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I have to ask... Which ones are the "tiny" ones? ;-)

One problem with your premise; Microsoft doesn't make a profit on xbox. They hope, to eventually make a profit, but they currently do not.

FWIW, the Nintendo RevolutionWii is IBM PowerPC based as well.

from http://www.ferrago.com/portal/cluster/631108 (down at the moment) 04/12/05 11/12/05 18/12/05 25/12/05 01/01/06 DS 176,958 29,9278 408,770 597,628 390,181 PSP 92,121 86,403 95,689 161,332 110,741 PS2 33,042 45,893 55,342 97,475 78,646 GBA 15,094 26,772 33,946 55,931 27,679 GC 6,494 12,212 17,849 36,646 12,579 Xbox 360 43,970 8,623 5,674 12,300 Xbox 149 164 182 141 121

Are you sure?
I think the Korean gamer who lost his job and later died after a fifty-hour session of Starcraft, might beg to differ. There are other cases that I have heard about, and so I'm sure it's more of a problem than many care to think.
Many of you are implying that because the addiction is psychological, it's not real... well, as one who knows people personally that suffer from psychological conditions, they are very real, even to the point where they become disabilities. A gaming addiction may not have the same symptoms as a methamphetamine addiction, but it is still a very real problem.

For every single dupefix, three new dupes are created. Goodbye, WoW economy..

Umm, you could have said goodbye to the in game and out of game economy a long time ago. There are reports and artciles of people in 3rd world countries who get paid to do nothing but farm gold in WoW. Don't believe me? Check out this article here.

It is true that they have no released a MRSP for the next-gen consoles however Merrill Lynch business analysts have placed their estimate for the PS3 at $399USD. What makes this interesting is that it has been expected that each system will cost Sony $494 to build. The full article can be read here.

Why would MS seek to undermine BitTorrent?

Why would MS be interested in BitTorrent?

Because they are pretty good at seeing where the market is going.

BitTorrent is *not* a niche protocol. BitTorrent is the *dominant* form of net-traffic.
http://www.cachelogic.com/research/slide3.php

Ask anyone who works at a major ISP.

BitTorrent is currently the *dominant* protocol on the net, in terms of bits transfered. Yes, bigger than HTTP, FTP, all the normal protocols, and all the other P2P protocols.

In addition to *ALL THAT TRAFFIC*, BitTorrent is starting to see siginifcant corporate legitimacy. Blizzard uses BitTorrent in a customized downloader to distribute patches.

Valve uses a BitTorrent-like (read, licensed from Bram Cohen (infact developed by him, http://www.ferrago.com/story/2963) protocol for distributing their software.

One can imagine that the legitimate electronic channels of distribution in the future will uses BitTorrent or BitTorrent-like schemes. The cost savings on bandwidth alone will set companies that use it apart from the competition.

And right now, MS has no technology that comes close. This is from a company that once dreamed of making MSN synonmous with 'The Net'.

More likely than not, MS currently sees BitTorrent as a massive threat to their having a position in the content distribution networks of tomorrow. Why use a Microsoft solution if you can either write your own in-house OSS solution, or hire another company with a pre-developed, pre-test solution (steam), that crushes the MS solution in bandwidth efficiency.

In the realm of content distribution (which is a big, big place, and a place where 'visionaries' see a lot of growth (perhaps real, perhaps imaginary), BitTorrent is the 'big fish'. And Bram Cohen occupies a similar spot to Linus Torvald's position in the 'Linux World'.

Advertising agencies and news sources have been reporting on how badly they want to get into the VG business.

Think of the the game Run Like Hell It's a freakin' ad for Bawls!

This will get a LOT worse. count on it.

http://www.legaltorrents.com/
http://www.xandros.com/products/home/desktopoc/dsk _oc_download.html
http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/bittorrent/ download.html
http://www.ferrago.com/
http://syd2.ausgamers.com:6969/
http://www.filerush.com/
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/faq/blizzarddo wnloader.html
http://www.slackware.com/torrents/

Who is the one living in the bubble here? Personally, I love being able to download popular files quickly. I guess you'd prefer to pay fileplanet for the privilege, hmm?

Demand for the GameCube last year was hurt by the lack of hit games for the console. - Bloomberg

uters and other news agencies have reported out of Japan that Nintendo's net profit has fallen 43 percent in the latest quarter, and that the videogame maker has also cut its forecast for the full year by more than one fifth, citing a strong yen and weak sales of the GameCube. - Reuters

Only one Nintendo title made it to NPD's Top 10 list: "Pokémon FireRed" for the Game Boy Advance. The company's highest-selling GameCube game, "Pokémon Coliseum," ranked 25th, according to Lowenstein. - Seattle Times

The company now expects that by the end of June it will have sold 21 million to 22 million Xboxes since the product debuted, up from an earlier forecast of less than 20 million. - CNET News.com

The Home and Entertainment division, which includes the Xbox and all games sales, reported sales of the console up 30% on the same period last year... Ferrango

PS: Name one killer game that came with psx2 on launch. Ready to Rumble, Timesplitters.. I think not.

PSPS: I remember having the same type of debate when xbox originally came out. Which just proves slashbotters have no insight on how consumer markets work.

Yup. And looks like they won.

News here

So hot!

Sony and Nintendo had both already confirmed they would be demoing their consoles at E3 as far back as last July; we were just waiting on Microsoft. The only thing that's changed now is Microsoft, and that Sony's confirmed they'll have playable demos at E3 rather than playable demos around E3.

Well, China already banned Soccer Manager 2005 for that very reason, so it's highly likely that's also the reason for banning FIFA 2005.

EA lost 20+ people in the creative group that gave us MOHAA. They left to form Infinity Ward and delivered Call of Duty, then were bought by Activision. Any industry consolidation will likely kill redundant/competing titles, but it may also cause more frustrated creatives to jump ship to create their own studios or join competitors.

XBox hardware was always going to be a loss-maker in its early incarnations, but the trend is for losses to shrink as the installed base grows.

The games turn a profit, but the hardware itself certainly doesn't

R4000 CPU @ ~133MHz

32M RAM

480 x 272, widescreen TFT

USB 2.0

802.11b

IrDA
And it looks so good.
I'm finding it hard to forget about.

Last year Bittorrent's creator Brahm Cohen was hired by Valve to improve Steam's content distribution system.

Also in terms of overloading servers, slashdot has nothing over the hordes of counter-strike players.

url schmurl

What Sony hasn't said for sure is whether the PS3 will be backwards compatible with DVD movies and PS2 games.

Uh, Yes, they have. Where have you been?

Geez, this is like last year news, and a simple google search revealed all of these links.

Nope, the new PS3 launch date of March 2005 is *before* E3, or even by the end of this year!

Why is this important? Sony had, until recently, said that it would release the PS3 in 2006. Microsoft thought it would be able to get its NeXtbox or whatever it is now out by Fall 2005, and laugh at Sony. Unfortunately for them, they're now screwed. Sure, Sony might not have the support of all developers if they launch it by the end of the year, or in March, but PS2 didn't, and its backwards compatibility kept it selling for quite a while. Xbox2? "Sorry, no backwards compatibility! We were working on it but we had to rush it out the door to compete with Sony!"

• AMIGA OS is...nononono
• nooo. I have it now >
• no...now APPLE!!! that one is is DEFINITELY...
• no wait. that last one, that's if your a fag. that's right.
• FUCK!!!
• Okay. I have it now...
• I rememeber
• (hey I'm a programmer who can store MULTIMENSIONAL ARRAYS in his head!)
• DREAMCAST is...

DS article

According to the above referenced article the new DS also has Voice recognition and its DS card can hold almost a Gigabyte of information. I noticed that this wasn't really referenced in the USA Today Article.

Any developer worth their salt has an in-house tools group whose sole responsibility is to improve productivity
Sure. I didn't mean to say that nobody cares about productivity at all, just that it's quite difficult to find time and money to make any changes on strategic level, especially in regards to how the business itself is run. And a lot of the technology you are talking about doesn't have the time to mature beyond what is necessary right here and now. The potential is there, but the ephemeral nature of game development means it is not realised.

PC games are in a slump, and have been for the last 12 months. Consoles are a much more attractive place to be: fixed hardware platform, and while there is piracy it's of the level that the PC was before widespread broadband/P2P (i.e., not endemic and largely confined to territories like Russian/parts of Asia - the US and Europe are relatively OK).
12 months is just a fluctuation. And everything related to consoles today will not necessarily remain true in 5 years. We are talking about 4th generation consoles - XBox 3, PS 4... The convergence of PCs, consoles, media centres, handheld devices, etc. makes one more optimistic about the fate of PC gaming. And don't forget that by saying "PC gaming" we actually mean "MS Windows gaming". And who is to say that XBox 3 will not be compatible with MS media centres and MS PC OS. And who is to say that the console market will not become more fragmented leading to smaller number of players on Sony PS (because just like before, we are not talking about "console games", we are talking about "Sony PS2 games"). Not to mention that as the larger fraction of costs today lies in art/design, there are fewer limits to porting successful games between two gaming universes.

Given that the price of an average game (of any game, not just FPS) is between $2 and $5 million nowadays, I'm not sure why you need "simple microeconomics" to get a figure that's out by a factor of 10. Oh, wait, unless you're just throwing terms around to try and look smart...
I wasn't talking about average. As of today, Half-Life 2 costed $40 millions.

And your source for that is what? Shit, EA laid off 100 people the other month, MS have just cancelled a couple of big projects (Mythica and Train Sim 2), and at least half a dozen small developers have gone under since the start of this year.
These are just parts of normal business. Heck, a well known fact is that 97% (or something like that) of small businesses go bankrupt in the first year, but noone is crying wolf and declaring the imminent death of small business. Furthermore, the whole American IT industry crashed a few years ago, but noone argued that in 5 years there will be no computers. Get real! :) The problems in the PC gaming industry are real and it's really scary for shareholders and employees, but from the macroeconomic point of view it's just business as usual. The whole American economy operates this way - every 4 years you have a recession. With double digit growth it's easy to miss a recession, but as gaming market matures, it finally has to notice that.

widespread net piracy is a lot more significant for PC games than you seem to think it is. Pick any high profile game from the last year, add "+torrent", and you can probably find a download on Google within 30 seconds: you're not trying to tell me that has no effect on sales?
Surely this has an effect on sales, but it doesn't mean the industry is doomed. Just one simple fact - it costs 3-4 times less to make the same game in Eastern Europe or Russia. So even if piracy rates increase from 30% (my estimate) to 80%, moving development abroad will allow to compensate for the effect of piracy. And this is just an organisational change - you can offset the effect of piracy with technology too, with marketing and many other tools.

As long as PC exist, there will be a market for PC games. The industry as a whole will not going anywhere.

However, the good reviews still pour in from GameZone and Ferrago.

I heard about this game about a month ago. Since that time, I can't fathom how much this game has endeared itself to me. As soon as I saw the lack of a good community website, I began to build one with the help of another community member with the same idea. Then I built a non-profit card store to help further the game, using osCommerce, located at scfans.net, though there are other resellers on the books, such as Gameguys and IBK, to be completely fair.

The bottom line is, in terms of pure gameplay fun, excitement, and community involvement (the developer, Paul aka Merakon, is on almost every evening, and his support in getting SCWatch.net up and running has been stellar to say the least.

If you dig a good strategy game, I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Yes. Excessive Gamer dies. But its not just in Korea... Boy exhausted after mammoth CS session

Yes. Excessive Gamer dies. But its not just in Korea... Boy exhausted after mammoth CS session

Worthplaying - Xb - 91%
Gamers Hell - PC - 86%
Ferrago - PS2 - 82%
Gamesradar - PS2 - 81%

http://www.ferrago.com/story/1848