When Jim Hunter raves about a game, I take notice. It seems like the Jim of 2013 likes more games than he hates (compared to Jim of 2012). Anyone else notice that?

I want DmC the more you guys talk about it. Though I am currently building a new PC rig if sony delivers I could spend 400 to 600 on the new system.

Kurt:
So they announced no backwards compatiblity does this include PSN or Classic titles?

---

They either said “no” PSN transfer, or at the very least “no system to do so as of yet”. I wouldn’t count on it.

Realistically on the backwards compatibility “issue.”

The PS3 has a high-end, multi-core CPU. Depending on how you count, it’s got 9 cores. Emulating that on x86 isn’t going to happen, and so you’re going to either have to recompile the games to x86, or you’re going to have to include the actual CPU in your build. Both cases cost a lot of money. Doing a disk exchange, ala the Vudu/Ultraviolet disk exchange (see Vudu’s website if you don’t know what I’m talking about), where you trade in a physical copy and pay a small premium is really the only option for that — but Sony may not want to do that, because their IT department has (traditionally) been lacking. (reference the security breaches, etc.)

But really that’s the only option — and it’s somewhat cannibalizing new sales. On the other hand, it prevents the disks from entering the used market — which in turn boosts the ability to sell older titles.

But realistically — doing this via software emulation is not going to happen, and so you’re talking a per-title cost for Sony to do it, times several years of titles.

Really, the key is providing a better experience than Wii. If you look at Wii, it’s dirt cheap — and so they sell tons of units — but the games, most of them, are utter garbage churned out for 12 year olds who will buy any title that’s pushed out, and then be disappointed and complain — but be unlikely to return to the game for an exchange.

If you look at Sony, you have a lot of titles on PS3 aimed at the older audience, with a lot of attention to detailed video. The social feature is “OK” — but the social features cannot be the focus in that if people want social, they’re going to use their PC, they’re going to use their tablet.

On the PC — regardless of platform (Linux, Windows, MacOS), you have a lot of overhead from the OS and from the fact that apps install background processes. While Windows 8 has tried to manage that to some extent, it only works for actual Windows 8 apps (or hybrid apps), and at the moment even Microsoft Office 2013 doesn’t use the new features to manage background tasks, and instead does it the old fashioned way.

Because of that, you have this stuff running all the time. The thing about a game console is because it has a dedicated, special purpose OS, it can block out background tasks entirely to focus on the game.

Additionally, if you’re Sony — you’re looking at where the market is going. Here’s what’ll sell units.

They’re building around this streaming service. EverQuest 2 has a streaming client and is free to play, so you can play with that. The way they do it is send a client app down to the PC, and then send just the files currently needed across the wire. Since a typical broadband connection in Japan is faster than the Xbox’s DVD drive, load times via a service like S3 are about the same. And so you can actually send the data down in real time.

If you look at Second Life, that’s another streaming platform — it streams content continuously. People here streaming and they think of OnLive, but the typical model has been to post the files to S3 or a similar service, and then run the client on the PC.

For example, Half Life 2′s streaming client also works that way, and lets you play while Steam continues to download the game (or did at one time anyway).

Certainly, they could do a disk exchange — similar to the Vudu disk exchange at Walmart, where you take a DVD and pop a fiver, and they exchange it for a HD copy — including an Ultraviolet license for the disk (in case Vudu would ever go belly up). That removes the DVDs from the used market, and so it’s good for the content distributors as well since fewer used copies means more new copies sold (regardless of medium).

I wouldn’t hold my breath on Sony doing that, of course, but since Walmart already has the infrastructure, it wouldn’t be completely unexpected.

However, the issue is that GameStop and similar chain stores hate the idea, because it removes the used copies. The vast majority of GameStop’s money comes from reselling used copies — which is why you see the $10 online passes and things showing up on titles, because the game companies see nothing off of GameStop selling a used copy. (this is also driving some of the DLC push on consoles, as well as the season passes).

My expectation is that the PlayStation Network titles would work similarly to Vita. Because we know PSN can do what Vita does.

That is — if there’s a PS3 and a PS4 version, the publisher would be able to tag the program as cross-buy if they so chose. This would be in line with Steam, who is a key competitor as well, doing the cross-buy of Linux and MacOS version on titles where those are available.

That cross-buy doesn’t happen for every title on Steam, and it doesn’t happen for every Vita title that also has a PS3 title, either, and so — in theory — it’s probably the individual publisher who picks, and so Sony wouldn’t be able to commit to it.

But it would be reasonable to expect that since Sony already provides cross buy on other platforms, that they’d be likely to provide cross-buy between PS3 and PS4 on new titles as well.

Keep in mind how miserable the PS2 emulation was very hit-or-miss on the PS3, with specific titles having numerous glitches on the early models that did feature compatibility. And that’s for a machine that had a CPU chip that was actually present in the up-level hardware.

Here you’d be talking on a x86 emulating a PowerPC running at 2ghz, with depending on how you count, 9 separate cores. That’s going to be an exceptionally difficult problem for emulation, it is very unlikely to happen in any usable state.

Just saying — the hardware is very different.