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The Economist Looks At The Console Industry
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."
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I found the following interesting:
the opportunity to create a network of consoles through which all kinds of entertainment content, including films, games and music, can be distributed. That was Sony's original aim with the PlayStation 2.
All of the XBox naysayers talk about how the "XBox is a PC" and how MS won't focus on the gaming experience but try to bundle it (see the recent PVR leak). However, it is obvious that Sony is trying to do the exact same thing - this is not the first time I've seen mention of a "Sony digital media center". So, really, the only "true" console is the GC, which of course a silly contention.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Okay, this is a matter of some debate from the many articles I've read on the console industry. Are they all really losing money on the consoles?
It seems pretty clear that Microsoft is losing money in a big way on the consoles. I have seen nobody suggest otherwise, and if you think about what their hardware is and the price it makes sense that they are losing money.
For sony, the profit/loss question seems more up in the air. I've seen most places say that they are losing money on it but I've seen some articles suggesting that the loss is minimal or may in fact be a small profit.
As for Nintendo, I've gotten the sense that they are actually making at least a small amount on their consoles. They didn't throw in all the power that the other two companies did planning to instead rely on the power of their collection of games as incentive to buy.
So does anybody have any reasonable factual information about how much the companies are or are not losing?
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It was that the bit rating of the console was always the main processor. Not the graphics. The NES only had 4 bit graphics, but it was an '8-bit' system. Sega genesis could only display 64 colors at once and the SNES 256, yet these were all, '16-bit' systems. The main processor was the heart and soul of all the consoles before the current generation. As it would do almost all the work. Only in the last generation did we finally see co-processors that could actually do more then flip a couple of bits. So now they rate it by the largest thing in the system they can get away with, which is usually the size of an internal register.
You really just can't compare apples to oranges which is what they are doing. All these systems over the years have compeletly different architechures. From the Atari 2600 to the X-Box, the only similarity is that they are all modeled after turing machines. So at the end of the day, they should be compared on which games they have and not how powerful they are.
Yes, Nintendo has stated many times that they can sell the Gamecube at $99 and still make a profit. They have always stated that they will have the trump card no matter how fierce the pricecuts get, and you know what? It's true.
Wtf? This is a surprise to me. So Sony is basically dependent on their video game console? If the number "exceeds" 100%, then all of Sony's electronic hardware and music properties are (or were), losing money. And Sony has only been in the 'console' business for 8 years or so.....
This is probably false info, considering all the other inaccuracies in this bad article.
well, I'd say that a well equipped gaming PC will blow an Xbox or Gamecube (sorry, I dont put the PS2 in the same league, but thats for another flame-ridden thread ;) away in terms of:
.. duh, console :)
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:)
- FPS
- resolution
- online play
- saved game complexity
but the consoles win with:
- FPS consistancy (games designed at a 'lowest denominator' level in terms of performance, so you dont slow down as much as PC games do when stuff gets really messy)
- control
- $-per-unit-of-performance
Also, dont forget the suitability of certain types of games:
- online lends itself to PC
- fps to PC
- PC games more editable
- loading times on consoles usually better (or at least Gamecube just blows everything away with its cute lil miniDVD media)
- multiple people at the same time
I dunno. As always, it depends on what you like to play. Some people need their Quake, others their Platformers. Console games are often designed to be more pickup-and-play than PC games too.
The fact that most people have larger televisions than monitors helps the console in terms of display real estate in most homes too
Okay, thats all I can think of. Spewing over.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Not only is it true, but I just love getting those dividend checks from Nintendo along with the quarterlies that prove that it's true.
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MSFT is really hurting - bad. If they can't sell 8-10 games per xBox, they lose money. Period. And the only reason their metric of games per box is where it is, is the 3 game bundles they sell it with
At least I'll be laughing while I play Oddworld: Munch's Odyssey on the GameCube and The Sims on the PS2
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
It's called subsidies. They were using profits from the games to offset losses in other groups. Because of this, the profits from the PlayStation business were actually larger than the profits for the whole company.
The 5200 was not at all irrelevant. At the time, it had games that could not be produced on any other console - only on the "personal computers" of that day - Atari 400/800, C64, etc. I was positively blown away when I first played games on the 5200 (at a JC Penny store in Fairbanks, Alaska, maybe 1981 (82?)).
There was a huge downturn in consumer spending in the early 1980s, that anyone in their mid-to-late 30s should remember as a fact of teenage life. This absolutely killed the market for game consoles at that time, given that it drove a huge price war among "personal computers".
This was also when Activision in particular rose to what was a huge business empire for the software world at that time - they produced titles for every console platform as well as every "pc" platform at that time that I am aware of. They later bought many of the rest of the companies that produced the classic PC games at that time (i.e. Infocom!).
So what you had was similar, oddly enough, to what we have today - "personal computers" that had as good or better titles than the most advanced consoles at a slightly higher cost (then - C64 for $299, Atari 5200 for $199; today, a PS2 will cost me $200, whereas I can build a K7 900mhz box with Nvidia GForce 4 for ~$300) but in both cases the PCs can do far more than the console.
I have no idea what my original point was at this point, except that maybe folks should look to Activision for where the really sound business model is - ~24 years of success in a time that saw literally hundreds of other HW *and* SW makers go by the wayside.
--astro
Yes, I have a Gamecube. And yes, my current "high end" PC is a 1ghz Duron. And I am happy as a clam with both.
Amazing. Anyone would read the reaction to this article would think the Economist was a computer magazine.
Look, the interesting stuff in the article isn't minor details about number of bits or whether Sony is losing more money than Microsoft, it's about how gaming is now a massive global industry, the trends and forces which have driven the industry on a continually upward curve, why that is and how the cycles work.
I find reading Slashdot increasingly depressing at the moment because of the almost constant ability of the posters to miss the big picture.