This week’s episode is a little late due to a power outage. However, despite the lack of really interesting news, the crew still finds plenty to chat about.
This week’s news includes:
The Question of the Week is, “What popular game did you play long after its initial release?”
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?
It’s the last Gaming Podcast episode of 2018, and it’s three hours long! Well, it’s to make up for the fact we won’t be doing one next week. There are only two news items, but the entire bulk of the episode is our Game Awards for 2017, and we took a different tack than most sites and podcasts by inventing our own Awards Categories!
The news we do discuss include:
We also discussed the game we’re looking forward to the most in 2018 — let us know which one you are interested in!
As a huge fan of Showtime’s Dexter, we’re excited (afraid?) to hear they’re making a game in its image. We actually pay for an Amazon Unbox because we’re too cheap to buy Showtime for all their other shows. A Dexter game could be killer on the PC and iPhone.
Obviously the first problem to concern ourselves with is the franchise name, all too often we end up with ‘branded’ named games that produce awful results. It’s easy to get lost in the idea of making money on the name Dexter than putting in the time to a quality game release.
There is a high probability a Dexter game is going to suck, but we can hold up our hopes they do the franchise justice and create something scary but entertaining with a good storyline. How else can you represent a TV series in which the main character is a serial killer and he justifies his killings?
(Thanks, Joystiq)
Hi guys.
Thanks for the episode. It was intersting and funny as always 🙂 To your question of the week: I Played Portal the first time last year. Of course i completed it very fast, but this was a PC game i played about 10 years after its release 🙂
For Console games, it must be some of the first 6 Mega Man Games … i don´t remember which ones i played as a kid, but of course not all of them. So i decided to play through the first 6 Mega Man games last year 🙂
I like to play all the old games, i missed in my youth, but as you know: now (as an adult) you got the money to buy games, but you dont have the time anymore to play all of them 🙂
Jonah: Archon is a really great game! I loved it as a kid, even i did not understood it at all 🙂 (I am born in 1980, so i was 4 years old, when Archon was released, and i got my first C-64 when i was 8).
So thanks again guys and keep gaming 🙂