Slashdot Mirror

The Wii stopped being the top-selling console many years ago. Nintendo most definitely lost the console war to the PS3 and 360, with the Wii becoming a repository for shovelware. The problem with the Wii's casual focus is that it attracted one-time buyers who rarely purchased any other games, so the only people who made any money on Wii sales were Nintendo.

Nintendo has been reporting lackluster profits the last couple of years, 66% loss this year. alone Nintendo has publicly stated that Apple is their biggest competitor, and the Wii U controller being shaped like an iPad should be enough of a confirmation.

They're in BIG trouble. A new Mario and Zelda game can mask that in the short term, but unfortunately success hides problems.

hours of enjoyment and actual cost of the video game are not equal, and that has been a problem. By that logic, a game with 4x as many "man-hours of enjoyment" should be $120. Or a game with "half the enjoyment" (a made up figure that makes no sense) should be worth half as much.Yet that would be obviously ridiculous. Plenty of people try to charge as much as possible for as little as possible.
Do you realize what kind of fuzzy logic (nice username for that) you are suggesting?

What about those "you can only play once through"? When you focus on merely number of hours, you're focusing on allowing yourself to be pigeonholed into an argument that doesn't focus on the reality of that the higher you price a video game the more likely people are not going to be willing to buy it. $40 games lead to 45 lead to etc etc. Now we're up to 60. What if those get to 70? Are you going to just say "well, that's inflation. Oh, and it's a good game!" Only if you are completely oblivious to essentially paying a grand in a single year just for a decent gaming collection.

Or you can buy a PC, download all the games you want via torrent, and spend $0 plus be able to play the game the way it should be able to, assuming that the developers deliberately restricted some kind of feature that should have been available.

Greed is the problem. $60 for a game isn't a value, it's an explotation of a consumer.

You're a bit late: http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2011/08/08/london-riots-blame-grand-theft-auto/

How should he have released the key to the rest of us? We all have a sacrosanct right to own our property, and I don't give two *$#% if somebody uses it for piracy. I applaud what he has done here, and in fact, it has finally made me consider actually purchasing a PS3.

If Sony does brick all the consoles, don't blame GeoHot. Blame Sony, because they are the ones that have acted in a morally repugnant fashion for years.

Just remember though that the way Sony make money on the PS3 is by charging people a percentage for the privilege of selling a game for the PS3. Sony also charge development houses a fortune for kit they need to write the games in the first place. They need some sort of special console that will run unsigned code then Sony keep final control of what comes out for the console by charging the games house to sign the code for release.

When the PS3 first hit the market it was sold by Sony at a loss and carried on like that for years. If Sony could not engage in all these practices they would have to do one of two things:

1) Abandon the market. Sony is a business, if they cannot make money by doing something they will not do it.

2) Charge more for the console so they do not need to make up such a huge loss on every console sold.

Some links:

http://nexus404.com/Blog/2010/02/05/sony-still-posts-a-loss-for-every-ps3-sold-ps3-costs-sony-18-more-than-it-costs-you/
http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2010/06/29/ps3-no-longer-sold-at-loss/

If Sony did not know they were making a fortune from every game sold they would never be able to risk selling the console at the stupendous loss they were to start with in 2006 when it first came out. This would push the price of buying a PS3 to something comparable to the price of a new PC unless Sony could find another way of ensuring that they were paid a percentage for every PS3 game sold.

But aren't they still losing money on the PS3 sales?

Nope.

Great!

So which parts of
http://www.thesixthaxis.com/
http://screwattack.com/
http://www.hardwareheaven.com/

are wholly yours so I can borrow them BY-NC for Beer-Free?