It sounds like a basic LotR version of Dynasty Warriors. That whole series has its fans and detractors, and any game like it is likely to fall the same way with those individuals. Personally, I pick up maybe 1 game in that particular series for each generation of consoles and play it occasionally. It's enjoyable, but not something I pin my hopes on for hours upon hours of enjoyment all packed into a period of a week or two the way I might some other games.
It also helped that it was a PlayStation release rather than a PC release. Once the basic copy protection is cracked on a console, most of the games are available very quickly, because few developers bother with more than the default protection. Once someone took additional steps to protect their game, it took a while for those people to get through it.
If it were a PC game, it's more likely it would've been cracked more quickly. The people handling PC releases have seen that sort of protection before (in fact, it's far more likely), especially since they had been using significant measures to prevent copying of floppies before they moved to CDs.
Most games are released at different times around the world because of localization issues (and these are not always translation issues, since you have different laws in different countries regarding the content, and different rating systems as well).
Of course, the summary of the article points out that Valve believes simultaneous releases have been a significant help in fighting piracy.
Most games are released on the internet with the DRM broken at or before the commercial release date. The only real impact of DRM is on the customers themselves, primarily stopping them from loaning games to other people to try out or play for fear they won't be able to play it again themselves at a later time (or won't be able to play it with their friends unless their friends also buy it).
At least Netflix isn't going to cost you anything extra if you're already subscribing to it. You're just out the time to watch the movie and send it back.
This is why I don't buy DVDs any more without having rented them first. Before Netflix it was roughly one-third or more of the cost of buying the disc to rent it. Now, the cost is mostly dependent on how many movies I manage to watch in a month.
In the US cable/satellite may get the movie a week or two ahead of time for pay-per-view, but for the most part the DVD release is very soon afterwards, if not simultaneous with the pay-per-view. It's also getting less likely for DVDs to be released as far out as a year after the film closes in theaters, there's far too much time there for people to forget about it.
NetFlix will put the movie up on their page pretty much at or before the start of advertising for the film release, so you can add it to your queue early (it will sit in a special section at the bottom of the page until it gets near DVD/BD release), long before they have a release date for the disc.
Re:Not to disagree with your conspiracy...
on
Gaming Netflix Ratings?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I got in on something similar to this a few years ago, and after the movie ended, we were given tickets to see another pre-screening the next week. As long as we kept going, we got to see free movies every week before they came out (usually only a week or so ahead of time, though). Unfortunately, we didn't really want to see most of the movies they were showing, so we'd end up giving the tickets away, and eventually someone didn't go (or didn't give us the tickets for the next week).
On the other hand, it's not uncommon for people that work in the industry to have access to copies of the film, either, and it definitely gets out to their friends and family, even if they simply borrow it.
Part of the reason gamers are purchasing more pre-built boxes is that the price of those boxes have come down. People buy Alienware because they have too much money on hand and it gives them some bragging rights in some areas (or they want a gaming rig but don't want a desktop). The last time I looked at the option of repairing my old gaming system, it was cheaper to buy an HP with an upgrade to a 19" LCD than to buy the new motherboard/CPU/RAM and a hard drive, and I just can't afford to spend the kind of money I used to on my systems.
On the other hand, a larger portion of PC gamers are used to tweaking their OS than other portions of the PC market. If you want to know how to get Windows running faster, you just have to search a couple of gaming sites to find all of the unneeded services (of course you might not be able to do some things other people might find necessary after the tweaks are done), the special registry hacks, and so forth that will get things moving faster. Of course many gamers are just following the instructions on those sites, but somewhere along the line a group of gamers came up with the information and put it out there in the first place.
I think it's probably about 10 years too late for Linux to tap into the gaming market to take over a huge chunk of market share, but it's still a portion of the market that Windows has never been particularly popular with in and of itself (but rather simply because of DirectX). Windows 95 was not seen as necessary to gamers when they were playing Quake and the first C&C, and even DirectX didn't matter to most gamers until it hit version 5 and developers really started using it.
With a mod in Windows, though, you already have a huge amount of your art resources taken care of. You can even get pretty far with a mod that requires no new art resources whatsoever (except possibly map makers). Once you get to a point where you have a fairly good code base, you can seek out a couple of artists to fill the gap, or even put a contest up on your mod's website asking for submissions for a particular piece of art, and give the 'winner' the 'benefit' of having their art appear in your mod.
As people have already mentioned, the real issue is getting people to do brick[001...029] textures and so forth, and making everything look like it was meant to go together in the same game.
John Carmack has been responsible for the majority of the code that ran a large number of PC games for years, but obviously as time has gone on he's needed more and more people working on the other portions of the game before they see the light of day. But the number of artists that worked on those games (both at id software and elsewhere) is huge.
Really the money needs to go into the open APIs that are needed for gaming. OpenGL used to be the best API to use for graphics in games, now almost everyone is using DirectX.
I would love nothing better than to be able to run games natively in Linux, and have an option to strip the system down to the bare essentials to run a game, rather than having the ever-bloating Windows OS taking resources from my games.
Of course, as pointed out below, art is a major expense in game development, and getting artists to do a lot of work for a game, for free, is nearly impossible.
It looks like the company thought they were getting a response from the end-user, rather than the ISP itself, they even reference the ISP having cooperated with them, despite the fact that the ISP was asking for more information and a billing address in order to cooperate in the first place.
I also like the Warner Bros. email that doesn't include any information other than a movie title and IP address, as if the ISP is just going to cut off whoever happens to have the IP when they receive the email (which has probably happened with some ISPs).
I have a feeling that someone told EA Dead Space would be "like Resident Evil [or whatever survival horror game was most popular at the time of the pitch], Doom 3, and Half-Life 2 all rolled into one". It's not really a hard sell if you throw enough top-sellers into the mix.
Mirror's Edge, well, I'm not really sure how that one got past them. Then again, I find it completely unplayable because it shares the same ability to give me motion sickness that only a small handful of other first-person games has (and it has nothing to do with heights).
I would really enjoy a new Descent Freespace, but what do I know? Hell, it's not like they have to come up with new IP to make new space flight games or new adventure games, they can still leverage existing IP, but they've let most of that IP rot to the point that it wouldn't make much of a difference in terms of sales.
At the same time, remember the state of PC RPGs before Baldur's Gate and Fallout came along? Remember when Dune II, Warcraft, and C&C were the only RTS games? When Wolfenstein 3D was new and interesting almost completely by virtue of its camera angle? None of those games are really the result of some big publishing house taking any significant risks (well, maybe a little risk).
Of course, some people are still attempting development in adventure games, they just aren't getting the backing they would have when they were glutting the market like WWII shooters have been for the last few years.
Or there are those of us that won't use a flat (or even straight) keyboard for any length of time. Some people might be happy with their laptop keyboards, but I'm certainly not going to use them for more than an hour.
Mine seems to make a great barrier that prevents people from using my computer. I'm not quite sure why, though, as my 4-year-old daughter and my not-quite tech-savvy wife have no problem with it (in fact my wife hates to use mice nearly as much as I do, now). My co-workers won't take over my computer the way they might to some others if they want to show me something, and I like it that way.
My main reason for using the trackball, though, is that using a mouse causes severe pain in my forearm, elbow, and wrist, whereas the trackball causes little or no pain even after a long day of use.
Watching the election coverage the one thing I really noticed was that they didn't think about the problems they might have with the interface, or run through using it before hand and make changes. For instance, they had a number of problems when they wanted to present information hidden behind a button near the top of one particular screen, because most of the people using the screen were too short to reach it. They also had many instances of people hitting the wrong button as they tried to reach for the correct position on the screen, and generally their targets were too small for some of the presenters' hands.
The difference here is that television traditionally has done this stuff with blue/green screens and either a timed presentation or a remote control to page through the data. This allows them to have a more interactive presentation with real data (rather than the equivalent of a power-point presentation).
This does not, however, translate into use by the general public. Touch-screen kiosks have been in use for a number of years for various limited functions, but the people that sit in front of computers for a living aren't necessarily going to see a benefit in a touch interface.
Presentation rooms may be changed forever by touch interfaces, and programs like Powerpoint may have to evolve to give people better interfaces in their presentations to present data the way it is presented on television. The corporate desktop isn't likely to change much.
You're talking about a significantly smaller screen, though, and a much more limited touch interface than that found on the Mac laptops and iPhone/iPod Touch.
The main price difference in the case of the DS vs the PSP is the hardware inside the case, not the screen (or screens) being utilized, although I'd take the PSP's screen (especially on the new model) over the DS' any day.
I own both, and play games on both systems. They each have their advantages, but one good thing about the DS is that most of the games I play on it allow you to use either the touch screen or the normal buttons to play the game.
On a corporate level, that is not really a problem. How many companies adopted Flat Screens well before they were the norm for home computing, simply because they were "new"? I know the company I worked for did. Nothing like purchasing 100 Flat Screen when everyone already had perfectly working Monitors.
Seriously, most companies didn't just go out and buy flat screens and replace all of their CRTs. They might have bought flat screens for every new computer they purchased as they replaced old ones, and there are certainly cases where companies went out and replaced all of their monitors and/or computers for one reason or another, but it's certainly not a common thing in corporate culture to waste that kind of money.
The price of touch-screen monitors is based on both the price of the LCD monitor and the touch-screen hardware mounted on the monitor. The price of LCDs has been falling for some time now, but there's little chance of that rate increasing significantly any time soon (in fact it should be leveling off, if it hasn't already). The hardware for the actual touch-screen interface has been changing rapidly over the course of the last 10-20 years, with new technology coming out all the time (especially now with multi-touch), but none of it has caught on to the level that would drive the price down significantly, and the technology still has to improve to catch on for general computing (as opposed to phones and media players, where it's still not caught on to overtake button interfaces).
People see touch technology and think it's cool. When they can afford to have touch technology in their homes, and actually use it, it loses the 'cool' factor fairly quickly. Unless you have very limited need to actually interface with the device, the touch interface eventually becomes an obstacle to overcome in order to use the device. At that point, if it's a computer, you find a USB jack and plug in a mouse/keyboard, and forget the touch screen is there.
Even touchpads on laptops are ignored by most people when they want to do long-term work on the computer. You walk into someone's office and they almost always have a mouse plugged into the docking station, or if they don't have a docking station, it's plugged straight into the laptop. Of course, with laptops there are also issues with the position of the touchpad for many people. I use the touchpad at home, when I'm not sitting at a desk, but in the office there's no reason not to have an external keyboard and trackball.
I worked on development for touch screen systems for years, and any time the users had an option to not use the touch screen, they almost forgot the system even had one. We had to make large buttons (we more or less went with the size of the manager's thumb as a good indicator of how big the buttons had to be on some interfaces), and simplify the interfaces to extreme levels. In the end we stopped worrying about the touch-screen for day-to-day use and used it primarily for presentations.
People are certainly doing interesting things to get around the limitations of the touch interface, and multi-touch technology is helping, but in the end the idea is probably doomed for normal use until we have good tactile feedback and possibly a visual experience to go along with it.
Of course they make money on every game, but they get more games by having market share. One of the easiest ways to convince a developer to put a title on your system is to show them the number of potential customers.
Of course, if market share was the only factor, everyone would have jumped ship for the Wii by now. It looks like the developers are trying to figure out just what the market is on the Wii, and how they can compete with the strong first-party offerings on the platform.
Every TV over $300 can take VGA or DVI video output from a PC.
Not quite, probably not even close, and most people don't have new TVs in every room of their house (and consoles don't always go on the newest/main TV in the house). There are ways to connect a PC to any TV for a relatively low price, and chances are that they'd have to put dedicated TV outs on a console-on-a-card system anyway.
Not providing a version for older PCs is almost entirely the fault of publishers. If there are both PS2 and PS3 versions of a particular title, why can't there be XP and Vista[1] versions of a particular title? And why do things like World of Warcraft still run reasonably well on an older PC?
It would require porting the game, and most console games don't have a significant market on the PC. PC gamers tend to stick to the genres that work best with a keyboard/mouse, and console gamers tend to stick to the genres that work best with a controller. It's only very recently that there's been any significant cross-over, and most of the people on either side still argue about the benefits of that.
Because all the console makers appear to require a prior published title on another platform and use cryptographic methods to enforce this requirement. The only platforms that break this sort of chicken-and-egg for new developers are Windows and Mac OS X. Or just one word: mods.
The PS3 and Xbox 360 have a much more open platform than the previous systems from either manufacturer, if you're willing to release the game as a download rather than trying to get it on store shelves. Especially the 360, as you can verify yourself (if you have the system) by checking Live Arcade and Community Games. You can develop the games using XNA and download a utility on your Xbox 360 that lets you test the game on the console.
Basically you would need to reduce the hardware inside the console to a single card, have the bandwidth between that card and the peripherals it might need (say the hard drive and DVD/Blu-Ray drive), and the ability to turn control of the system over to that card.
Anything less than that would leave you with a system that behaved like a PC, rather than a console. Plus, without control over the hard drive and optical drive, you could end up with slow-downs due to the drives not being as fast as the ones used in the consoles (or maybe they'd add another optical and hard drive to the system with dedicated connections to the card).
In the end, it would probably be an interesting way to go with systems that would otherwise be considered obsolete (or nearly obsolete), but that would make it worth less to them to do it in the first place. Before that point, there's a reason the systems are the size they are, which leaves you pretty much with the option of a Wii-in-a-PC at the moment, since the PS3 and Xbox 360 are currently bigger than most modern OEM PCs.
In the US, the game prices were on par between the console and PC titles until the 360 and PS3 came along with a $10 price jump. New games used to be $50 most of the time on any platform, now the PS3 and 360 titles are $60 (most of the time, some developers release some $50 titles).
With most generations of consoles since the PS1, the initial specs of the consoles are similar to a high-end PC either available at the time of launch or soon after launch. Over time, since the consoles are a static platform, the PC surpasses the consoles. However, since PC game developers don't have a static platform to develop for, they tend to develop for a middle ground rather than the top-of-the-line, only occasionally giving optional choices that make the game look better than a console game. If they didn't, they'd significantly reduce the market for their game, especially since a high-end graphics card can cost as much as (or more than) a new console.
The other issue is that PCs are running more than just the game, so they have to out-spec the console by a significant factor, and the platform isn't optimized for running games. You could spec a system to have the same hardware as an Xbox 360 and have little hope of playing the same games because you wouldn't have enough RAM to manage the game and Windows at the same time.
The idea that console manufacturers don't make money on the hardware was a myth until recently, and once they get further into the lifecycle on the current generation, it will probably be a myth again. Microsoft might be willing to take a loss on every console they make for sake of getting market share, but Nintendo and Sony are unlikely to do it for more than a short period of time to insure the initial sales of the platform. Hell, look at what's in the Wii, most of the hardware in that system is just a speed upgrade from the GameCube, and not taking the larger leap in the system capabilities meant they could cram it into a smaller box without an extreme effort.
You don't have to have "cheaped out" to have a couple-of-year-old computer that won't run quite a few games. You just have to have chosen one with an Intel graphics card rather than an ATI or nVidia. The Intel cards don't run many games less than 5 years old, and don't even run some older games very well.
The only problem is that most laptops and many desktops come with the Intel graphics chips, and often the computers with the ATI and nVidia chips come with a lot of other crap you don't necessarily need, driving the price difference up beyond that caused by just the graphics option.
Of course, I had a laptop with a "mobile" ATI chipset that was fairly unstable with many games, so it's not always the case that going with them would give you any assurances.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like a basic LotR version of Dynasty Warriors. That whole series has its fans and detractors, and any game like it is likely to fall the same way with those individuals. Personally, I pick up maybe 1 game in that particular series for each generation of consoles and play it occasionally. It's enjoyable, but not something I pin my hopes on for hours upon hours of enjoyment all packed into a period of a week or two the way I might some other games.
It also helped that it was a PlayStation release rather than a PC release. Once the basic copy protection is cracked on a console, most of the games are available very quickly, because few developers bother with more than the default protection. Once someone took additional steps to protect their game, it took a while for those people to get through it.
If it were a PC game, it's more likely it would've been cracked more quickly. The people handling PC releases have seen that sort of protection before (in fact, it's far more likely), especially since they had been using significant measures to prevent copying of floppies before they moved to CDs.
Most games are released at different times around the world because of localization issues (and these are not always translation issues, since you have different laws in different countries regarding the content, and different rating systems as well).
Of course, the summary of the article points out that Valve believes simultaneous releases have been a significant help in fighting piracy.
Most games are released on the internet with the DRM broken at or before the commercial release date. The only real impact of DRM is on the customers themselves, primarily stopping them from loaning games to other people to try out or play for fear they won't be able to play it again themselves at a later time (or won't be able to play it with their friends unless their friends also buy it).
At least Netflix isn't going to cost you anything extra if you're already subscribing to it. You're just out the time to watch the movie and send it back.
This is why I don't buy DVDs any more without having rented them first. Before Netflix it was roughly one-third or more of the cost of buying the disc to rent it. Now, the cost is mostly dependent on how many movies I manage to watch in a month.
In the US cable/satellite may get the movie a week or two ahead of time for pay-per-view, but for the most part the DVD release is very soon afterwards, if not simultaneous with the pay-per-view. It's also getting less likely for DVDs to be released as far out as a year after the film closes in theaters, there's far too much time there for people to forget about it.
NetFlix will put the movie up on their page pretty much at or before the start of advertising for the film release, so you can add it to your queue early (it will sit in a special section at the bottom of the page until it gets near DVD/BD release), long before they have a release date for the disc.
I got in on something similar to this a few years ago, and after the movie ended, we were given tickets to see another pre-screening the next week. As long as we kept going, we got to see free movies every week before they came out (usually only a week or so ahead of time, though). Unfortunately, we didn't really want to see most of the movies they were showing, so we'd end up giving the tickets away, and eventually someone didn't go (or didn't give us the tickets for the next week).
On the other hand, it's not uncommon for people that work in the industry to have access to copies of the film, either, and it definitely gets out to their friends and family, even if they simply borrow it.
Part of the reason gamers are purchasing more pre-built boxes is that the price of those boxes have come down. People buy Alienware because they have too much money on hand and it gives them some bragging rights in some areas (or they want a gaming rig but don't want a desktop). The last time I looked at the option of repairing my old gaming system, it was cheaper to buy an HP with an upgrade to a 19" LCD than to buy the new motherboard/CPU/RAM and a hard drive, and I just can't afford to spend the kind of money I used to on my systems.
On the other hand, a larger portion of PC gamers are used to tweaking their OS than other portions of the PC market. If you want to know how to get Windows running faster, you just have to search a couple of gaming sites to find all of the unneeded services (of course you might not be able to do some things other people might find necessary after the tweaks are done), the special registry hacks, and so forth that will get things moving faster. Of course many gamers are just following the instructions on those sites, but somewhere along the line a group of gamers came up with the information and put it out there in the first place.
I think it's probably about 10 years too late for Linux to tap into the gaming market to take over a huge chunk of market share, but it's still a portion of the market that Windows has never been particularly popular with in and of itself (but rather simply because of DirectX). Windows 95 was not seen as necessary to gamers when they were playing Quake and the first C&C, and even DirectX didn't matter to most gamers until it hit version 5 and developers really started using it.
With a mod in Windows, though, you already have a huge amount of your art resources taken care of. You can even get pretty far with a mod that requires no new art resources whatsoever (except possibly map makers). Once you get to a point where you have a fairly good code base, you can seek out a couple of artists to fill the gap, or even put a contest up on your mod's website asking for submissions for a particular piece of art, and give the 'winner' the 'benefit' of having their art appear in your mod.
As people have already mentioned, the real issue is getting people to do brick[001...029] textures and so forth, and making everything look like it was meant to go together in the same game.
John Carmack has been responsible for the majority of the code that ran a large number of PC games for years, but obviously as time has gone on he's needed more and more people working on the other portions of the game before they see the light of day. But the number of artists that worked on those games (both at id software and elsewhere) is huge.
Really the money needs to go into the open APIs that are needed for gaming. OpenGL used to be the best API to use for graphics in games, now almost everyone is using DirectX.
I would love nothing better than to be able to run games natively in Linux, and have an option to strip the system down to the bare essentials to run a game, rather than having the ever-bloating Windows OS taking resources from my games.
Of course, as pointed out below, art is a major expense in game development, and getting artists to do a lot of work for a game, for free, is nearly impossible.
No, you throw them in jail in a foreign country and forget about them.
He's downloading full CD quality wav files, so they're more like 10MB/minute, or only 11,000 years.
It looks like the company thought they were getting a response from the end-user, rather than the ISP itself, they even reference the ISP having cooperated with them, despite the fact that the ISP was asking for more information and a billing address in order to cooperate in the first place.
I also like the Warner Bros. email that doesn't include any information other than a movie title and IP address, as if the ISP is just going to cut off whoever happens to have the IP when they receive the email (which has probably happened with some ISPs).
I have a feeling that someone told EA Dead Space would be "like Resident Evil [or whatever survival horror game was most popular at the time of the pitch], Doom 3, and Half-Life 2 all rolled into one". It's not really a hard sell if you throw enough top-sellers into the mix.
Mirror's Edge, well, I'm not really sure how that one got past them. Then again, I find it completely unplayable because it shares the same ability to give me motion sickness that only a small handful of other first-person games has (and it has nothing to do with heights).
I would really enjoy a new Descent Freespace, but what do I know? Hell, it's not like they have to come up with new IP to make new space flight games or new adventure games, they can still leverage existing IP, but they've let most of that IP rot to the point that it wouldn't make much of a difference in terms of sales.
At the same time, remember the state of PC RPGs before Baldur's Gate and Fallout came along? Remember when Dune II, Warcraft, and C&C were the only RTS games? When Wolfenstein 3D was new and interesting almost completely by virtue of its camera angle? None of those games are really the result of some big publishing house taking any significant risks (well, maybe a little risk).
Of course, some people are still attempting development in adventure games, they just aren't getting the backing they would have when they were glutting the market like WWII shooters have been for the last few years.
Or there are those of us that won't use a flat (or even straight) keyboard for any length of time. Some people might be happy with their laptop keyboards, but I'm certainly not going to use them for more than an hour.
Mine seems to make a great barrier that prevents people from using my computer. I'm not quite sure why, though, as my 4-year-old daughter and my not-quite tech-savvy wife have no problem with it (in fact my wife hates to use mice nearly as much as I do, now). My co-workers won't take over my computer the way they might to some others if they want to show me something, and I like it that way.
My main reason for using the trackball, though, is that using a mouse causes severe pain in my forearm, elbow, and wrist, whereas the trackball causes little or no pain even after a long day of use.
Watching the election coverage the one thing I really noticed was that they didn't think about the problems they might have with the interface, or run through using it before hand and make changes. For instance, they had a number of problems when they wanted to present information hidden behind a button near the top of one particular screen, because most of the people using the screen were too short to reach it. They also had many instances of people hitting the wrong button as they tried to reach for the correct position on the screen, and generally their targets were too small for some of the presenters' hands.
The difference here is that television traditionally has done this stuff with blue/green screens and either a timed presentation or a remote control to page through the data. This allows them to have a more interactive presentation with real data (rather than the equivalent of a power-point presentation).
This does not, however, translate into use by the general public. Touch-screen kiosks have been in use for a number of years for various limited functions, but the people that sit in front of computers for a living aren't necessarily going to see a benefit in a touch interface.
Presentation rooms may be changed forever by touch interfaces, and programs like Powerpoint may have to evolve to give people better interfaces in their presentations to present data the way it is presented on television. The corporate desktop isn't likely to change much.
You're talking about a significantly smaller screen, though, and a much more limited touch interface than that found on the Mac laptops and iPhone/iPod Touch.
The main price difference in the case of the DS vs the PSP is the hardware inside the case, not the screen (or screens) being utilized, although I'd take the PSP's screen (especially on the new model) over the DS' any day.
I own both, and play games on both systems. They each have their advantages, but one good thing about the DS is that most of the games I play on it allow you to use either the touch screen or the normal buttons to play the game.
On a corporate level, that is not really a problem. How many companies adopted Flat Screens well before they were the norm for home computing, simply because they were "new"? I know the company I worked for did. Nothing like purchasing 100 Flat Screen when everyone already had perfectly working Monitors.
Seriously, most companies didn't just go out and buy flat screens and replace all of their CRTs. They might have bought flat screens for every new computer they purchased as they replaced old ones, and there are certainly cases where companies went out and replaced all of their monitors and/or computers for one reason or another, but it's certainly not a common thing in corporate culture to waste that kind of money.
The price of touch-screen monitors is based on both the price of the LCD monitor and the touch-screen hardware mounted on the monitor. The price of LCDs has been falling for some time now, but there's little chance of that rate increasing significantly any time soon (in fact it should be leveling off, if it hasn't already). The hardware for the actual touch-screen interface has been changing rapidly over the course of the last 10-20 years, with new technology coming out all the time (especially now with multi-touch), but none of it has caught on to the level that would drive the price down significantly, and the technology still has to improve to catch on for general computing (as opposed to phones and media players, where it's still not caught on to overtake button interfaces).
People see touch technology and think it's cool. When they can afford to have touch technology in their homes, and actually use it, it loses the 'cool' factor fairly quickly. Unless you have very limited need to actually interface with the device, the touch interface eventually becomes an obstacle to overcome in order to use the device. At that point, if it's a computer, you find a USB jack and plug in a mouse/keyboard, and forget the touch screen is there.
Even touchpads on laptops are ignored by most people when they want to do long-term work on the computer. You walk into someone's office and they almost always have a mouse plugged into the docking station, or if they don't have a docking station, it's plugged straight into the laptop. Of course, with laptops there are also issues with the position of the touchpad for many people. I use the touchpad at home, when I'm not sitting at a desk, but in the office there's no reason not to have an external keyboard and trackball.
I worked on development for touch screen systems for years, and any time the users had an option to not use the touch screen, they almost forgot the system even had one. We had to make large buttons (we more or less went with the size of the manager's thumb as a good indicator of how big the buttons had to be on some interfaces), and simplify the interfaces to extreme levels. In the end we stopped worrying about the touch-screen for day-to-day use and used it primarily for presentations.
People are certainly doing interesting things to get around the limitations of the touch interface, and multi-touch technology is helping, but in the end the idea is probably doomed for normal use until we have good tactile feedback and possibly a visual experience to go along with it.
Of course they make money on every game, but they get more games by having market share. One of the easiest ways to convince a developer to put a title on your system is to show them the number of potential customers.
Of course, if market share was the only factor, everyone would have jumped ship for the Wii by now. It looks like the developers are trying to figure out just what the market is on the Wii, and how they can compete with the strong first-party offerings on the platform.
Every TV over $300 can take VGA or DVI video output from a PC.
Not quite, probably not even close, and most people don't have new TVs in every room of their house (and consoles don't always go on the newest/main TV in the house). There are ways to connect a PC to any TV for a relatively low price, and chances are that they'd have to put dedicated TV outs on a console-on-a-card system anyway.
Not providing a version for older PCs is almost entirely the fault of publishers. If there are both PS2 and PS3 versions of a particular title, why can't there be XP and Vista[1] versions of a particular title? And why do things like World of Warcraft still run reasonably well on an older PC?
It would require porting the game, and most console games don't have a significant market on the PC. PC gamers tend to stick to the genres that work best with a keyboard/mouse, and console gamers tend to stick to the genres that work best with a controller. It's only very recently that there's been any significant cross-over, and most of the people on either side still argue about the benefits of that.
Because all the console makers appear to require a prior published title on another platform and use cryptographic methods to enforce this requirement. The only platforms that break this sort of chicken-and-egg for new developers are Windows and Mac OS X. Or just one word: mods.
The PS3 and Xbox 360 have a much more open platform than the previous systems from either manufacturer, if you're willing to release the game as a download rather than trying to get it on store shelves. Especially the 360, as you can verify yourself (if you have the system) by checking Live Arcade and Community Games. You can develop the games using XNA and download a utility on your Xbox 360 that lets you test the game on the console.
Basically you would need to reduce the hardware inside the console to a single card, have the bandwidth between that card and the peripherals it might need (say the hard drive and DVD/Blu-Ray drive), and the ability to turn control of the system over to that card.
Anything less than that would leave you with a system that behaved like a PC, rather than a console. Plus, without control over the hard drive and optical drive, you could end up with slow-downs due to the drives not being as fast as the ones used in the consoles (or maybe they'd add another optical and hard drive to the system with dedicated connections to the card).
In the end, it would probably be an interesting way to go with systems that would otherwise be considered obsolete (or nearly obsolete), but that would make it worth less to them to do it in the first place. Before that point, there's a reason the systems are the size they are, which leaves you pretty much with the option of a Wii-in-a-PC at the moment, since the PS3 and Xbox 360 are currently bigger than most modern OEM PCs.
In the US, the game prices were on par between the console and PC titles until the 360 and PS3 came along with a $10 price jump. New games used to be $50 most of the time on any platform, now the PS3 and 360 titles are $60 (most of the time, some developers release some $50 titles).
With most generations of consoles since the PS1, the initial specs of the consoles are similar to a high-end PC either available at the time of launch or soon after launch. Over time, since the consoles are a static platform, the PC surpasses the consoles. However, since PC game developers don't have a static platform to develop for, they tend to develop for a middle ground rather than the top-of-the-line, only occasionally giving optional choices that make the game look better than a console game. If they didn't, they'd significantly reduce the market for their game, especially since a high-end graphics card can cost as much as (or more than) a new console.
The other issue is that PCs are running more than just the game, so they have to out-spec the console by a significant factor, and the platform isn't optimized for running games. You could spec a system to have the same hardware as an Xbox 360 and have little hope of playing the same games because you wouldn't have enough RAM to manage the game and Windows at the same time.
The idea that console manufacturers don't make money on the hardware was a myth until recently, and once they get further into the lifecycle on the current generation, it will probably be a myth again. Microsoft might be willing to take a loss on every console they make for sake of getting market share, but Nintendo and Sony are unlikely to do it for more than a short period of time to insure the initial sales of the platform. Hell, look at what's in the Wii, most of the hardware in that system is just a speed upgrade from the GameCube, and not taking the larger leap in the system capabilities meant they could cram it into a smaller box without an extreme effort.
You don't have to have "cheaped out" to have a couple-of-year-old computer that won't run quite a few games. You just have to have chosen one with an Intel graphics card rather than an ATI or nVidia. The Intel cards don't run many games less than 5 years old, and don't even run some older games very well.
The only problem is that most laptops and many desktops come with the Intel graphics chips, and often the computers with the ATI and nVidia chips come with a lot of other crap you don't necessarily need, driving the price difference up beyond that caused by just the graphics option.
Of course, I had a laptop with a "mobile" ATI chipset that was fairly unstable with many games, so it's not always the case that going with them would give you any assurances.