Slashdot Mirror
On The Mysteries Of PC Computer Game Pricing
Thanks to The Adrenaline Vault for its editorial discussing the recent, seemingly strange retail pricing of PC videogames. The author explains that he has "reviewed a series of recent PC titles with an initial retail price of either $19.99 or, at most, $29.99... This is occurring even as console versions of the same games are selling for around $49.99." He concludes: "From a consumer standpoint, this new pricing pattern is heaven. You can buy more hours of quality virtual interactive entertainment for a lower fee than ever before... The one downside is the ability to get titles released more than six months ago, as small profit margins have led to diminishing shelf space in ever-contracting retail stores." But is there indeed a danger that "smaller [PC-developing] companies often can't handle the loss of revenues from lowered prices, so too dramatic a drop might jeopardize their existence"?
I got ut2004 DVD edition with free headset at bestbuy for $30 the day it came out. It also had a $10 rebate for people that own ut2003, bringing the total price to $20.
Also, my brother picked up Battlefield Vietnam same day for $35. It also came out that day. The next week, it went down to $30
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
Gotta be careful with that approach tho. Wait too long and you might find yourself paying 80 bucks for Suikoden II. *whistles innocently*
"smaller [PC-developing] companies often can't handle the loss of revenues from lowered prices, so too dramatic a drop might jeopardize their existence"
Review of Econ 101 for those slashdotters that need it:
Lowering the price of a product does not inevitably lead to lower profits. Nor does raising the price lead to higher profits. The higher priced that a product is, the fewer people willing to pay for it, and vice-versa. Theoretically, there is an optimum price that will bring in the most profit for a company.
There should be NO loss of revenue from a price drop made to bring the price closer to the optimum. So unless the argument is that game companies have lowered prices for reasons of insanity, then there should not be much to worry about simply from the fact of lower prices. They are just adjusting closer to the optimum profit point.
And if you're in for a new release film, you'll also probably browse/shop some more, so they'll get you there too.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I was a bit under whelmed by War 3 as well, however I found that there are a lot of funky user created maps for War3 that are a lot of fun. Most generally concentrate on the heroes and leave out all the resource management.
Q.
I am not sure what you mean by "had all of the x86's functionality". From an instruction set point of view there are missing capabilities, for example a square root instruction comes to mind. The PowerPC is coming from the RISC school of design. Some of the more complicated operations are not implemented as CPU instructions and are typically handled by library functions. But this is a tangent.
The clockrate differences are somewhat superficial. Apple PR has a history of overstating PowerPC advantages with carefully crafted "up to twice as fast" ads but in general when you compare PowerPC and x86 chips of the same clockrate you will see a 20-30% advantage for the PowerPC. Clockrate is only one of numerous variables that affect real world CPU performance. You also need to look at pipeline stages, cache, etc. The glue logic and various buses also plays a large role, the PowerMac G5s made noteworthy progress here.
When emulating you rarely replace one x86 instruction with one PowerPC instruction. Even if the instructions perform the same operation, add two registers for example, there are associated behaviors that will take additional instructions to emulate, CPU flags for examples.
PC hardware emulation, including the x86 CPU, works just fine on the Macintosh. For business apps and other typical apps it is quite usable. However current games are just too demanding. If you stick to games that are a generation of two behind in hardware requirements emulation is more practical.