Re:The rest of the launch lineup can go to hell...
on
Two Weeks with the Wii
·
· Score: 1
Super Monkey Ball is not worth $50. I tried it with some folks and none of us liked it after trying the minigames for about 20 minutes. We went back to tennis.
I'll pick it up again when it's $20 or so. It's a nice game but not worth $50.
If MS can reach 10 million first, they also need to be the first to reach 20 million and the first to reach 40 million. The figures for the PS2, NGC, and Xbox are so lopsided that it's almost unfair. The PS2 sold twice as much as its three other competitors combined.
I don't think Nintendo can convince the majority of previous PS2 owners to go with the Wii instead of the PS3. Not only does that not make sense, it's being publicly denied as Nintendo's strategy. High-def surround-sound ultra-next-gen gaming is being fought by the PS3 and the 360. Microsoft needs to take market share, and do it fast. They've yet to sell more than 500,000 on any month besides their launch (and possibly) this month that just passed. They should be selling AT LEAST 500,000 consoles and are simply not. If they don't pick up the pace, they might be the first to 10 million but they'll lag after that.
Hopefully, the Wii will do better than the Gamecube.
As the article off-handedly suggests, plasma still has some burn-in issues. If you play a lot of FPS games, you suddenly might see a movie one day and notice items from your HUD as ghostly images still appearing on the screen. Some newer plasma TVs have "burn-in reduction" or "protection" but it's not very good. Basically, what the TV does is burn every single element/pixel on the screen. Now the entire image is less bright. You won't see a difference but if you ever plug in another TV next to yours, you might notice how much it has faded.
From what I understand, if your source is 1080P (a PS3, an Xbox 360 playing 1080P WMV content, an HD DVD player) and your display is 1080i, the image still retains all its details and it looks exactly as it would on a 1080P set. If your display is 720P, it won't display all that information and downconvert it. For PC geeks, it's pretty easy to figure out. With full HD being 1920 x 1080 pixels, a 1080P set is like a PC running on a massively powerful graphics card. A 720P set has a slightly smaller resolution, and a 1080i set has two graphics cards that are half the power of the 1080P one. Honestly, on any TV in the sub-$2000 category, it's going to be extremely difficult to tell the difference.
If you're in the market, my suggestion is to go cheap as whatever is over $2000 nowadays is going to be half that price in a year or so. For the money, a properly configured rear-projection CRT HDTV is still going to give you the best display as it can deliver real blacks: i.e., no light and the nice bright whites of an LCD -- and at half the price of a comparable LCD/DLP/Plasma set. But of course, CRT HDTVs aren't flat so you don't look like that rapper on TV, so many people don't consider them. Their loss.
This isn't really a development tool, but for machinima enthusiasts (that term still irks me), there's Lionhead's The Movies. It starts out as a Rollescoaster Tycoon-esque resource management game and eventually lets you make your own films. Some of these are even shared online.
I've never used it, so I don't know how easy or difficult it is.
I never understood people's problems with in-game ads, especially since they've been around almost as long as video games themselves. The most obvious tie-in is licensing, from the bad (E.T.) to the decent (Simpsons arcade game). Then you've got games that are one giant advertisement (7-Up's Cool Spot, the new Xbox Burker King games). Then you've got the toy-based games (Barbie, Bratz, Pokémon), sponsored games (Ford Racing), etc. And plenty of games have straight-ahead advertisements (Honda ads in SSX3, Jeep ads in the Tony Hawk series).
I think good advertisers know that you can't annoy gamers, you want to deliver a good value for the game, and you want the game to (Warning: Marketing speak ahead) "deliver the brand's core values": something that the $3.99 Burger King games do very well.
I think the games that have exploited ads so far will be the ones using the new ad technology. I don't see the Mario flower being replaced by a Thinking of You 1-800-Flowers Bouquet(tm). But it would be interesting in Madden for the stadiums to have advertisements for local businesses. And micropayments could be replaced by being forced to watch a 60-second Old Spice "ultramercial" while you download a new costume for your character.
If the game you love doesn't have any advertisement content, it's unlikely to have any in the future. But for sports games, racing games, and the like, I can see this definitely being widely adopted. If we wanted to stop it, we should've said something ten years ago.
Is there the equivalent of "clip-art" for game studios? If I'm buying a racing game, I don't need to know that the makers personally did the buildings or the trees. Buildings are buildings, trees are trees. In film, there's a lot of specialization that exists: for example, you can buy pre-rendered explosions to put in your movie. A better example might be companies that specialize in making CGI oceans and water. A lot of movies with CGI oceans rely on them to deliver that look.
Could game companies do something like this? Every game is going to have proprietary assets like the protagonist, specific types of giant robots, monsters, vampires, what have you. But does some of this info get shared even between sub-studios? How many times is AI code re-written? (That may be a bad example, as AI code may or may not be part of the engine). Can we just use the same Enzo Ferrari model in each racing game? Do we really need 7 different companies perfecting how the car looks?
I don't think this will lead to homogeny in games. If anything, it will free up designers to be more creative and think about the important things in the game (gameplay, control, fun) as opposed to how accurate Scenery Team 3's rendition of this waterfall is.
A site which suggests which Slashdot stories I won't like, including dupes?
Digg's been up and running for a while now.
Ahem.
My Unsuggestion was: "Vogue Knitting on the Go: Socks". I'd say that's more spot on than the recommendations I get. The worst recommender, by far, that I've ever seen is Ticketmaster. I unwittingly got a few emails from them and there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to their recommendations. "Don't miss Beck! Don't miss Rod Stewart! Don't miss the Haitian Steel Drum Comedy Troupe! Don't miss Evanescence!"
Here's the oft-linked Michael Crichton speech "Aliens Cause Global Warming" where he rails against the idea of consensus and has some information on Lomborg as well. It's an interesting read and it has less to do with global warming than with the scientific process in general.
Their problem was they paid $375,000,000 for the talent. The problem was the talent left. Rare got worse because all their decent developers left or were on the way out. It would've been smart to give key people some stakes in the success of Rare. That obviously didn't happen.
Rare's original IP (Conker, Perfect Dark) is in no way worth $375,000,000.
I don't know how much Microsoft paid for Bungie, but I guarantee you it was a better deal than Rare.
Actually, the consoles are only $129. It looks like Wal-Mart is actually doing some decent bundling. For $129, you get the console. For $154 ($25 more) you get an extra controller and two games (not the best, but decent ones). Thanks to the PS2's huge install base, games get "Greatest Hits" status quickly: Shadow of the Colossus (a fantastic game) is only $20. As great as the Wii and the 360 are (and as the PS3 might become), for $300-$400 your best bet is still a previous gen console.
And a well-placed PR piece to remind parents about LEGO products during the holidays.
(Yes, I can be cynical about products I love).
The problem I see with LEGO is that you only need so many bricks. By making things very specialized they've bypassed that (oh, this set has a pirate ghost) but at some point you have enough basic pieces that you can make anything you want. Which is of course the reason people buy LEGO bricks in the first place.
I'm going to assume, by your domain, that you're in Australia. Thay may be the reason you haven't heard of certain games. Until I just searched for it as an example, I had never heard of the (probably $5M+ film) Like Minds; but it's well-known in Australia. There's plenty of great (and not so great) UK music artists that chart immensely over there and we never hear a peep from here or we get their album a year or two later.
In video games, sport games are what comes quickest to mind. Ask an American if he prefers Brian Lara Cricket over EA's Cricket and they'll look at you a bit odd. Compare the launch titles here and in Japan. The PS3 has two or three Mahjong games. The Gameboy Advance had the hit-game I Am an Air Traffic Controller.
Now, none of this necessarily really applies to Okami because it's not an American game but it's been mentioned a lot of times (more than, say Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! but less than the Katamari series). So you should've heard of it. Certainly most big review sites have a review of it: Metacritic lists more reviews of Okami than of Madden 2007 and FInal Fantasy XII. The New York Times mentioned it. Slashdot has had at least three Okami or Clover Studios-related articles.
And who knows. Maybe Capcom missed out on reaching 50,000 more people like you and that's why Clover studios closed down.
The truth is, more than marketing is necessary. Good marketing or bad marketing can sometimes raise or sink a game, but it's not the end-all be-all. There's a lot of other factors, and outside, uncontrollable circumstances ("luck") have something to do with it.
I personally think creating groups/communities outside of your regular one (friends/family) can only help gaming. These can be formal (creating clans in Halo 2, guilds in WoW) or informal: Microsoft's Xbox Live friend list is ingenious. You get to see what other people are playing and when the list is suddenly populated by a new game, you may feel compelled to get it because it really is what "everybody" is playing. Some games I believe even have options to message friends to let them know about this game. Others give you special things (unlockable maps, characters, vehicles) if you recommend a game to a friend (and codes are exchanged).
I don't know if this is what drives the 360's allegedly "troubling" high tie-in ratio where owners buy more games than other consoles. But, from this angle, more inter-connectivity seems like a win-win for gamers and developers.
I always liked the way that ZDF in Germany did it. They had a block of time each night were only ads were shown and the ads were interrupted by short 5- to 15-second animated shorts to get the kids to watch. As they wanted people to actually tune in, most of the ads were of Super Bowl ingenuity: actually fun to watch. I believe some of the American HD networks do something like this currently.
Wouldn't it make sense for consumers to buy LCDs which will be in environments mimicking their own? I like watching movies in a dark room but it doesn't make sense to have all the lights out if you're just watching sports or news. Or the kids are just watching a video and playing at the same time. If I were to take a guess as to what kind of rooms these TVs would be in: brightly lit rooms or pitch black rooms, I'd take the former.
It doesn't mean that's the best environment to replicate the movie theatre experience but that's not everyone's main concern all of the time.
What muddies this argument is that online and regular retailers are providing two different types of conveniences: (most) regular retailers have a very small selection but you get your item right away and if you've never seen it you can hold it, inspect it, etc. Online retailers (many times) have huge selections but you (almost always) have to wait a few days if not a week to get something. Price, I believe, is secondary. As long as either is within spitting range of each other (say 10%) most people will just choose on whether they want it now or are willing to wait.
Why not ask for a minimal, say $10-$20 deposit? If the game is released, the deposit is counted towards the purchase. If the game is not released, the money is returned. That's how you separate someone with intent to buy/play from someone filling out a form online.
I think for most people it's the PS or the S in FPS that's important. The F is just details. For the most part, most First- and Third-Person shooters work the same way. You have control over a reticle, aim it at stuff, and shoot. Games like GoW and GRAW (love these acronyms) need the third-person view to show you how well you're hiding, etc.
Nintendo's traditional types of games means that with the correct combination of art direction/design and coding, some of the games can look fantastic. Wii Sports looks phenomenal over crappy composite cable and does not need to look better. Excite Truck and Super Monkey Ball look good enough (although they are overpriced). On the other hand, games that try and look too much like current-gen (Downhill Jam) tend to have, at worst, Dreamcast launch title quality graphics. At the risk of sounding belittling, if all you have is finger paints, don't try and make a photograph.
Like in any console before it, working within the limitations of your hardware means you'll get the best results. While I have not played Zelda yet, the shots I've seen of it running make me feel like that title has it right.
Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam has some unlockable concept art that looks like a less stylized Jet Grind Radio. That would've looked a lot better, in my opinion and would've probably outperformed graphically the Dreamcast and Xbox versions. I'll take style over technical prowess any day.
Wii Sports seems to be an incredible pack-in with the console. I'm preparing different Miis (Wii avatars) for each family member so everyone can play on Thanksgiving.
In the days of yore, a company could manufacture hype for a product. Before the internet, word of mouth spready very, very slowly. Now, if you fuck it up -- you're done. Really done*.
I'm not much of a fan of building my own. I can do upgrades but for an entire system previously I just had a local shop build them for me. The resulting price was about what I would've paid for parts, so it's not like I paid more. I generally would walk in with a list of hardware wants and let them figure out the rest. Then again, I'm not a huge PC gamer.
People are obviously buying these $5,000 PCs based on the mere fact that Alienware is still in business (in some form). When Dell makes specialized gaming rigs, it indicates there's a market. For large manufacturers and retailers (Dell, Best Buy), having these kinds of rigs offers the idea of cost migration. You might go onto a website or store and check out the $4000 PC and then find a $1500 one that fits your needs much better. Plus, building ridiculously expensive machines also gets you press. I've never heard of Cyberpower before. Now I have.
I would say the PC enthusiasts that don't build their own use these companies because they don't want to or can't build their own and have some combination of high disposable income, willingness to sacrifice other things for the sake of a great gaming rig, and/or parents with loose purse strings.
Slashdot Mirror
Super Monkey Ball is not worth $50. I tried it with some folks and none of us liked it after trying the minigames for about 20 minutes. We went back to tennis.
I'll pick it up again when it's $20 or so. It's a nice game but not worth $50.
This is correct.
If MS can reach 10 million first, they also need to be the first to reach 20 million and the first to reach 40 million. The figures for the PS2, NGC, and Xbox are so lopsided that it's almost unfair. The PS2 sold twice as much as its three other competitors combined.
I don't think Nintendo can convince the majority of previous PS2 owners to go with the Wii instead of the PS3. Not only does that not make sense, it's being publicly denied as Nintendo's strategy. High-def surround-sound ultra-next-gen gaming is being fought by the PS3 and the 360. Microsoft needs to take market share, and do it fast. They've yet to sell more than 500,000 on any month besides their launch (and possibly) this month that just passed. They should be selling AT LEAST 500,000 consoles and are simply not. If they don't pick up the pace, they might be the first to 10 million but they'll lag after that.
Hopefully, the Wii will do better than the Gamecube.
The 360 outputs 720p and 1080i, and now with the recent patch, 1080P. The 1080P depends on the game and as far as I know, no game supports 1080P yet.
I think the original Xbox may have been able to output 1080i with some games, but I am not sure.
As the article off-handedly suggests, plasma still has some burn-in issues. If you play a lot of FPS games, you suddenly might see a movie one day and notice items from your HUD as ghostly images still appearing on the screen. Some newer plasma TVs have "burn-in reduction" or "protection" but it's not very good. Basically, what the TV does is burn every single element/pixel on the screen. Now the entire image is less bright. You won't see a difference but if you ever plug in another TV next to yours, you might notice how much it has faded.
From what I understand, if your source is 1080P (a PS3, an Xbox 360 playing 1080P WMV content, an HD DVD player) and your display is 1080i, the image still retains all its details and it looks exactly as it would on a 1080P set. If your display is 720P, it won't display all that information and downconvert it. For PC geeks, it's pretty easy to figure out. With full HD being 1920 x 1080 pixels, a 1080P set is like a PC running on a massively powerful graphics card. A 720P set has a slightly smaller resolution, and a 1080i set has two graphics cards that are half the power of the 1080P one. Honestly, on any TV in the sub-$2000 category, it's going to be extremely difficult to tell the difference.
If you're in the market, my suggestion is to go cheap as whatever is over $2000 nowadays is going to be half that price in a year or so. For the money, a properly configured rear-projection CRT HDTV is still going to give you the best display as it can deliver real blacks: i.e., no light and the nice bright whites of an LCD -- and at half the price of a comparable LCD/DLP/Plasma set. But of course, CRT HDTVs aren't flat so you don't look like that rapper on TV, so many people don't consider them. Their loss.
This isn't really a development tool, but for machinima enthusiasts (that term still irks me), there's Lionhead's The Movies. It starts out as a Rollescoaster Tycoon-esque resource management game and eventually lets you make your own films. Some of these are even shared online.
I've never used it, so I don't know how easy or difficult it is.
I never understood people's problems with in-game ads, especially since they've been around almost as long as video games themselves. The most obvious tie-in is licensing, from the bad (E.T.) to the decent (Simpsons arcade game). Then you've got games that are one giant advertisement (7-Up's Cool Spot, the new Xbox Burker King games). Then you've got the toy-based games (Barbie, Bratz, Pokémon), sponsored games (Ford Racing), etc. And plenty of games have straight-ahead advertisements (Honda ads in SSX3, Jeep ads in the Tony Hawk series).
I think good advertisers know that you can't annoy gamers, you want to deliver a good value for the game, and you want the game to (Warning: Marketing speak ahead) "deliver the brand's core values": something that the $3.99 Burger King games do very well.
I think the games that have exploited ads so far will be the ones using the new ad technology. I don't see the Mario flower being replaced by a Thinking of You 1-800-Flowers Bouquet(tm). But it would be interesting in Madden for the stadiums to have advertisements for local businesses. And micropayments could be replaced by being forced to watch a 60-second Old Spice "ultramercial" while you download a new costume for your character.
If the game you love doesn't have any advertisement content, it's unlikely to have any in the future. But for sports games, racing games, and the like, I can see this definitely being widely adopted. If we wanted to stop it, we should've said something ten years ago.
Is there the equivalent of "clip-art" for game studios? If I'm buying a racing game, I don't need to know that the makers personally did the buildings or the trees. Buildings are buildings, trees are trees. In film, there's a lot of specialization that exists: for example, you can buy pre-rendered explosions to put in your movie. A better example might be companies that specialize in making CGI oceans and water. A lot of movies with CGI oceans rely on them to deliver that look.
Could game companies do something like this? Every game is going to have proprietary assets like the protagonist, specific types of giant robots, monsters, vampires, what have you. But does some of this info get shared even between sub-studios? How many times is AI code re-written? (That may be a bad example, as AI code may or may not be part of the engine). Can we just use the same Enzo Ferrari model in each racing game? Do we really need 7 different companies perfecting how the car looks?
I don't think this will lead to homogeny in games. If anything, it will free up designers to be more creative and think about the important things in the game (gameplay, control, fun) as opposed to how accurate Scenery Team 3's rendition of this waterfall is.
Digg's been up and running for a while now.
Ahem.
My Unsuggestion was: "Vogue Knitting on the Go: Socks". I'd say that's more spot on than the recommendations I get. The worst recommender, by far, that I've ever seen is Ticketmaster. I unwittingly got a few emails from them and there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to their recommendations. "Don't miss Beck! Don't miss Rod Stewart! Don't miss the Haitian Steel Drum Comedy Troupe! Don't miss Evanescence!"
Here's the oft-linked Michael Crichton speech "Aliens Cause Global Warming" where he rails against the idea of consensus and has some information on Lomborg as well. It's an interesting read and it has less to do with global warming than with the scientific process in general.
Their problem was they paid $375,000,000 for the talent. The problem was the talent left. Rare got worse because all their decent developers left or were on the way out. It would've been smart to give key people some stakes in the success of Rare. That obviously didn't happen.
Rare's original IP (Conker, Perfect Dark) is in no way worth $375,000,000.
I don't know how much Microsoft paid for Bungie, but I guarantee you it was a better deal than Rare.
Actually, the consoles are only $129. It looks like Wal-Mart is actually doing some decent bundling. For $129, you get the console. For $154 ($25 more) you get an extra controller and two games (not the best, but decent ones). Thanks to the PS2's huge install base, games get "Greatest Hits" status quickly: Shadow of the Colossus (a fantastic game) is only $20. As great as the Wii and the 360 are (and as the PS3 might become), for $300-$400 your best bet is still a previous gen console.
Phi Kappa Zing!
And a well-placed PR piece to remind parents about LEGO products during the holidays.
(Yes, I can be cynical about products I love).
The problem I see with LEGO is that you only need so many bricks. By making things very specialized they've bypassed that (oh, this set has a pirate ghost) but at some point you have enough basic pieces that you can make anything you want. Which is of course the reason people buy LEGO bricks in the first place.
I'm going to assume, by your domain, that you're in Australia. Thay may be the reason you haven't heard of certain games. Until I just searched for it as an example, I had never heard of the (probably $5M+ film) Like Minds; but it's well-known in Australia. There's plenty of great (and not so great) UK music artists that chart immensely over there and we never hear a peep from here or we get their album a year or two later.
In video games, sport games are what comes quickest to mind. Ask an American if he prefers Brian Lara Cricket over EA's Cricket and they'll look at you a bit odd. Compare the launch titles here and in Japan. The PS3 has two or three Mahjong games. The Gameboy Advance had the hit-game I Am an Air Traffic Controller.
Now, none of this necessarily really applies to Okami because it's not an American game but it's been mentioned a lot of times (more than, say Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! but less than the Katamari series). So you should've heard of it. Certainly most big review sites have a review of it: Metacritic lists more reviews of Okami than of Madden 2007 and FInal Fantasy XII. The New York Times mentioned it. Slashdot has had at least three Okami or Clover Studios-related articles.
And who knows. Maybe Capcom missed out on reaching 50,000 more people like you and that's why Clover studios closed down.
The truth is, more than marketing is necessary. Good marketing or bad marketing can sometimes raise or sink a game, but it's not the end-all be-all. There's a lot of other factors, and outside, uncontrollable circumstances ("luck") have something to do with it.
I personally think creating groups/communities outside of your regular one (friends/family) can only help gaming. These can be formal (creating clans in Halo 2, guilds in WoW) or informal: Microsoft's Xbox Live friend list is ingenious. You get to see what other people are playing and when the list is suddenly populated by a new game, you may feel compelled to get it because it really is what "everybody" is playing. Some games I believe even have options to message friends to let them know about this game. Others give you special things (unlockable maps, characters, vehicles) if you recommend a game to a friend (and codes are exchanged).
I don't know if this is what drives the 360's allegedly "troubling" high tie-in ratio where owners buy more games than other consoles. But, from this angle, more inter-connectivity seems like a win-win for gamers and developers.
Not really. The dog wouldn't even sniff Katz's stories.
Not an interruption?
Do you also believe [ How much ladies will love your new ROCK hard action!! Advertisement] that onscreen ads on the internet aren't intrusive? I'd be willing to [ Approve you for best mortgage at prime minus 4%!! Pay nothing! Advertisement] bet that most people don't share that view. Certainly, I can live without [ hottest mover & shaker stocks - investors shouldn't miss out Advertisement] them, and sometimes they're not terribly intrusive, but they are still interruptions.
I always liked the way that ZDF in Germany did it. They had a block of time each night were only ads were shown and the ads were interrupted by short 5- to 15-second animated shorts to get the kids to watch. As they wanted people to actually tune in, most of the ads were of Super Bowl ingenuity: actually fun to watch. I believe some of the American HD networks do something like this currently.
Wouldn't it make sense for consumers to buy LCDs which will be in environments mimicking their own? I like watching movies in a dark room but it doesn't make sense to have all the lights out if you're just watching sports or news. Or the kids are just watching a video and playing at the same time. If I were to take a guess as to what kind of rooms these TVs would be in: brightly lit rooms or pitch black rooms, I'd take the former.
It doesn't mean that's the best environment to replicate the movie theatre experience but that's not everyone's main concern all of the time.
What muddies this argument is that online and regular retailers are providing two different types of conveniences: (most) regular retailers have a very small selection but you get your item right away and if you've never seen it you can hold it, inspect it, etc. Online retailers (many times) have huge selections but you (almost always) have to wait a few days if not a week to get something. Price, I believe, is secondary. As long as either is within spitting range of each other (say 10%) most people will just choose on whether they want it now or are willing to wait.
Why not ask for a minimal, say $10-$20 deposit? If the game is released, the deposit is counted towards the purchase. If the game is not released, the money is returned. That's how you separate someone with intent to buy/play from someone filling out a form online.
I think for most people it's the PS or the S in FPS that's important. The F is just details. For the most part, most First- and Third-Person shooters work the same way. You have control over a reticle, aim it at stuff, and shoot. Games like GoW and GRAW (love these acronyms) need the third-person view to show you how well you're hiding, etc.
I assume people that go to movie theatres and buy books before they hit paperback are also stupid?
Or is it possible that someone would rather pay $50 to play a game now rather than wait a year or two?
Nintendo's traditional types of games means that with the correct combination of art direction/design and coding, some of the games can look fantastic. Wii Sports looks phenomenal over crappy composite cable and does not need to look better. Excite Truck and Super Monkey Ball look good enough (although they are overpriced). On the other hand, games that try and look too much like current-gen (Downhill Jam) tend to have, at worst, Dreamcast launch title quality graphics. At the risk of sounding belittling, if all you have is finger paints, don't try and make a photograph.
Like in any console before it, working within the limitations of your hardware means you'll get the best results. While I have not played Zelda yet, the shots I've seen of it running make me feel like that title has it right.
Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam has some unlockable concept art that looks like a less stylized Jet Grind Radio. That would've looked a lot better, in my opinion and would've probably outperformed graphically the Dreamcast and Xbox versions. I'll take style over technical prowess any day.
Wii Sports seems to be an incredible pack-in with the console. I'm preparing different Miis (Wii avatars) for each family member so everyone can play on Thanksgiving.
* Does not apply to Sony (seemingly).
I'm not much of a fan of building my own. I can do upgrades but for an entire system previously I just had a local shop build them for me. The resulting price was about what I would've paid for parts, so it's not like I paid more. I generally would walk in with a list of hardware wants and let them figure out the rest. Then again, I'm not a huge PC gamer.
People are obviously buying these $5,000 PCs based on the mere fact that Alienware is still in business (in some form). When Dell makes specialized gaming rigs, it indicates there's a market. For large manufacturers and retailers (Dell, Best Buy), having these kinds of rigs offers the idea of cost migration. You might go onto a website or store and check out the $4000 PC and then find a $1500 one that fits your needs much better. Plus, building ridiculously expensive machines also gets you press. I've never heard of Cyberpower before. Now I have.
I would say the PC enthusiasts that don't build their own use these companies because they don't want to or can't build their own and have some combination of high disposable income, willingness to sacrifice other things for the sake of a great gaming rig, and/or parents with loose purse strings.