Console Wars VI

[Asher]

NPD Jan 2010. As expected, Wii falls back to Earth. PS3 moves back to its usual place at the back of the bus:

PlayStation 3 276.9K
Xbox 360 332.8K
Wii 465.8K

NEW SUPER MARIO BROS. WII WII NINTENDO OF AMERICA Nov-09 656.7K
MASS EFFECT 2* 360 ELECTRONIC ARTS Jan-10 572.1K
WII FIT PLUS W/ BALANCE BOARD* WII NINTENDO OF AMERICA Oct-09 555.7K
CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE 2* 360 ACTIVISION BLIZZARD Nov-09 326.7K
MARIO KART W/ WHEEL WII NINTENDO OF AMERICA Apr-08 310.9K
SPORTS RESORT W/ WII MOTION PLUS* WII NINTENDO OF AMERICA Jul-09 297.6K
CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE 2* PS3 ACTIVISION BLIZZARD Nov-09 259.0K
ARMY OF TWO: THE 40TH DAY 360 ELECTRONIC ARTS Jan-10 246.5K
JUST DANCE WII UBISOFT Nov-09 191.9K
DARKSIDERS 360 THQ Jan-10 171.2k

[Asher]

360 and PS3 up year over year, Wii down.

JAN 09 / JAN 10
2009/2010

Wii: 679,200 / 465,800
X360: 309,000 / 332,800
PS3: 203,200 / 276,900

[Asher]

MS details Halo Reach:

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/02/11/x10-halo-reach-demoed-will-be-the-definitive-halo/

X10: Halo: Reach demoed, will be 'the definitive Halo'

by Randy Nelson { Feb 11th 2010 at 6:39PM }

Bungie's "community guy " Brian Jarrard and Halo: Reach creative director Marcus Lehto are on-hand at X10 to provide a much deeper look into the workings of Reach, what they are calling "the best Halo yet" and "the most ambitious title Bungie has ever produced." The duo talked us through many of the changes being made to the established Halo formula, and new elements they believe make this "the definitive Halo experience."

Lehto talked about the team's desire to "throw new things at the player," building on the hallmark underpinnings of previous Halos, even changing some things to suit the new game's more serious tone, but says Bungie won't "be pushing it." Another key goal with Reach, according to Lehto, is to "reintroduce the Covenant," by both making them look different -- more alien, more savage -- and giving established enemies new behaviors. It was also mentioned that, to keep with the more realistic tone of Reach, players won't be able to understand what the Covenant are saying.

On the tech front, Lehto confirmed that the game engine has "been entirely re-written" in order to facilitate what Bungie wants to do in Reach. Specifically, its goal is to make the world more expansive, put a lot more on-screen and introduce much more detailed character, environment and weapon models. Addressing the former, Bungie showed a test animation of a battle between Noble Squad, eight marines and 30 Covenant -- it was even more impressive looking than it sounds. We got zoomed-in looks at things like rifle scopes, which are detailed down to small writing and screws.

The game is pushing about four million polygons more than Halo 3 overall, we're told, with a completely re-written animation system and A.I. The result, Bungie hopes, will be a much more realistic world to look at and be involved with. From the stills and footage we saw, it's on track to deliver -- the game looks phenomenal. It promises to sound great, too, as every sound effect has been re-recorded.

Lehto told us the revamped game engine and A.I. will allow Reach to adopt a more "sandbox" style within its levels. They're going to be much less linear, he said, and much less scripted. This will, Bungie hopes, give players more freedom to approach combat in their own way. One thing we saw along these lines: Special kills, which cause the camera to pull out to a third-person perspective in order to show off their intricate animations.

We were shown a live demo of one of the maps being included in the upcoming Reach beta. The cliff-top locale certainly was expansive, with a mix of indoor and outdoor areas. This area will evidently serve duel purposes as a campaign setting and multiplayer map. While Jarrard ran through it, we got a good look at the revamped battle rifle and a new Covenant weapon, the Needle Rifle, which allows players to combine ammo for a single, much more explosive shot. It was also revealed that health packs are back, and that equipment you pick up during the single-player campaign (the example shown was an enhanced sprint ability) won't be single-use -- you'll keep it from there on out.

According to Bungie, Halo: Reach is currently in alpha. What it showed today definitely got us excited about the much larger, more detailed world and overall heightened realism. And, we'll say it again, the game looks amazing in motion. Now we just need to get our hands on it. E3, anyone?

[Asher]

Xbox 360 outsells Wii in February...

February NPD

PlayStation 2 101.9K
PlayStation 3 360.1K
Xbox 360 422.0K
Wii 397.9K


BIOSHOCK 2* 360 TAKE 2 INTERACTIVE Feb-10 562.9K
NEW SUPER MARIO BROS. WII WII NINTENDO OF AMERICA Nov-09 555.6K 2
CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE 2* 360 ACTIVISION BLIZZARD Nov-09 314.3K 3
JUST DANCE WII UBISOFT Nov-09 275.4K 4
SPORTS RESORT W/ WII MOTION PLUS* WII NINTENDO OF AMERICA Jul-09 272.5K 5
CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE 2* PS3 ACTIVISION BLIZZARD Nov-09 252.8K 6
MASS EFFECT 2 360 ELECTRONIC ARTS Jan-10 246.5K 7
DANTE'S INFERNO: DIVINE EDITION PS3 ELECTRONIC ARTS Feb-10 242.5K 8
DANTE'S INFERNO 360 ELECTRONIC ARTS Feb-10 224.7K 9
HEAVY RAIN PS3 SONY Feb-10 219.3K 10

[Nikolai]

Took them long enough. Not surprising, considering how much Wii has sold and how few good games that are coming to it. The Nintendo developed ones are GREAT, but other than those? Not so much. The good ones make Wii worth it though.

[DrSpike]

Nice jump in the 360 sales.

[Asher]

MS is basically going to enter the portable gaming market with Windows Phone. Turns out the GPU in Windows Phones is based off the Xenos GPU in the Xbox 360.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=17881

Windows Phone 7 Series Shacks up With AMD, Will Bring 480x800 Xbox Live Titles

New device prepares to take on the iPhone for mobile gaming's crown

Mobile gaming was long dominated by Nintendo with Sony coming in a distant second. That was until Apple stormed onto the scene with its iPhone and stole the show. Today the iPhone is arguably mobile gaming's most influential platform.

Microsoft hopes to steal Apple's thunder when it releases Windows Phone 7 Series phones later this year. This week Microsoft shared some details about what gaming on the new operating system will look like.

Unlike the Zune and Courier prototype, which are both powered by NVIDIA's Tegra, most Windows Phone 7 Series phones will use a Qualcomm SnapDragon chipset that contains a GPU from NVIDIA-rival AMD. The GPU, the AMD Z430, features a unified pixel & vertex shader pipeline (based on the Xbox 360 Xenos GPU).

Unfortunately, developers won't be able to use the GPU's shaders in 3D game titles at launch. However, an update to Direct 3D Mobile will provide this functionality sometime late this year or early next year. Describes Microsoft's Shawn Hargreaves in a blog, "
The phone supports full hardware accelerated 3D, but we are not exposing programmable shaders in this release. Charlie Kindel summed up the reason for that in a great article about focus and priorities:
“We will do a few things and do them very, very well; we are better off not having a capability than doing it poorly. There are always future versions.”
Instead of programmable shaders, we augmented the existing BasicEffect with four new configurable effects: SkinnedEffect, EnvironmentMapEffect, DualTextureEffect, and AlphaTestEffect. These are designed to run efficiently on the mobile GPU hardware, and I think do a good job of providing enough flexibility for developers to create awesome looking games, while also meeting our goals of being able to ship a robust and well tested product on schedule.
Microsoft is offering developers two screen resolutions -- a 480×800 (WVGA) display resolution and a 320×480 (HVGA). The HVGA resolution will come post-launch as an update. Developers can pick which resolution to run, and Microsoft is dictating that its handset partners use dedicated scaling hardware to prevent GPU resources from being gobbled up and to provide better quality scaling. Touch input will automatically scale with whatever resolution you pick.

For example, if a user with a WVGA phone fires up a HVGA iPhone port on a Windows Phone 7 Series phone with a high resolution screen, the hardware will seamlessly scale the game up. This allows game developers flexibility and potentially better performance. Describes Hargreaves, "480×800 is a lot of pixels! This is a great resolution for displaying text, browsing the web, etc, but it can be a challenge for intensive 3D games to render so much data at a good framerate. To boost performance, some games may prefer to render at a lower resolution, then scale up to fill the display."

According to a separate Joystiq interview with Xbox Live GM Ron Pessner and XNA Game Studio manager Michael Klucher, developers will have two options for writing games -- Silverlight (Microsoft's Flash competitor) or the XNA Game Studio and the XNA framework. Developers can reuse assets, but they will have to port their efforts in Java or Flash to these new platforms. Silverlight games will be fully able to access Microsoft's Xbox Live gaming service.

One final tidbit is that it sound like it will be ridiculously easy to use Microsoft XNA Game Studio to port Zune titles to Windows Phone 7 Series phones and vice versa. States Microsoft, "Another big point is -- just like the portability piece we've shown here -- we've done some work internally and with some of the other Zune HD developers, and again, it's 90, 95 percent code reuse. Literally, in an hour or couple of hours, we're taking games that were written for Zune HD and putting them on the phone. We can do the same in reverse. Game Studio is a really powerful platform for portability between these different devices. We think there will be a series of developers that will want to target both platforms and Game Studio gives them a really great way of doing that."

While it may be a bit of work to port iPhone titles to Windows Phone 7 Series, it certainly seems like a tempting target, given its ability to exploit higher screen resolutions and likely larger amounts of texture memory. This is good news for Windows Phone 7 Series, as a lot of the iPhone's popularity has been due to its gaming success.

[KaiserIsak]

Nintendo blamed the poor sales after xmas on the fact that they sold out their warehouses during the amazing xmas sales. Could be true, or could be a bad excuse. Either way, I guess we will find out next week (Reggie said that their supply should be back by march).

New Super Mario Bros Wii still sells amazing, as do MW2. But what do you guys think about Heavy Rain? Its getting a big push from Sony, and have sold 219k in one week. l always felt it was a really niche title (but I hate QTE's), but so far, it seems to be doing good. Definitely does not hope this is the future for adventure-games though.

[DrSpike]

I'll probably get it - but not immediately as there are other games I want to play more right now.

[Asher]

Nintendo blamed the poor sales after xmas on the fact that they sold out their warehouses during the amazing xmas sales. Could be true, or could be a bad excuse. Either way, I guess we will find out next week (Reggie said that their supply should be back by march).

I dunno, there's tons of Wiis here in Ontario...and really the sales are quite normal for the Wii now outside of holiday months. They've been significantly slumping for a while outside of the holidays.

New Super Mario Bros Wii still sells amazing, as do MW2. But what do you guys think about Heavy Rain? Its getting a big push from Sony, and have sold 219k in one week. l always felt it was a really niche title (but I hate QTE's), but so far, it seems to be doing good. Definitely does not hope this is the future for adventure-games though.

Heavy Rain is a rental only, even if it's good. Fairly short and zero replay value.

[Asher]

Slim 360 is coming soon. Board shots of the motherboard have been leaked...CPU + GPU have been merged into one die. Significantly reduces power, space, and heat (and therefore noise).

As early as a few months away. It's speculated they may wait til Natal launches, and bundle Natal with the new Slim 360 (and also launch Halo Reach the same month). If so, I expect some new 360 sales records.

[KaiserIsak]

Slim 360 is coming soon. Board shots of the motherboard have been leaked...CPU + GPU have been merged into one die. Significantly reduces power, space, and heat (and therefore noise).

As early as a few months away. It's speculated they may wait til Natal launches, and bundle Natal with the new Slim 360 (and also launch Halo Reach the same month). If so, I expect some new 360 sales records.

this is good news, now if they will combine it with a price cut Sony will be in serious trouble

[DrSpike]

Tempting to get one just for reduced noise. I notice the 360 noise more now I have a slim PS3 as well.

But I'll probably wait until my current 360 breaks, as it almost inevitably will.

[mikelangelo11]

If the console wars ended I would have nothing to do....

side note, My wife suggested we get rid of the Wii cause she heard about the move and said maybe we would actually play the PS3, stupid Wii...

[Asher]

NPD March 2010

PlayStation 2 118.3K
PlayStation 3 313.9K
Xbox 360 338.4K
Wii 557.5K



GOD OF WAR III* PS3 SONY Mar-10 1.10M 1
POKEMON SOULSILVER VERSION NDS NINTENDO OF AMERICA Mar-10 1.02M 2
FINAL FANTASY XIII PS3 SQUARE ENIX Mar-10 828.2K 3
BATTLEFIELD: BAD COMPANY 2 360 ELECTRONIC ARTS Mar-10 825.5K 4
POKEMON HEARTGOLD VERSION NDS NINTENDO OF AMERICA Mar-10 761.2K 5
FINAL FANTASY XIII 360 SQUARE ENIX Mar-10 493.9K 6
NEW SUPER MARIO BROS. WII WII NINTENDO OF AMERICA Nov-09 457.4K 7
BATTLEFIELD: BAD COMPANY 2 PS3 ELECTRONIC ARTS Mar-10 451.2K 8
WII FIT PLUS W/ BALANCE BOARD* WII NINTENDO OF AMERICA Oct-09 429.6K 9
MLB 10: THE SHOW PS3 SONY Mar-10 349.2K 10