1up.com, crediting Dengeki Online as their source, has posted an extensive list of the planned titles for Sony’s upcoming PS3 console. Check it out here!

Engadget has posted a news about Sony losing money on the sale of the PS3. So far, nothing surprising, as the first 2 years of a game console are usually in the red, and money starts to kick in from games royalties overcoming the development costs on the 3rd and 4th year.

Merrill Lynch Japan Securities has calculated the cost structure of putting a Sony PlayStation 3 on the shelf, and they’re expecting Sony lose $94 per unit selling each at an estimated $399 at launch. (…) They go on to predict a net loss for Sony of $1.18 billion the first year—way, way more than the $458 million they lost the first year on the PS2.

Put into perspective of another article that they had few weeks back, everything makes more sense now I suppose.

The PlayStation 3 won’t be coming with an internal hard drive, because “no matter how much [capacity] we put in it, it won’t be enough.” Glossing over for the moment the curious logic of imagining zero capacity is somehow better than “not enough,” we move on to the news that there will likely be at least several add-on HDD options available, both locally in a 2.5-inch drive bay and in the form of some sort of network drive.

So, if I understand well, Sony will sell very expensive devices cheap and lose money on every single one, while selling cheap optional-yet-mandatory hard drive on the side with a fat margin. Also, because the HDD are “accessorized”, it allows them to sell upgrades when games become fatter, and cashing in on existing users, later on in the life of the same device.

All that seem very smart, getting money later while starting low, so that consumers buy their PS3 without being frightened by a cost too high, right? Well, the PS3 will most probably not be that cheap to start with anyway ($399)… When asked about the high launch price of the console, Ken Kutaragi (the “father” of the PlayStation) answered: “Our ideal is for consumers to think to themselves, ‘OK, I’ll work more hours and buy it.’ We want people to feel that they want it, no matter what.” Sony Style…

1UP.com has this cool feature on videogames emulators by Nich Maragos, titled “Afterlife“, which is an interesting read if you’re into video games.

What looks like a game system, plays like a game system, and yet isn’t a game system? The answer is an emulator, which is a means to make one piece of consumer electronics behave like another. Whether they’re hardware add-ons or clever pieces of coding, emulators have been a part of videogames almost as long as the medium itself — but they’re decidedly the black sheep of the gaming family, for a variety of legal and ethical reasons. (More…)

(Always via Waxy)

Sock Master has published a game console controller family tree (in other words, a visual history of console joysticks and gamepads) with family relations, pictures, and comments.
If you remember your first Atari or if your first console was a PS2, anyway you should go get inspired…

Via Waxy

The Register has an article on the PS3 specs:

That the PS3 would use a PowerPC-based Cell processor was already well known, but Sony yesterday revealed the chip would be clocked at 3.2GHz - matching Xbox 360’s PowerPC-based three-core chip - enough to yield 2.18 teraflops, the company claimed - twice what Xbox 360 will be able to pump out, apparently. There’s 512KB of on-die L2 cache, and seven AltiVec vector processing units.

More here.

One day old is already considered “old news” for hot topics like this, but at 3Yen we don’t care and neither should you: Cool news is like good risotto, it gets tastier the next day.

Anyway, Sony has just unveiled their new PlayStation 3, and Engadget and Joystiq were there to cover it live. And they also published some more photos here.