This week we check out Paradox Interactive’s showcase, as well as the following news:
Let us know what you think of Paradox’s lineup.
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?
Due to unforeseen circumstances, this episode was recorded on Monday, but despite the lateness, it’s full of rich news items, including some very disturbing trends in videogames, as well as a question by a listener that got mental juices flowing. This week’s Gaming Flashback is Professor Pac-Man.
The news items include:
This week’s Question of the Week: “What do you think is the future of older games?”
Last week’s episode was a bust, and there was a strange glitch in this one that caused the audio on Jonah’s side to completely cut out. However, it’s been recovered, and this episode deals with the direct-to-Blu-Ray animated film Batman Ninja.
This week’s news includes:
Let us know what you think.
