This week is another short one as the news is pretty light. However, there is another Gaming History as The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! is examined.
This week’s news includes:
The Question of the Week: “What is your favorite giant monster?”
Nintendo plans to capitalize on the monumental success of Wii Sports by doing what they do best, building a hot game with an accessory backing its success. The new Wii Sports Resort will be a mini-game set like Wii Sports and Wii Play but with a beach setting and games like frisbee.
Frisbee? How can the Wii motion controller handle a Frisbee toss? Wii Motion Plus of course! We believe they’ll be packing the game in with the Wii Motion Plus to add more value to the purchase. Honestly, this adds more value to the accessory as a driving force to make sales and increase margins. Game accessories are a great way for Nintendo to profit, consider the pack in game marketing material.
As Wii Play has shown us, historically, gamers want the accessory and the bundled game is just icing on the proverbial cake. Wii Play, as a game, was lacking in many ways and would be, as a stand alone product, a definite must-not-have title. But, considering the amount of Wii controllers sold, this allows Wii Play to show up high on best games sold month over month.
Wii Sports Resort takes this to a new level by using the term “Wii Sports” in the game, allowing the masses to flock to the store to get anything that can reproduce the fun of the original title. Nobody knows, yet, if it will reproduce the same fun factor but the accessory is neat.
(Thanks, joystiq)
This week we’re creating our last gaming podcast before Christmas, no holiday break for us! We’re reading some of our community comments and taking a look back at both Pac-Land and the history of Atari post-2600 release. This weeks news includes:
This week’s question of the week is really simply, have a good holiday. Unless you want to answer the question, “where do you roast your chestnuts for the holidays?”
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?
Hello guys.
(First of all: i am not a native english speaker, so please excuse me, if some sentences sound horrible 😀 )
I really enjoy every episode of your stream. Thank you for your time doing such a nice podcast!
In the latest episode you asked the listener to comment about Ono mentioned, that there will be no pay to win in Street Fighter 5. I am a huge Fan of Street Fighter (since i played it the first time on the SNES (i think it´s called super favicon in th US 😉 )). Regarding SF4 (and all the updates: super, ultra and so on). there is NO opportunity to pay to win. The only thing you can buy, are other costumes and stuff like that. All balancing is for free, which means, you can’t buy an updated version of a character to make it stronger. If you have a newer version of the game (for example the lastest one: ultra street fighter 4) you are only able to use the new characters against other people who got the latest version. But you have the opportunity to select an older version of the game, before you look online for opponents. This means a person who has NOT the newest version of the game, and with this, neither the new characters is NOT able to play against another player with a new version. He is only able to play against other players with the same version of the game. so it is NOT able to pay to win … except you feel like a winner, when your char has another costume 😉
Belonging to your question of the week, my favourite “monster” is not a real monster … it´s only a giant turtle: Groß-A’Tuin. I don’t exactly, if it has the same name in the english version, but this is the giant turtle from Discworld, on which back are standing the four giants, which carry the disc world 🙂 I really like big giant things .. such as this out of the world turtle … it´s so smooth and gentle 🙂
I have two question for you: is there any possibility to get older episodes than the ones in itunes-podcast?
second one: do you have experience in upscaling devices, so i can play my old consoles (like NES and Master System) on a new Plasma tv? A friend told me about this site: http://retrogaming.hazard-city.de … but i hope you may have some experience already and could share them with me 🙂
Thanks again for your great work, and please keep on doing this podcast.
If you ever want to visit germany, maybe to join the games con or just for fun, contact me … i can help you around in germany and you can stay at my place 🙂
So long, greetings
Ralf