Doesn’t Microsoft also have partnerships with “the major music labels” for music in the Zune Marketplace? There are also a small selection of gear from third-party hardware accessory makers for the Zune.

Perhaps that section should read something like this:

“Partnerships: Apple pioneered links with Nike, Starbucks, Audible, all the major music labels and movie studios, indie distributors, and hardware accessory makers, even including MP3 rival Creative. Microsoft, normally the king of partnership deals, appears to have found much more difficulty in establishing partnerships for the Zune after burning its previous PlaysForSure partners (including Creative) two years ago. Apart from the major music labels, who will now ironically jump at almost any digital licencing deal now that they feel so threatened by iTunes, the best Microsoft can do is scrape up a tiny selection of third party cases and speaker systems.”

I have music on both CDBaby and iTunes. The issue of how much money is made in either place really has little to do with the venue. It has all to do with the promotion the artist does on their own. You’ve got to play shows, you’ve got to push your myspace profile and build your community, you’ve got to do things to build a base of committed fans who will buy your product.

CDBaby is the best tool for independent artists I’ve ever found. It cost me $30 to put an album on CDBaby. I was able to select to have my music included in 20 different digital distribution sites, including iTunes. On top of that they process sales for me at shows. I was able to get a card swiper to use at shows through them with no merchant account. They take a larger share of the profit than a normal merchant account, but I need no collateral or minimum purchases to have it. I like CDBaby and iTunes both but for different audiences.

No sales venue is going to guarantee sales. Just because iTunes has more eyeballs than CDBaby doesn’t mean more sales. More sales will only come from more exposure and hard self-promotion.

Good luck to your friend!

Ah, right, I see what you’re saying. The Cell and Sony’s lackluster developer tools are the main problem.

On the quality of multi-platform games, it appears as though some developers care about code optimization while others don’t. EA’s COD4 looks and works fine on both platforms. Rockstar’s GTA4’s colors apparently looked more vibrant on PS3. Valve’s Orange Box was crudely ported to PS3, though TF2’s online didn’t work well on either console. BioShock is apparently gonna look better and offer exclusive PS3 content.

I don’t even have a PS3, but being a 360 owner, I really hope in the next few years Sony’s console becomes the lead programming platform. All games for both platforms would presumably look better and perform almost equally well on each, creating stronger competition between the two.

Games are programmed in both the 3D layer (DirectX or OpenGL) and in the general API. I’m no game dev so I’m probably mangling the terms, but in essence you have a CPU and a GPU to program for. The sweetest graphics card in the world – even supported by powerful development software – can’t do anything without equivalent backup from the main processor. For every object, texture and effect you see onscreen: general processing has to have already been done to deliver it to the GPU ready for rendering. And then there’s core game logic, handling other players, physics, sound, rumble, etc. etc.

My comment was about the PS3 using the Cell processor. Cell is a very unusual design for this kind of use. It has a fairly weak middle, surrounded by several strong satellite cores. (I know I’m mangling terms now!) If you run traditional code on a Cell, you get poor performance compared with a more traditional processor like that in the 360. But if you take the time to optimise your code – and this is such a change it really means *redesign* your code – then the Cell suddenly jumps into life and can pull off extraordinary things. Carmack was talking about this some years ago when id were first introduced to the developer tools for both platforms. The 360 was more traditional, and so easier to get things done on from the get-go. The PS3 meanwhile clearly had deeper promise, but he’d always found the traditional PS2 fiddly to develop on thanks to less than stellar developer tools by Sony.

In other words: the PS3 has indeed proven to be great for platform exclusives. But for all those titles with simultaneous releases, it’s often easier for the 360’s port to look and feel better than the PS3’s as the 360’s is often completed first and can be finessed for longer.

One last thing: GPU’s. From what I heard back when this was a hot talking point: the 360’s GPU is stronger than the PS3’s. And yes, you can use DirectX much like on Windows and therefore make best use of your (presumably brought up in Windows game work) dev team. As soon as you want to play outside of Microsoft’s systems however, you absolutely must use OpenGL. And when you’re talking PS3, it’s definitely worth the time to learn how to use that Cell. It can more than make up for some of the PS3’s other weaknesses.

Once upon a time, we in the Mac world drooled at the thought of Cell based Macs. It is a PowerPC architecture. The chip is certainly capable of many a task, but we’d *still* be stuck on G4’s in our PowerBooks! I think Apple may have just made the right choice…

I question how “hard” it is to program a PS3 game vs. a 360 title. I think it has more to do with DirectX vs. OpenGL. As far as I understand it the 360 uses an API rather similar to what DirectX coders use on the Windows PC while OpenGL ES isn’t nearly as prevalent. I don’t know how Sony addresses it, but just about every first-party published games looks much more impressive to me than most of what I can play on my 360. With good looking games like LittleBigPlanet and Killzone 2 coming to the system two years into its life, perhaps their technological investments will pay off.