Episode 425: Paul’s Return Part 1

Paul returns to the show to drown his sorrows in the discontinuation of a game series he loved, and the podcast ran so long it has to be split into two parts.

The first half of this podcast includes the following news items:

  • Why Disney Infinity 4.0 was shut down
  • Microsoft kills Project Spark for Windows, Xbox One

Stay tuned for Part 2.

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Xbox 360 Price Cut Official: September 5th, 2008Xbox 360 Price Cut Official: September 5th, 2008

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The price breakdown is as follows:

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  • Xbox 360 Elite $399

This is a US price cut, Japan had their price cut last week. We’re not sure about how the rest of the 360 regions will shake out, but they’ll probably end up with a price line much like the one above.

Anyone surprised? Anyone going to run out and buy a 360?

(Thanks, Gamestooge)

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The news includes:

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The Xbox 360 price drop rumors flow like water and it’s all but officially been announced at this point. What about PlayStation 3 and their price? No.

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The question remains, how will they actually make money if they’re no longer in the race for competitive market prices? Considering game licensing must Net them some amount of profit Sony’s idea seems to be the exact opposite of their original PlayStation method: saturate the market and sell them all games.

So far we’ve seen very few “need to have” games for the PlayStation 3 console while Xbox 360 continues to build a substantial library and Wii continues to break sales records for apparently no reason. When a game publisher has to decide on a platform to launch a new game, why would they choose the one that doesn’t care to be competitively priced in the market? The one that doesn’t care about quantity of sales?

Sony intends to reverse the entire razor blade philosophy where one sells a cheap razor and charges users for the blades over and over again. Their take on this concept is to sell really expensive razors and put out small half-quality blades. Is that a good market strategy at this point?