profits - Apple makes money from the iPod hardware and incidental cash on the side thanks to the music store. Videogame companies like Nintendo are software-oriented, they make the most cash from their software licensing/sales. For this reason the latter are far more concerned about how their data is distributed, and whether it's been paid for - Apple don't lose much when people use illegally-downloaded content on their machine, Sony certainly do with their PS2.
This is totally untrue in my experience, particularly in the case of iPods (as opposed to other MP3 players) which are a mass market product. Most people I know mostly have ripped CDs form their own collection, which is legal. Second, they have tracks that they got off other people they know personally, which is illegal I suppose. That doesn't help shadowlayer's point, but actually I think I know more people with more tracks legally downloaded from the iTunes Store or elsewhere than stuff taken from filesharing systems. Most people I know with iPods don't know a thing about BitTorrent or Kazaa. What Shadowlayer is saying is precisely that the market is going to change change, so this as well as your "what about store sales?" argument from a previous post really miss the point. The times, they are a-changing. ...word is bondage...
I agree that industries change. The whole portable MP3 player market sprouted AFTER the popularity of Napster. People had hundreds of MP3s that they downloaded and wanted to play them on the go. Out came Rio MP3 players which were popular with music downloaders and music fanatics. With apple, they did it right. They came out with the iPod and then iTunes when the legal version of Napster was about to debut. they marketed it the way videogames have been marketing their hardware. Videogame companies use software to sell their hardware. That is what apple did, they used iTunes to market their iPod and that helped them, a lot, in the. Alchy still has a strong point. Companies don't want to risk using technology that can be easily pirated. Using high capacity flash memory, which would cost a lot of money and games are increasing in size every year, even mobile games. There is a piracy risk using broadband service to. If the technology is executed and marketed just right, then the consumer will like it and go with it. If and only if the consumer likes the new technology will the industry change, otherwise it stagnates.
