Sorry fatass microsoft executive. MGS4 = gap closing, not widening, unlike your waistline and your addiction to snacking on modchips.

Totally good points Aaron, but tell me: How do you feel about having only a 5 mils lead despite all these faults and a 16 MONTHS lead? I'll tell you how: pretty fucking worried.

I like it when executives go "fuck it" to being nice and just spray venom everywhere like this.

Only a microsoft employee could observe the gap between the install bases of the 360 and PS3 decreasing steadily over time and then, upon analyzing this, determine that the pattern will continue in the exact opposite direction.

I do agree with him about sony's hollow promises, or at least promises with belated results though.

Hello 500 comment news article!

Honestly I don't know where to begin here. He's bashing the PS2 for not keeping promises? Yeah, um take a look at that console's sales. He's asking where are the achievements in Home? Is that some kind of requirement?

He's bragging about a 5 million console lead? Uhhhh, the PS3 has sold 13 million since Nov. 2006. The 360 has sold 19 million since Nov. 2005. Plus the PS3 wasn't even released till march 2007. It has easily been outpacing the 360 year over year, and it's more expensive to boot. If he wants to brag about short term advantages without seeing the bigger picture, he is an idiot

Here's how Microsoft could have one this console war, not taking into account the Wii. I think that's a different beast all together. They should have dropped a half billion on RockStar last summer to release GTAIV as a XBOX 360 exclusive at the beginning stages with PS3 development lagging and install base rather low they could have delivered a death blow before the race even started. Oh well, I enjoy the competiton.

I love how the Sony fanboys come out in full-force in response to PR spin

[grabs popcorn]

Holy shit. So much for a little decorum, eh Microsoft. What's even funnier is that Sony has been admitting that they fucked up with some of their PS3 promises. Nothing like getting kicked while you're down.

@LittleBigPlaneteer:

wasn't released in Europe till March 2007*

They had a 7 Million unit lead to begin with, so that means it's now down to 5.

Anyway, I've never seen a PR person so full of bile against their competition, no matter the industry. I guess he's rallying the fanboy troops. Kudos sir, you will bring endless flames, plenty of ad-honorems and more than your share of racial/sexual epithets thrown your way... to increase the number of eyeballs following your product. Kudos.

I hate when I say one when I mean "won", spell check won't help that kids :P

... The broken promises stuff is true, but the SDF is going to ba all over this thread. What were you thinking Ashcraft!? Ready the banhammer!

@Snuffbox:

*Takes some of your popcorn*

@NitrousO:
Hey man! Don't shoot the messenger.

@Brian Ashcraft:

This is going to be messier than that vomit elevator Bash!

Handbags!

Actually they are quite valid points, Sony has made some quite grand claims that in the era of the PS2 were kind of let slip because it had such a lead and library. With the PS3 though we are seeing comparable performance to the 360 and lots of delays or at least long development time.

Of course on the flip side I have to say someone sounds a little sensitive about the size of his install base. :)

Corporate Flamebait, gee i wonder how much he gets out of this useless showboating?

*Spidey sense tingling*

I'm sure there is half a valid point somewhere in there, but I drowned in the wall of questions before I could get to it.

Anyway, this makes me realize one thing: I don't like it when execs spin everything, but I like it even less when they supposedly "take the gloves off".
In fact, I'd like them to shut up, all of them.
We don't need them sugarcoating bad news any more than we need fueling retarded fan wars.

Congrats, Greenberg, you're ready to argue against kids on the Gamefaqs forum.

Oh man, he brung it in a way that we rarely see it brung!

I'm incredibly excited.

Also I've been wondering this for a while, and this seems like a good place to ask this.

Whatever happened to Microsoft's IPTV plans? Is it available anywhere yet? Is it coming to N. America as initially stated?

@LittleBigPlaneteer: I completely agree that he is only looking at the short term. Personally I think that when he is talking about Sony's promises about whats to come he forgets that Sony is working to make sure the features such as Home are the best they can be before the public can get their hands on them. As for the cutting edge games the PS3 should have I think that it is very easy to forget that developers need time to create games and the longer they work on them the better the chance of the developer getting things the way they should be. Please note that the next Duke Nukum game is the exception for the better game over time rule.

Any and all references to "popcorn" should be a banable offense on every message board.

At the very least karma owes anyone a good, swift kick in the crotch for using such a tired, obnoxious expression.

Oh, c'mon. Don't act like it's just Sony. Every multi-million dollar corporation makes promises they don't keep. EVEN YOU, Microsoft . . .

Dont own a PS3 so I dont care what he says. Instead of listening to his rambling about competition i'll go play video games instead.
I advise everyone else to also play video games right now ;)

Well its true Sony sold a lot of hype and empty promises to gamers and so far I think the 360 is a better bet. This guy is just pointing out that Sony cannot be trusted to deliver the experience you are expecting from a 'next-gen' console. You can wait all you want for Sony to come around but its going to be a long wait especially when developers are not on their side.

@Nightshift Nurse: Mile High Colonic: Hush now, just because you don't like popcorn dosen't mean the rest of us can't enjoy some.

@Nightshift Nurse: Mile High Colonic: Popcorn AND grabbing a chair.

He also forgot that the PS3 is dominating the 360 in Japan and is quickly closing the gap in Europe, which is another region that Sony basically owns.

He's right about Sony's empty promises but some of his blathering sounds like fanboy FUD. First of all YOU didn't release Gears 1 and 2 in the time Killzone is taking to come out, EPIC DID. YOU simply threw a large sum of money at them to procure it as an exclusive. Also it's not exactly fair to brag about how much faster Gears 1 and 2 have come out compared to Killzone 2 since Sony is basically building an amazing proprietary engine with Killzone 2. Yea hopefully the game will be great, but Killzone 2 is basically a tech demo for Sony's amazing engine that other devs will be able to use with the PS3. Epic on the other hand was far into the development of the Unreal 3 engine long before Sony even hinted at KZ2.

He also chose to ignore that Sony is actually going to have a line-up of exclusive games this year that will be able to compete with the 360s line-up which is something that he should be a little concerned with.

O and before anyone marks me as a fanboy you should know I own both a PS3 and a 360, I owned the 360 first and I play more games on it than I do my PS3 so you'd be hard pressed to say I have a bias in favor of Sony.

The days of Sony snowing the consumers and the press are over.

So does that mean the days of Microsoft snowing the consumers and the press have been in full swing for two years now? Your ad campaigns sure reek of it.

Jesus, what happened to honest, good-natured competition? Does everything have to be a flame war? We have Barack and Hilary spewing shit at each other and they're on the same side, Sony and Microsoft fighting over one Lego piece while Nintendo runs off with the entire box...it's too much to deal with sometimes.

@Nightshift Nurse: Mile High Colonic: Popcorn fanboys are gonna "pwn" you

halo ds confirmed :p

Hahaha, this could get ugly and fun. Let's see if Sony hits back by dredging up every negative point about the 360 or takes the high road. Ash, get the cats fighting picture ready!

Only a 5M gap? Wow that's not much.

@Pornosaur:

That and cutting their price instead of pushing on when they saw the PS3 wasn't going to be the hot potato at launch. Greedy greedy MS.

Recent news of Blu-Ray and new chipsets are interesting and of course a little bit tin-foil inspiring considering Sony is entering a stretch of strength. Nothing like instilling doubt.

What about RROT? That easily outweighs all of the ps3s flaws.

Why does he sound like hes shouting because no one listening? He seems like his about to loss his job so hes doing anything he can to make Microsoft like him more. I'm for Seattle and this right across the water from Redmond/kirkland/Bellevue so I know Microsoft just loves the a-holes. I love the big MS :)

No need to worry Mr. Dille, your lead is shrinking and no one knows why. Maybe thats why hes pissed.

O and almost forgot. He called out the PS3s online service but apparently forgets it took them an entire console generation to get XBL where it is today. Give Sony time they'll get there, and I wager it will be by the end of this year.

haha someone sounds a little insecure :)

I think they're just snippy because they shilled out 50 million for GTA IV and Sony still sold consoles off the back of it.

I was actually considering buying a 360 for GTA4, but this crap actually acts to dissuade me - I don't want my little digit addition to the sales figures to be seen as an endorsement of such twattitude.

Pretty harsh words, but he is very correct on one point: Sony bullshit about products that are nowhere near ready for release to spoil sales on rival formats. They did it to the Dreamcast with the PS2 (promising Toy Story and Final Fantasy Spirits Within in realtime) and they've tried to do it with the PS3 by announcing things like Home to counter Live and adding tilt support to their controllers when the Wii was announced.

If Sony had been honest about their time scales rather than releasing fake early launch dates and then announcing delays until the real release date comes round I wonder if they could have sold as many consoles?

So much venom but so much truth.

After Sony's gamers-day I traded my PS3 in and got another 360 for my 2nd son. Home delayed, I had already been put off by the Homo erotic MGS4 and now announcing that it has cut scenes within cut scenes. Little Big Planet was the only shining light and thats just not enough to make me keep my PS3. Killzone 2 leading the 1st party games for this year.......out in 2009 ffs.

maybe I will pick one of the new lighter models up in 2009 until then its not worth keeping.

Let's all pose similar flame-bait questions to Mr. Greenberg. Like:

1.) When's IPTV coming to America?

2.) When is the Zune and 360 going to interact (and I don't just mean syncing)

3.) What are the real percentages of RROD out there?

4.) Why doesn't the 3 year warranty cover Disc Read error's? That's a big issue too

5.) Where is the blu-ray add-on? You once stated that if Blu-ray was victorious there would be a blu-ray add on but so far all there have been are denials of any work on one.

6.) What is being done to combat your abysmal sales in Japan?

and so forth...

Meh.. Merely the screech of a rat on a sinking ship.

That Linked article though [kotaku.com] ; it's funny how everything he said turned out to be true. Not so crazy after all.

How many of that "console lead" was because of 360'ers having to buy another console cause of the RROD and the warranty going bye bye? Please answer that mr I bleed green. Sure Sony has had some mistakes there first year but the PS2 wasn't exactly a problem free launch and look where it ended up. Yes I only have a PS3 but I don't have bias agaisnt 360. I would of bought one if I thought the hardware could stand up to my gaming habits. They have some good games that you can only get on that machine but as long as the hardware is a question that still hasn't been fully answered I just can't see me getting a 360. BTW besides Gears, Too Human, and NG 2 what else does MS have up their sleeve? At least with Sony you can some good solid titles coming out that you can only get on the PS3.

In during Microsoft hate.

I do not agree with him on the Home part. I think it sounds like an awesome addition, and once it actually FREAKING happens I will be happier (assuming I have a PS3 by that point).

That having been said, at the current, and I mean current moment, he makes valid points. Maybe I will care more once Xbox quits making systems that, according to Yahtzee and confirmed by my personal experience, "occasionally piss themselves and die".

I guess what I mean by this mini-rant is that both sides have things to brag about and things to be shit on about...although I do think that Microsoft has delivered more on this console round so far. And who takes anything Sony says about a console during a conference at face value after all the pre-rendered PS2 shit back in the day anyways?

lol PR Spin Scramble. Hilarious. and people who defend PR are even more hilarious as well are the people it offends.

@VishusBurn:

heh, you're right. Didn't even read that.

Here's the quote from Dille for the lazy:

"With the Xbox 360 you've got an inconsistent design, some have a hard drive, some don't, and none of them have Blu-Ray, and the HD-DVD will be out of business in a matter of months. Is this a 10 year product? And by the way, it doesn't even work. Do they want to be selling it for 10 years and refurbishing them all for 10 more years? I don't think that's a 10 year product. You could disagree with me, or they could disagree with me, but I'd put that up against the PS3 any day."

@photoboy:I wouldn't say they are lying about launch dates. They are just perfectionists. GTA4, MGS4, Haze... a lot of third-party games get delayed without their control. Home and LBP is pivotal to the PS3 this generation and if they screw THAT up, they will lose the momentum. They need to charm both users and devs with it for it to bounce. I actually like that are taking their time instead of rushing half-baked crap. Besides, between finals, Warhawk and GTA4, I would barely have more time for other games right now. Haze (that I probably won't buy anyways) is just around the corner and MGS4 is just 5 weeks away and my summer is pretty much safe. I won't miss KZ2 thanks to Resistance 2/Motorstorm 2/ LBP this fall. Plus let's not forget the multiplats coming this summer (Top Spin 3, Madden, Fifa, Battlefield, etc). And on the bright side, there are at least 4 great titles already for 2009 for PS3 (GT5, FF13, KZ2 and GoW3). On the Xbox side, it's a little dark after this fall so far...

1. Has it been two years since GDC 2007? Really?

2. How many of those "5-million-unit console sales lead" units are replacements for *%¤#¤$% RROD'd units, huh??!!

Now that's the main reason why i don't own a 360.

@aldo_14: before you use this instance as a reason to not buy a console, you should look at some of the stuff Sony has done to companies. Lik-Sang and Working Designs comes to mind, as well as their supposed customer service (supposedly, and I realize this is rumor, they don't even service the 20 or 60 gig ps3's anymore...had a few customers tell me that but obviously I can't confirm it firsthand)...plus, there are people with every company that talk shit. It makes life exciting, and gives us reason to beat on our friends for disagreeing with us.

360 Fanboys: "Yeah! You tell 'em!"
PS3 Fanboys: "Shut up! Ar Ar Oh Dee!"

The rest of us: "Christ, it's like they're running for election."

@Does Not Equal:

Wii Fanboys: We would like to play *bows*