Look, we’re back, and as promised, the new podcast is now up and recorded on the final day of E3 in Devolver Digital’s off-site space. Jonah and T.J. hang out near the Fable Fortune booth as they discuss the games they scoped out on the show floor. If T.J. seems a lot more chill than usual, keep in mind he’s enjoyed a few beers by then.
Next week will see Scott joining in with his impressions of the conference from afar.
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.
Nobuyuki Oneda, the Sony’s chief financial officer said, “our plan is not to reduce the price. Our strategy is not to sell more quantity for PS3 but to concentrate on profitability.” (gamespot) This makes complete sense coming from their chief financial officer, as their motivation is to make money, not lose it.
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?
The Gaming Podcast is back after three weeks of a forced hiatus as one former host has left the podcast for good. Otherwise, some of the news items are old, some are new, in this long episode.
There’s no Gaming Flashback or Gaming History, but plenty of news, including:
There’s also some Listener Feedback. The Question of the Week: “Do you think consoles will start doing early access on games?”
Paul crows about Nintendo’s dominance over the ColecoVision and Dreamcast, while Jonah and Jordan reminisce about this week’s Gaming Flashback, Electronic Arts’ Barnstorming for the Atari 2600.
The news also includes the following topics:
This week’s Gaming History looks at the husband-and-wife developing team Freefall Associates, while the Question of the Week is: How much weight do you give the score of a review? Let us know what you think.
