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Video Game Industry Thread: November's done, post in the new one
I'd find it refreshing if a game reviewer admitted a game was so poorly designed they themselves could not bring themselves to finish it. "It might get better but I'll be f'd if I'm going to play that far in such a horrible game."
Move is such a cool idea, glad Nintendo had it several years ago... Oh wait. ha ha ha.
Hey, remember when Sony showed their color tracking/motion detection/gesture recognition tech that was a precursor to the Move back in '04?
Or when Sega released Samba De Amigo for the arcades and later Dreamcast?
Or when midway had a dude working on motion controls for Ready to Rumble over a decade ago?
Or when any number of other companies released similar devices over the past twenty years?
Actually they showed the prototypes for the Move off as early as 2000.
I don't give Sony flack for the motion control addition to the PS3, as Sony has been testing the tech forever...I give them flack for aping the Wii's controller design instead of doing something interesting and different with it like MS did.
The demo I mentioned from '04 is basically a wand with a colored ball at the end, which is what Move is now.
The things they did with the EyeToy during the PS2 era are basically the exact same gameplay experience as all of the Kinect software is doing now.
I'd find it refreshing if a game reviewer admitted a game was so poorly designed they themselves could not bring themselves to finish it. "It might get better but I'll be f'd if I'm going to play that far in such a horrible game."
I'd find it refreshing if a game reviewer admitted a game was so poorly designed they themselves could not bring themselves to finish it. "It might get better but I'll be f'd if I'm going to play that far in such a horrible game."
That's still one of the gold standards for wonderful reviews of terrible games (and I encourage you to read the written review too).
In other news, Rock Band lives on! Kinda. And will probably be dipped in a giant vat of mutagen.
Rock Band developer Harmonix says the future of the four-year-old rhythm game-franchise will involve a "fairly fundamental creative reinterpretation" of the performance-based music game.
In a wide-ranging interview with Giant Bomb, conducted by former Harmonix employee Alex Navarro, senior VP of product development Greg LoPiccolo stated plainly "that we have not abandoned the Rock Band franchise."
Added Hamonix CEO and co-founder Alex Rigopulos, "Looking into next year, we're actually considering fairly fundamental creative reinterpretation of what the Rock Band business is. We're committed to the franchise, but when I think that when we do things with it in the future, it's going to be a pretty dramatic departure from what we've done before."
While the team was vague on the details of what form such a reinterpretation might take, CTO Eran Egozy gave one example of the kind of thing that will not be a part of a new Rock Band game.
"You might assume we're going to add saxophone or something along those lines, but no, the kind of direction we're planning on taking Rock Band ... [is] more suitable to the kind of environment we're in, what people are doing now, what they're interested in playing now, versus, say, 2007."
The statements echo those CEO Rigopulos made in an August interview with Gamasutra, where he said "it's clear that the [instrument-based game] category needs some material reinvention" and mentioned "fairly ambitious plans on where we want to take the Rock Band franchise in the future in what I think will be some big, unexpected directions."
It will consist entirely of Kinect-based air guitar. Since Kinect isn't capable of picking up finger motion and to make the series more family-friendly as a whole, gameplay will consist of exaggerated strumming to a beat.
Are you intentionally missing my point just to be obtuse?
It's the same gameplay experience as Kinect. You stand and wave your arms around like a doofus. This is a callback to the post I made about how none of our "new" gameplay technology/methods are new at all.
Maybe you should call it a night and try again tomorrow?
With the Wii sinking like a stone into it's now last-gen grave, Nintendo is struggling to keep it's stock prices afloat thanks to lower than expected profits and a killer Yen-exchange rate.
That's the word from Reuters who's reporting that Nintendo Company is expected to report a loss of 100 BILLION Yen ($1.32 Billion) in the first half of this year. That expectation caused stock shares to drop 7.5%.
This is what I don't understand about captalism. A company does exceedingly well, posting billions upon billions of dollars in profit, storing that away in the bank for years of Reasearch and Development, but when those sales slow down, or even stop (because everyone fucking owns what the company is selling), they're punished for it.
Yes, yes, the world turns, but fuck that noise. It'd be a good bet that if you hold on to your stock it'll return to its former glory in short time.
Are you intentionally missing my point just to be obtuse?
It's the same gameplay experience as Kinect. You stand and wave your arms around like a doofus. This is a callback to the post I made about how none of our "new" gameplay technology/methods are new at all.
Maybe you should call it a night and try again tomorrow?
And are you intentionally missing my point just to be goosey?
No need to be rude!
But hey, since you stated the classic "every motion controlled game 'you just stand and wave your arms around like a doofus'" line, by that reasoning you clearly are of the opinion that every game controlled with a pad "you just sit there, slack-jawed, stabbing buttons with your stubby fingers".
Fruit Ninja, Dance Central and Child of Eden are no more similar than Gears of War and Halo, or Mario and Zelda.
The majority of the gaming industry is built upon iterative design but still, every game is not created equal.
And there are degrees of comparison which can be drawn, similarities which can be categorised, identified and labelled within every genre in the gaming industry, nothing is truly unique. Still; don't confuse gameplay with design or intended input device.
I didn't mention design or intended input device - I said game experience. Motion gaming is not new or novice, even the line "Your body is the controller" has been used before.
I made a statement, you claimed it was ignorant, I backed it up with evidence, and you tried to change the argument from "motion gaming is nothing new" to "all motion gaming is similar/all controller based gaming is similar".
edit: Looking back, it looks like you misinterpreted my "Completely different, obviously." comment to imply that they weren't different from each other, when the actual point is that they weren't different from Kinect.
SmokeStacks on
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
With the Wii sinking like a stone into it's now last-gen grave, Nintendo is struggling to keep it's stock prices afloat thanks to lower than expected profits and a killer Yen-exchange rate.
That's the word from Reuters who's reporting that Nintendo Company is expected to report a loss of 100 BILLION Yen ($1.32 Billion) in the first half of this year. That expectation caused stock shares to drop 7.5%.
This is what I don't understand about captalism. A company does exceedingly well, posting billions upon billions of dollars in profit, storing that away in the bank for years of Reasearch and Development, but when those sales slow down, or even stop (because everyone fucking owns what the company is selling), they're punished for it.
Yes, yes, the world turns, but fuck that noise. It'd be a good bet that if you hold on to your stock it'll return to its former glory in short time.
They are releasing new hardware soon, you know.
That's pretty damned stupid to be mad at people who are looking at Nintendo's utterly unreliable track record. Pulling out now really is the smart move. If the new product takes off, then you can still invest again on the way up. If it tanks, which is just as equally likely (remember back during the PS1? Yeah, Nintendo knew everything and still almost managed to go under), then you don't lose tons of cash. The only thing Nintendo was really solid about was their handhelds and now they've shaken confidence in that area as well.
I'm more surprised this didn't happen a while ago, but people were way more interested in the the awful Wii controls than I would have given them credit for.
They'd probably be far better off if they had released something notable this year before November (in NA, at least) for the Wii. Sure the 3DS was the shiny new thing, but I don't know that I've ever seen such a severe software drought for a system whose successor is not yet out, and people will remember that come time to pick the next console. (Obviously they're not in danger of "going under," though.)
No, Ninty's not doomed, but a $1.32 billion loss? Cripes. Looks like the 3DS isn't quite covering up for the decline of the Wii, at least not yet.
Though I do remember the N64 had a horrible drought before the Cube came out. Conker was the last game of note, and it came out in March. Meanwhile the Cube didn't launch until November.
Why the crap did I ever make my original name "cloudeagle?"
The Wii only had "awful controls" in the cases in which such is true. The better games, shockingly enough, have pretty great controls.
Say what you will about the Wii but it was a bold move, marketed very well, and as always, has been constantly pushed by stellar first party games (well, sometimes there were gaps, but you know what I mean). It and the DS are certainly not part of anything resembling an "unreliable track record." The only really unreliable part of their track record has been the Virtual Boy if we are looking at things that could be considered failed products.
I assume he's talking about Nintendo's lowest point where it was trading for $8 a share (Around Jan 1997 - post NA and Japanese launch of the N64). As opposed to its high at $75ish on Oct of 2007. It's currently at $18.19, down around 40 percent from last year.
For consistency, Nintendo's not the stock you want to go for. Whereas a company like Activision is sitting around $13.50, but their history is of mostly consistent growth.
In other news, as we talk about reviews and games journalism, journalism in other markets is seeing increased scrutiny due to the firing of a personality on NPR.
Last year, for example, CNN Senior Editor and Middle East expert Octavia Nasr was fired after more than two decades at the news channel because she posted a sympathetic comment about the death of an alleged terrorist leader to her Twitter account. As I wrote at the time, these kinds of events force media outlets to confront the myth that journalists are objective — and that reporters can’t have or express opinions about the topics they cover. If anything, I think news consumers would be better off if they expressed themselves more rather than less, so that everyone would know where they stand.
Former Slate media critic Jack Shafer, now a columnist for Reuters, said something similar during a live discussion about objectivity and journalism hosted by the Poynter Institute on Wednesday. As Shafer put it:
We’re kidding ourselves and kidding our readers when we pretend that journalists have no opinions and no biases. My view is that journalists can’t be objective, because as human beings we are all subjective. What we can do is employ an objective method in the reporting and writing of the news: To be fair, to be accurate, to be comprehensive. If a reporter pledges to do that, I have no problem with them having opinions.
...as David Weinberger noted in his post about transparency, the web allows for the inclusion of links and other features that make it easier for users to check facts and come to their own conclusions. Objectivity, he said, is “a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links.” It’s time we allowed journalists to be human beings, both online and off.
I read an absolutely alarming amount of tech and business news to do my job, and it was interesting to see the Uncharted 3/Battlefield 3 reviews problems pop up at the same time as this.
It also illustrates that games journalists rarely operate in the same moral spaces as real journalists.
The problem is people saw the surge in 2006/7 and investors who knew nothing about video games suddenly thought they were the next google, causing their stock to be insanely overvalued. Then it turns out, they're just a video game company.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]XBL: Rakayn | PS3: Rakayn | Steam ID
Famitsu says that a Memory Card is pretty much a requirement, as some games will require the card. Games that require a card can't even be booted up if you don't have one.
So the Vita more or less costs 299.99, and Sony's just trying to pass it off as cheaper.
Eh, a 4GB memory card will probably be $20 or less and that should be sufficient for every save file you could possibly want along with some DLC and some smaller download games. If you want to go purely digital, you'll be spending well over $300 for a 16-32 GB memory card + the Vita itself but we already knew that.
Nintendo is definitely in uncharted waters at this point, but they are also in the same boat more or less as any other hardware manufacturer.
The 3DS launch was a misstep, the WiiU announcement a confusing mess that has yet to expanded upon or clarified (thus allowing unfounded speculation to be passed off as "probably" true), and the Wii is on life support.
Meanwhile, the other two manufacturers have only recently figured out how to make money on their 6 year old consoles, and have nowhere really to go in their own version of the traditional, iterative console cycle.
Also, the major point from that (aside from observing what typically happens to sales when a console nears the end of its lifetime) was that a major factor of the loss can be attributed to Research and Development because they are releasing new hardware soon. Sure the drop off of Wii sales and the underperformance of the 3DS thus far don't help (that I would say is on Nintendo, not because of the hardware itself but more because of the timing of its release and said release possibly becoming blurred with the many revisions the DS had), but the fact that the Wii U is coming out early next year changes what would have been a smaller loss to a much more substantial loss.
If you were to look at the quarters for Sony and Microsoft before the PS3 and the 360 came out you would probably see a similar trend in losses being reported.
The problem is people saw the surge in 2006/7 and investors who knew nothing about video games suddenly thought they were the next google, causing their stock to be insanely overvalued. Then it turns out, they're just a video game company.
I'm not disagreeing, but the problem is Nintendo benefited from the huge stock bump, and as such, they're getting hit by the drop. Because as we all know, investors only want you to get better. The internal bottom line is probably fine, but externally it looks shaky.
Nintendo is definitely in uncharted waters at this point, but they are also in the same boat more or less as any other hardware manufacturer.
The 3DS launch was a misstep, the WiiU announcement a confusing mess that has yet to expanded upon or clarified (thus allowing unfounded speculation to be passed off as "probably" true), and the Wii is on life support.
Meanwhile, the other two manufacturers have only recently figured out how to make money on their 6 year old consoles, and have nowhere really to go in their own version of the traditional, iterative console cycle.
Microsoft in particular is just hoping nothing happens so they can keep selling Kinects, and get new products from some of the company's other divisions in a better place (WP7, Windows 8, and Bing).
Famitsu says that a Memory Card is pretty much a requirement, as some games will require the card. Games that require a card can't even be booted up if you don't have one.
So the Vita more or less costs 299.99, and Sony's just trying to pass it off as cheaper.
Eh, a 4GB memory card will probably be $20 or less and that should be sufficient for every save file you could possibly want along with some DLC and some smaller download games. If you want to go purely digital, you'll be spending well over $300 for a 16-32 GB memory card + the Vita itself but we already knew that.
The only thing is that ive read on a few sites that Sony is using a new format for its memory cards on the Vita which i'll assume will cost significantly more than $20 as this is Sony.
Famitsu says that a Memory Card is pretty much a requirement, as some games will require the card. Games that require a card can't even be booted up if you don't have one.
So the Vita more or less costs 299.99, and Sony's just trying to pass it off as cheaper.
Eh, a 4GB memory card will probably be $20 or less and that should be sufficient for every save file you could possibly want along with some DLC and some smaller download games. If you want to go purely digital, you'll be spending well over $300 for a 16-32 GB memory card + the Vita itself but we already knew that.
The only thing is that ive read on a few sites that Sony is using a new format for its memory cards on the Vita which i'll assume will cost significantly more than $20 as this is Sony.
Sony is able to charge whatever they want for the memory cards as its a new propriety format and I don't really trust sony not to take advantage of that and rip people off.
No, Ninty's not doomed, but a $1.32 billion loss? Cripes. Looks like the 3DS isn't quite covering up for the decline of the Wii, at least not yet.
The real loss might be lower than that. At some point in the recent past when Nintendo was reporting a big hit from the exchange rate it was mentioned that they were required to report that as if they actually transferred the money to Japan and it was converted to Yen.
But it's entirely possible for them to keep that money overseas and wait for the exchange rates to improve (assuming that their financial advisers think that is likely), which means that the loss they are reporting from the foreign exchange rate might only exist on paper.
Rollers are red, chargers are blue....omae wa mou shindeiru
Generally Japanese companies discount prices in the US because they know that stuff like $60+ 3DS & $100 PS3/360 games isn't going to work here so I'd expect $15-$20, $30, $50-60, $100. Case in point, the Wi-Fi PS Vita is the equivalent of $327.729 in Japan going by the current conversion rate but it's being sold for $250 here.
Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the birds.
How big is Angry Birds?
You may have played (or laughed at someone playing) the iOS app. You may have heard there's an Angry Birds movie in the works (a real one, not an amazing web video from last year). You may have seen the Chrome commercial running right now on primetime TV. You may have ignored the people on the bus or at work or at school talking about it. You may, in other words, be aware that there is a game called Angry Birds that has become a thing of a certain size. But do you really know how big it is? I do.
This year, every carny hawking games of chance was doing so behind a wall of stuffed Angry Birds characters.I've just come home from the North Carolina State Fair in Raleigh, where citizens of North Carolina and the surrounding environs gather every year to eat things that have been deep-fried. They step aboard stupid carnival rides and play almost-impossible-to-win games of chance for the opportunity to take home a stuffed version of some recognizable television, book, comic book, movie, or video game character. This year, every carny hawking games of chance was doing so behind a wall of stuffed Angry Birds characters. There were still the usual assortment of popular cartoon characters and random stuffed animals and fruits, but this year, those were shunted to the back of the booth. In front of the stuffed Winnie the Poohs, Scooby Doos, Banana Men, and Pikachus--right out in front where every passing man, woman, and (especially) child could see them--were those angry little birds and their porcine nemeses. At Every. Single. Booth.
Birds as far as the eye can see.
I am aware that many very serious and otherwise very intelligent and insightful video game writers and analysts have been studiously ignoring the phenomenon of Angry Birds, hoping that it will flame out quickly and let us get on with the very serious business of bringing our very serious knowledge of very serious games to very serious people like us who will take it all very seriously. We want to play our Batman and our Battlefield and then complain about the niggling negative details about each. We want to write about how many hats are too many hats, and why downloadable content is cheating the customer. We want to wage Total War with our keyboards and mice and moan about how infrequently we get the chance to do so anymore. We want, in other words, to preserve what we most first loved about gaming and justify our belief that this will all someday be more than just an overly complicated and prohibitively expensive hobby that only a handful of humans are willing to try. I am also aware that it is time to wake up and take the blinders off.
Businessmen and soccer moms are buying them, and then dropping $0.99 to $1.99 a pop on Angry Birds.While serious gaming journalists have been attempting to woo an ever-expanding, gaming-savvy audience base with tales of rich narrative experiences, immersive worlds, and meaningful digital interactions, all the while bemoaning the fact that gaming is not a mainstream pursuit, gaming has become a mainstream pursuit--just not how we imagined it. iPhones and other "smart" devices may be as expensive as gaming consoles, but they are multipurpose tools. Businessmen and soccer moms are buying them, and then dropping $0.99 to $1.99 a pop on Angry Birds. Not just a few of them--hundreds of millions of them. More than will play all of this holiday season's AAA titles combined.
Angry Birds was released late in 2009. That year, many major outlets (including the one I ran) proclaimed Batman: Arkham Asylum their game of the year. Last year, many of those same outlets (including mine) selected Red Dead Redemption. Both were fine choices. Both games presented vast, semi-open worlds, cross-genre play styles, and deep narrative experiences. Both games have sold approximately 13-15 million copies combined.
Meanwhile, Angry Birds has moved approximately 400 million. And that number has roughly doubled from approximately 200 million in May of this year, just a month before Apple announced that it had sold approximately 222 million of its iOS devices. In other words, almost every person who has purchased an iOS device (the best-selling electronics devices in the history of the world) has also downloaded Angry Birds.
Still not buying it? All right. Those of you raised on Nintendo devices playing some variation of a Mario game may consider the iconic plumber to be one of the most widely recognized video game characters of all time. If so, you're not alone. Guinness World Records did too, just this year. Yet, Nintendo has sold only approximately 260 million copies of its Super Mario-themed games in the nearly 30 years it has been making them. That's roughly half the number of Angry Birds titles that are estimated will be downloaded by the end of this year, just two years after it was first debuted.
And yet, people who had never heard of Fallout had heard of Minesweeper, and most of them had played it.I used to say that I believed the most popular video game of all time was Minesweeper. Everyone with a Windows PC had it, and most of them played it. It was hard to come by sales or playtime data for the game, however, so this was a difficult argument to make, and it was hard to be taken seriously. And yet, people who had never heard of Fallout had heard of Minesweeper, and most of them had played it. Before most of the currently popular online game media organizations were even founded, bankers and secretaries were playing games--just not the same games played by the journalists who started those outlets. The journalists starting those outlets were not starting them to write about Minesweeper and, to be fair, Minesweeper is not among the games that have been pushing the industry forward of late. Yet most people still played it. Even those who claimed they didn't play video games.
Now there's Angry Birds. Not only is everyone playing it, but nobody is ashamed to admit to doing so except hardcore gamers. Most of us who have been playing and writing about video games for decades can (and should) take some credit for helping to eradicate the stigma associated with video gaming. We can (and should) feel proud that this pastime is now something shared by hundreds of millions of people around the world. We can also (and should) try to play what those people are choosing to play, even when it is not the same thing we're playing.
This month Rovio added a new edition of Angry Birds to its market-crushing lineup: the next iteration of Angry Birds Seasons, featuring more levels based on Halloween and other holidays. There's even a new bird, which is such a momentous occasion for Angry Birds fans that it has become mainstream news, eclipsing Blizzard's announcement from BlizzCon of a World of Warcraft expansion featuring the once mythical pandas. According to Gamasutra, Angry Birds Seasons is now the number two best-selling app on the Apple App store. What's number one? The original Angry Birds.
This game will sell more copies than any video game ever made before it is forgotten…Angry Birds may eventually work its way loose from the mainstream, but to ignore it in the meantime is to ignore the irrefutable evidence that video gaming has so deeply insinuated itself into popular culture that a bird from a video game (one with no name, no less) is rapidly becoming one of the most iconic, instantly recognizable characters in popular culture, and a company that no one had ever heard of just three years ago is piggybacking on Apple's world-changing technological architecture to change the way video games are played--and by whom.
This game will sell more copies than any video game ever made before it is forgotten, and it will shatter every perception of what a video game can do. Think about that while you're spending your Q4 reading and writing about AAA "blockbusters."
Rovio CEO Mikael Hed talked about the game at this week's Le Web 10 in Paris. TechCrunch was there and reports that Hed said the company has not only sold 12 million copies of the game to date, but they've also seen 30 million downloads of the free version of the app.
Even if we're assuming a relatively small percentage of the total downloads are purchases, it could easily end up being a very large number. 10% of 400 million is still 40 million which is about as many as the entire Halo series has sold. Admittedly, it has a big boost due to being a dirt cheap title, but it's still huge. Plus, it has more merchandising than just about any video game that isn't Pokemon.
Posts
The demo I mentioned from '04 is basically a wand with a colored ball at the end, which is what Move is now.
The things they did with the EyeToy during the PS2 era are basically the exact same gameplay experience as all of the Kinect software is doing now.
I've seen that game Lp'd by Chipcheezum, it was hilarious how awful it was.
pleasepaypreacher.net
That's still one of the gold standards for wonderful reviews of terrible games (and I encourage you to read the written review too).
In other news, Rock Band lives on! Kinda. And will probably be dipped in a giant vat of mutagen.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/38133/Harmonix_Planning_Fundamental_Creative_Reinterpretation_For_Rock_Band.php
I'm guessing no more plastic instruments.
Ignorant statement is ignorant.
Combine Rock Band with Dance Central tech to become Go-Go Dancer Hero?
This is true.
The EyeToy was better!
Do not engage the Watermelons.
Science!
Time to Crate.
Completely different, obviously.
pleasepaypreacher.net
EVERYBODY WANTS TO SIT IN THE BIG CHAIR, MEG!
They are both Eyetoy videos, so...?
I guess your point is all motion controlled games are the same?
Ergo obviously every game which uses a controller with buttons is EXACTLY THE SAME!
More amazing facts proven with science!
It's the same gameplay experience as Kinect. You stand and wave your arms around like a doofus. This is a callback to the post I made about how none of our "new" gameplay technology/methods are new at all.
Maybe you should call it a night and try again tomorrow?
In other news, an editor actually giving some thought about the recent report from Nintendo.
Nintendo Reports Record Low Revenue
And are you intentionally missing my point just to be goosey?
No need to be rude!
But hey, since you stated the classic "every motion controlled game 'you just stand and wave your arms around like a doofus'" line, by that reasoning you clearly are of the opinion that every game controlled with a pad "you just sit there, slack-jawed, stabbing buttons with your stubby fingers".
Fruit Ninja, Dance Central and Child of Eden are no more similar than Gears of War and Halo, or Mario and Zelda.
The majority of the gaming industry is built upon iterative design but still, every game is not created equal.
And there are degrees of comparison which can be drawn, similarities which can be categorised, identified and labelled within every genre in the gaming industry, nothing is truly unique. Still; don't confuse gameplay with design or intended input device.
I made a statement, you claimed it was ignorant, I backed it up with evidence, and you tried to change the argument from "motion gaming is nothing new" to "all motion gaming is similar/all controller based gaming is similar".
edit: Looking back, it looks like you misinterpreted my "Completely different, obviously." comment to imply that they weren't different from each other, when the actual point is that they weren't different from Kinect.
That's pretty damned stupid to be mad at people who are looking at Nintendo's utterly unreliable track record. Pulling out now really is the smart move. If the new product takes off, then you can still invest again on the way up. If it tanks, which is just as equally likely (remember back during the PS1? Yeah, Nintendo knew everything and still almost managed to go under), then you don't lose tons of cash. The only thing Nintendo was really solid about was their handhelds and now they've shaken confidence in that area as well.
I'm more surprised this didn't happen a while ago, but people were way more interested in the the awful Wii controls than I would have given them credit for.
I'm hoping its like a joke you know, some kind of irony?
pleasepaypreacher.net
Though I do remember the N64 had a horrible drought before the Cube came out. Conker was the last game of note, and it came out in March. Meanwhile the Cube didn't launch until November.
Say what you will about the Wii but it was a bold move, marketed very well, and as always, has been constantly pushed by stellar first party games (well, sometimes there were gaps, but you know what I mean). It and the DS are certainly not part of anything resembling an "unreliable track record." The only really unreliable part of their track record has been the Virtual Boy if we are looking at things that could be considered failed products.
For consistency, Nintendo's not the stock you want to go for. Whereas a company like Activision is sitting around $13.50, but their history is of mostly consistent growth.
In other news, as we talk about reviews and games journalism, journalism in other markets is seeing increased scrutiny due to the firing of a personality on NPR.
http://gigaom.com/2011/10/26/its-time-to-admit-that-journalists-are-human-beings/
I read an absolutely alarming amount of tech and business news to do my job, and it was interesting to see the Uncharted 3/Battlefield 3 reviews problems pop up at the same time as this.
It also illustrates that games journalists rarely operate in the same moral spaces as real journalists.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/
I write about video games and stuff. It is fun. Sometimes.
Eh, a 4GB memory card will probably be $20 or less and that should be sufficient for every save file you could possibly want along with some DLC and some smaller download games. If you want to go purely digital, you'll be spending well over $300 for a 16-32 GB memory card + the Vita itself but we already knew that.
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire,
The 3DS launch was a misstep, the WiiU announcement a confusing mess that has yet to expanded upon or clarified (thus allowing unfounded speculation to be passed off as "probably" true), and the Wii is on life support.
Meanwhile, the other two manufacturers have only recently figured out how to make money on their 6 year old consoles, and have nowhere really to go in their own version of the traditional, iterative console cycle.
If you were to look at the quarters for Sony and Microsoft before the PS3 and the 360 came out you would probably see a similar trend in losses being reported.
I'm not disagreeing, but the problem is Nintendo benefited from the huge stock bump, and as such, they're getting hit by the drop. Because as we all know, investors only want you to get better. The internal bottom line is probably fine, but externally it looks shaky.
Microsoft in particular is just hoping nothing happens so they can keep selling Kinects, and get new products from some of the company's other divisions in a better place (WP7, Windows 8, and Bing).
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/
I write about video games and stuff. It is fun. Sometimes.
The only thing is that ive read on a few sites that Sony is using a new format for its memory cards on the Vita which i'll assume will cost significantly more than $20 as this is Sony.
Sony is able to charge whatever they want for the memory cards as its a new propriety format and I don't really trust sony not to take advantage of that and rip people off.
But it's entirely possible for them to keep that money overseas and wait for the exchange rates to improve (assuming that their financial advisers think that is likely), which means that the loss they are reporting from the foreign exchange rate might only exist on paper.
4GB = 2,200yen ($29)
8GB = 3,200yen ($42)
16GB = 5,500yen ($72)
32GB = 9,500yen ($124)
Generally Japanese companies discount prices in the US because they know that stuff like $60+ 3DS & $100 PS3/360 games isn't going to work here so I'd expect $15-$20, $30, $50-60, $100. Case in point, the Wi-Fi PS Vita is the equivalent of $327.729 in Japan going by the current conversion rate but it's being sold for $250 here.
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire,
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire,
So?
Drag and release. I am, truly, blown away.
Here's some sales figures from almost a year ago. Just the iPhone version:
http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/12/08/5612223-pigs-outraged-as-angry-birds-sells-12-million-copies
Even if we're assuming a relatively small percentage of the total downloads are purchases, it could easily end up being a very large number. 10% of 400 million is still 40 million which is about as many as the entire Halo series has sold. Admittedly, it has a big boost due to being a dirt cheap title, but it's still huge. Plus, it has more merchandising than just about any video game that isn't Pokemon.
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire,