Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: Chris Chadwick Newsgroups: scea.yaroze.freetalk Subject: Re: yaroze members? Date: Sat, 02 Aug 1997 13:05:08 -0700 Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 55 Message-ID: <33E392F4.64CD@dial.pipex.com> References: <33b1d797.15944657@news.scea.sony.com> <5r7c9t$5na48@chuka.playstation.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: am080.du.pipex.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.02 (Win95; I; 16bit) Gil Jaysmith wrote: > > jamin1@psu.edu (Jamin Frederick) wrote: > >Does anyone know a ballpark figure of the number of yaroze members in > >the US and Europe and Japan? The newsgroups haven't been very lively > >lately. I'm wondering if there's many members who know what they're > >doing already and don't really contribute, or if a lot of people don't > >even use newsgroups, or if a lot of people don't know much at all, or > >finally, there's not that many people to begin with! > > A bit of hearsay floating around the office right now is that Sony has > sold only a couple of hundred units in the States. This would not surprise me, but then again what does it matter? Just as long as there is a *significant* (not neccessarily huge) number. IMHO It's not going to sell in thousands like the home PS as it's catering to a niche market. Reletively speaking, there cant be that many home game programmers, using C, willing (or able) to spend this much money to move over to programming for another system. This does not mean I think Yaroze is expensive because I don't - Sony couldn't buy mine back for five times what I paid for it! I think the price paid is not for the hardware but for the *essential* on-line support and again, the reletively small sales. I've tried to think why Sony released Yaroze in the first place: I can't believe they can make any significant profit from the project, if any profit at all! And any thoughts of an act of philanthropy must go out the window - Sony is in business to make money, after all. Anyway, whatever the reasons, I for one am just glad they did it as I am enjoying the experience (except when I can't sort a problem, 'course :) > > In either case I'm surprised as hell that there's been so little > takeup; the impression I got from the European groups was that there'd > be more, since it's usually only a vocal 2% who contribute to > newsgroups. Perhaps all those garage programmers out there have > decided to wait for the Nintendo 64 home devkit ;=) Don't hold your breath! Although, they might bring out a Virtual Boy (ha ha ha) dev kit... not! :) > > Gil Jaysmith > SN Systems Software Ltd, makers of Psy-Q... http://www.snsys.com > Disclaimer: What I say when I post here represents me, not my employers. These are just some of my thoughts I thought I'd post (I've never posted to SCEA newgroups before, see) and BTW no I'm not in any way associated to Sony - in case you were wondering :) SCEE ya! Chris