Games Industry Off Its Game

A Washington Post article explores the problems facing the games industry in this year of console generation turnover and lackluster PC game sales. From the article: "There are other potential problems. The new-generation consoles look best when plugged into high-definition TV sets -- and it is not clear how many people will buy a new television just for the latest version of the Madden football game. And the cost of the new gaming systems continues to rise. Perhaps no question haunts the industry more at the moment than the mystery of when Sony's PlayStation 3 will come out and how much it will cost."

bad article

[the computer guy nex]

"And the cost of the new gaming systems continues to rise."

PS3's price continues to rise. A $300 Xbox360 is less (adjusted for inflation) than PS1 PS2 Xbox1 NES SNES and the N64.

Also hard to say the Industry is in trouble when they set records in sales and profit last year (console, not PC).

Re:White Flag

[MBCook]

I don't care if their idea of an "open console" means "here is a virtual NES devkit, and you can download your creations to the Revolution". Giving hobbiests a REAL development platform on a real console, no matter how scaled back (within reason, like I said above, NES is enough, SNES would be great, PS/N64 would be fanstastic) would be a major boon for a large number of reasons. First of all there is NO hardware out there for people to make games for except the PC. Sure, you can try on the GBA or whatever (questionable legality, requires special hardware, etc). Or there is the XGameStation (interesting, powerful enough, but $200 compared to "free" if you already own the Rev.). The Net Yahorzee (or whatever) for the PS showed people wanted to be able to do this (I almost bought one). And if you could send your creations to freinds/relatives then all the better.

Nintedo could hold little development competitions (Sony did that once with the Yahorzee, I remember playing the games on a PlayStation Underground CD) which fosters talent, good will, etc.

I don't understand why these companies don't do this. Why not do it for the older consoles? Now that the PS3 is out (hypothetical), release a dev-kit for $100 that lets you make PS2 games (I know you can do it with the Linux kit, but they need better libraries instead of "here is the chip manual, figure it out" which is where I understand the Linux kit puts you).

And if they don't sell the console at a loss (or sell a "developer" version for an extra $50 or something) then they will only make money off the people who buy the console to develop for it.

All I'm left with right now is waiting for Parallax's Propeller [parallax.com] chip (read about it here [makezine.com]) which looks like a great little console on a chip to me.