My only comment on the numbers you just reiterated is: for games for which MS acted as publisher and distributor (1st and 2nd party games) even $10 revenue per box sounds awfully low.
Your forgetting retail mark up.
It may cost $1 to make the physical form of a $50 game but the retailer/distributor gets around 60% of that. so that leaves 20 bucks of which they must pay that $1 and marketting and developement.
FFX sold 10 million AC. 4 million is 30% penetration for the Xbox. It'd be considered a fair success for PS2. IT's a super smash hit for the Xbox. FFX-2 sold 6.6 mil. GTA, PS2's smash hit sold 29 million world wide. So yes, my statement is correct. Halo didn't do FFX or GTA numbers.
Quake 3 was a roaring PC success. Sold less then any of the Final fantasies after 6. NWN is a huge success, still sold less then Gran Turismo. Warcraft 3, starcraft, Half life are about the only games that sell console numbers on the PC. HL2, Doom3 won't do console numbers. Even on the Xbox. Their FPS. FPs have a limited market. Even Halo didn't do GTA or FFX numbers.
5 letter mmorpg. It's been Sony's PC cash cow of ra while and as of yet PC mmorpg never get to the same level. It's a niche market but MMORPG is a very very profitabel niche.
Right now if most people want a new game system they pick the XBOX, the PS2 is seen as being "old" and the Gamecube is not seen at all.
and the proof for this is where? Anicdotally. all the black guys I know have an xbox, ps2. All the white guys have a PS2 some have game cubes, and equal number of xboxes. All the asian guys I know have a PS2 and a GC. Almost everybody has a GB SP too. Common denominator: everybody has a ps2. Now the ps2 sales haved ropped. however the games sales haven't dropped as much. It doesn't imply that people aren't "picking up" a ps2 because it's old. but because they alreayd have one.
I believe it's far from over, and for Doom3 also read Half Life 2, Halo 2, and Fable, as obvious blockbusters. Xbox has a very strong lineup for the holiday season, more than just standard sequels that the other two machines have.
You have just listed 4 games that are nichey products that traditionally have done well in the "PC" market and sold about fairly low number of units. FPS + mmorpg don't have a significant niche in consoles.
I don't believe that the Xbox is failing. Just look at E3 this year, and you can see that Xbox exclusives like Halo 2, Burnout 3, Jade Empire, Fable, etc were walking away with a lot of awards, not to mention Xbox Live's success.
umm.. exclusive means "xbox only" not "xbox and PC only" since Jade empire is ofr the PC as well. Halo two will be eventually. Burnout and fable are most likly excluive but Jade empire is definently not.
It's definitely the platform with the most longitivity due to the superior hardware specifications.
Umm.. look up the definition of longevity. Their technical spechs are pretty independant of longevity. The gameboy has longevity. It has some pretty poor specs. The PS1 had longevity the hardware was pretty baseline, the Dreamcast had technological supuriority and no longevity.
the fact remains, they haven't done nearly as well as they hoped. Have failed everywhere except America.
Nowm I'm not a fanboy. I have all 3. And a gameboy SP and a PC that can run all modern games. Thats just the facts. Xbox is nice technically, but did rather poorly in comparison to it's expectations.
That's not necessarily true -- sure, XBox prices have never been lower, but the same is true of the hardware that comprises one. The longer a system is out, generally, the cheaper it is to manufacture it.
This is also not necessarily true. They out sourced a lot of their chips and hardware within the Xbox thus they don't get the "volume" or "vertical integration" discount on the hardware that Sony and Nintendo enjoys. So while the price has undoubtly come down for them. It hasn't as fast as it has for nintendo or sony.
The price of the nvidia graphics chips and the intel chips and the HD wont' fall much so their likly still losing money on each system.
What color is the sky in Dvorak's world? The Xbox is outselling the Playstation 2. Xbox parties have quickly replaced LAN parties, and the fact that you can mod the hell out of it has almost turned soldering into a fad. The only place I can see the Xbox as hurting Microsoft is that PC gaming may suffer as a result. But what does Microsoft care if they already control most of the PC world through Windows anyway? If anything, the Xbox is increasing Microsoft's stronghold in the home.
This is a fairly recent developement, it's happening in only one market, and it's not representative of XBOX success but instead of Playstations market saturation. GC is #2 world wide. #3 in America. Xbox is #2 in America #4 or #5 in many other places. MArket penetration wise, Xbox is about as far in as GC in America. their totals aren't too far off. As for games sold, xbox does have some tantalizing exclusives but they sell less games then sony.
I'm much more experienced now with Linux than Windows. (And I'm pretty damn experienced in Windows... right up until W2K came out. Then, I switched. What is that... 15 years?)
But... my Linux experience cost me one fourth the time and one twentieth the $$ in documentation compared to the cost of my Windows experience.
(OK... I didn't pay that much for Linux reference material. But, what the heck... I have to give Windows a bit of a chance.)
That, IMHO... is huge.
The incremental cost for being "experienced" in Windows was just to damn big to justify for me.
I know that when I learn some *nixy way of doing something... it will be valid (and work!) years down the road.
Can't say that for *do(w)s any more...
And on a similiar note, I paid for my Unix education (University) but I recived my MS education free (fixing my own comp. Fixing friends comps. Working fixing comps. and the other techs in the office). So it does seem to be a matetr of experience. Everyone I know has some experince with windows. Most of the techs I meet and the Friends who I graduated with use windows a lot. Few of them also knwo unix/linus. So for me the knowlege base I can draw form for a XP/95/98 problem is greater then for a *NIX problem. And thus for me I aquired my Windows info faster and cheaper. I've been tinkering wiht computers since dos 6.22. I'm glad to have *nix for somethings like servers and db because it's easier to do it on *nix but I like XP for word proccessing, graphic design (Can't afford a mac) and games. Both systems have weaknesses and strengths and I use them where their strong.
Is *nix architectually better? As far as I can see, yes it is. Is it "Better" at every thing. Nope. IT's a tool. Like a Mac OSX or XP or Dos. I use it where I find it useful.
What lost viet name was the lack of definable goals. Same with Iraq. Goals such as "Take the beach" "annihalate dresden" or "destroy this installation" are military goals that can be achived. but "Create a free and democratic state" and "Remoev the threat of communism" are not.
Technology made it so you didn't lose more troops. The daisy cutters helped alter the battle field and prevent an outright slaughter. The tanks and FAE ensured a victory in the initital military campeign. what defeats the US is the political campeign after. For that you need to educated your Populace that good leaders rarely arise from idiots(Bush jr.) and cretins (Nixxon).
As a admin of windows machines and a repair tech for them too. I generally have the inverse exprince. Errors in unix take 2 -3 days to track down. While windows I generally know whats wrong. It's all a matetr of experience. For usage at least and trouble shooting.
The Bush Doctrine applies only to nations which are A) unpleasant and B) dangerous. Canada fails the second condition.
We massacred your troops and burned down your white house. We beat germans like they were red headed step children twice and kept our incredibly vast country with 1/10 as many people as the US. So We're dangerous.
(White House: 23:00. Presidential press conference) President: Ladies and Gentlemen. I have sad news to report. The city of Las Vegas had been hit with a WMD. The damage is incredible. 34,000 US citizens are now speaking with a Canadian accent and wearing flannel. 40 city blocks have suddenly been cleared of thier trash and 27 immigrant 7 eleven owners have worked a shift without being shot. The weapon was a class 4 "Dion Bomb" and hit one of th major casinos in Vega. We have rough estimates of the ground zero damage area but will require a few weeks to fully tally the collateral damage. We will not lets this go unpunished. We will find those responsible and put in prisons where they will make naked pyrimids while we take pictures. We will find the animals who did this and spend 150 billion dollars invading an unrelated country. I promise, so long as i'm president and you keep watchign fox news and buying shit I will punish those who aren't responsible for this.
Lets invade Canada. We can use the French Canadians for medical experiments, and We'll appropriate enough maple syrup to pay for the invasion. They have WMD (celine dion) and are more then willing to use it.
It was a boob. Children can see it all they want. They saw it when they were 0-1, they'll see when their 16-dead (on slashdot, from 32-50 when their wives file for divorce when they won't quit spending 13 hours a day posting.). Or they see it everyday in the shower. It's a breast. It's not like the executed someone on live or they were having sex with a hourse. It was a breast. Nothing obscene or bad about it. It was blown way out of proportion and made Americans look like infintile teenagers. At least the nit wits getting upset over it. Whats the difference from a normal Britney spears video or show and what happened there? About 1 cm and a bit of pink instead of dark brown. Why is one fine and the other an attrocity to the innocence of children? Children need to be protected from gun violence, from murder, from poverty, from exploitation but not from sex.
I wouldn't pay much attention to the "electonic" part of the equation. I think this is only thrown in to make sure that nobody mentions Babbage's Analytical Engine (which now it has been built is Turing complete).
Machines that don't work shoudn't be listed as a "first". I'm could be the first to build a commercial passenger space craft. It's proto type is sitting in my back yard. It works in theory and with $900,000,000.00 USD It'd work. Just like Babage. And when they rebuild my machine from my specs (with all the "device that produces anti-gravity goes here" arrows in the design) 200 years from now, they can proudly say King manic build the first Commercial Space liner.
Babage might have done it had he more moeny and more precise tools. But he didn't so...
When you put your bomb factories and tank factories in city's like Dresden and London and Osaka, don't be surprised when your enemy raises those cities to the ground. When you place a valid military objective near on in a civillian center. It then becomes a military objective. Generva Convention covers this, so does common sense.
Yeah, It took them months to flush out one unit hold up in one fortress on the Maginot Line, after they had cut off re-enforcements and the supply line to the fort. Taking the line full on, from the side it was aimed at would have blunted the German advance and degenerated into anothe trench war like WWI.
The wars conclusion was almost a given in both WWI and WWII. you had one highly advanced technological country vs essentially the rest of the world. And the three largest armies of the world are all gunning for you too.
Russia would have invaded any way, taking some of the holdings the Nazi's had. It was just a matter of time. So instead of waiting for it, the Germans were beign pro-active. Russia has a immense reserve of resources and troops and much of the area Germany occupied was unfriendly terrortory. IT was obvious that they could not combat a russian invasion and stalve off a English/ American/ Canadian assualt. they closest (geographically) ally Italy didn't have much to contribute. So they decided to commit to an offensive and hopefully wrap it up before the Anglo/Americans's attacked.
But as a lot of out forces have found out, a attack on russia is never a quick or painless ordeal.
Slashdot Mirror
Lemma 8: If there are a unlimited number of prime pairs implies there are a unlimited number of prime pairs.
My only comment on the numbers you just reiterated is: for games for which MS acted as publisher and distributor (1st and 2nd party games) even $10 revenue per box sounds awfully low.
Your forgetting retail mark up.
It may cost $1 to make the physical form of a $50 game but the retailer/distributor gets around 60% of that. so that leaves 20 bucks of which they must pay that $1 and marketting and developement.
FFX sold 10 million AC. 4 million is 30% penetration for the Xbox. It'd be considered a fair success for PS2. IT's a super smash hit for the Xbox. FFX-2 sold 6.6 mil. GTA, PS2's smash hit sold 29 million world wide. So yes, my statement is correct. Halo didn't do FFX or GTA numbers.
I just confirmed it right now. Sorry my bad. It may eventually come out for PC but it's truly exclusive. Damn it.
Quake 3 was a roaring PC success. Sold less then any of the Final fantasies after 6. NWN is a huge success, still sold less then Gran Turismo. Warcraft 3, starcraft, Half life are about the only games that sell console numbers on the PC. HL2, Doom3 won't do console numbers. Even on the Xbox. Their FPS. FPs have a limited market. Even Halo didn't do GTA or FFX numbers.
5 letter mmorpg. It's been Sony's PC cash cow of ra while and as of yet PC mmorpg never get to the same level. It's a niche market but MMORPG is a very very profitabel niche.
Right now if most people want a new game system they pick the XBOX, the PS2 is seen as being "old" and the Gamecube is not seen at all.
and the proof for this is where? Anicdotally. all the black guys I know have an xbox, ps2. All the white guys have a PS2 some have game cubes, and equal number of xboxes. All the asian guys I know have a PS2 and a GC. Almost everybody has a GB SP too. Common denominator: everybody has a ps2. Now the ps2 sales haved ropped. however the games sales haven't dropped as much. It doesn't imply that people aren't "picking up" a ps2 because it's old. but because they alreayd have one.
I believe it's far from over, and for Doom3 also read Half Life 2, Halo 2, and Fable, as obvious blockbusters. Xbox has a very strong lineup for the holiday season, more than just standard sequels that the other two machines have.
You have just listed 4 games that are nichey products that traditionally have done well in the "PC" market and sold about fairly low number of units. FPS + mmorpg don't have a significant niche in consoles.
I don't believe that the Xbox is failing. Just look at E3 this year, and you can see that Xbox exclusives like Halo 2, Burnout 3, Jade Empire, Fable, etc were walking away with a lot of awards, not to mention Xbox Live's success.
umm.. exclusive means "xbox only" not "xbox and PC only" since Jade empire is ofr the PC as well. Halo two will be eventually. Burnout and fable are most likly excluive but Jade empire is definently not.
It's definitely the platform with the most longitivity due to the superior hardware specifications.
Umm.. look up the definition of longevity. Their technical spechs are pretty independant of longevity. The gameboy has longevity. It has some pretty poor specs. The PS1 had longevity the hardware was pretty baseline, the Dreamcast had technological supuriority and no longevity.
the fact remains, they haven't done nearly as well as they hoped. Have failed everywhere except America.
Nowm I'm not a fanboy. I have all 3. And a gameboy SP and a PC that can run all modern games. Thats just the facts. Xbox is nice technically, but did rather poorly in comparison to it's expectations.
That's not necessarily true -- sure, XBox prices have never been lower, but the same is true of the hardware that comprises one. The longer a system is out, generally, the cheaper it is to manufacture it.
This is also not necessarily true. They out sourced a lot of their chips and hardware within the Xbox thus they don't get the "volume" or "vertical integration" discount on the hardware that Sony and Nintendo enjoys. So while the price has undoubtly come down for them. It hasn't as fast as it has for nintendo or sony.
The price of the nvidia graphics chips and the intel chips and the HD wont' fall much so their likly still losing money on each system.
What color is the sky in Dvorak's world? The Xbox is outselling the Playstation 2. Xbox parties have quickly replaced LAN parties, and the fact that you can mod the hell out of it has almost turned soldering into a fad. The only place I can see the Xbox as hurting Microsoft is that PC gaming may suffer as a result. But what does Microsoft care if they already control most of the PC world through Windows anyway? If anything, the Xbox is increasing Microsoft's stronghold in the home.
This is a fairly recent developement, it's happening in only one market, and it's not representative of XBOX success but instead of Playstations market saturation. GC is #2 world wide. #3 in America. Xbox is #2 in America #4 or #5 in many other places. MArket penetration wise, Xbox is about as far in as GC in America. their totals aren't too far off. As for games sold, xbox does have some tantalizing exclusives but they sell less games then sony.
You are right about that.
I'm much more experienced now with Linux than Windows. (And I'm pretty damn experienced in Windows... right up until W2K came out. Then, I switched. What is that... 15 years?)
But... my Linux experience cost me one fourth the time and one twentieth the $$ in documentation compared to the cost of my Windows experience.
(OK... I didn't pay that much for Linux reference material. But, what the heck... I have to give Windows a bit of a chance.)
That, IMHO... is huge.
The incremental cost for being "experienced" in Windows was just to damn big to justify for me.
I know that when I learn some *nixy way of doing something... it will be valid (and work!) years down the road.
Can't say that for *do(w)s any more...
And on a similiar note, I paid for my Unix education (University) but I recived my MS education free (fixing my own comp. Fixing friends comps. Working fixing comps. and the other techs in the office). So it does seem to be a matetr of experience. Everyone I know has some experince with windows. Most of the techs I meet and the Friends who I graduated with use windows a lot. Few of them also knwo unix/linus. So for me the knowlege base I can draw form for a XP/95/98 problem is greater then for a *NIX problem. And thus for me I aquired my Windows info faster and cheaper. I've been tinkering wiht computers since dos 6.22. I'm glad to have *nix for somethings like servers and db because it's easier to do it on *nix but I like XP for word proccessing, graphic design (Can't afford a mac) and games. Both systems have weaknesses and strengths and I use them where their strong.
Is *nix architectually better? As far as I can see, yes it is. Is it "Better" at every thing. Nope. IT's a tool. Like a Mac OSX or XP or Dos. I use it where I find it useful.
Better idea. Mount a CPU on top of a rocket. Aim at the finish line. You've won the 10h test in problably less then 3 min.
What lost viet name was the lack of definable goals. Same with Iraq. Goals such as "Take the beach" "annihalate dresden" or "destroy this installation" are military goals that can be achived. but "Create a free and democratic state" and "Remoev the threat of communism" are not.
Technology made it so you didn't lose more troops. The daisy cutters helped alter the battle field and prevent an outright slaughter. The tanks and FAE ensured a victory in the initital military campeign. what defeats the US is the political campeign after. For that you need to educated your Populace that good leaders rarely arise from idiots(Bush jr.) and cretins (Nixxon).
As a admin of windows machines and a repair tech for them too. I generally have the inverse exprince. Errors in unix take 2 -3 days to track down. While windows I generally know whats wrong. It's all a matetr of experience. For usage at least and trouble shooting.
The Bush Doctrine applies only to nations which are A) unpleasant and B) dangerous. Canada fails the second condition.
We massacred your troops and burned down your white house. We beat germans like they were red headed step children twice and kept our incredibly vast country with 1/10 as many people as the US. So We're dangerous.
(White House: 23:00. Presidential press conference)
President: Ladies and Gentlemen. I have sad news to report. The city of Las Vegas had been hit with a WMD. The damage is incredible. 34,000 US citizens are now speaking with a Canadian accent and wearing flannel. 40 city blocks have suddenly been cleared of thier trash and 27 immigrant 7 eleven owners have worked a shift without being shot. The weapon was a class 4 "Dion Bomb" and hit one of th major casinos in Vega. We have rough estimates of the ground zero damage area but will require a few weeks to fully tally the collateral damage. We will not lets this go unpunished. We will find those responsible and put in prisons where they will make naked pyrimids while we take pictures. We will find the animals who did this and spend 150 billion dollars invading an unrelated country. I promise, so long as i'm president and you keep watchign fox news and buying shit I will punish those who aren't responsible for this.
Lets invade Canada. We can use the French Canadians for medical experiments, and We'll appropriate enough maple syrup to pay for the invasion. They have WMD (celine dion) and are more then willing to use it.
It was a boob. Children can see it all they want. They saw it when they were 0-1, they'll see when their 16-dead (on slashdot, from 32-50 when their wives file for divorce when they won't quit spending 13 hours a day posting.). Or they see it everyday in the shower. It's a breast. It's not like the executed someone on live or they were having sex with a hourse. It was a breast. Nothing obscene or bad about it. It was blown way out of proportion and made Americans look like infintile teenagers. At least the nit wits getting upset over it. Whats the difference from a normal Britney spears video or show and what happened there? About 1 cm and a bit of pink instead of dark brown. Why is one fine and the other an attrocity to the innocence of children? Children need to be protected from gun violence, from murder, from poverty, from exploitation but not from sex.
I wouldn't pay much attention to the "electonic" part of the equation. I think this is only thrown in to make sure that nobody mentions Babbage's Analytical Engine (which now it has been built is Turing complete).
Machines that don't work shoudn't be listed as a "first". I'm could be the first to build a commercial passenger space craft. It's proto type is sitting in my back yard. It works in theory and with $900,000,000.00 USD It'd work. Just like Babage. And when they rebuild my machine from my specs (with all the "device that produces anti-gravity goes here" arrows in the design) 200 years from now, they can proudly say King manic build the first Commercial Space liner.
Babage might have done it had he more moeny and more precise tools. But he didn't so...
When you put your bomb factories and tank factories in city's like Dresden and London and Osaka, don't be surprised when your enemy raises those cities to the ground. When you place a valid military objective near on in a civillian center. It then becomes a military objective. Generva Convention covers this, so does common sense.
Yeah, It took them months to flush out one unit hold up in one fortress on the Maginot Line, after they had cut off re-enforcements and the supply line to the fort. Taking the line full on, from the side it was aimed at would have blunted the German advance and degenerated into anothe trench war like WWI.
The wars conclusion was almost a given in both WWI and WWII. you had one highly advanced technological country vs essentially the rest of the world. And the three largest armies of the world are all gunning for you too.
Russia would have invaded any way, taking some of the holdings the Nazi's had. It was just a matter of time. So instead of waiting for it, the Germans were beign pro-active. Russia has a immense reserve of resources and troops and much of the area Germany occupied was unfriendly terrortory. IT was obvious that they could not combat a russian invasion and stalve off a English/ American/ Canadian assualt. they closest (geographically) ally Italy didn't have much to contribute. So they decided to commit to an offensive and hopefully wrap it up before the Anglo/Americans's attacked.
But as a lot of out forces have found out, a attack on russia is never a quick or painless ordeal.
If you violate America anti-trust law, you get a slap on the wrist with a wet noodle.