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To: Harry who wrote (1196)	8/7/1998 12:34:00 PM
From: Jeff Lins	Respond to of 1773

Bleeker- good point about Goldman posting sales numbers and earnings. Seems that they are fairly "in the know" and so while we may do better than they expect, we are probably a long way from even. Then again, Goldman said they expected CREAF to be at 40 in 12 months when it was around 20. Down 50% since...OY! Harry- good points about developing for multiple systems. Obviously, common sense says put a game out on as many systems as possible and present your product to as many customers as possible. And at heart, I agree with this. But splitting development man hours can come at a cost, as can developing a game with mixed focus. I believe that DD was originally designed as a PC game, with PSX in mind early on. But look what happened. The PSX version had a poor framerate. Forget every other feature in the game- if it runs slowly, it is going to kill itself. How much worse would the game have been if developers had to split their hours further to design an N64 version? Would all 3 varieties have been merely "ok"? Had they totally focused on PSX only and not PC, would the PSX version have been better? Lastly, I remember seeing some games ported to Saturn from PSX. THe ports weren't very good, and this can tarnish the developers reputation. Regarding backwards compatibility of PSX2: who knows? I have heard Sony suggest that they will, and that they will not. Previous machines have not been compatible due to the cartridge media. PSX2 may well run on DVD, so the playback mechanism is OK. You mentioned that having games was important to a console's launch. Would be pretty good if they had a few hundred games at launch... Regarding no company leading the market for 2 successive generations. Correct. I believe that this will be the first time. For starters, the N64 is dead. The only hope they have is the "Bulky Drive" and they have TOTALLY blown that one. We MIGHT see it in the next millenia. Meanwhile, FF8 is going to Sony. As is Crash, Lara, Res Evil, and all of the good fighting and driving games. Sega has a bad rap to get by. This hurts them by having weary consumers, and worse, weary developers, who will take a wait and see attitude. I believe that PSX2 will be announced after christmas, maybe Jan-Feb, and will be backwards compatible. Should release for x-mas '99- though that would be a problem with getting software out (since there are no developer kits out there yet). That would make the PSX 4 years old, which is not as long a life as previous consoles, but I think we will see console life cycle continue to shrink as technology continues to break past Moore's law. Since DVD is the likely medium of the future, I think there will be a lot of backwards compatibility accompanying the change. (I know that there is more involved in the compatibility issue, but you could probably bundle the 4 year old PSX technology [which is not redundant/compatible with the new box] into a single $10 chip) Jeff