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Project Natal/Sony Move Thread (Natal $150 ?)
As the time draws closer, we get more information on Project Natal and what is currently called the Sony Arc.
Most recently, Sony has announced that the Arc has been delayed until Fall 2010 which means both will launch around the same time.
And I guess saying it now, based on the current line-up, it seems like the launch of Natal and Sony Arc will be the big thing for the 360/Ps3 respectively. What does that mean for you at the end of the year?
What do you expect from each controller/device? What price range would get you interested?
The price for both will most likely be near-new system range.
And I'm not down for that.
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Perhaps this is the best place to tell my huge disappointment in WM+. It hardly added anything in Grand Slam Tennis. And often it didn't even register my swing at all. I preferred to play without WM+.
A camera-based solution might work better.
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Re: Project Natal/Sony Arc Thread
Some news.
Quote:
Sony Motion Controller Gets 10 Titles This Year
Sports and pet raising games on the way for Fall device.
Nikkei has a short report on Sony's upcoming motion controller device. The one piece of new information in the report is that Sony will release "around 10 or so" titles for the device within the year. Included among the titles will be sports and pet raising games.
Sony announced last week that its motion device will be released in the Fall rather than the originally announced Spring time frame. The company did not share a list of software, but promised a robust lineup.
Video-game enthusiasts are looking forward to the release of Microsoft's motion-sensitive video-game control system, code-named "Project Natal," later this year. Maybe investors should be doing the same.
That's the underlying message in an analysis of Project Natal issued this morning by Sarah Friar and Derek Bingham of Goldman Sachs. The analysts make a series of assumptions -- including an $85 retail price for the camera-based system -- and estimate that Natal will boost Microsoft's revenue by $1.7 billion in its 2011 fiscal year (which begins in July 2010) and $2.3 billion in its 2012 fiscal year.
It's a bullish position, to say the least, and it will no doubt be greeted with some skepticism. For a bit of context, Microsoft's entire Online Services Business posted only $3 billion in revenue in the 2009 fiscal year, out of $58.4 billion in companywide revenue.
The Goldman Sachs analysts obviously believe consumer demand for the motion-sensitive Project Natal device will be big. In a note to clients, they say they expect Natal to reach a 56 percent "attach rate" less than two years after its launch, meaning that more than half of new and existing Xbox 360 owners will buy Natal for their consoles. By comparison, they say, Nintendo's Wii Fit achieved a 41 percent attach rate over a similar time period.
"Xbox has been predominantly targeted towards a more hardcore gaming demographic, which is different from the family oriented approach of Wii and Wii Fit," they write, adding that "Natal now adds a hook for the more casual gamer."
Cumulative sales of the Xbox 360 were 39 million worldwide at the end of 2009. Project that out to 2011 and 2012, take into account the analysts' estimates of attach rates for Natal, multiply the result by their $85 price assumption, and you can see how they start getting into the realm of billions of dollars in revenue. On Microsoft's bottom line, the analysts predict that Natal will translate directly into increases in earnings-per-share of 4 cents (2 percent) in fiscal year 2011 and 7 cents (3 percent) in fiscal year 2012.
"Internally, Microsoft views Natal’s introduction as significantly extending the lifecycle of Xbox 360 to 10 years (until 2015), which is double the average for consoles," they write. "If this is the case this could have significantly positive ramifications for the longer-term margins of [Microsoft's Entertainment & Devices] group."
Microsoft itself hasn't talked in detail about the financial potential of Natal, which is expected to be released under a different name. However, the question is likely to be asked by analysts on the company's post-earnings conference call Thursday afternoon, now that Microsoft has confirmed a fall release.
Natal will use its camera-based system to let a user control the action on screen by moving around, without the need to hold a controller. It's part of the company's shift toward "natural user interfaces." Nintendo's Wii popularized the idea of motion controls with its Wiimote and companion nunchuck. Sony last week delayed, until fall, the release of its new PlayStation 3 motion controller.
Yeah I don't think any of them is going to make much money this gen. I see the projects as training for the next-gen, nothing more. They want to find out what works, what sells, how to hook developers.
I'd say Nintendo has it easier, they only have to add pretty graphics. And I guess better online.
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Re: Project Natal/Sony Arc Thread
Quote:
Microsoft: Natal Has Five-Year Lifespan
Microsoft's director of product management Aaron Greenberg has said that software will be created for Project Natal for the next five years.
Speaking to CVG, the Xbox exec said, "The richness of the technology is going to really enable experiences that never had existed before. And we're not just speaking about what we're doing this year, but I think two, three, four, five years from now as this evolves.
"Millions of consumers this Holiday will be able to experience Project Natal and this is just the beginning of something that will change the way consumers interact with entertainment and change way our publishing partners think about game development."
When asked how Microsoft viewed accusations that Natal was simply a "jazzed-up EyeToy" Greenberg responded, “We obviously could have done a motion controller if we'd have wanted to do that, but we felt that would be a much more interruptive experience. We had an opportunity here to really do something that's transformative and brings a whole new category of experiences to life.
"Now we're saying to creators: 'We can see when you move your hand, when you move your feet, we can track your body. I can stand in front of this sensor and it can recognise my face and know if it's me, or my brother or my sister.'"
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Re: Project Natal/Sony Arc Thread
This is taken from IGN and comes from Matt, so take however you want, thought would just share.
Quote:
So I'm relaxing on a couch in a high-rise suite as a developer offers me a glimpse of its new game, still unannounced but very exciting. We get to talking about Sony's motion controller, recently unveiled. I played with it at publisher's event and as something of a Wii veteran with a firm understanding of how pointer and gestural controls work and how games should feel when they are properly finessed. I'm not impressed, I say. PS3 Move features almost no latency -- just one frame -- but that paper truth didn't seem to translate to reality as I played with the controller at Sony's event. Most of the stuff played like first-generation Wii efforts from third-parties.
Obviously, I'm not making games and I'm sure some software creators will note that with the roll of the eyes and claim that it's all too easy for me to bitch and moan from the backseat, or the sidelines, as it were. But playing the armchair role for a minute, it seems an unavoidable conclusion to me that Sony should have at least examined the very best genre-leaders on Nintendo's platform and then duplicated if not surpassed them with its own Move-controlled experiences. For instance, Medal of Honor, The Conduit and Red Steel 2 offer fantastic controls for first-person shooters. Anything less than these will be considered substandard by the informed masses -- at least those with knowledge of Wii's library. Unfortunately, Move doesn't yet compete. The company's shooter feels laggy and unresponsive as I attempt to gun down robotic targets. The boxing game is not one-to-one, but gestural-based, and slow. Nearly everything feels redone, but somehow half-baked.
The exceptions are the augmented reality games, which project gameplay graphics onto real-time views of players using Sony's camera. These are all flimsy affairs -- mini-games of the sort that sold Wii consoles three years ago, but as I watch people having fun while they shave the heads of goofy virtual monsters, I can't help but think how much my kids are going to love this stuff. It's fluffy, sure, but families will eat it up and there's just enough freshness that critics like me can't say that Sony copied Nintendo, at least not blatantly. Just as importantly, it's responsive and it feels good.
Move's hardware is more than competent and there's certainly a lot of potential, but most of it remained untapped at the event. This opinion is seconded by the developer, which is working closely with the device. They tell me that they believe it will ultimately outperform the Wii remote in responsiveness and say that their own tests are already proving that true. I ask if there is the kind of lag I experienced at Sony's demo and they say no, that it's very fast and reliable when programmed correctly. They add that it still has some calibration issues like the Wii remote, but that it's still an improvement.
Natal, though -- the motion offering from Microsoft -- not so much. The same studio rep calls Natal a big, buggy mess. "It's sh*t," he adds, saying that it just doesn't work as promised. That it's slow and that the camera is imprecise, which he notes, is causing some major development woes.
He refers to a development conference Microsoft held not so long ago in which Peter Molyneux of Fable fame (presently, creative director at Microsoft Game Studios) took the stage and attempted to demo the publisher's much-publicized Milo Natal project. Molyneux apparently called someone from the audience to the stage and asked them to interact with the virtual boy, but it didn't go to plan. Natal's camera failed to see the person accurately because he was wearing a black trench coat. After some fiddling, he was asked to remove his trench coat and -- whoops -- wore a black shirt underneath. When it still didn't work, he was invited to take his seat again.
Next, Molyneux said that Milo could interact with illustrations drawn to paper and scanned by the camera. He asked the audience for suggestions. "You could see him cocking his head and listening for the right key words, and then finally he heard something the game would recognize," my development source explains. It was a cat. So he invited someone from the audience to ascend the steps to the stage and illustrate the feline on paper. When Natal attempted to scan the horribly scribbled drawing, it instead picked up the Abercrombie & Fitch logo on the person's sweater.
I laugh at this but try to play devil's advocate. Okay, I say, so it's obvious you're not a fan, but somebody must be getting this thing to work well or it wouldn't be on the slate to ship this year. I ask if he knows of any other studios struggling with Natal.
"How about Rare and Lionhead? They're just going to try to make launch and then they're going to patch everything later," he says, laughing.
I'm very interested in the platform, but I haven't entrenched myself in Natal development. Later, when I bump into a colleague, I ask them if they have heard any behind-the-scenes rumblings about development trouble with Microsoft's casual entry device. He turns to me and says that yes, he has -- that studios are telling him they're struggling to get it working.
It's anecdotal and unproven and I know from experience that it's never so black and white. The fact of the matter is, the Wii remote shipped with so many problems that Nintendo was forced to release an upgrade device that even needs constant recalibration. And Wii MotionPlus? Word on the street is that the heat from your hands de-calibrates the sensor. It's still not perfect by any means, but it's workable, and I think that by the time Natal ships, it will be workable too, even if developers have to kill themselves getting it there. Lest we not forget that there are some amazing games for Wii and whether by ingenuity or simple trickery, the motion controls sometimes feel fantastic.
What I do find very telling about both some of these public unveilings and secret murmurings, however, is just how difficult it seems to be to nail motion controls. People love to shrug off Nintendo's work. Hell, I've done it. But for all the primitive graphics surrounding the Wii Sports experience, there's some pretty fancy handiwork powering the gameplay controls -- and I think Microsoft and Sony are only now discovering just how fancy it really is.
Speaking of Nintendo, everyone seems to be waiting for word on the company's next system. It's the go-to question in interviews. "Yes, I understand Wii sold a bazillion units in December alone, but hey -- when's Wii HD coming?" Yeah -- I'm guilty of that one, too. And it's no different when I talk to developers and publishers, nearly all of whom receive the obligatory query about new hardware -- what and when? I always resign myself to the no comment or the no idea, but at GDC I struck a bit of a niblet when a developer said Nintendo told him it would be ready to roll with Wii 2 in 2012. Anybody with a brain would probably guess as much, but it is even so always refreshing to hear so from a semi-official source.
Of course, the NPD numbers just hit and the Wii dominance is at an end. Outsold in February by Xbox 360, ending a forever-long winning streak. And PS3 was not far behind, either. We'll just have to see if Nintendo isn't willing to move that date forward.
Takeaways so far: Sony has made a dildo-controller that feels like a gimped Wii remote. Natal sucks. And Wii 2 is in no rush. At least, that's how it goes in pure black and white and if you believe everything you hear at this year's Game Developers Conference. Of course, if you do, then maybe you'll also believe that GameCube's fill rate is much better than Xbox's and therefore Nintendo's hardware is superior. Right?
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Re: Project Natal/Sony Arc Thread
Quote:
Exclusively on Multiplayer.it and thanks to our readers we can present you the first pictures ever published Project Natal, taken during a testing phase for speech recognition. Our source, who asked to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, says he was recruited by a company marketing and market research Italian and was recruited to carry out such testing on that Christmas will continue for four months, ie a mirror of time commensurate with the alleged date of issuance of the apparatus final. The photos show what we are told to be a prototype of Natal and we do not know what the final version. The camera includes USB connection for X360 and seems to have some bearing sensor integrated or balance. Natal is connected to a 360 and Debugging Software on Windows 7, the tester (which are quite numerous) should pronounce certain texts in a room with several microphones and obviously Natal, probably to work on speech recognition capabilities in various environmental situations. This is a sample of 600 sentences, ranging from "light up Xbox 360" in "go on Facebook" and more. Among other things you can see photos of what appears to be the device manual, or at least an outline of it.
M.it unable to verify the reliability of the source relies on the wisdom of our readers to assess if the photos that we offer here at the bottom of exclusive worldwide are credit worthy or not.
That ball game looks like SHIT. I'm sorry, but it does.
And Natal and the Anal Wand both look like epic fails that are basically ripping off Nintendo's success this generation.
Nintendo has a ton of flaws, many of which I love to discuss, but this is just sad sad posturing on Sony and Microsoft's part.
If Nintendo wants to rape the market they will release a brand new secret console to blow Anal Wand and Project Buggy Waggle Cam out of the water, yeah?
I think this is a good time for Nintendo to show how innovative they can be.
Project Natal/Sony Move Thread (Natal $150 ?)
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