Console Wars, Price Wars
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/25/14 at 07:50 PM CT
The 8th Generation Console Wars are already in full swing, with the three established factions ready to defend their unworthy champions upon the battlefield. In the early months of any Console War, picking a side and defending it to the death is common practice among hardcore gamers and nerds alike. It is also commonplace early on for gamers to lose no matter which side they pick.
With all three platforms struggling with the “NO GAEMZ” issue right now, many Console War Crusaders have chosen to nitpick on pricing. And in this worldwide market funk, threatening to plunge the globe back into recession at any moment, only fools (and the 1%) aren’t cautious with their entertainment budgets.
Let’s look at a cost breakdown of the three traditional consoles as well as the hybrid Steam Machines and see where frugal gamers should put their hard-earned cash. In each case, we need to consider the cost of the hardware itself (including add-ons), the cost of incidentals (like service …
Nintendo Cuts WiiU Sales Forcast. Sony and Microsoft Soon to Follow?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/19/14 at 03:42 PM CT
The big and overblown news story dominating the minds of Internet Trolls this week is that Nintendo has cut their WiiU sales forecast by 2/3, from 9 million units to 2.8 million. Plenty of businessy types and trolly types are pronouncing Nintendo’s DOOMED status, once again.
Nintendo may be going through a rough patch, and they may occasionally fixate on some gimmick to the detriment of the overall quality of their products, but saying the company is DOOMED and going out of business seems a bit ridiculous. We must bear in mind, after all, that Nintendo is a videogame company, while Sony is a generalist electronics company, movie studio, and recording label; and Microsoft is an enterprise-level productivity and OS developer. If either of those companies stopped making games, they’d continue making other products. If Nintendo stopped making games, the company would be gone. And despite a variety of missteps throughout their history (Virtual Boy, N64, MotionPlus, stereoscopic …
PlayStation Now? PlayStation, No!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/12/14 at 01:52 PM CT
This past week at the Consumer Electronics Show, Sony finally pulled the sheet off the garage science project they’ve been tinkering with since they purchased Gaikai in July 2012. The result of almost two years of work? PlayStation Now, an underwhelming cloud-based service for streaming ‘classic’ PlayStation 3 games to PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Sony Bravia TVs, and… PlayStation 3. There has been mention of ‘future’ compatibility with non-Sony devices, but I believe that about as much as I believe Nintendo Virtual Console games will become compatible with Steam.
What exactly does PSNow bring to the table? For starters, there’s cloud-based saving and ‘always’ having the most up-to-date, fully-patched version of a game. For finishers, there’s the ‘customer friendly’ choice between renting individual titles or paying a subscription to ‘explore a range of titles.’
Sony expects us to pay for the dubious privilege of cloud-based saves and updated …
Backlog: The Embiggening - January, 2014
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/05/14 at 02:09 PM CT
Welcome to another look into the near future. The holiday rush has come and gone once again, leaving us with the leftovers that didn’t make it out in time to be purchased as Christmas gifts. With the spectacularly low number of pre-determined January releases reaching a mere 5 titles (Steam, of course, has already had some Indie releases, with more coming throughout the month, but these releases are nearly impossible to predict in advance), it looks like there won’t be very many reasons for gamers to open their wallets again so soon after Christmas.
The five non-Indie games coming in January consist of the following:
One licensed piece of shovelware based on that lowest common denominator of anime series, “Dragon Ball Z.”
One single-game ‘compilation,’ which is essentially a rehash of the “Tomb Raider” reboot, given the game-of-the-year treatment with regard to DLC, and packaged with a couple of e-comics to give the story a bit of a boost. I’m not convinced …
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