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Gaming PC Makers Take Aim at Lucrative Niche
Cymage writes "Yahoo (Reuters) reports that gaming PCs are now a high profit area, and that the bigger players (Dell, HP) are trying to get into the market: 'In an age when a new PC can cost just a few hundred dollars, an adolescent need for speed is creating a profitable niche for souped-up gaming computers at the ultra-costly end of the market.' How many people really spend $5,000 on a gaming machine? Mine cost less than $2,000, and I can play UT2k4 and others on it just fine."
"With price tags from US$2,000 to $5,000, the market is luring heavyweights..."
:)
I can't see myself paying that much for a gaming machine. I can buy a PS2/XBOX/GAMECUBE for less than 200 dollars. I could even buy all three and a decent amount of games for each system for less than 2,000. I know, they can only play games but isn't that the point of a gaming pc? I wouldn't want to put my gaming pc on the internet, because then I would have to worry about viruses, which means I have to install a firewall, virus scanner etc which would just slow down my game play. A gaming system works like it should. I don't have to make sure I have the newest video card, all games will work. It plays games with no blue screens, drivers to intall, or patches. Not to mention its easy to stick in my car and play where ever I can find a tv.
I just want my phantom console.
The small-penis crowd needs to validate itself through what it owns.
Well I have a small penis and I don't care what kind of car *I* drive, so THERE!
ithout a modchip or a buffer-overflow exploit, the consoles cannot run games from studios that aren't yet big enough to attract a Major Licensed Publisher's attention.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I know many of the wippersnappers here are too young to remember it, but Nintendo began this trend after their original NES system was spammed with tons of crap games. Just about every "game company" was building a boring rip-off game of some sort (anyone remember Karate Kid?) and selling it for $$$.
Nintendo knew that poor quality of titles was what killed the Atari 2600 (E.T. anyone?). Thus they implemented a "Nintendo Seal of Quality" for their NES system. This worked well as a stop-gap measure. Then when Nintendo released the Super-NES, they used a combination of legal and technical tactics to make sure that only games that passed strict Nintendo quality standards were released to the public. This was mostly successful, so Nintendo tightened up again for the N64.
The end result of all this is that there were very few "bad" games released for the Super-NES and N64. Sure, Nintendo pushed a family friendly, "cartoony" style, but the games really were fun. Many other console manufacturers decided that this was a worthwhile strategy and have followed Nintendo's lead with various degrees of success.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I think the same philosophy goes to having a comfortable bed, chair, etc. Money's made to be spent, and what better place to spend it than on something I use most every day?
A big, simple reason innovation in cars (or airplanes, or coffee makers) is slower than that in computers: computers are still a young industry. Bill Gates likes to use this sort of comparison by way of arguing that MS hasn't stifled innovation: "If airplanes had changed as much between 1980 and today as computers, they'd fly us cross-country for 50 cents in ten minutes," that kind of thing. But all those other industries changed at a vastly higher rate when they were young too. Flying machines changed an awful lot from Santos-Dumont's balloons to World War I to the German jets at the end of WWII, in every imaginable way, right?
But back to your point: Cars won't be obsolete in 3 or 5 years, and that difference really isn't "pointless." If I trick up my Civic, it'll be out-of-style in three years, but it'll get me there on the gas they sell at SA. With a gaming computer, I can spend through the nose and be below box specs for some of the games that come out next year. Partly that's just the young industry again. But you know, you can still find places to land your biplane.
Between the gaming wonks trying to one-up each other and the game studios whose idea of innovation is better texture effects in FPS titles, the lack of imagination is pretty amazing. You'd think this would be such a creative thing, games, but instead we get the equivalent of U.S. blockbuster movies over and over again. You'd think the wonks would at least show some individuality in their tastes... Car geeks and EAA airplane kit builders are a lot more interesting, for my two cents.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
A high powered rig *will* make you perform better in a resource intensive game such as Dark Age of Camelot, where the computer must render hundreds of characters and effects simultaniously at a high framerate to keep you in the battle. I play on a 3GHz P4 with a gig of ram and a Radeon 9800 pro, and I still have some trouble in certain situations with a large number of players. And yes, my system is *very* clean.
I keep forgetting my place. Jesus is for losers. Why do I still play to the crowd?
A friend of mine spent closer to $10K on his gaming rig, buying not only a completely new system from the ground up using only the newest and highest-end (read: most pricey) hardware, but also the highest end set of 7.1 surround speakers he could get.
I believe he's running an Athlon 64 FX processor but other than that I don't know too much about his system.
Here's the best part:
We're having a LAN party at his place this weekend and he's not even going to be playing. He very rarely uses his PC at all, let alone to play games.
Model 551, Chambered in 6mm