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EveOnline has hired an economist to give quarterly reports etc. http://gameinfowire.com/news.assp?nid=10738

They may not play Pokemon, but they may play Madden, Zelda, Metroid Prime 3 and Red Steel ...

Yeah, but are they going to play Madden on the system that has Pokemon, or on the system that has Halo or Gran Turismo?

The fact is that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are all in competition for the same gamer-dollar.

If Nintendo is targeting the same gamers as Microsoft and Sony, they're screwed. Good first-party titles alone weren't enough to make the Gamecube anything better than an also-ran. Nintendo needs third party support, and that's exactly what they are so very bad at getting.

Super Smash Bros Melee: 3,765,500
Super Mario Sunshine: 2,886,000
The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker: 2,435,500
Metroid Prime: 1,492,500 (Metroid Prime 2: Echoes: 758,000)
Pokemon Colosseum: 1,165,000
Total: 11,744,500

Where did you get those statistics? I highly doubt that they represent sales within the span of one year. Moreover, they represent a small fraction of the PS2's software sales. From the second article, software shipments for the PS2 for the year ending September 30 were 47m. Every single GTA3 game sold over 11m copies apiece, and Gran Turismo 3 is over 14m copies. As of September 2005, the PS1 + PS2 had a total of 1.87bn software units sold. According to Wikipedia, the PS2's share of that was a bit over 1 billion, which makes sense given that sales records put PS1 software shipments at 690m. In comparison, as of March 2005, Nintendo had sold 160m cumulative software units for the Gamecube.

The automakers license the car logos and designs to the game publishers on the condition that the cars are drawn with less damage than they would have in real life,

Does anybody have a source for this claim?

Sure: "And where, in premiere racing titles like 'Forza Motorsport' and 'Gran[] Turismo,' licensing deals with automakers ensure that no real damage modeling will ever dirty up their precious automobiles, 'Burnout' uses generic cars that steadily fall to pieces as you race."

OR I could do the whole shebang for free

If you can get Madden 2006 for 60 dollars right next to a bin with Madden 2005 for 10, you're going to buy Madden 2005.

Most people won't, because Madden 2005 doesn't have the updated rosters.

Now, if you're looking at a copy of God of War for 50 or Shadow of the Colossus for 40 or Madden 2004 for 10, you're far more likely to go with the awesome original title. The developers will have provided an amazing, original experience, will deserve the cash and will get it.

Again you are wrong, most people go for sequel rehases. Look at the 2005 video game sales chart

Innovative games in general aren't what sells. Look at the slump of Psychonauts, Beyond Good & Evil, and other great games in comparison to Pokemon X, or MaddenXX

Microsoft has always maintained that XBox was from the get go conceived as a loss leader. They needed to get into console business, they didn't have time to R&D custom hardware like Sony. They used off the shelf parts to give XBox short time to market in exchange for their own fab facilities and eventually being able to break even on hardware.

XBox is a success in terms of what it gained them in the market place though:
1.) Sizeable install base
2.) Best graphics in the industry. Though I'll grant you its only because they were last to market and thus took advantage of latest hardware.
3.)Arguably the best online story of the 3 major consoles.
4.) They are #2 game publisher in the industry according to Game Developers Magazine. That's up from #9 last year and god knows what in pre-Xbox times.
5.) Valuable lessons for development of XBox 2 (remains to be seen if they actually take heed)
6.) As a byproduct, XBox experience gave us the nForce chipsets from nVidia, which are arguably the best chipset family for AMD platform.

So while monetarily XBox is a loss for them, it is not a failure.

Looking at your article, PC game sales account for $1.2 billion (52.8 million units). Sure, maybe sales decreased from $1.4 billion, but that doesn't change the fact that selling 52.8 million units of games, which are some of the most demanding applications out for the PC, will effect hardware sales. It is as simple as that.

Ok, so I specced out two computers with similar performance yet one will last longer than the other? Please explain other than it's too expensive to upgrade the Mac as much people do to PCs. The old PC stuff can hold up just as well as old Mac stuff.

That is just online multiplayer games that can be tracked (and during non-prime hours). It doesn't even include single player PC games or MMORPGs which would be considerably larger.

How else could NVIDIA and ATI afford to do the research and development on new GPUs every 6 months if the people that bought them (the PC gamers) were negligible when it comes to sales?

The number of PC gamers is in the millions, and they do make an impact on hardware sales.

Here's some info on a related game that is being released. The most interesting thing is that the same CGI being used for the movie (and the trailer you just saw) is supposedly being used in the game so it's supposed to be the closest correlation between movie graphics and game graphics ever.

This can not be right. 50% for PS2 is WAY low.

PS2 has sold 40Mu worldwide, 10Mu in last 4-5 month.

XBox total sale WW is around 3.0 Mu, of which 2Mu or so is in the US.

PS2's US sales are 40% or so of total, equal to 16Mu (give or take) in the US. This gives PS2 80% share and 20% for Xbox, assuming GC same as XBox.

You know, it's vocal, endorsed and promoted projects like this that give the OSS and free software community a bad name. YOU might view it as tinkering or whatever but the general populace views it as "pissing in the pool" so to speak.

Judging from the X-Box's market share (or lack thereof), the general populace cares about as much about the X-Box as they do about Linux (which isn't a whole lot).

And even though the number of people using X-Boxes as cheap PCs is small, Microsoft certainly appreciates not having those consoles as unsold inventory (which would cost them even more).

> I think the obvious next move is for Microsoft to buy Sega.
They already have tried:
http://www.redherring.com/insider/2002/0716/sega07 1602.html

And after that they tried to buy Nintendo for 25Bn(I think to remember 2.5Bn,
but in the news sites I found it says 25Bn!):
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1131308
http://gameinfowire.com/news.asp?nid=263

I don't remember much, I just found this links by looking in google for less
than one minute, I'm sure you can find some better info elsewhere in the net.

My favorite part of this history is the answer of Nintendo: "We weren't sure
what to think when Microsoft made the offer. In fact I was surprised - we
didn't need the money. I thought it was a joke."

hehehe...

I wonder what will they try next, it's obvious that they are desperate for
finding some other business now that the software licensing is going to become
obsolete thanks to opensource, I think they should stick to what(only) they are
good at: mouses ;)

\\Uriel