Sez who? Alexa.com puts it orders of magnitude below the BBC News website, for example.
Alexa is ranking bbc.co.uk, not the news site specifically. Alexa only distinguishes TLD's.
It would be the same thing if MSNBC numbers were counted as a part of the NBC web site, but they're not. MSNBC gets counted individually (because there is an "msnbc.com" TLD) and also as part of MSN's results (because MSNBC redirects to msnbc.msn.com).
The question is how many people get MSNBC news through MSN vs. manually typing in "www.msnbc.com" (or typing "msnbc" and hitting ctrl-enter). Myself, I type it in, but I suspect most people are just going to MSN.
So it's impossible to compare msnbc.com's numbers with news.bbc.co.uk's numbers because they're counted totally differently by Alexa. MSN itself has a much higher readership than the BBC as a whole, but you don't know what percentage of the users of each actually read the news on those sites.
btw, just related to the whole BBC issue - I find their news both as biased as anyone else and often pretty uninformed. The fact that they're biased more towards a European viewpoint, which may or may not better match the bias of most of the posters here, does not change anything. I also don't see any point whatsoever in linking to them for local stories in the United States, as I see happen often here - they are writing completely devoid of context. It is, specifically, incredibly annoying to me as a New Yorker when I see anyone link to them for a story about this city, because they always completely ignore the background issues at play, and are always writing with a skewed, bemused viewpoint that suggests "this isn't the way we do things in London!"
I would prefer it if article submitters would link to news sources with a better handle on the context of the stories they're reporting.
I read this article the other day and still wonder how it's possible to release this system without any flak from Nintendo. This is considered legal?
It's not only *considered* legal, it is legal.
The NES was reverse-engineered years ago. And all of their important patents have expired as well. Anyone has free reign to build a famiclone these days, and in fact nearly all of the retro-consoles on the market right now (with some notable exceptions like the Flashback 2 and the C64 joystick thing) are famicoms-on-a-chip running emulated software.
Nintendo doesn't like it but there's not a thing they can do about it. What they do do every once in a while is find a manufacturer that's including game ROMs with their famiclones and bust them for that. Then they word their press release such that it looks like the real issue was "unauthorized consoles" and the headlines end up saying things like "Nintendo busts NES clone manufacturer!" But it's always the ROMs that are the real issue - obviously the copyright on actual content still applies.
If you just sell the hardware, though, anybody is free to do so.
No game in this series has really changed since the 2nd UT.
You are in the future and shoot people with lasers and mini-nukes.
A little troll-ish, but I basically agree. It's actually kind of funny that the same people who complain about the yearly Madden games being little more than roster updates will nevertheless run out and buy the latest UT or other FPS for basically the same sorts of "upgrades".
I saw another poster raving about how one of the vehicles was now going to have a rocket launcher. Whoop-dee-frickin'-doo. The better graphics are nice, but you kinda just expect that on the PS3.
As is the case with Xbox 360 games right now, it's gonna take more than a graphically enhanced version of a game I've been playing for years to make me buy the system. Where are the new gameplay experiences that have historically accompanied system launches?
EA doesn't see the PSP getting to installed base that the company had previously expected, either in North America or Europe
Of course lack of sales of EA games on the platform would have nothing to do with the fact that most PSP EA games are ports from consoles.
I think you misread his comment. He didn't say he didn't expect PSP game sales to be what they expected, he said he didn't see the PSP getting to the installed base he expected.
In other words, it's the PSP itself that isn't selling. Which we all already knew, but it's a big deal (for Sony, anyway) when EA says it. EA is famous, at least in recent years, for making or breaking systems - when they very publicly refused to put Madden (or anything else) on the Dreamcast it went a long way towards killing that platform and making the PS2 a success.
If EA is having doubts now about the PSP, it does not bode well for Sony in their war with Nintendo. Like them or not, EA does have 25-30% market share and that's a huge number of people you take with you when you decide to develop for one system or another.
Wow...I've seen odd things in the Times, but this (which, if you haven't RTFA, is in fact in the article!) is just weird and scary.
It's called humor, dude. The writer was just having a little fun with the article, which, if you hadn't noticed, is pretty ridiculous all the way around. The whole point of it is using humor to shed light on a serious subject, which is something the Times does frequently.
There's more to the Times than just the front page headlines...
Most of the release titles were sequels of solid games (COD, Perfect Dark, EA sports games). These are phenominal launch titles because they are easier to create and already have a fan base.
So what you're saying is that this launch features a bunch of generic, lowest-common-demoninator sequels that appeal to people who have already played the previous versions.
This is a good launch lineup? At best, it will appeal to some of those who already own Xboxes. It will not initiate any interest in anyone beyond that. This is the problem when you have a launch lineup that's mainly a bunch of sports games and sequels.
Good launches always have at least one "must-have" game that shows off what the new system is capable of and/or offers a new gameplay experience. They also have to have most of the popular genres represented. The Xbox 360 has most genres represented (though it's missing a few important ones, like fighting games and RPG's), but it has no must-haves whatsoever. There is nothing in the 360's launch lineup that makes me go "wow! I've never seen anything that cool before, and I have to have it." There's no equivalent to Super Mario or Soul Calibur or even the original Ridge Racer in there (no, RR6 just doesn't carry the same cachet). MS obviously thinks there is in PD0 and CoD2, but these are sequels - they are basically graphical upgrades to previous games that a lot of people have already played. They may have a few gameplay tweaks but the core gameplay is nothing we haven't seen before.
I'd say the 360 launch lineup is middling. It's not the worst ever (go look up something like the Intellivision launch lineup), but there have been better ones, including the PS2, PS1, Coleco Vision, NES, SNES, Game Boy, N64, and Dreamcast. Not all of these systems had the same quantity as the Xbox 360 but they all had at least one game that everybody just had to play, and in some cases they had several.
I don't think the 360 launch lineup will hurt or help the console; I think it will mainly be forgotten about once the next round of games comes out.
As for the article, well... I think an award should go the the Rockstar Games marketing department, who were obviously the ones behind the DMA Design buyout. Rockstar was well on their way to being notorious for the rock bottom low quality of their games after the PS2 launch, and having DMA Design become Rockstar North has associated an expectation of quality with the Rockstar name.
Just FYI, Take 2 owned DMA Design well before they became Rockstar North. The Rockstar North thing was just a name change. The only non-"Rockstar" GTA was GTA1 on the PC. (The PS1 version was a Take 2 game, as were all subsequent versions.)
Guess I might as well also point out that these names are all just labels. Take 2 is the actual parent company. Rockstar Games operates out of the same office with the same people. Rockstar North is, like all of Rockstar's dev teams, elsewhere... but they all operate under the Take 2 umbrella.
Thought I should clear that up since you seem to be under the impression that DMA was bought out some time after the PS2 launch. Rockstar/Take 2 has owned DMA since 1996 or 1997. You can even still see all of Rockstar's GTA web sites linked from here. The original GTA site is here.
I do agree that Take 2's reputation was not all that great for a while, though it's a fairly young company and reputations do take time to build. You're not going to start a company from scratch and instantly be one of the top publishers/developers in the world (which is what Take 2 is now).
I picked this up the other week for £20 and I must say I'm really enjoying it. However, it is of course a sequal and does boast "nice graphics". Good game though, it'd be shame if people avoided it just because they thought it was another sequal that was just the same with a higher polygon count.
First of all, it's "sequel" - I don't think I've seen a single person spell that word correctly in this thread yet. (And it's become sort of a plague in any game-related thread on/.)
Anyway, I think the bottom line is CoD2 is just another WWII FPS with better graphics. However good it may be (and I'm sure it is), it is at best an incremental upgrade from the previous game, and from other games in the genre.
I think one of the problems is that the sequelitis that's plagued the industry for the past decade or so has had this really bad side effect of both driving away casual gamers who are more open to new things, while at the same time hardening the expectations of those buyers that remain as far as what a developer can do within a specific genre. So now the very people that publishers count on to buy these new sequels pretty much demand that they be just like the last game only incrementally better, which ensures a built-in audience but at the same time also attracts basically zero new buyers. Because if you didn't like the last game enough to buy it, why would you like the new one if it's pretty much the same thing?
This is at least in part responsible for the drop in game sales this year. Obviously, there are a lot of other factors involved - people saving up for new systems, developers moving their top dev teams to new platforms, etc. But just knowing my own personal habits as someone who used to spend thousands of dollars on games a year (I'm 33, I have disposable income), and knowing both the feelings of friends in the same boat as me along with what I read in various places on the net, I have to believe that there are a lot of people out there who are just dissatisfied with what they see as a boring, uninspired, utterly derivative crop of current games. We want something new, not the same thing as before but with better graphics.
Bottom line is sequels can draw on their built-in audience (that's the whole point) but they do nothing to expand the market or draw in new gamers. If all that you've got available on the market are sequels (as is pretty much the case right now), then the prospects for industry growth are basically nil.
This trumped-up format war is going to be dead on arrival -- because 90% of U.S. televisions won't be anywhere near an HDTV signal until 2015.
News flash: they already are.
Even "wait and see" articles like this one admit that there are already 16 million HDTV's in the US, which makes for greater than 10% market share (more like 15%). And that's as a percentage of all TV's currently in use - if you realize that there are more TV's in use than households in this country, then you can also make the assumption that many HDTV-enabled homes also have standard TV's in secondary rooms. So the total household penetration is probably more like 20%.
And the adoption rate is increasing, especially now that there's more of a reason to buy an HDTV - we've got the Xbox 360, we've got all prime time programming (except reality TV) in HD, we've got Blu-Ray and HD-DVD coming next year. At the same time, prices for HDTV's are falling through the floor - they have been well below the $500 mark for a couple of years now. You can buy a 26" HDTV for $299 at Best Buy. People who say HDTV's are expensive are focusing exclusively on the high end - but high-end TV's have always been expensive, HDTV or not.
Maybe you literally meant that most TV's wouldn't be near an HDTV signal until 2015 (that's what you actually said) - I kinda doubt you meant that but I may as well address that too just in case. All major metropolitan areas that I know of in the United States have access to over-the-air HDTV, cable HDTV and satellite. Rural areas have access to at least satellite. 100% of the US is covered by an HDTV signal of some sort, and most of the US is covered by several options.
You people who think the world is going to be stuck with standard-def analog TV forever are literally living in the past. Your friends probably have HDTV. A lot of people on this site have HDTV. Most new network programming is in HD, the new game consoles are in HD, the new optical disc formats are HD. It's already an HD world, and at some point, you'll join us.
And you plan to listen to all 500 of them the week after that? Give me a break. What do you do at home when you want to listen to a CD? You go over to the case, put the CD in the player.
Ummm, no? What century are you living in?
If I want to listen to a "CD", I reach for my iPod. Often, I do this as I am walking out the door. What is the use to me of a CD that has not yet been ripped in that situation? The fact of the matter is if I'm out the door on my way to work, I don't have time to sit there and rip a CD, then transfer it to my iPod afterwards.
It seems to me that the whole point of ripping music for a lot of people (not everyone, but a lot of people) is to get that music onto a portable player of some kind. And people have portable players because they're portable, i.e. you just grab them when you're on your way out, and have them with you all the time. Why should I have to plan in advance what I'm going to listen to?
So I, like probably 99% of the rest of the world that's ripped their collections, did it in one fell swoop. I did it myself, and I'd do it again, but yes, the time investment was such that if my collection was any bigger, it probably wouldn't be worth it. I've got about 300 CD's and using the "--preset standard" setting on LAME, it took me several days on a 2.4ghz Pentium 4 with a fast CD drive. It is not an instantaneous process. Then there's the process of getting all that music into iTunes (or whatever library you use) and transferring it to your portable player.
(Sure, you could just import using iTunes and cut the time investment down a tiny bit, but it still takes a little while to rip, and anyway LAME is a better encoder than iTunes for mp3. I use mp3 so I'm not locked into the iPod forever.)
I guess if you have no portable player and you use your PC as your sole music player, then you could get away with just importing as you go along. A portable player, though, is pretty much useless unless it's pre-loaded with stuff. Which means an all-at-once rip, and if I had 500 CD's and some disposable cash available, I might choose to pay someone else to do it too.
yeah, a very fluff article. ok, you're all "cloak and dagger", hope that roleplaying works for you guys...
I'm not sure how much of it's role playing and how much of it's a bit of editorial license taken in the article.
I own some of the stuff listed in this article, and have had access to other items (I used to work in the game industry, first as a reviewer and then in the marketing department for a major publisher). So I technically am one of these guys, and I know plenty of others who collect this sort of stuff.
I know I sure don't dress up in trench coats and meet guys in back alleys with suitcases full of cash. I don't know anybody else who does either. Maybe it's because I'm still using my industry contacts and we're sort of a casual bunch; maybe guys who are on the "outside" really do make a real game of it. But I think most of the people who are even interested in something like a Dreamcast dev kit or an M2 prototype probably have some connection to the game industry; otherwise, why the interest to begin with?
There's really not any actual difference between the guys who go on Ebay and blow $200 for a copy of Radiant Silvergun and the guys who are out looking for PS2 TOOL systems. It's the same guys, despite what this article says. Collectors all have their various fetishes - nobody just collects a bunch of totally random stuff; everybody specializes. But whether you're into modern games, classic games, collecting all the Sonic memorabilia ever created, possessing all Nintendo hardware ever made, or whatever... you're eventually going to get to a point where the only stuff you've got left to look for are prototypes, unreleased games and systems, dev kits and debug units, hotel units, or other oddball stuff. A collector is a collector. These guys are not a special breed, though a few of them may think they are.
I'm inclined to think there's a little bit of both of what I mentioned before in this article - rampant editorializing and role playing by a few specific people. The section on Japan ("virtually impenetrable due to the language barrier and sense of security"), for example, is utterly hilarious on both counts. It makes it sound as if there's some sort of secret Yakuza faction hoarding all the rare video game stuff, when in reality all you need are a few Japanese friends. Heck, I'm sure I've bought stuff in used stores in Japan that the guy quoted here probably considers legendarily difficult to come by, simply because I knew where to look and he doesn't, and I happened to get lucky on that particular day.
But that's the thing... read between the lines here and nothing in this article is really all that dramatic. "Connections" is just another word for "friends", for example - but "connections" just sounds so much more clandestine. If I wanted to, I could probably insert myself into an article that sounds just like this, but there's absolutely nothing about my life as a collector that I'd think of as anything outside the normal way human beings interact with other human beings.
I don't think you or my father are the kind of customer the RIAA is trying to attract.
No? I'm not the guy who wrote the comment you're replying to, but I'm in the same boat. You really think the RIAA doesn't want to attract thirtysomething males with scads of disposable income? Maybe you're right - maybe they don't care about actually getting people who have money to spend, but that's really their problem, isn't it? Shouldn't they be doing something to attract people like me?
I actually do still buy music, but of the last six CD's I've bought, five have been used CD's from Japan. If I told the RIAA this, it would drive them absolutely nuts. They'd tell me I'm everything that's wrong with music consumers these days - buying used, and buying imports! This is what they need DRM and region protections for! And pass a few more laws too while you're at it, make used purchases illegal!
Well you know what? Release those CD's in the US, and provided there was no DRM on them, I'd have bought them new. But hey, RIAA, you didn't. So I had to take matters into my own hands, didn't I?
I have no patience for Britney Spears or JessicAshley Simpson or any of these tone-deaf, generic monkeys from American Idol that they keep trying to foist on the American public. So yeah, maybe they're not trying to attract me; instead they're trying to attract people without any taste that live in trailers and live off unemployment insurance. Well, more power to them I guess, but that doesn't sound like a business model.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is yeah, I've slowed down buying music as I get older, but it's only because the RIAA and its member companies (and the RIAA is the music labels, remember) refuse to release any music I'm interested in anymore.
So 360's are sold bundled in Japan. Fair enough. Are PS2's sold bundled in Japan? If they are, how much slower are 360 bundles being sold than PS2 bundles? Don't give me "percentage unsold" -- that's horrendously misleading.
Well, the thing about this whole bundling issue is that it's not a forced thing. You can either walk out of a store with an Xbox 360 for $330 or you can buy one for $150 with a year of net service. This is pretty common in Japan, but the point is the choice is still there. It is not like bundling here, where you have to take what the store wants to give you. (I'm not even sure that would be legal in Japan.)
So the real deal is that the Xbox 360 still isn't selling. It's not like all 80,000 or whatever of the unsold consoles are unsold because people didn't want to sign up for internet access at the same time. If a customer doesn't want that bundle, they're free to buy one without it. They're choosing not to. That's the story here.
Do the japanese have a similar season or have they adopted christmas for that purpose?
Despite what somebody else said... no.
Retailers have tried to promote Christmas for this purpose, but it is not a family holiday. It's considered more of a romantic holiday, and boyfriends/girlfriends may exchange small gifts. It is more similar to Valentine's Day here than Christmas.
The Japanese do have customs called "temiyage" and "omiyage" that involve social customs of giving gifts on various days and for various reasons. But there's no one big holiday like there is here, and most gifts are small (like a bottle of wine, or a cake). Big gifts are given on things like wedding days, when it's customary for guests to provide a lot of money to the bride and groom. (But even then, it's expected to be repaid with a lavish reception, and the bride/groom are also expected to provide parting gifts to each guest. In essence, then, the guests just pay for the wedding.)
It really was pointless for MS to try to rush this system out for Christmas in Japan, but I guess their thinking was maybe some girls would buy a system for their boyfriends for Christmas. It's not like here, though, where parents are rushing around looking for a big gift for their kids.
I think another key factor to consider is how many more 360s are sold compared to the original XBox. This number will tell us how much inroads Microsoft has made into the Japanese market. It seems like the 360 is doing a whole lot better.
Not to me it doesn't.
The original Xbox sold 180,000 units in its first month on the market in Japan. That's the early adopter crowd, the same people who are buying the 360. I would be surprised if the 360 even sold that much; there seemed to be more reports of the original Xbox selling out and for a while it seemed like it might even be a hit there.
The point being, you seem to be assuming that because the Xbox did poorly for the majority of its life in Japan, that it had a poor launch too. It didn't. It had a decent launch, which was then marred by glitchy systems and a poor response from MS to it, then a lack of compelling follow-through in the form of new games.
That hurt the system's reputation. But it's not like MS released the system and it was immediately selling 5,000 units a month. No, it started out at 180,000, then dropped by about half every following month. (This is how they've managed to sell around 500,000 Xboxes even though they average about 3,000 systems per month now - the majority of those were sold in the first year.) Given what the Xbox 360 has had to overcome, MS would have to consider the launch a success if they even match the original Xbox numbers. The key then would be to maintain momentum, not lose it like they did last time.
But it seems to me that the Xbox 360 launch has been more laid back than the original Xbox launch, so I will be surprised if they claim to have sold 180,000 units at the beginning of next month (that would be almost a complete sellout, as I've heard they only shipped around 200,000 units to the country).
That picture he takes makes the area look pretty empty. I would actually be scared of another person being around while getting something that expensive from a vending machine.
Er, well for one, I hope you're not under the impression he was going to buy an Xbox 360 from a vending machine. The vending machine was incidental to the story. The guy was standing outside of Softmap, a computer/electronics store. There happened to be a vending machine there.
Guess Japan is not like NYC.
Not withstanding my comments above, though, people do buy expensive things from vending machines there - just not as part of this story.
No, Japan is not like NYC. There's crime - more than there used to be - but cops don't even carry guns there. You can walk down the street late at night without worrying about it. You can buy iPods out of isolated vending machines like this and provided you're not some little kid lost in a sea of high school bullies, you don't really have anything to be concerned about.
But this story is about a guy waiting outside of a store looking for customers... he just has a drink vending machine near him.
To get a little bit back on topic, Gamespot today has a glowing report of the sell-out in Shibuya. But honestly, this is one of MS's problems - and it's a problem western sites like Gamespot are all too eager to buy into. That is, Japan is more than Shibuya and Akihabara. Honestly. Yes, these are trendsetting areas for youngsters and tech retail, but it's like having a big launch event in Times Square in NYC and then ignoring the rest of the country and expecting anything to happen. It's just meaningless in the grand scheme of things; most of Japan - and in fact most of Tokyo - pays no attention at all to what goes on in Shibuya. MS wouldn't do that in the US - they have events all over the country, and they sponsor all sorts of things to keep the system in the public eye - but I haven't seen any reports of MS doing this in Japan. I have talked to people who live there who have said all they've seen on TV lately are PS2 and DS commercials, with maybe one or two Xbox 360 commercials really late at night.
It all just gets back to what I still think is a very basic misunderstanding of the Japanese market. Not everybody in Japan is the same and not everybody in Japan buys things just because people in Shibuya or Akihabara buy them. MS is making a huge push to attract a very specific type of customer in one tiny little geographic area in one city in Japan, but that is not going to get them anywhere nationwide.
Also, does this data apply only to a-list titles (games $40 and more) or to all games? The distinction is crucial.
Yeah, I said basically the same when Joystiq published this story. I'll paraphrase (and maybe expand upon) my comments there, here.
The thing that this study seems to show is not that poorly rated games sell well, but that highly rated games often don't. That's where the disconnect in the correlation is. There's a relatively flat distribution correlation of game sales to ratings, but generally speaking, most games sell poorly regardless of rating.
The exceptions, if you look at the graph, are the big-budget games like GTA and Madden, which obviously sell because they have a lot of marketing dollars behind them, not because they get good ratings.
So you can pretty much exclude those. What you're left with is a bunch of games selling under 500K whether they're rated a 5 or a 10.
At first glance, it does seem like that would then mean marketing dollars matter a whole lot more than review scores. But, you do need to take into account genre. A lot of highly rated games are very targeted to a specific niche, and they satisfy fans of that niche (RE4, Virtua Fighter 4 and Winning Eleven being examples). On the other hand, most poorly rated games are poorly rated in part because they are unfocused and not genre-specific enough - I think if you look through a list of poorly rated games at GameRankings, you'll see that. Good developers know their audience and will focus on it like a laser beam; bad developers will try to make a game anyone can like and in the process will satisfy nobody (and in the end, that's what makes it a bad game). Both approaches might end up with wildly differing review scores (and real quality) but similar sales numbers.
So while I don't think it's an assumption you can make - it would require further study - I do think it's totally possible that highly-rated games often don't sell simply because they are targeting a smaller group of people to begin with than poorly rated games often are. And if that's the case, then review scores do matter, because 90% of a highly-rated game's audience might buy it, while only 10% of a poorly-rated game's audience might buy it... and the total sales can still end up being pretty equal.
Do you live in an area where you can get OTA HD? If so, you can get the boxes pretty cheap, usually less than $100.
If he's already got a tuner, all he needs is a $20 Radio Shack antenna.
My $600 CRT HDTV came with a built-in tuner and I was enjoying free, full quality (i.e. not "downrezzed" or recompressed) HDTV the day I bought it.
Another hint: don't get taken in by these "HDTV" antennas. There's nothing special about an HDTV antenna, and unless you live on the outskirts and get poor reception anyway, there's no need to spend more than a few bucks on one.
Will the Japanese have the same problems with bundling, like those that purchased their 360s at Best Buy, in the USA?
Highly doubtful as nobody's expecting a sell-out as it is. With low demand, forced bundling would just reduce sales further. A customer can just walk out of the store and buy somewhere else, which was not really an option here.
Do retail outlets even DO bundling over there? I don't know.
I have never seen stores do it (factory bundles like pack-in games that come in the box are more common there, though), but that doesn't mean the idea won't ever catch on there like it has here. The Japanese have no problem copying ideas that they see have worked elsewhere.
On the other hand, antagonizing consumers is still considered "bad business" in Japan, so forced bundling may never catch on.
As I remember, the PS2 had its lower release number due to the complete meltdown of a chip forging plant. Yet Sony, by producing its own hardware, had enough in backup store in order to at least satiate a heathly part of consumer demand.
Yeah, and people thought that was bad. I waited in line for that launch, didn't get a unit and was really pissed off. But I had preordered online also and got a second shipment system - one week later.
I don't recall a time when a system launched and then was sold out completely for more than a week or so. I mean Ballmer's saying stores are getting weekly stock replenishments - what stores? Obviously not any of the big ones or we'd be hearing about it on all the tech blogs. My thinking is he's just pulling this out of his ass to make people feel better. I don't think they've shipped a single unit in the US since launch.
If we go a month between shipments (which seems pretty possible), then I don't even think you can call this a launch. This is more of a "test market". A launch is when you can actually put product in consumers' hands. A test market is when you test demand and also see how the system stands up to consumer use. That's what this feels like to me.
Game publishers can't be very happy about this either, especially as rushed as some of the launch titles obviously were. No doubt they'd have loved to have had another couple of months to finish up. And the stupid thing about it is, it's not like MS is getting any extra revenue because of Christmas out of the November "launch", because they don't have enough systems to satisfy demand in any case. They would have sold out regardless even if they launched in February or March.
It seems pretty freakin' clear at this point that this launch was rushed. I don't think there can be any argument about that anymore.
Look closer. What you are looking for is the absence of jagged lines.
Yeah, but the point is it's just not that big of a difference. I felt the same way as the parent poster, even though I *did* see the lessening (not "absence" - check DOA3 again) of jaggies.
It looks like the difference between running a PC game at 640x480 vs. 1024x768. It doesn't even look truly HD, even though GameSpot says the X360 shots are at least 720p. Part of the problem may be that they appear to have upsampled the Xbox shots and downsampled the X360 shots. It would have been more informative seeing full-resolution X360 shots (and if these are full resolution as they are, then they're not HD).
I don't really see any improvements other than the increased resolution. There's no additional detail that I can see in any of these shots. Textures look the same, lighting looks the same, etc. Not that I necessarily expected anything more - it's just backward compatibility after all - but a lot of people have been making a big deal about how much better Xbox games look on the 360 (including this article) and I just don't see it. The games are being played at a higher res and that's about it.
I don't see any hard comments in the letter. It's just like another soft-diplomatic letter to me.
The submitter seems to be European. The site it's hosted on is European. By European standards, this letter might seem harsh. By American standards, it's pretty mild.
I'm not trying to start a flamewar myself, but I think it's a pretty well known thing that Americans are by and large plain-spoken people, whatever side of the political fence you're on (though that's changing a bit as "marketing-speak" starts to infiltrate everyday speech). Generally, we say what we mean and we don't disguise it in a bunch of niceties or doublespeak.
When I saw the description of the letter in the article submission, I was expecting things like "we categorically refuse to hand over control to a bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys" but there's nothing like that here. It seems to me a pretty respectful and diplomatic way of saying we don't want to turn over control. I mean, "we ask the European Union to reconsider its new position on Internet governance and work together with us to bring the benefits of the Information Society to all"? That's harsh? That's "stern"?
If that's considered stern or harsh, then the rest of the world needs thicker skin.
Well, as it says flat-out in big, bold type at the Museum of Natural History in NYC,
BIRDS ARE DINOSAURS.
They make no bones about it. It actually gave me chills when I first saw that. They also had a logical and easy to understand rationale for why it's not accurate to say "birds descended from dinosaurs" either; that birds are dinosaurs. (Unfortunately I don't recall what it was right now, but I remember they used an analogy that was similar to "just as man is not 'descended from' mammals, birds have not 'descended from' dinosaurs. Humans are mammals that have evolved over millions of years, just as birds are highly evolved dinosaurs.")
From what I've read, this is becoming a popular - if not the prevailing - belief among scientists at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
Sez who? Alexa.com puts it orders of magnitude below the BBC News website, for example.
Alexa is ranking bbc.co.uk, not the news site specifically. Alexa only distinguishes TLD's.
It would be the same thing if MSNBC numbers were counted as a part of the NBC web site, but they're not. MSNBC gets counted individually (because there is an "msnbc.com" TLD) and also as part of MSN's results (because MSNBC redirects to msnbc.msn.com).
The question is how many people get MSNBC news through MSN vs. manually typing in "www.msnbc.com" (or typing "msnbc" and hitting ctrl-enter). Myself, I type it in, but I suspect most people are just going to MSN.
So it's impossible to compare msnbc.com's numbers with news.bbc.co.uk's numbers because they're counted totally differently by Alexa. MSN itself has a much higher readership than the BBC as a whole, but you don't know what percentage of the users of each actually read the news on those sites.
btw, just related to the whole BBC issue - I find their news both as biased as anyone else and often pretty uninformed. The fact that they're biased more towards a European viewpoint, which may or may not better match the bias of most of the posters here, does not change anything. I also don't see any point whatsoever in linking to them for local stories in the United States, as I see happen often here - they are writing completely devoid of context. It is, specifically, incredibly annoying to me as a New Yorker when I see anyone link to them for a story about this city, because they always completely ignore the background issues at play, and are always writing with a skewed, bemused viewpoint that suggests "this isn't the way we do things in London!"
I would prefer it if article submitters would link to news sources with a better handle on the context of the stories they're reporting.
I read this article the other day and still wonder how it's possible to release this system without any flak from Nintendo. This is considered legal?
It's not only *considered* legal, it is legal.
The NES was reverse-engineered years ago. And all of their important patents have expired as well. Anyone has free reign to build a famiclone these days, and in fact nearly all of the retro-consoles on the market right now (with some notable exceptions like the Flashback 2 and the C64 joystick thing) are famicoms-on-a-chip running emulated software.
Nintendo doesn't like it but there's not a thing they can do about it. What they do do every once in a while is find a manufacturer that's including game ROMs with their famiclones and bust them for that. Then they word their press release such that it looks like the real issue was "unauthorized consoles" and the headlines end up saying things like "Nintendo busts NES clone manufacturer!" But it's always the ROMs that are the real issue - obviously the copyright on actual content still applies.
If you just sell the hardware, though, anybody is free to do so.
No game in this series has really changed since the 2nd UT.
You are in the future and shoot people with lasers and mini-nukes.
A little troll-ish, but I basically agree. It's actually kind of funny that the same people who complain about the yearly Madden games being little more than roster updates will nevertheless run out and buy the latest UT or other FPS for basically the same sorts of "upgrades".
I saw another poster raving about how one of the vehicles was now going to have a rocket launcher. Whoop-dee-frickin'-doo. The better graphics are nice, but you kinda just expect that on the PS3.
As is the case with Xbox 360 games right now, it's gonna take more than a graphically enhanced version of a game I've been playing for years to make me buy the system. Where are the new gameplay experiences that have historically accompanied system launches?
EA doesn't see the PSP getting to installed base that the company had previously expected, either in North America or Europe
Of course lack of sales of EA games on the platform would have nothing to do with the fact that most PSP EA games are ports from consoles.
I think you misread his comment. He didn't say he didn't expect PSP game sales to be what they expected, he said he didn't see the PSP getting to the installed base he expected.
In other words, it's the PSP itself that isn't selling. Which we all already knew, but it's a big deal (for Sony, anyway) when EA says it. EA is famous, at least in recent years, for making or breaking systems - when they very publicly refused to put Madden (or anything else) on the Dreamcast it went a long way towards killing that platform and making the PS2 a success.
If EA is having doubts now about the PSP, it does not bode well for Sony in their war with Nintendo. Like them or not, EA does have 25-30% market share and that's a huge number of people you take with you when you decide to develop for one system or another.
Wow...I've seen odd things in the Times, but this (which, if you haven't RTFA, is in fact in the article!) is just weird and scary.
It's called humor, dude. The writer was just having a little fun with the article, which, if you hadn't noticed, is pretty ridiculous all the way around. The whole point of it is using humor to shed light on a serious subject, which is something the Times does frequently.
There's more to the Times than just the front page headlines...
Most of the release titles were sequels of solid games (COD, Perfect Dark, EA sports games). These are phenominal launch titles because they are easier to create and already have a fan base.
So what you're saying is that this launch features a bunch of generic, lowest-common-demoninator sequels that appeal to people who have already played the previous versions.
This is a good launch lineup? At best, it will appeal to some of those who already own Xboxes. It will not initiate any interest in anyone beyond that. This is the problem when you have a launch lineup that's mainly a bunch of sports games and sequels.
Good launches always have at least one "must-have" game that shows off what the new system is capable of and/or offers a new gameplay experience. They also have to have most of the popular genres represented. The Xbox 360 has most genres represented (though it's missing a few important ones, like fighting games and RPG's), but it has no must-haves whatsoever. There is nothing in the 360's launch lineup that makes me go "wow! I've never seen anything that cool before, and I have to have it." There's no equivalent to Super Mario or Soul Calibur or even the original Ridge Racer in there (no, RR6 just doesn't carry the same cachet). MS obviously thinks there is in PD0 and CoD2, but these are sequels - they are basically graphical upgrades to previous games that a lot of people have already played. They may have a few gameplay tweaks but the core gameplay is nothing we haven't seen before.
I'd say the 360 launch lineup is middling. It's not the worst ever (go look up something like the Intellivision launch lineup), but there have been better ones, including the PS2, PS1, Coleco Vision, NES, SNES, Game Boy, N64, and Dreamcast. Not all of these systems had the same quantity as the Xbox 360 but they all had at least one game that everybody just had to play, and in some cases they had several.
I don't think the 360 launch lineup will hurt or help the console; I think it will mainly be forgotten about once the next round of games comes out.
As for the article, well... I think an award should go the the Rockstar Games marketing department, who were obviously the ones behind the DMA Design buyout. Rockstar was well on their way to being notorious for the rock bottom low quality of their games after the PS2 launch, and having DMA Design become Rockstar North has associated an expectation of quality with the Rockstar name.
Just FYI, Take 2 owned DMA Design well before they became Rockstar North. The Rockstar North thing was just a name change. The only non-"Rockstar" GTA was GTA1 on the PC. (The PS1 version was a Take 2 game, as were all subsequent versions.)
Guess I might as well also point out that these names are all just labels. Take 2 is the actual parent company. Rockstar Games operates out of the same office with the same people. Rockstar North is, like all of Rockstar's dev teams, elsewhere... but they all operate under the Take 2 umbrella.
Thought I should clear that up since you seem to be under the impression that DMA was bought out some time after the PS2 launch. Rockstar/Take 2 has owned DMA since 1996 or 1997. You can even still see all of Rockstar's GTA web sites linked from here. The original GTA site is here.
I do agree that Take 2's reputation was not all that great for a while, though it's a fairly young company and reputations do take time to build. You're not going to start a company from scratch and instantly be one of the top publishers/developers in the world (which is what Take 2 is now).
I picked this up the other week for £20 and I must say I'm really enjoying it. However, it is of course a sequal and does boast "nice graphics". Good game though, it'd be shame if people avoided it just because they thought it was another sequal that was just the same with a higher polygon count.
/.)
First of all, it's "sequel" - I don't think I've seen a single person spell that word correctly in this thread yet. (And it's become sort of a plague in any game-related thread on
Anyway, I think the bottom line is CoD2 is just another WWII FPS with better graphics. However good it may be (and I'm sure it is), it is at best an incremental upgrade from the previous game, and from other games in the genre.
I think one of the problems is that the sequelitis that's plagued the industry for the past decade or so has had this really bad side effect of both driving away casual gamers who are more open to new things, while at the same time hardening the expectations of those buyers that remain as far as what a developer can do within a specific genre. So now the very people that publishers count on to buy these new sequels pretty much demand that they be just like the last game only incrementally better, which ensures a built-in audience but at the same time also attracts basically zero new buyers. Because if you didn't like the last game enough to buy it, why would you like the new one if it's pretty much the same thing?
This is at least in part responsible for the drop in game sales this year. Obviously, there are a lot of other factors involved - people saving up for new systems, developers moving their top dev teams to new platforms, etc. But just knowing my own personal habits as someone who used to spend thousands of dollars on games a year (I'm 33, I have disposable income), and knowing both the feelings of friends in the same boat as me along with what I read in various places on the net, I have to believe that there are a lot of people out there who are just dissatisfied with what they see as a boring, uninspired, utterly derivative crop of current games. We want something new, not the same thing as before but with better graphics.
Bottom line is sequels can draw on their built-in audience (that's the whole point) but they do nothing to expand the market or draw in new gamers. If all that you've got available on the market are sequels (as is pretty much the case right now), then the prospects for industry growth are basically nil.
This trumped-up format war is going to be dead on arrival -- because 90% of U.S. televisions won't be anywhere near an HDTV signal until 2015.
News flash: they already are.
Even "wait and see" articles like this one admit that there are already 16 million HDTV's in the US, which makes for greater than 10% market share (more like 15%). And that's as a percentage of all TV's currently in use - if you realize that there are more TV's in use than households in this country, then you can also make the assumption that many HDTV-enabled homes also have standard TV's in secondary rooms. So the total household penetration is probably more like 20%.
And the adoption rate is increasing, especially now that there's more of a reason to buy an HDTV - we've got the Xbox 360, we've got all prime time programming (except reality TV) in HD, we've got Blu-Ray and HD-DVD coming next year. At the same time, prices for HDTV's are falling through the floor - they have been well below the $500 mark for a couple of years now. You can buy a 26" HDTV for $299 at Best Buy. People who say HDTV's are expensive are focusing exclusively on the high end - but high-end TV's have always been expensive, HDTV or not.
Maybe you literally meant that most TV's wouldn't be near an HDTV signal until 2015 (that's what you actually said) - I kinda doubt you meant that but I may as well address that too just in case. All major metropolitan areas that I know of in the United States have access to over-the-air HDTV, cable HDTV and satellite. Rural areas have access to at least satellite. 100% of the US is covered by an HDTV signal of some sort, and most of the US is covered by several options.
You people who think the world is going to be stuck with standard-def analog TV forever are literally living in the past. Your friends probably have HDTV. A lot of people on this site have HDTV. Most new network programming is in HD, the new game consoles are in HD, the new optical disc formats are HD. It's already an HD world, and at some point, you'll join us.
And you plan to listen to all 500 of them the week after that? Give me a break. What do you do at home when you want to listen to a CD? You go over to the case, put the CD in the player.
Ummm, no? What century are you living in?
If I want to listen to a "CD", I reach for my iPod. Often, I do this as I am walking out the door. What is the use to me of a CD that has not yet been ripped in that situation? The fact of the matter is if I'm out the door on my way to work, I don't have time to sit there and rip a CD, then transfer it to my iPod afterwards.
It seems to me that the whole point of ripping music for a lot of people (not everyone, but a lot of people) is to get that music onto a portable player of some kind. And people have portable players because they're portable, i.e. you just grab them when you're on your way out, and have them with you all the time. Why should I have to plan in advance what I'm going to listen to?
So I, like probably 99% of the rest of the world that's ripped their collections, did it in one fell swoop. I did it myself, and I'd do it again, but yes, the time investment was such that if my collection was any bigger, it probably wouldn't be worth it. I've got about 300 CD's and using the "--preset standard" setting on LAME, it took me several days on a 2.4ghz Pentium 4 with a fast CD drive. It is not an instantaneous process. Then there's the process of getting all that music into iTunes (or whatever library you use) and transferring it to your portable player.
(Sure, you could just import using iTunes and cut the time investment down a tiny bit, but it still takes a little while to rip, and anyway LAME is a better encoder than iTunes for mp3. I use mp3 so I'm not locked into the iPod forever.)
I guess if you have no portable player and you use your PC as your sole music player, then you could get away with just importing as you go along. A portable player, though, is pretty much useless unless it's pre-loaded with stuff. Which means an all-at-once rip, and if I had 500 CD's and some disposable cash available, I might choose to pay someone else to do it too.
...can you lose your company four BILLION dollars and get promoted.
I'm just waiting for Peter Moore to take over as CEO.
yeah, a very fluff article. ok, you're all "cloak and dagger", hope that roleplaying works for you guys...
I'm not sure how much of it's role playing and how much of it's a bit of editorial license taken in the article.
I own some of the stuff listed in this article, and have had access to other items (I used to work in the game industry, first as a reviewer and then in the marketing department for a major publisher). So I technically am one of these guys, and I know plenty of others who collect this sort of stuff.
I know I sure don't dress up in trench coats and meet guys in back alleys with suitcases full of cash. I don't know anybody else who does either. Maybe it's because I'm still using my industry contacts and we're sort of a casual bunch; maybe guys who are on the "outside" really do make a real game of it. But I think most of the people who are even interested in something like a Dreamcast dev kit or an M2 prototype probably have some connection to the game industry; otherwise, why the interest to begin with?
There's really not any actual difference between the guys who go on Ebay and blow $200 for a copy of Radiant Silvergun and the guys who are out looking for PS2 TOOL systems. It's the same guys, despite what this article says. Collectors all have their various fetishes - nobody just collects a bunch of totally random stuff; everybody specializes. But whether you're into modern games, classic games, collecting all the Sonic memorabilia ever created, possessing all Nintendo hardware ever made, or whatever... you're eventually going to get to a point where the only stuff you've got left to look for are prototypes, unreleased games and systems, dev kits and debug units, hotel units, or other oddball stuff. A collector is a collector. These guys are not a special breed, though a few of them may think they are.
I'm inclined to think there's a little bit of both of what I mentioned before in this article - rampant editorializing and role playing by a few specific people. The section on Japan ("virtually impenetrable due to the language barrier and sense of security"), for example, is utterly hilarious on both counts. It makes it sound as if there's some sort of secret Yakuza faction hoarding all the rare video game stuff, when in reality all you need are a few Japanese friends. Heck, I'm sure I've bought stuff in used stores in Japan that the guy quoted here probably considers legendarily difficult to come by, simply because I knew where to look and he doesn't, and I happened to get lucky on that particular day.
But that's the thing... read between the lines here and nothing in this article is really all that dramatic. "Connections" is just another word for "friends", for example - but "connections" just sounds so much more clandestine. If I wanted to, I could probably insert myself into an article that sounds just like this, but there's absolutely nothing about my life as a collector that I'd think of as anything outside the normal way human beings interact with other human beings.
I don't think you or my father are the kind of customer the RIAA is trying to attract.
No? I'm not the guy who wrote the comment you're replying to, but I'm in the same boat. You really think the RIAA doesn't want to attract thirtysomething males with scads of disposable income? Maybe you're right - maybe they don't care about actually getting people who have money to spend, but that's really their problem, isn't it? Shouldn't they be doing something to attract people like me?
I actually do still buy music, but of the last six CD's I've bought, five have been used CD's from Japan. If I told the RIAA this, it would drive them absolutely nuts. They'd tell me I'm everything that's wrong with music consumers these days - buying used, and buying imports! This is what they need DRM and region protections for! And pass a few more laws too while you're at it, make used purchases illegal!
Well you know what? Release those CD's in the US, and provided there was no DRM on them, I'd have bought them new. But hey, RIAA, you didn't. So I had to take matters into my own hands, didn't I?
I have no patience for Britney Spears or JessicAshley Simpson or any of these tone-deaf, generic monkeys from American Idol that they keep trying to foist on the American public. So yeah, maybe they're not trying to attract me; instead they're trying to attract people without any taste that live in trailers and live off unemployment insurance. Well, more power to them I guess, but that doesn't sound like a business model.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is yeah, I've slowed down buying music as I get older, but it's only because the RIAA and its member companies (and the RIAA is the music labels, remember) refuse to release any music I'm interested in anymore.
So 360's are sold bundled in Japan. Fair enough. Are PS2's sold bundled in Japan? If they are, how much slower are 360 bundles being sold than PS2 bundles? Don't give me "percentage unsold" -- that's horrendously misleading.
Well, the thing about this whole bundling issue is that it's not a forced thing. You can either walk out of a store with an Xbox 360 for $330 or you can buy one for $150 with a year of net service. This is pretty common in Japan, but the point is the choice is still there. It is not like bundling here, where you have to take what the store wants to give you. (I'm not even sure that would be legal in Japan.)
So the real deal is that the Xbox 360 still isn't selling. It's not like all 80,000 or whatever of the unsold consoles are unsold because people didn't want to sign up for internet access at the same time. If a customer doesn't want that bundle, they're free to buy one without it. They're choosing not to. That's the story here.
Do the japanese have a similar season or have they adopted christmas for that purpose?
Despite what somebody else said... no.
Retailers have tried to promote Christmas for this purpose, but it is not a family holiday. It's considered more of a romantic holiday, and boyfriends/girlfriends may exchange small gifts. It is more similar to Valentine's Day here than Christmas.
The Japanese do have customs called "temiyage" and "omiyage" that involve social customs of giving gifts on various days and for various reasons. But there's no one big holiday like there is here, and most gifts are small (like a bottle of wine, or a cake). Big gifts are given on things like wedding days, when it's customary for guests to provide a lot of money to the bride and groom. (But even then, it's expected to be repaid with a lavish reception, and the bride/groom are also expected to provide parting gifts to each guest. In essence, then, the guests just pay for the wedding.)
It really was pointless for MS to try to rush this system out for Christmas in Japan, but I guess their thinking was maybe some girls would buy a system for their boyfriends for Christmas. It's not like here, though, where parents are rushing around looking for a big gift for their kids.
I think another key factor to consider is how many more 360s are sold compared to the original XBox. This number will tell us how much inroads Microsoft has made into the Japanese market. It seems like the 360 is doing a whole lot better.
Not to me it doesn't.
The original Xbox sold 180,000 units in its first month on the market in Japan. That's the early adopter crowd, the same people who are buying the 360. I would be surprised if the 360 even sold that much; there seemed to be more reports of the original Xbox selling out and for a while it seemed like it might even be a hit there.
The point being, you seem to be assuming that because the Xbox did poorly for the majority of its life in Japan, that it had a poor launch too. It didn't. It had a decent launch, which was then marred by glitchy systems and a poor response from MS to it, then a lack of compelling follow-through in the form of new games.
That hurt the system's reputation. But it's not like MS released the system and it was immediately selling 5,000 units a month. No, it started out at 180,000, then dropped by about half every following month. (This is how they've managed to sell around 500,000 Xboxes even though they average about 3,000 systems per month now - the majority of those were sold in the first year.) Given what the Xbox 360 has had to overcome, MS would have to consider the launch a success if they even match the original Xbox numbers. The key then would be to maintain momentum, not lose it like they did last time.
But it seems to me that the Xbox 360 launch has been more laid back than the original Xbox launch, so I will be surprised if they claim to have sold 180,000 units at the beginning of next month (that would be almost a complete sellout, as I've heard they only shipped around 200,000 units to the country).
That picture he takes makes the area look pretty empty. I would actually be scared of another person being around while getting something that expensive from a vending machine.
Er, well for one, I hope you're not under the impression he was going to buy an Xbox 360 from a vending machine. The vending machine was incidental to the story. The guy was standing outside of Softmap, a computer/electronics store. There happened to be a vending machine there.
Guess Japan is not like NYC.
Not withstanding my comments above, though, people do buy expensive things from vending machines there - just not as part of this story.
No, Japan is not like NYC. There's crime - more than there used to be - but cops don't even carry guns there. You can walk down the street late at night without worrying about it. You can buy iPods out of isolated vending machines like this and provided you're not some little kid lost in a sea of high school bullies, you don't really have anything to be concerned about.
But this story is about a guy waiting outside of a store looking for customers... he just has a drink vending machine near him.
To get a little bit back on topic, Gamespot today has a glowing report of the sell-out in Shibuya. But honestly, this is one of MS's problems - and it's a problem western sites like Gamespot are all too eager to buy into. That is, Japan is more than Shibuya and Akihabara. Honestly. Yes, these are trendsetting areas for youngsters and tech retail, but it's like having a big launch event in Times Square in NYC and then ignoring the rest of the country and expecting anything to happen. It's just meaningless in the grand scheme of things; most of Japan - and in fact most of Tokyo - pays no attention at all to what goes on in Shibuya. MS wouldn't do that in the US - they have events all over the country, and they sponsor all sorts of things to keep the system in the public eye - but I haven't seen any reports of MS doing this in Japan. I have talked to people who live there who have said all they've seen on TV lately are PS2 and DS commercials, with maybe one or two Xbox 360 commercials really late at night.
It all just gets back to what I still think is a very basic misunderstanding of the Japanese market. Not everybody in Japan is the same and not everybody in Japan buys things just because people in Shibuya or Akihabara buy them. MS is making a huge push to attract a very specific type of customer in one tiny little geographic area in one city in Japan, but that is not going to get them anywhere nationwide.
Also, does this data apply only to a-list titles (games $40 and more) or to all games? The distinction is crucial.
Yeah, I said basically the same when Joystiq published this story. I'll paraphrase (and maybe expand upon) my comments there, here.
The thing that this study seems to show is not that poorly rated games sell well, but that highly rated games often don't. That's where the disconnect in the correlation is. There's a relatively flat distribution correlation of game sales to ratings, but generally speaking, most games sell poorly regardless of rating.
The exceptions, if you look at the graph, are the big-budget games like GTA and Madden, which obviously sell because they have a lot of marketing dollars behind them, not because they get good ratings.
So you can pretty much exclude those. What you're left with is a bunch of games selling under 500K whether they're rated a 5 or a 10.
At first glance, it does seem like that would then mean marketing dollars matter a whole lot more than review scores. But, you do need to take into account genre. A lot of highly rated games are very targeted to a specific niche, and they satisfy fans of that niche (RE4, Virtua Fighter 4 and Winning Eleven being examples). On the other hand, most poorly rated games are poorly rated in part because they are unfocused and not genre-specific enough - I think if you look through a list of poorly rated games at GameRankings, you'll see that. Good developers know their audience and will focus on it like a laser beam; bad developers will try to make a game anyone can like and in the process will satisfy nobody (and in the end, that's what makes it a bad game). Both approaches might end up with wildly differing review scores (and real quality) but similar sales numbers.
So while I don't think it's an assumption you can make - it would require further study - I do think it's totally possible that highly-rated games often don't sell simply because they are targeting a smaller group of people to begin with than poorly rated games often are. And if that's the case, then review scores do matter, because 90% of a highly-rated game's audience might buy it, while only 10% of a poorly-rated game's audience might buy it... and the total sales can still end up being pretty equal.
It is more than the base console, which is only $300.
$200 in 2002 dollars is $213.49 today, according to the inflation calculator here. So, no, the GameCube was not more than the base X360 console.
The Dreamcast also cost $199 when it was launched in 1999, and that's only $228 today.
The Xbox 360 core system is not really more expensive than most, but it is hardly the cheapest ever at launch.
Do you live in an area where you can get OTA HD? If so, you can get the boxes pretty cheap, usually less than $100.
If he's already got a tuner, all he needs is a $20 Radio Shack antenna.
My $600 CRT HDTV came with a built-in tuner and I was enjoying free, full quality (i.e. not "downrezzed" or recompressed) HDTV the day I bought it.
Another hint: don't get taken in by these "HDTV" antennas. There's nothing special about an HDTV antenna, and unless you live on the outskirts and get poor reception anyway, there's no need to spend more than a few bucks on one.
Will the Japanese have the same problems with bundling, like those that purchased their 360s at Best Buy, in the USA?
Highly doubtful as nobody's expecting a sell-out as it is. With low demand, forced bundling would just reduce sales further. A customer can just walk out of the store and buy somewhere else, which was not really an option here.
Do retail outlets even DO bundling over there? I don't know.
I have never seen stores do it (factory bundles like pack-in games that come in the box are more common there, though), but that doesn't mean the idea won't ever catch on there like it has here. The Japanese have no problem copying ideas that they see have worked elsewhere.
On the other hand, antagonizing consumers is still considered "bad business" in Japan, so forced bundling may never catch on.
As I remember, the PS2 had its lower release number due to the complete meltdown of a chip forging plant. Yet Sony, by producing its own hardware, had enough in backup store in order to at least satiate a heathly part of consumer demand.
Yeah, and people thought that was bad. I waited in line for that launch, didn't get a unit and was really pissed off. But I had preordered online also and got a second shipment system - one week later.
I don't recall a time when a system launched and then was sold out completely for more than a week or so. I mean Ballmer's saying stores are getting weekly stock replenishments - what stores? Obviously not any of the big ones or we'd be hearing about it on all the tech blogs. My thinking is he's just pulling this out of his ass to make people feel better. I don't think they've shipped a single unit in the US since launch.
If we go a month between shipments (which seems pretty possible), then I don't even think you can call this a launch. This is more of a "test market". A launch is when you can actually put product in consumers' hands. A test market is when you test demand and also see how the system stands up to consumer use. That's what this feels like to me.
Game publishers can't be very happy about this either, especially as rushed as some of the launch titles obviously were. No doubt they'd have loved to have had another couple of months to finish up. And the stupid thing about it is, it's not like MS is getting any extra revenue because of Christmas out of the November "launch", because they don't have enough systems to satisfy demand in any case. They would have sold out regardless even if they launched in February or March.
It seems pretty freakin' clear at this point that this launch was rushed. I don't think there can be any argument about that anymore.
Look closer. What you are looking for is the absence of jagged lines.
Yeah, but the point is it's just not that big of a difference. I felt the same way as the parent poster, even though I *did* see the lessening (not "absence" - check DOA3 again) of jaggies.
It looks like the difference between running a PC game at 640x480 vs. 1024x768. It doesn't even look truly HD, even though GameSpot says the X360 shots are at least 720p. Part of the problem may be that they appear to have upsampled the Xbox shots and downsampled the X360 shots. It would have been more informative seeing full-resolution X360 shots (and if these are full resolution as they are, then they're not HD).
I don't really see any improvements other than the increased resolution. There's no additional detail that I can see in any of these shots. Textures look the same, lighting looks the same, etc. Not that I necessarily expected anything more - it's just backward compatibility after all - but a lot of people have been making a big deal about how much better Xbox games look on the 360 (including this article) and I just don't see it. The games are being played at a higher res and that's about it.
I don't see any hard comments in the letter. It's just like another soft-diplomatic letter to me.
The submitter seems to be European. The site it's hosted on is European. By European standards, this letter might seem harsh. By American standards, it's pretty mild.
I'm not trying to start a flamewar myself, but I think it's a pretty well known thing that Americans are by and large plain-spoken people, whatever side of the political fence you're on (though that's changing a bit as "marketing-speak" starts to infiltrate everyday speech). Generally, we say what we mean and we don't disguise it in a bunch of niceties or doublespeak.
When I saw the description of the letter in the article submission, I was expecting things like "we categorically refuse to hand over control to a bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys" but there's nothing like that here. It seems to me a pretty respectful and diplomatic way of saying we don't want to turn over control. I mean, "we ask the European Union to reconsider its new position on Internet governance and work together with us to bring the benefits of the Information Society to all"? That's harsh? That's "stern"?
If that's considered stern or harsh, then the rest of the world needs thicker skin.
Well, as it says flat-out in big, bold type at the Museum of Natural History in NYC,
BIRDS ARE DINOSAURS.
They make no bones about it. It actually gave me chills when I first saw that. They also had a logical and easy to understand rationale for why it's not accurate to say "birds descended from dinosaurs" either; that birds are dinosaurs. (Unfortunately I don't recall what it was right now, but I remember they used an analogy that was similar to "just as man is not 'descended from' mammals, birds have not 'descended from' dinosaurs. Humans are mammals that have evolved over millions of years, just as birds are highly evolved dinosaurs.")
From what I've read, this is becoming a popular - if not the prevailing - belief among scientists at the moment.