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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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Why buy a $1500 gaming computer, with all the worries about compatible hardware, flaky software, etc. etc., when you can buy a $300 console, plug it into your TV, and be on your way? I have a console because I use linux on my main box, and if I'm working and want to take a break, I don't want to have to save everything, shut down, reboot into Windows, play the game, shut down, reboot into Linux, and re-open my work. There are also all kinds of games (like Gran Turismo) that are unavailable on the PC.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Rather frightening that on the graph, everything pre-nintendo is labelled "Atari systems". Of course, society back then pretty much equated Atari with video games (see: Blade Runner for a good chuckle).
I know the VCS pretty much decimated all competition back then, but does anyone have any harder figures? Adding the Colecovision and Intellivision into the pot, there must have been some signifigant inroads into Atari's numbers.
The funniest though, has to be the fact that they say Atari systemS. Sorry folks, but other than the venerable VCS/2600, Atari didn't really do squat in the marketplace.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Nintendo stated many times that they plan to eventually offer the Gamecube for $99 and they will still be turning a profit on the machine itself. However, they didn't plan on cutting prices so soon to fight the competition. As usual the person writing the article just assumes all the consoles are losing money when in fact Sony has refab'd their system for the pricecut so they dont lose money, and Microsoft has done nothing but lose tons of money from the start.
People who arnt in the business of comparing (ie, not techies or wannabe techies) rarely make that comparison. Doubly so for products they would never even be comparing when making purchasing decisions.
Its just a number for sales people to rattle off to parents, who invariably think one of two things:
- gee, that number's higher than the last time I heard it
or even worse
- gee, that number's high
It was like MMX - it was a useless feature when salespeople were pushing it, but shoppers really seem to be fooled by numbers and acronyms. The only part that ticks me off is how hard it is to teach a non-technical person to never put stock into what they hear, and more importantly, never put stock in their own ability to interpret it. For some reason, people dont all seem to act like they can talk the talk with cars, planes, other technical things - but there is something about technology that makes lots of newbies think they can get some sense of perspective in the jungle of specs and features out there. I know I might sound somewhat elitist, but I hope for my sake a mechanic knocks some shit into me if I ever go off on engine specs and prepare to drop serious money on my assesment of the sales lingo I'm presented.
"Old man yells at systemd"
My guess would be royalties. After all, your PC game company can create a new PC game and not have to pay a dime in royalties to Microsoft. If the company takes the time to make an XBox port, then they have to worry about copies of their XBox port stealing sales from their more lucrative PC version. When the XBox market gets large enough so that it is worth the risk the PC game companies will probably do the necessary work. In the meantime, however, only those companies that Microsoft is paying are likely to come out with XBox titles first.