Publishers are doing their virtual E3 announcements, such as Ubisoft Forward and ID@Xbox’s Indie Showcase. There’s other wild news going on, and some not even in the official news items below.
Said news items include:
Let us know what you think.
This week Jonah and Jordan go it alone without Paul, which is unfortunately since the Gaming Flashback is the classic Nintendo 64 title Paper Mario. It might be just as well as the events of the last week made the crew ramble on about the industry at length, making the post much longer than usual.
This week’s impressive news items:
Lots of Reader Feedback, but no Question of the Week this week – just too much show.
This week on the TD Gaming Podcast we explore four exciting news stories:
This week in gaming history we’ll look back at LJN, a listener’s idea and gaming flashback on the hit title Myst. This week we discuss the concept of using the Nintendo DS as a learning device, as they’re doing in Japan.
Gigaom had a great writeup about how Grand Theft Auto IV marks the end of “next generation” as we know it, stating, in more words or less, the game is a failure. GTA: San Andreas sold 21.5 million copies during its time on the shelf while GTA IV has sold roughly 9 million copies as of June 7th.
Granted, the game is still on the shelves and will still get sales, but the mass of “hardcore gamers” have had their fill and either purchased it or will not. The end result? A huge tapering of sales numbers for the graphically impressive game. Take-Two spent USD $100 million to develop the game which had great opening sales records but has gone down drastically since.
Imagine the title gains them USD $30.00 per sale in profit (considering distributors get the game for roughly USD $45 to $48.00 USD), taking into account shipping of the product, marketing and all the materials that go into producing a copy, they’d have to sell a large quanity of game titles to break even, which I think they have done.
Nobody is in this industry to break even. A block buster title should make block buster profits, right? Else, why bother to spend the 100-million when a Wii title can double or triple the profits with six months of development?
