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Life After the Videogame Crash
Clark Hall writes "Is it 1983 all over again? E3 is over and millions of gamers are realizing they can't afford a PS3, or an HDTV. Is it time for a steep and painful correction in the gaming market? Pointlesswasteoftime has been tracking what is looking like a Hindenburg voyage for console gaming, with HDTV playing the role of Hydrogen." From the article: "There's going to be a lot of money lost the next few years, a lot of articles written, a lot of panic, a lot of changes. And when gaming comes back, it will hopefully be different and innovative and based on something other than eye candy and the shock value of blood and guts and hookers. Hopefully it will allow for creativity from the players, and room for small, independent game makers to create content. Hopefully it will be something every working person can afford. "
This could mean a huge boost in PC Gaming. I'm not willing to dish out $400-$500 for a console system and another couple grand for an HDTV, but I'm certainly willing to spend the money to upgrade my PC.
Seriously, you can buy an HDTV for about $500 now if you look around, it will be $300 by Christmas 2007 or shortly thereafter, and you can even get a 1080p version right now for $500 (check out the NY Times electronic reviews a couple of weeks back, and in the Wall Street Journal two weekends ago in the Saturday issue).
And you can buy a Nintendo Wii by about Presidents Day 2007 for a reasonable price at Costco - maybe even by Christmas 2006.
The world isn't over. Your old TV works fine with a cable box, you don't need a 64 inch screen HDTV, you can settle for a 32 inch or 40 inch one.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
What videogame crash? I can certainly afford an under 300usd Wii. Oh wait, you mean sony? They'll just have a wonderful future building cameras, and slapping rootkits on the wrong places
I'm sticking with PC gaming.
I just can't justify spending all that money on a game console, and then on top of that, having to shell out THOUSANDS for an HDTV set just so I can see Solid Snake in Hi-Def? Ummm.. NO.
I'm sticking with my old-fashioned Tube T.V. as long as I possibly can, and I'm not buying any new HD or Blue-ray DVD players until the format war is good and over and prices come down to something reasonable. Which means I won't be getting an HD TV or DVD players for probably 5-10 years.
I'm sure I won't miss it either.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
I read this article earlier today, and the author just writes off the Wii completly. What he's not grokking, is that the Japanese game market already crashed a few years back. Microsoft and Sony were able to use the ever growing US market to write that off as an anomoly, but Nintendo took it to heart and came out with the DS and now the Wii in response.
So, yes, it's reasonable to say that Sony and Microsoft (and all their 3rd party developers) are in for a harsh awakening, but Nintendo is already on the other side of the crash and things are looking better than ever.
Otherwise it would be a monster to make any kind of cash on a good bank heist. You would need to hire day laborers just to get all the cash into your rental truck..
Storm
Just relax, pull out that old copy of UT or TA or NFS III or Madden 2001, and ignore all of the gnashing of teeth by the hardware vendors. If it's fun, it's good. Who says it also has to be high tech?
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Looking at market trends, it's difficult to see just why there will be a big crash. Xbox360 keeps selling, massive turnout for E3, Nintendo is still selling shitloads of Nintendogs, and PS3 will definitely turn heads, no matter the price. Seriously, are these *really* signs pointing to a crash?
Seriously, I would buy a $1000 game console if it had games worth playing. I might even pay more than that considering a console lifespan is 5+ years (ie. generally longer than the $2000+ computer I am using).
Todays games are just barely even worth a $200 console let alone 3 times that price. As the summary mentions, the current crop of games are lacking that certain something that makes you want to play them because they traded it away for fancy graphics and sound.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Maybe it wasn't the Hydrogen but the coating on the fabric... personally I think that disaster has given Hydrogen an undeserved bad rep when it comes to nextgen fuel options.
(hell, if someone described how dangerous the stuff we fill our cars with now can be to us for a new fuel, it would never get adopted.)
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
This just proves a very good point: It is the fault of the US government that HDTV isn't widely used.
All the marketing hype behind HDTV has duped the general public into believing that a higher definition actually makes a difference. Unless you sit eighteen inch's away from your sixty inch screen, there is no difference between a traditional television and an HDTV.
I'm being completely serious: if you can't tell the difference between HDTV and standard def, you need to see an optometrist.
I sit about 12' away from my 50" plasma, and I can easily see a dramatic difference between HD content and standard-definition content. At one point I accidently set my cable box for 480p output, and for the next day or two happened to be watching only standard-definition programming so of course I didn't notice anything wrong. Then I tried to watch a high-definition show, and within five seconds I was hunting through the settings trying to figure out why the picture looked so blurry. It really is that dramatic. I also have a smaller plasma which is farther away from the viewing position (42" at 18') and I can easily tell on that one as well.
Have you actually seen HDTV and standard-definition on the same TV set? I doubt it, or you wouldn't be making claims like this. Or perhaps the set you were comparing on was marked "HDTV compatible" or something equivalent, which just means that it can accept a high-definition signal, but can't actually display it at its full resolution -- typical "EDTV" sets have 480 lines of vertical resolution just like standard-definition TVs do.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
I see consoles getting more and more expensive and decent gaming PC's getting cheaper and cheaper. When the price of one gets close to the price of the other, how can there not be a confrontation?
Good point. I agree, the current commodity bull run has as much to do with rising demand as with the dollar depreciating. Whoever modded the parent troll needs to get out from under their own bridge.
;))
The PS3 is launching at EUR 500/600, just like in the US. However, the PS2 launched at EUR 450. What a difference a few years make!
(FYI, advertized prices include VAT/sales tax in Europe, which usually runs in the 15-20% range. So the "EUR 1 = USD 1" rate retailers are using today is about right. Ask the British instead if you want to hear about genuine exchange rate rape!
a) This is not true, as any basic check of median income would have told you ("median" being the key word, because it's not as skewed by rich folks as "average" income would be).
Median (or any other measure of "average" income) has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not a family lives paycheque to paycheque. The grandparent post is actually bang on, especially in North America but also in the rest of the 1st world too. This is for several reasons:
1) Wages in most 1st world countries have almost, BUT NOT QUITE, kept pace with inflation, so employed people are making more dollars but must spend even more dollars to make ends meet.
2) People are trying to "keep up to the Jones'" again at a pace not seen since Ronald Regan ran the US. Overall "average" families are buying larger homes, driving bigger vehicles, eating more food and so on.
3) Tax load is higher--in the US the gov't has to pay for all those military operations and has a crushing debt. Income taxes are relatively low but the US consumer is nickel-and-dimed to death by state and local taxes and service fees. Sales taxes are particularly bad because they are "regressive" so those who have to spend more of ther income to live effectively pay a higher tax rate (the poorer you are the higher your tax rate basically). Canadians are even more heavily taxed, although most of it comes right off your paycheque.
4) As a result of the above household debt is at a record high--on average US household debt load is ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of disposable income! Basically this means that if you add up the value of all the assets (house, cars, investments, etc) then subtract liabilities (mortgage, credit cards, loans, etc) that the average family is IN THE NEGATIVE by the same amount as their combined annual after-tax income!
The Atari VCS cost $249 when it was first launched. That's more than $800 in today's dollars. You were lucky to find a 19" TV set for $500 - about $1,500 in today's dollars.
Early adopters tended to be upper-middle class or even rich. $800 is still not that much today for them. What is different today is that the Atari was exciting, new and different from anything before--until 1978 basically all you could get was pong and Oddysey (hardwired to play one or a handful of very simple games). The "Fairchild Channel F" was the only cart-based console until the VCS and it was hard to find and had a small library of crappy games. Also The VCS situation was very different from the XBox360 or Wii or PS3. Back then going from pong to being able to play Space Invaders and Breakout (the hottest arcade games of the time) right in your home was amazing. What do we get now with these expensive new machines? Umm...well I guess I can play NFL football 2006 instead of NFL football 2005 and umm..you can see the players sweating and the picture will be clearer...if you buy a new HDTV. There isn't much there motivating average people to run out any buy these next-gen consoles yet. These new consoles are a bit like the Intellivision situation--when the Intellivision II came out it gathered dust on the store shelves because owners of the original Intellivision didn't see anything compelling about it (it looked prettier and talked if you had one of the handful of games that supported it--and the original intellivision could talk too if you got an add-on).
As for the TV, almost nobody had to buy a new one to take advantage of the VCS' capabilities--WAY more people owned 19" colour console sets in 1978 than currently own full-resolution HDTV sets today, and not many people will spend twice the money just to get a TV that makes their console look nice--and besides that crisper image there isn't much out there yet to get excited about.
I'm saying that most people do have the money, they just don't know how to prioritize their purchases.
Maybe they DO know how to prioritise--in fact maybe better than they did in the late 70's and early 80's. As you mentioned there is also