Paul’s back for an episode, as the crew still has E3 on the mind, and still discuss stuff from the show. In fact, the conversation remains so much on E3, half of the scheduled news items don’t get done. Instead, it’s just a reunion of sorts as the rambling goes on and on.
The news that does get discussed includes:
Let us know what you think.
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?
This week’s episode talks about Sony having issues, and that’s not even taking into account their pulling out of a convention due to the coronavirus scare. This week’s Gaming Flashback looks at the classic dark puzzle platformer Limbo.
As for the news:
This week’s Question of the Week: “What is your favorite videogame commercial or trailer?”
The podcast is back, albeit on a Saturday instead of the usual Friday. No Gaming Flashback or Gaming History, but a good chunk of news, though some of it only tenuously connected to videogaming.
The news this week includes:
This week’s Question of the Week is based on the Minecraft convention scam from last week, which the podcast discusses, “Have you even attended a convention devoted to a game?”
