The Nintendo Switch is looming on us all, and more rumors from trusted sources are popping up. We also reminisce about music from the Jet Grind Radio games and talk about the timing of Titanfall 2 sucked.
This week’s news includes:
Let us know if you’re going to buy a Nintendo Switch.
This week’s gaming podcast covers a wide variety of news, we also argue a bit about the Wow restrictions on taking donations and cash (again) and touch on some gaming history involving The Sims and the history of Infocom. For news, we’ve tackled
EA Leaves SecuRom out of Sims 3This weeks question, is the Nintendo Wii killing off gaming as we know it?
This week is shortened due to Thanksgiving and Black Friday, but there’s still some fun to be had, especially when the Gaming History is about The Legend of Zelda cartoon series.
The news:
The Question of the Week: “When do you start your holiday shopping?”
Does the console market need any more competitors? We’ve seen record sales in the game industry for titles like Halo 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV along with huge expectations for Resistance 2 and some new Sony PlayStation 3 projects. Yet, the tiny little Wii product holds best sales records around the world as the heavy hitter, Microsoft and Sony, compete for the most awesome spectacle show of graphics.
Competition is a great way to drive down costs, drive up expectations and give consumers new innovative products with better quality. Imagine if Apple got into console development and produced a new highly sexy product with the hype and consumer desire of the iPhone or iPod.
“Apple has the infrastructure in place through iTunes to create a real value proposition for those that want to extend the capability of their console beyond gaming and has the cash — about $20 billion — to not only invest in the best components on the market, but in an online gaming experience that could rival Xbox Live.” (kotaku)
Apple’s showing a huge surge in recognition and sales thanks to the iPod and growing desire for Apple hardware competing against Microsoft’s Vista operating system. As more consumers turn to Apple for their music and mobile gaming needs, Apple must see windows of exploiting the gaming market further.
More importantly, nobody can pull off digital rights management (DRM) and locking consumers into a product line like Apple all while they beg for more. Consoles are little boxes of DRM waiting for happy consumers to buy into the concept all while avoiding the hacking and bittorrenting like you’ve been seeing on Spore in the last few weeks. Had Spore been released on a console this DRM fiasco would have been avoided because gamers don’t even realize (or care) that a console locks them into playing and, more importantly, buying the game for the hardware.
