Yes $250 is less than half the price of the PS3, but the 'casual gamer' you talk about likely wont know what a PS3 is or if they do they wont be interested in it. Nintendo doesn't want people to say "Wow that's a great price compared to the XBox 360 and PS3". They want people to say "Wow that's a great price for a whole lot of fun". And in that case, it really doesn't matter what Sony or Microsoft does. I don't think Nintendo even wants to be placed in the same catagory as those other two.
I guess what I am trying to say is I don't think that the PS3 price point will affect Nintendo's price point for the Wii.
This guy gets half his facts wrong and the other half he completely makes up. He talks like the video game industry crash of the early 80s like it was some inexplicable cataclismic event that no one could explain. At that time, literally ANYONE could make a game for the Atari, and there was no governing body that certified a game was acceptable. A LOT of crap was released. Then along came Nintendo, requiring all games released for their system to be "Liscenced by Nintendo".
And whats with the "...Sony plans to take a $400 to $500 loss on every single damned PS3 they sell for the first few years." Is he just making stuff up?? The article he sites doesn't make a statement even remotely close to that. Yes I realize that Sony will be taking a loss per machine, but he is pulling numbers out of the air.
Then he goes on to argue that people play games because they are looking for novel graphical experiences, comparing Golden Eye, to Red Faction 2. i.e. We are all graphics whores. Yes graphics are a key selling point for games, but thats not what makes a good game. People will always pick up the shiniest pebble, but so long that gamers enjoy the games they play, they wont stop playing regardless of whether or not the graphics are three times better than last years title.
This article is completely bogus, the game industry is far from crashing.
The most anticipated titles of this year are franchise old-timers - Final Fantasy XII on PS2; Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess on GameCube; Metal Gear Solid 4 and Vision Gran Turismo on PS3; and Tomb Raider Legend on practically everything.
Big wig movie types are afraid that people like you, looking for the big screen and the popcorn and the 'theater' experience are getting fewer and further between. I am with you, I like the big screen and the surround sound and all that, but I have actually read some articles predicting in 30 years we wont even have movie theaters, all gone the way of the drive-in.
I certainly hope this doesnt happen... but I think products like the Video iPod are preparing themselves for that new type of market.
I personally would not pay more than $5, and this seems a little steep to me. The whole attraction to the download a movie thing is that it's spur of the moment, it's an impulse buy. I am not gonna spend $10+ on a movie unless I really like it. And if I really like it, I might as well drive to Target and buy the DVD (or HD-DVD?) with the box and all too for an extra couple bucks.
If they were asking for a couple dollars for a movie though, I am more likely to grab Friday the 13th on Halloween and It's a Wonderfdul Life on Christmas, purely on impulse.
I dont know enough about RF signals to really argue any sort of point here, but it seems to me like your trying to say the XBox 360 interferes with itself... if you are pulling this from some specific source, by all means link it, but I have read nothing about anything like this. And setting that aside, IMHO, a design flaw this obvious would be highly unlikely. You'd have to be a complete idiot to develop and begin to mass produce a wireless video game controller that interferes with 802.11 signals.
Well Microsoft supposedly will be selling seperately an 802.11b adapter designed specifically for the XBox 360, so I doubt the console will interfere with normal wireless networks.
Just because you don't like the movies being released now adays doesnt mean no one likes them. The movie industry (and Hollywood) is obviously still very profitable. You don't have to appeal to everyone to make a profit.
Microsoft has not said they are adopting HD-DVD for the 360, everyone is just speculating. They HAVE said they are considering the addition of support for a new DVD format for the 360 in the future, but again, that's not even confirmed. They are only considering it.
What's more, Gates has been quoted saying he thinks the whole format war is pointless anyway and that digital delivery will be whats really important (i.e. downloading movies you buy). In fact the XBox 360 will be able to play a movie that is streaming from your PC over your home network. This is also kind of why they support HD-DVD as opposed to Blu-ray, apparently the Blu-Ray copy protection prevents streaming video like this.
It seems to me that all this talk about mobile gaming being the next big thing is an attempt at creating a self-fullfiling prophecy. Over the past few years I have read a lot of articles about mobile gaming going mainstream and how it's gonna be the next big cash cow. I just dont see it happening, and I don't see where the predictions are coming from.
I know I may be the minority but I am very aware of they types of games that are available to me on my cell phone. I am just not interested. I am an avid gamer and have been for the past 15 years, but when I am at home I'd rather play my PS2 or XBox, and when I'm out, if I am by myself and bored, I'd sooner read a book or a newspaper than play a game on my cell phone. It may sound shallow but as a working professional, I think I'd actually be embaressed to whip out my Gameboy Advanced on my lunch break.
I have been using this service for about 2 months, and I have been very very happy with it. It has a free trial and you dont even have to enter an email address. If you like music I recomend giving this a try.
I am sick of the RIAA. I used to download songs to try them out, see what I liked. Now I just download out of spite cause I fucking hate those greedy bastards.
Any movie that is an adaption of a book or comic or anything like that is going to be butchered in some way or another. There are things that work in comics but dont work in movies. Or maybe they COULD work in movies, but they just wouldn't sell. People don't crave a movie focusing around mutant-human politics, they just want to see Wolverines claws flash.
That being said I understand where you are coming from and I would have liked to have seen more of some of the things you talked about, especially better dynamics between the characters. But I think the reason Serenity's characters worked so well was because they had 14 TV episodes to set up their relationships. Most people who watched X2 had seen X-Men 1, but thats about all the exposure to those characters they have had..
I really dont think anyone can write an Ender's Game screenplay the way Card wants honestly.. In a movie, there just isnt enough time to get as emotionally attached to Ender as you are able to in the book.
And BTW, did you know that David Hayter also does the voice acting for Snake in the Metal Gear Solid games?:P
No, not every business in the US is corrupt, but every 'big' business is.
All the big US companies got 'big' by acting this way.
Right, every big business is corrupt, every german is a nazi, and every indian is a muslim. Every videogame is filled with violence and every cartoon is targeted at children. Did I miss anything? Oh, and every slashdotter is an idiot.
I really don't understand the logic behind this. Selling more of a system that you're selling at a loss in the first place is not can to cause you to make more money in fact it'll put you farther into the red.
You may be right. The idea is that they take a loss on the consoles but make a profit on the games, but it doesnt look like they got in the black even here in the states until very recently. And that didnt make up for their prior losses. So if they were more popular in Japan, I guess they may have lost even more money.
I think I agree with an above poster, they probably were expecting a loss on this generation of hardware, hoping to get their foot in the door and make up for the losses with the XBox 360... Or maybe they should just fire their accountants.
"People buy their OSs! Their stuff is simple and works! Office is awesome!" the fan boys will shout. Guess what fan boys, Microsoft's cash cows, Windows and Office, were shown by the DOJ as *illegally maintained.* Microsoft lost in court. Whether or not their products ended up becoming decent after 10 years of reworking, Microsoft was proven, in court, to have illegally used their monopoly status to buy themselves the time to get where they are today. In other words, they were allowed to cheat so long that they eventually had enough time to put something decent together.
The fact that they illegally used the success of the Windows OS to help them in the web browser market has nothing to do with the quality of their software. I agree they did wrong and I also agree that they got off lightly, but to say that they write lousy software because of that makes no sense.
Why does this shame America in the world? Because we claim to be the land of freedom, justice, free enterprise. Except, of course, we aren't. Microsoft is a stunning example of that.
But what are you really trying to get at? That capitalism, or even the US is corrupt? Give me a fucking break. Corruption will always exist, regardless of the type of government or economy. Do we shoot every houshold dog in the country when one attacks it's owner? No, shit happens. And just because there are some companies in the United States that have behaved unethically is no reason to condem capitalism or the US.
There's a tautology for you: "If they had sold more of it,
they would have made more money selling it"
Well not everyone realizes that the XBox bombed in Japan. All they see is it's relative success in the US and then wonder why Microsoft is taking a loss. I dunno if they would have been in the black by now if the XBox was a success over seas, but I am sure they hoped and expected it to do better than it did.
Seriously, they never expected to make serious money with
the original XBox. The whole idea was to lose as little
money as possible while getting the mindshare to allow the
XBox successor (which turns out to be the 360) to make
serious money. The real question here is whether a
4-billion loss is a reasonable loss for what they've
accomplished, and we won't know that until we see how
successful the 360 is.
It is worth noting that virtually all game systems in the past have initially been sold at a loss whent hey first hit the market. Eventually via streamlining the manufacturing process, costs come down and the company can actually make a profit selling the hardware. But initially the goal is to A) create as large an installation base as possible encouraged by lower prices, and B) make up for the loss they take on selling consoles through liscence fees from game developers.
I am just speculating here, but I would be willing to bet that the XBox division would be a lot closer to being in the black if the XBox didn't tank in Japan.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes $250 is less than half the price of the PS3, but the 'casual gamer' you talk about likely wont know what a PS3 is or if they do they wont be interested in it. Nintendo doesn't want people to say "Wow that's a great price compared to the XBox 360 and PS3". They want people to say "Wow that's a great price for a whole lot of fun". And in that case, it really doesn't matter what Sony or Microsoft does. I don't think Nintendo even wants to be placed in the same catagory as those other two.
I guess what I am trying to say is I don't think that the PS3 price point will affect Nintendo's price point for the Wii.
This guy gets half his facts wrong and the other half he completely makes up. He talks like the video game industry crash of the early 80s like it was some inexplicable cataclismic event that no one could explain. At that time, literally ANYONE could make a game for the Atari, and there was no governing body that certified a game was acceptable. A LOT of crap was released. Then along came Nintendo, requiring all games released for their system to be "Liscenced by Nintendo". And whats with the "...Sony plans to take a $400 to $500 loss on every single damned PS3 they sell for the first few years." Is he just making stuff up?? The article he sites doesn't make a statement even remotely close to that. Yes I realize that Sony will be taking a loss per machine, but he is pulling numbers out of the air. Then he goes on to argue that people play games because they are looking for novel graphical experiences, comparing Golden Eye, to Red Faction 2. i.e. We are all graphics whores. Yes graphics are a key selling point for games, but thats not what makes a good game. People will always pick up the shiniest pebble, but so long that gamers enjoy the games they play, they wont stop playing regardless of whether or not the graphics are three times better than last years title. This article is completely bogus, the game industry is far from crashing.
The most anticipated titles of this year are franchise old-timers - Final Fantasy XII on PS2; Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess on GameCube; Metal Gear Solid 4 and Vision Gran Turismo on PS3; and Tomb Raider Legend on practically everything.
.....
Sounds like a good definition to me.
Big wig movie types are afraid that people like you, looking for the big screen and the popcorn and the 'theater' experience are getting fewer and further between. I am with you, I like the big screen and the surround sound and all that, but I have actually read some articles predicting in 30 years we wont even have movie theaters, all gone the way of the drive-in.
I certainly hope this doesnt happen... but I think products like the Video iPod are preparing themselves for that new type of market.
I personally would not pay more than $5, and this seems a little steep to me. The whole attraction to the download a movie thing is that it's spur of the moment, it's an impulse buy. I am not gonna spend $10+ on a movie unless I really like it. And if I really like it, I might as well drive to Target and buy the DVD (or HD-DVD?) with the box and all too for an extra couple bucks.
If they were asking for a couple dollars for a movie though, I am more likely to grab Friday the 13th on Halloween and It's a Wonderfdul Life on Christmas, purely on impulse.
A Microsoft bashing story on Slashdot??
I dont know enough about RF signals to really argue any sort of point here, but it seems to me like your trying to say the XBox 360 interferes with itself... if you are pulling this from some specific source, by all means link it, but I have read nothing about anything like this. And setting that aside, IMHO, a design flaw this obvious would be highly unlikely. You'd have to be a complete idiot to develop and begin to mass produce a wireless video game controller that interferes with 802.11 signals.
Well Microsoft supposedly will be selling seperately an 802.11b adapter designed specifically for the XBox 360, so I doubt the console will interfere with normal wireless networks.
You are basing that comment on what? Yeah I can think of spectacular losses, but I hardly think thats the norm.
Just because you don't like the movies being released now adays doesnt mean no one likes them. The movie industry (and Hollywood) is obviously still very profitable. You don't have to appeal to everyone to make a profit.
Microsoft has not said they are adopting HD-DVD for the 360, everyone is just speculating. They HAVE said they are considering the addition of support for a new DVD format for the 360 in the future, but again, that's not even confirmed. They are only considering it.
What's more, Gates has been quoted saying he thinks the whole format war is pointless anyway and that digital delivery will be whats really important (i.e. downloading movies you buy). In fact the XBox 360 will be able to play a movie that is streaming from your PC over your home network. This is also kind of why they support HD-DVD as opposed to Blu-ray, apparently the Blu-Ray copy protection prevents streaming video like this.
It seems to me that all this talk about mobile gaming being the next big thing is an attempt at creating a self-fullfiling prophecy. Over the past few years I have read a lot of articles about mobile gaming going mainstream and how it's gonna be the next big cash cow. I just dont see it happening, and I don't see where the predictions are coming from.
I know I may be the minority but I am very aware of they types of games that are available to me on my cell phone. I am just not interested. I am an avid gamer and have been for the past 15 years, but when I am at home I'd rather play my PS2 or XBox, and when I'm out, if I am by myself and bored, I'd sooner read a book or a newspaper than play a game on my cell phone. It may sound shallow but as a working professional, I think I'd actually be embaressed to whip out my Gameboy Advanced on my lunch break.
I have been using this service for about 2 months, and I have been very very happy with it. It has a free trial and you dont even have to enter an email address. If you like music I recomend giving this a try.
I am sick of the RIAA. I used to download songs to try them out, see what I liked. Now I just download out of spite cause I fucking hate those greedy bastards.
Any movie that is an adaption of a book or comic or anything like that is going to be butchered in some way or another. There are things that work in comics but dont work in movies. Or maybe they COULD work in movies, but they just wouldn't sell. People don't crave a movie focusing around mutant-human politics, they just want to see Wolverines claws flash.
:P
That being said I understand where you are coming from and I would have liked to have seen more of some of the things you talked about, especially better dynamics between the characters. But I think the reason Serenity's characters worked so well was because they had 14 TV episodes to set up their relationships. Most people who watched X2 had seen X-Men 1, but thats about all the exposure to those characters they have had..
I really dont think anyone can write an Ender's Game screenplay the way Card wants honestly.. In a movie, there just isnt enough time to get as emotionally attached to Ender as you are able to in the book.
And BTW, did you know that David Hayter also does the voice acting for Snake in the Metal Gear Solid games?
I didnt buy a Nano because I was EXPECTING them to release a new full size iPod in the near future.
Are you insane? I felt like X-Men 2 was brilliant.
For what it's worth I was not trying to imply being a Muslim is bad, I was just trying to point out generalizations suck.
No, not every business in the US is corrupt, but every 'big' business is. All the big US companies got 'big' by acting this way. Right, every big business is corrupt, every german is a nazi, and every indian is a muslim. Every videogame is filled with violence and every cartoon is targeted at children. Did I miss anything? Oh, and every slashdotter is an idiot.
I really don't understand the logic behind this. Selling more of a system that you're selling at a loss in the first place is not can to cause you to make more money in fact it'll put you farther into the red.
You may be right. The idea is that they take a loss on the consoles but make a profit on the games, but it doesnt look like they got in the black even here in the states until very recently. And that didnt make up for their prior losses. So if they were more popular in Japan, I guess they may have lost even more money.
I think I agree with an above poster, they probably were expecting a loss on this generation of hardware, hoping to get their foot in the door and make up for the losses with the XBox 360... Or maybe they should just fire their accountants.
"People buy their OSs! Their stuff is simple and works! Office is awesome!" the fan boys will shout. Guess what fan boys, Microsoft's cash cows, Windows and Office, were shown by the DOJ as *illegally maintained.* Microsoft lost in court. Whether or not their products ended up becoming decent after 10 years of reworking, Microsoft was proven, in court, to have illegally used their monopoly status to buy themselves the time to get where they are today. In other words, they were allowed to cheat so long that they eventually had enough time to put something decent together.
The fact that they illegally used the success of the Windows OS to help them in the web browser market has nothing to do with the quality of their software. I agree they did wrong and I also agree that they got off lightly, but to say that they write lousy software because of that makes no sense.
Why does this shame America in the world? Because we claim to be the land of freedom, justice, free enterprise. Except, of course, we aren't. Microsoft is a stunning example of that.
But what are you really trying to get at? That capitalism, or even the US is corrupt? Give me a fucking break. Corruption will always exist, regardless of the type of government or economy. Do we shoot every houshold dog in the country when one attacks it's owner? No, shit happens. And just because there are some companies in the United States that have behaved unethically is no reason to condem capitalism or the US.
There's a tautology for you: "If they had sold more of it, they would have made more money selling it"
Well not everyone realizes that the XBox bombed in Japan. All they see is it's relative success in the US and then wonder why Microsoft is taking a loss. I dunno if they would have been in the black by now if the XBox was a success over seas, but I am sure they hoped and expected it to do better than it did.
Seriously, they never expected to make serious money with the original XBox. The whole idea was to lose as little money as possible while getting the mindshare to allow the XBox successor (which turns out to be the 360) to make serious money. The real question here is whether a 4-billion loss is a reasonable loss for what they've accomplished, and we won't know that until we see how successful the 360 is.
I agree 100%.
It is worth noting that virtually all game systems in the past have initially been sold at a loss whent hey first hit the market. Eventually via streamlining the manufacturing process, costs come down and the company can actually make a profit selling the hardware. But initially the goal is to A) create as large an installation base as possible encouraged by lower prices, and B) make up for the loss they take on selling consoles through liscence fees from game developers.
I am just speculating here, but I would be willing to bet that the XBox division would be a lot closer to being in the black if the XBox didn't tank in Japan.