Jonah goes absolutely off on NBA 2K20, not just on its buggy launch, but it’s decline into microtransactions in the form of Virtual Currency.
The news includes:
Let us know what you think.
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?
Gamers get upset when developers sneak ugly hacks onto their computers when they just want to play video games. Although gamers really only revolt when they know their being exploited, Spore is a fine example of how not to lock down a video game. Using SecuROM was a bad decision on the part of Electronic Arts, no matter what their PR spin tries to tell us.
Imagine a world of DRM free spore and you may be imagining reality using the Valve’s Steam software download architecture.
“The moderator specifically mentioned Spore but it’s possible this extends to other EA games that used SecuROM as well (like Mass Effect). If a game on Steam uses third-party DRM, it’s supposed to be mentioned on the product page.” (cinemablend)
We’ve been complaining about the Spore DRM for month snow on the gaming podcast, perhaps we’ll have to shut our mouths soon enough.
(Thanks, GameStooge)
This week we’ve got four folks on the show, including Jonah Falcon who will soon take over the reins from Don as the third host of the gaming podcast. This week we’ve got a bit of user comments (a few didn’t make it as they were stuck in my queue, hopefully next week) and we’re flashing back to Food Fight while hitting up news:
Question of the Week: What did you buy on Black Friday?
Speaking of remastering older games, I want Diablo 2 remastered!