- Valve think that the PC is the biggest and fastest growing gaming platform. And that there is a question mark over the future of consoles.
- Microsoft cut the price of the Xbox 360. Predicted in December and analysed in this article. Both Nintendo and Sony say they are not going to respond. Obviously Sony want to get the maximum revenue out of GTA IV. But events in the market may focus minds.
- EA’s takeover of Take Two descends into soap opera. Take two’s management have implemented a poisoned pill defence protecting all their staff with big golden handshakes, the biggest investors in Take Two are taking advantage of the high share price to sell a massive number of shares (to EA?) and some Take Two shareholders have started a lawsuit against the directors for not taking the EA offer seriously enough and for the poisoned pill. Meanwhile Take Two have reported a first quarter loss of $38 million which makes the EA offer look outrageously generous. They should withdraw it and pitch again at a lower price. EA hold all the cards here.
- Square Enix commits to simultaneous worldwide releases. The advantages of this are so enormous that it is unprofessional not to. Likewise all format versions of a game should be launched simultaneously. We live in the age of the interweb and it is better to sell when you have momentum than when you are old news.
- Play.com Live is this weekend at the new Wembley stadium. They have kindly sent me a VIP ticket so I will be there.
- The MI6 game marketing conference is shaping up nicely for the beginning of next month in San Francisco.
- WiiWare game distribution channel launches this month. It is just a pity that the Wii doesn’t have the hard drive necessary to do this properly. Obviously Nintendo are gearing up for the HDTVÂ SuperWii.
- Sony Home to target user generated content. It’s nice to see the console platform holders starting to catch up with Web 2.0 at long last. User generated content is going to be massive in gaming.
And this week we have a couple of bonus stories:
- Microsoft, Panasonic and Toshiba plan an upgrade of the DVD standard to incorporate HDDVD features. It is not over till the fat lady sings.
- iPhone SDK downloaded by over 100,000 developers in just four days. Including THQ, Namco, PopCap, EA, id and Sega. This is going to become an amazing gaming platform.Â
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Many of the gamers from my community are finding consoles an increasingly attractive alternative for their fix of gaming, purely because they’re fed up with spending hundreds of pounds to upgrade their PC just to play a game at £34.99. The process of upgrading a PC in itself requires, for want of a better word, a shit load of research on the part of gamers, what with all the options available and their respective acronyms (PCI, AGP, SLI, GPU, RAM, MOBO etc etc etc) to ensure an optimum gaming experience, and even then hardware/software conflicts can ensue can cause massive headaches.
Lombardi: “The console guys are still trying to figure out how to release DLC, and are still not selling full new games [digitally]”
What? I download full games from PSN all the time and I’m sure the same is possible (surely more so) on XBox Live.
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I can’t believe they’re going on with this HDDVD lark. According to the link below, they’ve already sunk $1 billion into it! Throwing good money after bad, I reckon…
http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/12/toshiba-swallows-a-billion-dollars-on-hd-dvd/
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It really shows how much the PS3’s star has risen when Sony does not feel the need to respond immediately to an Xbox 360 price cut. It is interesting to note that the cost of equipping a 360 with all the add-ons required to match the built-in features of the PS3 is still more expensive than the PS3. This has always been the case, and it is strange that Sony has never had a good marketing campaign to spread this compelling price/value message. I guess that gamers are finally beginning to understand this point on their own, but I still am perplexed why Sony did not jump all over this advantage from the beginning.
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That’s an interesting point, Evan. I wonder if that really is an advantage though – Microsoft’s spin on the whole “Add-on” thing is that you can buy only the features you want – essentially bringing “next-gen” at almost any price-point and providing an upgrade path for users who bought the economy models so that they aren’t forced to (as they would say of Sony) chuck out their low-end console for the premium version when they feel they’re ready for it…
Perhaps Sony didn’t want to pick that fight because they feared that, despite the reality of the pricing schemes, they’d come across as the bad guys. Considering how poorly ’07 and ’06 went for Sony in that regard (can a company look more arrogant than Sony did, these last 2 years?), that might have been a very wise move, on their part.
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Snipehunter, your point makes good sense. As I recall, in the period following the launch of the PS3, people were criticizing the console as “over-engineered”, meaning that it had more built-in features than lots of gamers needed. As seen by the success of the Wii, for a large segment of the market, this point was valid.
Ironically though, the market now seems to be catching up to the PS3 design. Features such as a hard drive and WiFi are increasingly being viewed as basic required features — even developers have begun to demand that a hard drive be included as part of the default configuration for any serious next-gen console. And, of course, with the triumph of Blu Ray, gamers increasingly see the value of getting a built-in player.
So if you add those features to an Xbox 360, the PS3 still comes in at a cheaper price. And if you factor in likely lifespans, then the annual “ownership cost” of the PS3 is considerably less than the 360 (and possibly even less than the Wii). This may be too complex an analysis for the mainstream press, but I am surprised that the analysts and pundits do not spend more time on this point.