The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer
SlashDot has an article about Gamestop basically saying they won’t have enough units to fill all the preorders. By chance, I was at Gamestop to get a new Guitar Hero II disk (a friend rocked a bit too hard this weekend), and I asked about it. The Gamestop employee said that North America PS3 shipments are being cut from their original 400K number by 60%.
If true, is this now officially the most botched hardware launch ever?
Am I the only person who has stopped buying DVDs altogether? I read an article recently that mentioned that DVD sales have slowed. The studios seem to think it’s because people have finished filling their libraries.
Has it occurred to anyone that there are probably a whole bunch of people who don’t want to buy more DVDs until we know whether or not to pursue HDDVDs or Blu-Rays?
Anyway, until someone wins, I’m just Netflixing everything.
One hidden aspect to Nintendo’s strategy for world domination is the rather unique idea of actually having enough product on the shelves. EA estimates that there will be 900K to 1.4 million Wii sold in North America by the end of the year, which contrasts sharply with the PS3 numbers, which look to be half that.
Sony has been trying to spin this as a way of creating a sense of demand, and that this will be the ‘hot product’. How well that will work when mom can turn around and buy a Wii or a 360 instead remains to be seen. And don’t be fooled – consoles are Christmas gifts in North America – having more boxes under trees dramatically increases Nintendo’s odds of hitting critical mass. Shipping substandard numbers in North America for Christmas is going to mean a lot of kids who currently only live off allowances will have to wait a year to get their hands on the box (especially considering PS3’s substantial price tag). Continue reading
Rumor has it that the Blu-Ray is a core reason why PS3 is running late – you don’t want to run half-assed into a major tech war against a heavily funded opponent. They aren’t apologetic – they are, in fact, trying to spin it as a major boon to developers.
There’s this sort of misunderstanding that the Blu-ray disc player for movies is somehow burdening the console with unnecessary cost. That is completely not true. We put our Blu-ray disc functionality in the console purely from a game design point of view. Once we had that storage capacity on Blu-ray disc, adding the movie playback functionality was extremely cost-effective, [the cost] is actually non-existent.
I didn’t buy a 360. Sure, it’s true that I haven’t even seen an XBox 360 as of yet at the stores, but even if I’d come across one hidden in the back of a sales rack that everyone else had missed, I’m not sure I would have picked it up.
Given I’ve constantly harped about gameplay over graphics, this may not come as a surprise to a lot of Zen readers. It’s not that I don’t appreciate great graphics. But really, I don’t buy a console for ports of games that appear on other consoles. The 360 desperately needs an exclusive game made with it in mind. Continue reading
Speaking of the 360 and their sales figures of 600K, one is left with one inescapable conclusion: launching at Christmastime is the worst time to launch a game console. Think about it – they’re at 660K units now, far short of reaching their goal of 2.5M in 90 days and 5 million in 6 months. Most of these are due to problems filling the demand for the hardware, which has plagued pretty much every console launch. Continue reading
Okay, this is now a new design requirement for all upcoming console devices – your console should not interfere with the store management systems of the world’s largest softare (and everything else) retailer:
A spokesperson for the retailer told Next Generation, “As we began setting the Xbox 360 up in sample kiosks in our stores we’ve found that, in a handful of some of our older stores, the devices are interfering with our Telzon printouts. We’re working with Microsoft to correct this and should have Xbox sample kiosks available and working in all of our locations in the next few weeks.”
See, this is exactly the sort of thing that probably doesn’t appear in any QA plan anywhere in the world – until now.
From the New York Times (registration required, bugmenot is cranky), it seems that the XBox 360 is trying to market heavily towards women. Unfortunately, their planned path is not by actually making games for women.
Microsoft hopes to win a bigger share of the market from the PlayStation 2, the top-selling console made by Sony, by promoting a more family-friendly image for the new Xbox, which will be in stores starting Nov. 22…
Brochures going out to major retailers like Best Buy prominently describe the 360’s ability to double as a DVD player, play music from an MP3 player through a television’s speakers and even display digital photos on a TV. Its game functions, while impressive, are now only part of the message…he brochure even says, “Here are some things you might want to tell your wife this thing does.”
Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how good your game is. Sometimes, it matters more the environment that your game is released in. Usually, when we point this out, we’re talking about gaming competition. Surely, Matrix Online and Saga of Ryzom would have fared better if there’d been more seperation between them and the juggernaut that is Worlds of Warcraft. Guild Wars fared better, but undoubtedly part of that is that MMO fans didn’t have to layer another subscription fee onto their existing WoW price tag.
The catch, of course, is that your ability to delay a launch is very limited. You hope and pray that you manuever yourself towards a good release window, but a full-sized MMO team burns through cash faster than Halliburton. You might be able to delay your launch a couple of months, but at some point, you have to bite the bullet before you start laying people off. This is obviously more true for smaller companies, but even inside behemoths like EA, your potential is fuzzy, but your actual burn rate is undeniable, which creates an impetus to ship as soon as possible. Continue reading
Gamespot has put together a helpful list of rules regarding being a fanboy of one console or another. Some of the useful rules:
Innovation is what it’s called when your console has a unique feature. Otherwise, it’s called a gimmick.
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A sequel on another console is a “rehash,” while a sequel on your console is not; in fact, it’s highly anticipated.
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A person who owns just one console is inherently less biased than editors at GameSpot who have access to all consoles.
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[I]t is up to you to monitor how companies are doing and report every dip in stock price of manufacturers of other consoles. You’re all experts in the fields of economics and finance, so your analyses will always prove correct.
Putting together this list for MMO fanboyism would be a lot of fun. Might get me fired, though.
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