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Podcast notes:
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This is the first podcast of 2015, and Jonah and Paul are ready to get going, talking about their holiday gifts and their disappointment in the film Birdman. There’s no Gaming History or Gaming Flashback this week, but stay tuned for one next week.
The news in this episode includes:
Also in the podcast is some Listener Feedback and the Question of the Week, “How much do you play online?”
This week we’re hammering through some top news articles while tackling some community comments and hitting the history hard!
Question of the week, have you seen any video game tattoo’s that have been less dork and more actual awesome? Do you have any?
Yoichi Wada of Square Enix has let the cat out of the bag. The cat is Final Fantasy XIII for the Xbox 360 and it will be simultaneously released with the PlayStation 3 version. This may be an end to an exclusive era for Sony as all their big brands jump to non-exclusion.
This is probably a result of gamers slow adoption of the PlayStation 3 hardware for various issues, one being cost. Personally I think Sony’s move to say “no price cut” in our near future is a grand mistake. It is well understood that they want profitability over quantity but you’re losing your exclusives to a broader audience.
Each generation of consoles brings new industry trends and, for now, exclusive games from third party developers is too risky when you look at overall cost to produce a block buster title like Final Fantasy XIII. Consider the sales of GTA IV, although they were in the millions, imagine how low it would have been if they only released on the PS3. They’d might have actually lost money on the game.
Square Enix can see the writing on the wall, that writing says “ship on as many mediums as possible.” Gamers are split between consoles with a huge segment on Wii and Xbox 360, if you can at least ship on one of those consoles along with the PS3 you’ll do better financially.
(Thanks, Kotaku)
