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Professor cyborg
If we want to stop machines from taking over, we better start becoming more like them.
By Janelle Brown
[10/20/99]

Attack on the Net
In the midst of dot-com mania, one radio ad campaign takes the offensive against online commerce.
By Andrew Leonard
[10/19/99]

Technology: View from the top
Stoking the Net's growth
Industry veteran Ellen Hancock talks about Windows NT, glass ceilings -- and how her company, Exodus, keeps its vast server farms humming.
By Julie Polito
[10/18/99]

The Hollywoodization of venture capital
The business of funding tech companies has gone gaga for brand names and boffo deals. "Visionaries," though, may be out of luck.
By Mark Gimein
[10/15/99]

Books
The Red Hat diaries
Are Linux coders and Linux companies on different paths? A slapdash new book and a recent flurry of corporate maneuvers suggest just that.
By Andrew Leonard
[10/14/99]

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Dreamcast costs $199. Playstation 2's Japanese launch price of 39,800 yen is about $360 at current exchange rates -- and it will probably launch for $299 in the United States (although a recent story by Nikkei BizTech holds out the possibility that the launch price may be as low as $199, which would be extremely competitive).

Many gamers have complained that $299 is too much. That's probably why Nintendo has backed off from promising DVD playability on Dolphin; it's hoping to keep its hardware cheaper, looking for a competitive advantage. The X-Box? Even Mr. Bill probably doesn't know; per rumor, Microsoft won't manufacture the machine itself. Microsoft will probably create what is known in the biz as a "reference platform," and personal computer manufacturers like Gateway and Dell will be invited to build their own machines -- and set the pricing.

If Playstation 2 does launch at $299, its relatively high price will deter some gamers, who will stick with Dreamcast (the price of which will steadily drop), at least until Dolphin comes out. But it's worth remembering that the original Playstation launched at $299 too -- and still managed to conquer the world.

But even the cheapest price doesn't always seal the deal. Nintendo64 suffered in the battle with Playstation because it was the last major console system of its generation to market -- after Sega Saturn and long after Playstation. By the time Nintendo launched, Playstation had a critical mass of games on the market. Nintendo never entirely recovered.

Dreamcast is a demonstrably inferior machine to its competition. Yet it is out now, close to a year before Playstation 2. Dreamcast has sold more than a million copies in Japan, and more than half a million in the United States. It launched in Europe on Oct. 14, and is already outpacing initial sales projections there. In all likelihood, at least 5 million Dreamcasts will be in people's homes worldwide before Playstation 2 launches. (By comparison, Playstation has sold more than 60 million units to date.)

So Dreamcast has a first-mover advantage -- that may give it enough momentum to keep going after Playstation 2 launches. Nintendo will be late to market again -- the company will be trying to convince people who may already have bought Dreamcast or Playstation 2 or both to lay out another couple hundred bucks for another machine.

But no matter how cool the technology or how cheap the hardware, people won't flock to a new console unless the games are there. Sega's Saturn died a horrible death because very few titles were available when Saturn launched, Sega never got enough developers to commit to supporting the platform, and a mere handful of titles were published each year.

Sega learned from Saturn; the company had its ducks in a row before Dreamcast appeared. When Dreamcast launched in the U.S., 17 titles were available; 40 will be available before year end and (Sega claims) more than 100 by the end of 2000. So far, only two -- Power Stone and Soul Calibur -- have gotten glowing reviews; Sega needs a hit to drive the machine, a Mario Brothers or Zelda or Pokemon, all games that spurred sales of their resident hardware. But throw enough crap at the wall and something will stick; Sega has sterling support from developers. It's cool on this score.

Sony actually has a bit of a problem. Its machine is so novel and so powerful that it's quite hard to develop for. Higher polygon resolution means more time spent creating images and models. Powerful processors enable more complex physical models, artificial intelligence and graphic effects -- but those require more time programming. And few programming tools -- software developer kits, programming libraries -- are available for Playstation 2 yet.

A typical Playstation game costs about $2 million to develop. A typical Playstation 2 game is going to cost more -- and one that takes full advantage of the hardware's abilities is going to cost a lot more. Square, the publisher of the Final Fantasy game series, says it expects to spend $40 million on the next installment -- the largest game development project in history.

According to Sony, 89 Japanese developers, 46 North American developers and 27 in Europe have signed to develop for Playstation 2. That sounds impressive, but what it really means is that 162 companies have signed a piece of paper that gives them access to information about the new system and allows them to develop for it if they want. You'd be morons not to sign. How many of them will actually bring games to market is another question.

Nintendo has clearly noticed Sony's problem with developers. The company has announced partnerships to "make [Dolphin] game development easier, faster" -- with MetroWerks to create a version of the CodeWarrior software development environment for Dolphin; and with Applied Microsystems to produce the development hardware. This is something that ought to reassure developers -- but Nintendo won't say who or how many companies are working to produce Dolphin titles.

Of course, Sony has clout -- and more importantly, Playstation 2 will play old Playstation games. That's certainly comforting to people with large libraries of Playstation games -- and it means that 3,000-plus existing titles will run on the thing.

As for X-Box, it's basically a personal computer variant. In principle, it should be possible to run a great many PC games on the machine; in practice, that may be difficult, or even impossible. The X-Box -- like all three other machines -- will have both video out and VGA support, meaning you can connect it to a TV or computer monitor. The problem with this is that TV resolution sucks. Suppose you have a PC game with controls labeled in 12-point text; that will look fine on a personal computer, but it will be illegible on a TV.

Secondly, PC games are invariably designed for keyboard and mouse. Some games (notably first-person shooters) are easily adaptable to a console controller -- but others require wholesale change to work that way. Conceivably X-Box will come with a keyboard and mouse, in which case it will probably be perceived as something you put on a desk instead of on top of your TV -- a "PC junior" rather than a game console. If it looks more like a true console, most PC games probably won't run on the thing.

Microsoft, of course, hasn't revealed what game developers it's working with, if any; it won't even admit the project exists. But European trade paper CTW reported that Microsoft was showing X-Box behind closed doors to developers at the European Computer Trade Show in London last month.

So depending on what the final machine looks like and how successful Microsoft is in lining up partners, the X-Box could run thousands of existing PC titles at the start -- or a handful of new games -- or nothing at all.

Next page | Mortal Combat: Sony vs. Microsoft