Video Gaming on TV: A Ways to Go (and Free Advice on Getting There)

I managed to catch the World of Warcraft and Guitar Hero portions of the World Series of Video Games on CBS today, and, at least for WoW, let's say that it's still got a ways to go before it's watchable. The best advice I've got is to learn from Madden. That takes a real game that's increasingly made for TV and translates it to the console in a way that makes an eminently watchable game playable. Now, at least with WoW, TV broadcasts need to make an eminently playable game watchable.

How can you do this? Step one that occurred to me in the commercials before the WoW event started, this broadcast got right. For games like WoW 3v3, you can't do this live. You have to recut it. There's no single ball, no obvious focal point to privilege. At any one time, one might want to see what all six folk in a 3 on 3 are doing with equal intensity, and that requires being able to show what happened from time A to time B as many as six times. The battles are so short and so full of action that it has to be all replay. Showing the whole field would be worthless, kind of like foo... ur, US soccer's ratings on TV suggest. I suppose you could, say, follow the tank, though not his [sic] point of view, throughout as a sort of baseline around which to sprinkle in replays, but I think you get my point.

Here's the important thing they didn't get right: Don't use the in-game point of view, showing the TV viewer what any player sees. It's one thing when you're the guy making your character swiftly change direction but quite another when it's a viewer who has no idea of the strategy behind, or at least no way to anticipate, the nauseating shifts in what's now their shared point of view. Keep the camera stably oriented, and watch as many of the six as is appropriate at a time, focusing that third-person view camera on whatever area has the most action. Swoop it around all you want, but keep the camera pointing, say, north. This is why Guitar Hero works a bit more easily, I think. You have two guys up there and two tracks of chords dancing down the screen. The camera stays with one orientation, and it's not by its nature distracting. You know what to watch. If the two guys were six, all of them had wireless guitars, free to run wherever they wanted, and the only cameras were ones strapped to their heads, well, it'd be a TV nightmare, wouldn't it?

So I'd tell the WSVG to recut WoW, showing us exactly what each player's doing during what, in retrospect, ends up being the most crucial moments of the match, and to use essentially a third-person view camera rather than trying to put us into the disorienting view of a single player. The HUD at the bottom of the screen needs to be more informative than simply showing health, and it might be good to have the players come back and narrate what they were trying to accomplish.

(posted from spellchecker-less Mozilla 1.0)

Labels: tv, WoW, wsvg

--rufbo at 12:41

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Game Price Trends since 2004

Someone recently suggested I look at game prices, especially since the advent of $60 PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 games. The results are up today at Next-Gen.biz. I used mostly public data on the top 10 and top 20 lists since June 2004, with some additional data provided by NPD.

To my mind, the upshot is that Wii games are holding the $50 floor while $50 and $60 Xbox 360 games are filling in the top 20, pushing the average price of the top-selling games higher. PlayStation 2 games are getting pushed out, removing the main downward pressure from console games. Only the Nintendo DS presence in the top 10 and top 20 is pulling game prices below $50.

Additional bits that didn't go into the article:

• NPD was very helpful providing more data. While I didn't get everything I wanted (understandable), they did take a sample spreadsheet from me with a formula in it and apply the same to months for which unit sales data is not public. I especially need to thank David Riley of NPD for his patience and effort helping me.
  
  
• The public NPD data on the top 10 and top 20 is easiest to get from this page on GameDaily.
  
  
• NPD apparently revises their lists, but the published lists don't reflect this. For example, Bully for the PS2 placed #9 in October 2006 according to published charts. It actually placed #3 on the October 2006 list I got directly from NPD. There were some other very minor changes here and there, mostly transposing two games (say #2 and #3 switching).

As usual, thoughts and so forth in the comments.

Edit: Fixed link. Blogger's WYSIWYG interface hates URLs with ampersands.

Labels: data, graphs, nextgen, npd, prices

--jvm at 08:25

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NPD fun while on vacation

Over the grumbling of family, I stopped my vacation for a few hours and worked on the NPD data released yesterday. The results are up at Gamasutra today. I hope I'll have more time in future months -- there were some things I didn't get to do this time around.

As usual, comments are welcome.

Labels: data, Gamasutra, npd

--jvm at 12:36

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Aberrant Gamer on Silent Hill 2

Silent Hill 2 is a brilliant game. If you don't mind some spoilers (from the first three Silent Hill games, incidentally), then go read this Aberrant Gamer (Leigh Alexander) article on the inner workings of Silent Hill 2. I quite enjoyed it.

I'm on vacation. Bug Ruffin, JohnH, and Martin to post more.

--jvm at 13:24

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I recently caused the smallest tempest in a teacup a while back saying that InsideMacGames was too close to the games it at least implicitly claims to report on in a journalistic fashion, and that this closeness had hamstrung their ability to report news.

If I haven't made a point of it before, I'll do it now. In the above (from today's IMG "News"), InsideMacGames is "reporting" that there's a new game available in the store it owns. The first line begins as follows:

Macgamestore.com and Big Fish Games have released Azada...

The heading for this advertisement is "News". It came out at 6am on the dot, which suggests to me that it's not exactly breaking news; someone knew this was happening well beforehand. On the top right of the page, there's a link that says...

Send mac games news to:
news@insidemacgames.com

That's pretty incestuous, ain't it? A wholly owned subsidiary (at best) of the "news" site is in a partnership with a gaming company, and they are selling a game in the news section of the site.

Aside from being the author of the IMG post, I'm not sure who Cord Kruse is, but this is at least one non-Tuncerite in on the advertisements. Not that I think this blog requires investigative reporting, which this isn't, but let's irrationally and irresponsibly assume he could be the Cord Kruse of this statement:

My name is Cord Kruse and I am a reporter for the Lower Columbia College student newspaper, The Logos, in Longview Washington.

Poor, easily corrupted man, what has the Mac "news" field done to you?! ;^)

The Azada post is not journalism folk! It's not news. If you want to write jouraltisements, stories where I argue that the readers have been trained, if just barely, to suspect the proverbial veracity of what you've got to say, great. That's called a preview. If you want to sell games and call it news, you're unethical. I don't want Tuncer to go hungry; I want his sites to be honest.

There's a really nice discussion about The Washington Post and their policies whose ends are to reduce even the appearance of bias with their reporters on the 6/25 (iirc) episode of the Tony Kornheiser Show, a paper that apparently goes as far as not to let Washpost employees' spouses write checks to political interest groups with a joint account, nor use their shared home to host fundraisers, etc. If I get a chance, I'll transcribe it and slap it on cgmr.net sometime.

--rufbo at 12:57

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I've ranted a bit about the sys reqs for the latest Tomb Raider, particularly how poorly the thing ran on my ATi Xpress 200 integrated graphics system. To be a big hit on the PC would seem to me to require hitting as wide a set of hardware as possible, including, say, recent discrete card-less lap and desktops purchased for soon-to-be college freshmen. Having seen that the graphics on the PS2 aren't all that kick-arse added to my perception that it was some unnecessary, poorly-placed eye candy that was slowing Tomb Raider down on my IGP and the decision to cut off so much of the PC market seemed an avoidable move.

In any event, I was happily surprised to see that Blizzard has started writing code for WoW that takes better use of the main processor for Macs running WoW without a good, discrete video card solution. Most entry-level Macs have Intel's 950 integrated graphics, which suX0rz: the Mini, MacBook, and lowest-end iMac all sport the 950. Rather than (continue?) to cut out these folk, they've leaned harder on the main proc in the newest version.

From the WoW 2.2 PTR Patch Notes:

Additional graphic optimization utilizing AltiVec for PowerPC-Mac and SSE for Intel-Mac. This provides some performance benefit on systems where vertex animation shaders are either unavailable or disabled (recommended on systems with Intel integrated video).

So not just the recent Macs get a boost, so does my long in the tooth iBook G4 with a 32 meg ATI Mobility Radeon 9200.

So buried way down here is my reason for writing: Why bother? Eidos didn't. I realize that WoW's about all that's going outside of The Sims and fps for Macs, but it's still arguably playable on my box as is. Why, in essence, agree with me? Why make your game more playable on woefully inadequate hardware? Why not start mothballing your Mac-specific code and start going to Cider like nearly everyone else? What's the point in wasting dough supporting hardware with one foot in the tar pits?

On an only tangentially related note, I finally made the plunge and upgraded to some DX10 video hardware with MSI's GeForce NX8500GT-TD256E OC (no, no Newegg kickbacks from that link). It's pricer than some other hardware that'll outperform it, like the Sapphire Radeon 1650XT, but does ostensibly do DX10 and sure is a heck of a step up from what I was running.

Labels: mac, video cards, WoW

--rufbo at 17:32

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Rock Band, PS3...same thing

I just read yet another gush about EA's upcoming Rock Band:

You thought Guitar Hero was a breakout hit? This thing is going to be like Brain Age in Japan. Rock Band is a watershed for the games industry. It'll be a watershed for the music industry, too.

Let me put it out there: I think Rock Band will fail miserably.

I'll be happy to say I'm wrong when the time comes, but I just don't see it. A few points:

• Millions of people have dropped $80+ on Guitar Hero and its products since November 2005. That brand recognition and familiarity presents a significant barrier to entry for EA's product, even if it's comparable.
  
  
• While Guitar Hero controllers will apparently work with Rock Band, that can't make EA happy one bit. You just know they want you to buy their controllers. I'm surprised they're even offering the game separately, to be honest. (Maybe they expect to make the real profits by offering track downloads after the initial sale -- that'd certainly make up for people buying just the game.)
  
  
• Regardless, people simply aren't going to drop $100-$200 on a game and these crazy controllers. Not in droves, and certainly not enough to warrant the kind of gushing that's going on in the press. Not when they can have a brand new Wii for $250 (provided they can find one).
  

It certainly isn't going to be like Brain Age in the sense that every system owner will have to buy a copy. That outrageous analogy simply floors me.

Look, Guitar Hero and its sequel(s) got out first, have brand recognition, and cost less (for existing and returning customers). Rock Band is going to come out with more-more-more at an accordingly higher price. To me, it's a lot like the Xbox 360 vs. PlayStation 3 situation. The Xbox 360 offers a lot of value for $400. While the PS3 gives you more hardware out of the box (decent sized hard drive, wireless, and the Blu-Ray player, for example), the price puts it out of mass-market contention.

Won't Rock Band be essentially the same thing?

Labels: ea, ps3, xbox360

--jvm at 01:19

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Total moronic reversal

It's been an interesting few days watching the Sony situation. I have more than a few game news outlets in my RSS reader and I read NeoGAF every day. Previously I felt that the game press and forum denizens were very harsh on Sony, jumping on every piece of news that could cast Sony in a bad light. On the other hand, reports in the mainstream press were generally neutral or positive on Sony, letting Sony spin without penalty and taking Sony's line that the PlayStation 3 is both a movie player and a game machine (which allows Sony to mitigate poor game sales with better-than-HD-DVD movie sales).

The roles appear to have reversed.

After Sony's price strategy announcement (it's a drop to me, but not others apparently) and reasonable E3 press conference (again, my opinion), the game press has seemed mostly positive on Sony's prospects and the NeoGAF tide has definitely turned to favor Sony a good bit more. On the other hand, places like Forbes are giving Nintendo lots of kudos and slapping Sony around. Microsoft is just there.

The muddling of the 60Gb PS3 issue today -- saying it's going away and then not -- hasn't helped.

Anyway, you know my bias already, but that's my view.

Colin Campbell at Next-Gen.biz has an editorial about Sony's fortunes that you might read. He's not pro-Sony. Disclosure: I've written and continue to write occasionally for Next-Gen.biz.

Labels: business, ps3, sony

--jvm at 22:36

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Sony's Infinite Price Drop Loop

Give Sony credit. They've hit on a way to announce a price drop every week from here until Christmas. Here's how it works:

1. Sell two configurations, one at $500 and a better one at $600.
2. Discontinue the $500 model, mark the $600 model down to $500.
3. Create a newer model, price it at $600.
4. Goto 2.

Brilliant, I tell ya.

Labels: business, ps3, sony

--jvm at 22:09

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My PSP is 33% overweight and 19% too thick!

Or: My take on E3 2007.

There's a degree of sensationalism that attaches itself to E3. Or whatever media conference that takes your fancy - lord knows there are enough of them. It's an interesting trend; originally the media inflated the importance of such events to sell magazines and get the punters splashing out cash, and now the situation has reversed and the public are attaching such hyperbole to these events that the media is striving to provide us with real-time footage and detailed text transcripts of the events as they happen.

At the end of the day, nothing gets accomplished. The futile insatiability of the modern gamer is no closer to being quashed than before they spent an hour streaming a CEO, VP or some other kind of fancy acronym awkwardly spew forth facts, statistics and painfully short trailers of products they'd really quite like you to buy. The E3 conferences have been taken, scrutinised and regurgitated back onto the internet before they've even finished. Doom and gloom has been placed on products and companies months in advance of anyone actually sampling the goods. Games are being analysed on a narrative and technological level by faceless nicknames on a forum or a blog who are, quite frankly, woefully under-qualified to make such statements. This is pretty hypocritical, coming from myself. I'm no expert, after all.

I distance myself from E3 because the whole thing is too much of a competition. Too much focus is being placed upon who delivered the best speech, which company had the least embarrassing turn-out and which console sucks the least. Gamers force themselves to live in a perpetual state of limbo, forever anticipating what's around the corner and neglecting what they can enjoy right now. The games that are coming out in 12 months are given more significance than the games that we can play today. A common sentiment on the forums I've been reading is that all of the main E3 conferences were a terrific failure because they were just too busy showing games that will be released this holiday period and not focusing on breathtaking new announcements. That's just not right.

So, I'm not going to analyse E3 from the perspective of a suit wearing business expert. I don't care about install bases, attach rates or SKU's. The demographic graphs mean nothing to me. I'm not a particularly jaded console owner, either, so the future of the corporations is something I'm not interested in. What I saw, as a rather casual gamer type of chap, was a bevy of rather sassy looking games that I will no doubt get to enjoy at some point in the future. I'd compile a list of my personal favourites, but it all looked pretty good to me. I'd probably play (and like!) almost everything they put up on display. I'll discriminate further down the line. Right now I will, very casually, look forward to most of these games as, in the meantime, there's plenty of titles that I can enjoy right now.

--Martin at 10:32

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Game 3.0?

Maybe I missed it, but did anyone from Sony utter Game 3.0 during their press conference? I relied on press reports since I don't have hours to sit around listening to these things, and so far I've not seen it mentioned once. Google's news and blog searches are turning up no useful references to "game 3.0" in the past day or two.

Seems like a pretty big no-show, if Sony didn't say it at least once.

Labels: ps3, sony

--jvm at 00:09

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Too much E3

Another sign I'm getting old: I've overdosed reading details of press conferences and watching trailers of videogames at E3 and it's only been going on for 24 hours. Yuck.

The things that mattered most to me:

• Metal Gear Solid 4 within a year
• Silent Hill 5 teaser with music that reminds me of Silent Hill and Silent Hill 2
• PlayStation 3 60Gb with hardware PS2 is now $500 (looking to buy one soonish)
• Infamous, new game from Sucker Punch
• Unreal Tournament III -- with mod support -- timed console exclusive for PS3
• Uncharted: Drake's Fortune could be good
• Little Big Planet -- watch
  

Killzone 2 did look nice, and impressively similar to the notorious E3 2005 trailer, but I'm less interested in first-person shooters than I used to be.

Didn't hear anything interesting about the PS2, although it's still getting more games in the next year than the PSP. Crazy.

Haven't heard a single thing for the Nintendo DS that interests me. I'll look around more later.

Still waiting on something for me on the Wii. Umbrella Chronicles is close, and apparently Wii RE4 is the best version, but that's not enough for me yet.

I'll let the other curmudgeons post their own takes of what they've seen.

Me? I'm going to read a book and work on other things.

Labels: e3

--jvm at 21:35

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Videogames are toys

While doing some research for a project I came across this quote (my emphasis):

"I think the mistake Wall Street made," [David J. Londoner, an analyst with Wertheim & Company] said, "is that they viewed this as a proprietary electronics business. It's the toy business. And the toy business does not get 24 to 25 percent pretax margins."

That's an analyst quoted in the New York Times in a 10 December 1982 article by Andrew Pollack on the diminishing profits of videogame companies. It made me chuckle.

Labels: history

--jvm at 12:33

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Who wants a McGriddle?

2003:
2007:
Note the "Kotaku sponsored by Project Sylpheed" in the upper left corner.

At least I never seriously thought there was a potential conflict of interest between IGN and McDonalds.

Update: More interesting, try clicking this link and then this one. (Read update.) The first is Kotaku's home page and the second is Kotaku's section (like labels, tags) on Project Sylpheed. The Sylpheed ads show on the former but not on the latter, to wit:
Mystery solved: JohnH points out that you can get Project Sylpheed ads on the front page, but not in sections or on individual posts.

Perhaps more unfortunate, someone at Kotaku makes a post every week where they recognize sponsors, a recent one of which has been Project Sylpheed. Yet, Project Sylpheed news posts that have come since then have not bothered to mention the sponsorship. Wouldn't that be appropriate?

--jvm at 00:23

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The Race to Cut

Sony has announced a price drop. Other than "Do I buy in August or November?", my question is this:

Is Sony beginning the same kind or price war they started (and won) with Sega?

For context, see the text of this comment by MonkeyKing1969 on my post documenting price drops for the original PlayStation.

The blue laser diodes have reportedly dropped in cost. The Emotion Engine hardware has been dropped from the new 80Gb PlayStation 3. Sony has reported that they have nearly full capacity production of the PlayStation 3 systems. Ideally they should be able to drop prices as their costs change, and this $100 price drop seems to be part of that.

So what's different? Whereas I suspect that Sony controlled the production of almost everything in the original PlayStation and in the PlayStation 2 (except perhaps the RamBus stuff), they have a partnership with NVIDIA for the PlayStation 3's graphics chip, the RSX. That's an entanglement I bet they wish they didn't have. As I recall, NVIDIA and Microsoft didn't part on the best of terms from a similar relationship on the original Xbox.

Microsoft doesn't own everything in the Xbox 360, but it does own more than the original Xbox. Still, it does depend on IBM and ATI/AMD for parts. The Xbox 360 ain't no Saturn, so to speak, but I'd like to hear a professional's opinion on how quickly and deeply Sony and Microsoft will be able to reduce costs of their respective systems.

If Sony drops the price again in a year by another $100, I do wonder if Microsoft will be able to keep up. Perhaps at that point, Nintendo's Harrison will want to reconsider his bravado.

Labels: business, ps2, ps3, psone, xbox, xbox360

--jvm at 23:53

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Enough blame to go around

In a conference call to investors today Strauss Zelnick, Take Two Interactive's chairman, said (my emphasis):

"We don't see ourselves in the AO business," Zelnick explained. "But if we find ourselves in the AO business, it would be because we have a title that we consider art and entertainment, that we consider is appropriately rated at AO, that we'd like to bring to market, and that I and Ben [Feder, CEO] are prepared to stand behind.

"In that instance, one has to ask oneself what's the purpose of a rating if it in fact means that a title cannot be released? But I don't think that that issue falls at the door of retailers. Retailers are acting responsibly, frankly, and I think a retailer has a right to say, 'This is what I'm prepared to put on my shelves.' It's not correct to be critical of the retailers at all.

"Because this is a voluntary ratings system in the US, we have to be critical of ourselves if we've allowed a system to develop that prevents us from bringing a title to market that we want to bring to market. That's something that we have to address."

Let me disagree completely.

The system that is broken here is the consolidated videogame retailer market. I know we're all tired of movie-to-game comparisons, but I think the one I have in mind is fitting. Bear with me. There will be nudity, if that matters to you.

It is my belief that smaller video rental shops can survive by offering the one thing that Blockbuster (et al) will not: dirty movies. The independent video stores in our old city all had naughty sections in the back -- tastefully separated from the mainstream movies by curtains. According to a grad school friend who used to work in one, they made a killing off of the dirty movies. (Aside: He was even encouraged to watch a variety of them so he could advise customers.)

Then all of those shops seemed to disappear and only Blockbuster remained. If you like getting your movies from behind the curtain and Blockbuster is your only option, then consolidation has limited your options. (Perhaps cheap broadband access and a river of porn on the internets killed the smaller video shops, but I have to think that Blockbuster did the most damage.)

The connection to games should be obvious. I look around and I see that in my current city the small independent game shops are gone. Instead I can now drive to a half-dozen GameStops in under 15 minutes, all with nearly identical stock. If you don't want to buy your games there you can go to Wal-mart, Target, Best Buy, or Circuit City. That's about the end of it. Or you can shop online.

Look, I understand that Sony and Nintendo refusing to license AO games in the U.S. is also a problem, but even if they weren't there, the big retailers who control most of the market would still balk at stocking an AO-rated Manhunt 2. I'd even guess that some of Sony and Nintendo's reluctance is based on the positions of the retailers. After all, lots of crazy stuff gets licensed and released in Japan and sometimes Europe.

As Josh has said recently, the ESRB should focus on informing consumers about what's in the game. The user-generated content issue notwithstanding, I think they're doing that. What happens after they assign a rating isn't really their problem.

The real problem is that Rockstar and Take Two are trying to squeeze a filthy, violent camel through the eye of a conservative corporate needle. The conservatism comes not from the ESRB but from the console manufacturers (who can be swayed, I believe) and the retailers. So yes, let's blame the retailers.

Can they be swayed too? Perhaps, but I'd rather we have a case like Manhunt 2 where Sony relents and permits a download of the game to PlayStation 3 owners and it sells like gangbusters. If the retailers smell enough profit, I'm sure they'll come around.

Labels: business, esrb, game stores, sex, violence

--jvm at 22:54

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So here's the title of a post at The Escapist, which was linked to in a comment to a post at Cathode Tan, a post which I found, in turn, by a link from Matt's latest:

"Boobies Did Not Break the Game": The ESRB Clears the Air On Oblivion

Trying not to paint with such a broad brush this time, knowing how it pains our readers, and only posting at all here because one could conceivably end up there in about three clicks (well, one plus a cut and paste) from a CG story, let me give the ever proverbial Wag of the Finger to Michael Zenke at the Escapist for so much as suggesting an ESRB rep gave them such a pithily inappropriate tag line.

(Too bad we don't have cmgrPage2.com.)

--rufbo at 17:13

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Call the ESRB!

Today Josh has a new post on the racist Forza Motorsport 2 user-generated content issue. I'd pinged him the other day because I thought it fit with his warnings almost two years ago that ESRB ratings (or re-ratings) based on user modifications are ill-considered. I think the best quote comes from Todd Hollenshead of id Software from two years ago:

If the ESRB is going to put a burden on publishers and developers that requires policing any end user created content that may contain pornographic material, then developers like id, Valve, Epic, and others who actively support the mod community may have to reconsider how open we make our games to changes. In such a case, the ESRB would effectively be requiring us to throw out the baby with the bath water as far as modified content goes. Either way, I think developers and publishers are entitled to understand the ratings process, and in such a high-profile case, understand why the rating was changed so that we may plan accordingly.

That last sentence is doubly important because it is the same feeling many have after the recent Manhunt 2 flap -- what are the guidelines and how do we know where the boundaries are? (I think it's clear Rockstar knew the boundaries and intentionally crossed them in that case, which is why I'd ask them to lie in the bed they've made.) For user-generated content, there needs to be something more useful than the current "game experience may change online" tag which I'd guess the ESRB feels covers the Forza 2 marketplace.

The ESRB needs a tag that says the game is subject to modification and such modifications could place the game outside the boundaries of its nominal rating. As Josh says, help the parents understand the situation.

For posterity, the original GameCloud page quoting Hollenshead is gone. You can find an Internet Archive version of it here.

Labels: esrb, racism

--jvm at 16:36

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Let's face it, when the Washington Post titles an article on video game "journalism" An Inside Play To Sway Video Gamers, it's no wonder there's no All The President's Men being filmed based on the video gaming press' work. Here's a quote from that piece that I'm sure many of you have already read.

In addition to an hour-long demo and chats with the game's designers, the trip included a two-night stay in downtown's swank Helix Hotel, dinner at Logan Tavern and a private party at a nightclub in Adams Morgan. Airfare, hotel, food, drinks and shuttle bus were provided, courtesy of Bethesda Softworks. Although a few attendees paid their own way, most did not.

'What we're trying to accomplish with an event like this is to have the undivided attention of the important people in our industry, that cover the industry,' said Pete Hines, vice president of marketing at Bethesda Softworks...

It looks like Bethesda Softworks is getting that attention: Fallout 3 is scheduled to soon grace the covers of 20 gamer magazines, largely as a result of the event.

I'm not saying schmozing isn't important, nor would I fault someone for attending if offered. What I am saying is that if such schmozing produces coverage (double entendre intended), the only folk that don't realize gaming rags represent salesforces on commission are the people doing the writing. Doesn't sound like Mr. Hines is confused one bit. Nor is the Post. The "inside play" results, their word, results in coverage.

Hey, well, at least I'm not posting about WoW...

--rufbo at 20:29

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When did the original PlayStation drop in price?

My friend Kyle was asking me when the original Sony PlayStation -- the PS1 or PSX as we called it back then -- dropped in price. I had looked when I did my recent piece on console price cuts, but hadn't looked in the right places. With a bit of Lexis-Nexis hunting, I came up with the following:

Sony PlayStation launches on 9 September 1995 at $300 (i.e. $299.99).

The first price drop is from $300 to $200 and it happens on Thursday 16 May 1996, according to an AP news item that day titled "With Rollout of New Systems, Upturn Begins in Video Game Industry" written by Evan Ramstad. Quote:

The Nintendo machine, along with Sony's Playstation and Sega's Saturn, stand out from their predecessors in graphics, speed and game-playing features. Sony lowered the price of its system from $ 300 to $ 200 on Thursday, beating the $ 250 price level of Sega and Nintendo.

The second price drop is from $200 to $150 (i.e. $149.99) on Monday 3 March 1997, according to an AP news item that same day titled "Sony slashes prices of PlayStation, Nintendo says it will not follow" written by Rachel Beck. Quote:

Sony Computer Entertainment America launched a price war in the video-game industry Monday when it slashed the cost of its PlayStation system and accompanying software by over 25 percent.

Sony's popular PlayStation will now have a suggested retail price of $ 149, down $ 50, and its games will sell for $ 49.99 and under from the previous price of about $ 70.

Rival video-game maker Nintendo said it would not immediately match the cuts, although analysts said the Japanese company may have to pare prices soon to compete.

If someone has the dates for later drops, let me know and I'll add them.

To my knowledge, the precise dates of these drops were not available out on the generally available internets, but there they are now.

Labels: business, history, psone, sony

--jvm at 21:43

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Bill Budge Pinball Construction Set reborn?

Saw Powershot Pinball Constructor for Nintendo DS on Game | Life and have added it to my want list.
I hope they don't screw this up, because the idea -- especially on the stylus-wielding system -- is brilliant. Just like it was years ago when Bill Budge did it on 8-bit computers:
GameSpot has more images here (of the new NDS game, not the classic).

Labels: construction kits, ds, pinball

--jvm at 15:07

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Not Ready for Prime Time

GameSpot recently changed how their site handles reviews. Among other things, the 0.1 granularity in scores is gone. Tonight they reviewed the PS3 game Super Stardust HD and the page I got came up with a score of 0.0. Here's the screenshot:
Looks like the system needs a little work guys. Although, if the score stays at 0.0, I'll at least give them credit for sticking it to (what appears to be) a copy-cat game with a thick layer of eye candy. (Of course, by the time you read this, they will probably have updated the page to show the correct score...)

Labels: gamespot, ps3, reviews

--jvm at 21:07

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Comment [ 5 ]

  

Give Tretton a Cookie

I've not been impressed with SCEA president Jack "$1200" Tretton, but if Sony's going to fight Microsoft's moneyhats with words, I thought this was decent:

We have a very different approach to exclusives than some of our competitors. We don't buy exclusivity. We don't fund development. We don't, for lack of a better term, bribe somebody to only do a game on our platform. We earn it...

[shnip]

Microsoft is too dependent on the third-party community, and Nintendo is too depended [sic, dependent, I presume] on first-party. We like to feel that we got a pretty good mix.

I'd give Jack a cookie for that one.

Labels: business, ps3, sony

--jvm at 15:28

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Comment [ 3 ]