The Economist Looks At The Console Industry 215
Fromeo writes "The Economist is running an interesting article discussing the state of the console industry, along with their usual interesting graph, showing the cycle that the industry follows."
Re:Consoles.... (Score:1, Interesting)
theres more reasons, but the simpsons is on.
Re:Consoles.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hardware vs. software (Score:2, Interesting)
Reminds me of a book I read... (Score:2, Interesting)
It will be very interesting to see how the competition pans out over the years... Microsoft and Sony make quite an assumption that gamers are really looking for the "Total-Multimedia-Experience" and "Network Gaming". Personally, I'd just like to see innovation replace the same old styles of games being re-released with a facelift every year...
Atari and the 80s (Score:3, Interesting)
I know the VCS pretty much decimated all competition back then, but does anyone have any harder figures? Adding the Colecovision and Intellivision into the pot, there must have been some signifigant inroads into Atari's numbers.
The funniest though, has to be the fact that they say Atari systemS. Sorry folks, but other than the venerable VCS/2600, Atari didn't really do squat in the marketplace.
Wrong as usual... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not just for kids anymore... (Score:2, Interesting)
And why didn't NEO-GEO make it into the chart? That was by far the best console during that time...too bad it was $100 a game (or some ungodly price like that) and some ridiculous amount for the console. I knew a kid who had one, but he was a prick and never invited me over to play it, because he was a spoiled brat.
Re:Error in article (Score:3, Interesting)
Its just a number for sales people to rattle off to parents, who invariably think one of two things:
- gee, that number's higher than the last time I heard it
or even worse
- gee, that number's high
It was like MMX - it was a useless feature when salespeople were pushing it, but shoppers really seem to be fooled by numbers and acronyms. The only part that ticks me off is how hard it is to teach a non-technical person to never put stock into what they hear, and more importantly, never put stock in their own ability to interpret it. For some reason, people dont all seem to act like they can talk the talk with cars, planes, other technical things - but there is something about technology that makes lots of newbies think they can get some sense of perspective in the jungle of specs and features out there. I know I might sound somewhat elitist, but I hope for my sake a mechanic knocks some shit into me if I ever go off on engine specs and prepare to drop serious money on my assesment of the sales lingo I'm presented.
xbox strategy failure (Score:2, Interesting)
What is preventing PC games from being ported?
Re:Wrong Wrong WRONG!!! (Score:1, Interesting)
Big R&D up front for in-house solution
= Low incremental cost of production
= No leakage of profit to suppliers
= obscenely profitable as quantities get larger.
Microsoft approach:
Use mostly off-the-shelf components from third-party suppliers:
Gets machine to market quickly
Reduces R&D costs (reasonable if you're just putting a toe in the water of a completely new market).
HOWEVER
the *incremental* cost does not go down nearly as fast and there is leakage of profits to the suppliers.
My guess is that XBox is a comparitively low cost market-testing exercise and the second-generation example (if M$ has half a brain) will be built more on Sony/Nintendo lines.
Re:Fact Check: Are they ALL losing money? (Score:1, Interesting)
Don't be silly. The Gamecube/Dolphin is faster processor-wise and graphics-wise than the PS2. It should be...the design is 2 years newer.
I own all 3, so I can tell you that the "power" of each is so close that it doesn't matter. They're essentially the same machine from an end-user standpoint.
The future... (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyway, that's my 2
Re:xbox strategy failure (Score:3, Interesting)
My guess would be royalties. After all, your PC game company can create a new PC game and not have to pay a dime in royalties to Microsoft. If the company takes the time to make an XBox port, then they have to worry about copies of their XBox port stealing sales from their more lucrative PC version. When the XBox market gets large enough so that it is worth the risk the PC game companies will probably do the necessary work. In the meantime, however, only those companies that Microsoft is paying are likely to come out with XBox titles first.
Re:Consoles.... (Score:2, Interesting)
The reason to buy a gaming computer is because consoles don't work well for a whole lotta games -- and there are all kinds of games that are unavailable on consoles.
Conversely, some games work better on consoles -- or at least on a controller. You can always hook up a controller to your computer, but if you're mostly going to be playing those types of games, you may, indeed, want to dispense only $300 of your money.
But the gaming world only uses software as an excuse -- I can't imagine being bereft of my beloved Civ III, Heroes of Might and Magic IV, Deus Ex and Homeworld, but I think people tend to classify themselves as a console or PC gamer, and stick to one to the exclusion of the other. I'm a PC gamer, and my pet peeve is whenever someone refers to computer games in general as "videogames". Even though I should know better, I ignore most things happening in the console world, with the exception of some exceptional titles that remind me of my early days on the SNES -- like Metroid Prime. And for the past half decade I've been bereft of Metal Gear Solid, and every Final Fantasy after VI.
So, should I have forgone the complexities of my dual-boot Mandrake/WinMe system for the PSX, PS2 and XBox? Well, the consoles may be simpler, and cheaper, but it doesn't matter, because I can honestly say the PC games I've played are worth the thousands of dollars I spent to play them. My advice is, go into debt and buy everything, because games are more important than money.