Tag Archives | Gaming

PSP Go Retailer Backlash Begins

Posted by Jared Newman on September 16, 2009 at 11:57 am

When the PSP Go launches next month, the Netherlands’ largest video game retailer won’t be selling it, according to Eurogamer.

Nedgame says the biggest reason it won’t carry the PSP Go is the price of 249 euros ($250 in the United States), which isn’t justifiable when the existing PSP-3000 costs 169 euros ($130 here). The retailer also knocked the PSP Go’s smaller screen size, at 3.8 inches compared to 4.3 inches.

But there’s another, more obvious reason behind the decision. Because the PSP Go has no optical media slot and the games are download-only, Nedgame would essentially be digging its own grave by selling the handheld. Sure, the retailer could sell game vouchers, as GameStop does with the download-only Patapon 2, but no physical media means no used game sales. I’m not familiar with Nedgame, but at least in the United States, used games generate monster profits for Gamestop.

Meanwhile, Eurogamer’s Spanish-language Web site is reporting a rumor that several retailers in Spain won’t support the PSP Go for similar reasons.

GameStop is selling pre-orders for the PSP Go, so it seems the retailer is willing to support it. However, after the handheld launches on October 1, it should be interesting to see how well GameStop promotes the PSP Go, and how the retailer treats downloadable titles. We could see more incentives for buying games in the store, such as the early demos offered for Patapon 2. I’d like to see frequent buyer discounts and some way to let shoppers come in, try the title out and then buy it using an in-store kiosk.

Whatever happens, I don’t think banning the PSP Go from store shelves is a good idea. Customers who want it will ultimately find a way, and retailers will have burned bridges.

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Mario, and Why the Wii Will Still Reign

Posted by Jared Newman on September 15, 2009 at 12:19 pm

It’s been rumored lately that Nintendo will cut the Wii’s price from $250 to $200 some time this month. That wouldn’t be a surprising maneuver, as Sony and Microsoft have recently tinkered with their own home console pricing.

But at first, I laughed off the news. Nintendo doesn’t even have a killer app for the holidays, I thought to myself, wondering whether a measly $50 price cut would really help juice the lead between the Wii and its competitors.

Then again, I initially forgot about Mario.

Confession: I’ve had enough of Mario ever since 2007’s Super Mario Galaxy — hailed by critics as nothing short of perfection. In my eyes, Mario 64 was the last game to bring with it a sense of magic, so either I simply grew out of Mario, or Nintendo dropped the ball. Either way, after 20-plus years of playing video games, I approached Galaxy with a “been there, done that” mindset, and the game didn’t sway me.

But I’m in the minority, and sometimes I lose sight of Mario’s enduring popularity. That’s why, when I looked at NPD’s August sales figures, I was shocked to see New Super Mario Bros., a Nintendo DS game that is 3 years old, hanging in 12th place for software sales. And that doesn’t count the number of people who bought a used copy of the game. The Nintendo DS was the top-selling console last month, at 552,900 units, and I’m sure many of those consumers chose New Super Mario Bros. as one of their first purchases.

Here’s the kicker: New Super Mario Bros. Wii is coming out in November. It’s essentially the same side-scrolling, 2D Mario game you’ve been playing for decades, but with up to four players at a time. The idea couldn’t bore me any more, but I know people will lap it up. Pair that with a Wii price cut, and Nintendo’s golden again.

I know, I said 2009 is the Year of the Playstation 3, and I still believe it, in that Sony will hit a major turning point this year. But Nintendo, which has reigned since the Wii debuted in 2006, isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

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Calling It: 2009 is the Year of the Playstation 3

Posted by Jared Newman on September 11, 2009 at 4:50 pm

Even with the reduced-price PS3 Slim arriving at the tail end of August, Sony’s console gained considerable ground on the Xbox 360 and the Wii according to the NPD Group, coming in just behind the former by 5,400 sales, and the latter by 67,400 sales. Indeed, the stage is set for the PS3 to top both the Wii and the Xbox 360 in September.

So let’s make the declaration, shall we? 2009 is the Year of the Playstation 3. Nintendo and Microsoft fanboys, delay your vitriol while we qualify this.

The “Year of the Playstation 3” has become somewhat of a punchline in the gaming press. According to numerous accounts, 2008 was supposed to be the PS3’s year, except that the console never dug itself out of last place in North America, and had no signs of doing so. (To be fair, Sony’s doing just fine overseas, as PC World’s Matt Peckham wrote last month.)

At the start of this year, when some were bold enough to back Sony again, chuckling ensued. But now, things are looking up. It’s already September, so there’s a lot of catching up to do and little time. Come the end of the year, Sony may still be on the bottom of the heap in annual sales, but it’ll have something its competitors don’t: Momentum.

Yes, I said “momentum,” the buzzword Sony’s PR team kept using to describe the Playstation brand even as it languished through the end of last year. No joke, Sony has it now, thanks entirely to the PS3 Slim and the price cut it brought along. Meanwhile, the Xbox 360 seems to be stagnating with a pseudo-price cut, waiting for Project Natal to tap the casual audience. Same goes for the Wii, which desperately needs something to spark interest and stop the shedding of year-over-year sales.

Sony, on the other hand, has nowhere to go but up, and a cheaper, slimmer console is the best way to begin the ascent. Come 2010, the console wars will look a lot different.

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Apple: Hey Sony, Nintendo, Bring It

Posted by Jared Newman on September 10, 2009 at 4:48 pm

Man, we’re getting so close to having Apple as a real contender in the handheld game console wars, I can feel it.

As Gamespot points out, Apple’s music-themed event marked the first time that the company publicly argued why the iPhone and iPod Touch are better gaming options than Sony’s PSP and the Nintendo DS. Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, went so far as to say those other two consoles are “not a lot of fun.”

Now, we can debate ad nauseum the merits of iPhone and iPod Touch gaming vs. the PSP and the DS. We can argue which device is the most successful, has the best games or has the greatest chance of survival. But that’s boring. What’s really great about the console wars is all the bickering and spin that goes along with it. In that regard, Apple showed that it’s ready to play hardball.

At yesterday’s event, one of Apple’s slides touted a catalog of 21,178 “Games & Entertainment Titles,” compared to 3,680 DS games and 607 PSP titles. Of course, it’s totally bogus for Apple to include “Entertainment” in the mix, as we’re strictly comparing gaming devices here. A quick check of Apptism shows 14,657 games on file.

If Apple’s still ahead, why fudge the stats? Because that’s what you do in the console wars. I’m reminded of when Sony argued last January that it’s a better value than the Xbox 360, assuming that you bought the basic Xbox 360 Arcade, then purchased the most expensive hard drive available and threw in an optional Wi-Fi adapter. Sure, the argument is valid, but the math is fuzzy.

And then, there’s all the trash talk. Back in February, I looked on with delight at the way Microsoft and Sony were sniping at each other. Yesterday, Schiller argued that “once you play a game on the iPod touch, you think ‘hey, [the DS and PSP] aren’t so cool any more…'” Burn!

Sony and Nintendo haven’t fired back yet (in fact, Sony’s been unbelievably timid on the matter), but if Apple keeps up this rhetoric, it’s only a matter of time until the sparks fly. I can’t wait to watch.

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Reimagining the Future of Digital Games Distribution

Posted by Jared Newman on September 8, 2009 at 5:45 pm

With Sony launching the download-only PSP Go next month and Microsoft recently launching premium game downloads over Xbox Live, the seeds are planted for a fully digital future.

For the most part, I’ve viewed this as a good thing, but an editorial by Jim Sterling at Destructoid today gave me pause. Entitled “Fearing the future of digital distribution,” Sterling argues that digital distribution, for all its convenience, will come at a price. Game publishers will dominate the marketplace, Sterling writes, offering no refunds, no used game sales and “no accountability whatsoever,” merely because they can. I disagree.

The current behavior of Microsoft and Sony make for inviting red flags in Sterling’s argument. The Xbox 360’s Games on Demand — downloadable games that also sell at retail — are often more expensive to download than they are on disc. And Sony will sell downloadable PSP games that cost more than their boxed counterparts. “The games industry will set its own price at whim, and without any more alternatives, consumers will have no choice but to pay whatever they’re told to pay or simply stop buying games altogether,” Sterling writes.

The problem with this is that it’s based on limited examples. Though Sterling acknowledges that doom-and-gloom is only one possible outcome, it’s hardly the most likely.

Downloads won’t dominate unless consumers endorse the idea, and that requires incentives. Without a reason to go digital — for instance, better value over a hard copy, or rewards for loyalty — consumers will stick with Gamestop. Publishers, in turn, won’t fully commit to digital because there’s no market for it.

Even if console makers slowly grab more market share with downloads, to the point that physical media is out of the equation, it won’t mean the end of competition. In fact, it’ll create more of it. I see a future where a gaming console isn’t only about the best graphics and most exclusive games, but how much value exists in the digital marketplace.

The store that treats its customers the best and offers the most incentive to shop will prosper, while the oppressor will find a smaller audience overall. That’s nothing to be afraid of.

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Google Digs Video Games, Not Aliens. Cool!

Posted by Jared Newman on September 7, 2009 at 11:04 am

If you happened to use Google on September 5, you might’ve seen a UFO sucking up the second “O” in the company’s name.

When Google changes its logo, it’s usually to denote a holiday, or the birthday of a famous scientist or thinker. But this “Google Doodle,” as they’re called, had the ‘net puzzled. The answer started coming together when the company Tweeted a cryptic message that linked to a picture of the logo.

Translating the Tweet, “1.12.12 25.15.21.18 15 1.18.5 2.5.12.15.14.7 20.15 21.19,” into letters of the alphabet yields the following message: “All Your O Are Belong to Us.” From there, all it takes is a some encyclopedic video game knowledge (or in my case, cheating by reading this Telegraph story) to know Google was celebrating the 20th anniversary of Zero Wing.

This is the Japanese space shooting game turned European Sega Mega Drive release, whose butchered English translation resulted in “All Your Base Are Belong to Us.” The phrase turned into a viral phenomenon thanks to a video from the Something Awful forums.

Mashing up a bizarre techno track with supposedly real-world appearances of the game’s dialog, the video is nothing short of brilliant. I can’t say that All Your Base was the first viral video, but it was the first one that really caught my attention for the way it spread so thoroughly into pop culture, despite its obscure origins.

So, kudos to Google for acknowledging it.

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Happy (Almost) 10th Birthday, Sega Dreamcast!

Posted by Jared Newman on September 4, 2009 at 3:15 pm

sega-dreamcast Next Wednesday will mark the Sega Dreamcast’s 10th birthday, having launched on September 9, 1999. Less than a year and a half later, Sega discontinued the console, facing competition from Sony’s Playstation 2, the looming threat of Microsoft’s Xbox and some friction within the company.

1UP editor Jeremy Parish is celebrating a little early with a retrospective. He does a good job of looking back on Sega the Console Maker, explaining why the Dreamcast was an important product — it had great games, mostly — and what led to its demise. But what really struck me while reading was how much the game console business has changed and solidified over the last 10 years.

Ever since Microsoft launched the Xbox in November 2001, we’ve been playing consoles from the same three manufacturers, with virtually no outside competition. That was unheard of in the 90s, which saw a handful of console makers come and go. The 3DO, Atari Jaguar, TurboGrafx-16 and Neo Geo all took a stab at the home console market, but either failed miserably or didn’t produce any progeny.

Sega was a different case because, as Parish points out, it had been around. Even before the Genesis fiercely competed with the Super Nintendo, there was the Sega Master System, and before the Dreamcast came the Sega Saturn. Sega’s exit from the console market was significant because it made room for Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo to dominate.

I don’t see any of those three manufacturers bowing out any time soon. If the Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and the Wii all stick to their goals of a 10-year life cycle, we’ll be looking at 15 years with the same three brands. The only competitors I see on the horizon are cloud gaming services such as OnLive and Gaikai.

That’s not a bad thing as long as everyone’s innovating. It just underscores how console gaming is no longer a wild and unpredictable industry. By dropping the Dreamcast, Sega made the transformation possible.

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Oh, Just Tell Us the Xbox 360 Failure Rate Already!

Posted by Jared Newman on September 2, 2009 at 5:11 pm

Another day, another stab at the Xbox 360’s failure rate.

This time, the estimate comes from Square Trade (PDF), a third-party electronics warranty company. Based on customer reports, the company says Microsoft’s game console has a 23.7 percent chance of dying within two years of purchase. Half the errors reported to Square Trade involved the infamous Red Ring of Death.

Overall, the Xbox 360’s one in four chance of failure makes it far and away the most unreliable console on the market. By comparison, 10 percent of Playstation 3s were defective, and 2.7 percent of Wiis needed repair.

SquareTrade is the same company that in February 2008 said the Xbox 360 has a 16.4 percent failure rate, and we’ve seen other estimaes all over the map. In 2007, GamePro talked to some EB Games and Best Buy employees, who generally estimated that a third of all Xbox 360s had to be sent back for repair. More recently, Game Informer conducted a poll of readers, 54.2 percent of whom said they’ve dealt with an Xbox 360 hardware failure.

The funny thing is, you tend to be skeptical of such high estimates until the Red Ring of Death happens to you. My Xbox 360 kicked the bucket a few weeks ago, and suddenly I started realizing how many friends have gone through the same thing. If someone told me that 99 percent of Xbox 360s were bound to die within 10 years of ownership, I’d be skeptical of the claim, but not overly surprised if it turned out to be true.

Which is why I’d like Microsoft to come clean. Let’s clear the air of all these wildly speculative failure rate estimates and get some precise numbers and facts in order. If I treat my console right, can I expect it to last forever? If not, how long is it before every press of the power button is a crapshoot? And what are the odds that the Xbox 360 will outlast the three-year warranty that comes with every new console purchase?

Of course, I’d be foolish to expect such transparency out of the blue, but I doubt the truth could be much worse than third-party guesstimates and anecdotes. Or is it?

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Why Shadow Complex’s Impressive Sales Matter

Posted by Jared Newman on September 1, 2009 at 7:51 pm

shadow.complex During the first week after Microsoft released Shadow Complex for the Xbox 360, something extraordinary happened: Over 200,000 people plunked down $20 $15 to download the game.

That makes Shadow Complex — an exploration-themed shooter in the same vein as the classic Metroid — the most downloaded single-player Xbox Live Arcade game to date. Compared to boxed retail games, 200,000 sales for a downloadable game isn’t too shabby, either.

There are a few reasons why this is important news. Foremost, at $20 $15, Shadow Complex is expensive for an Xbox Live Arcade game. Prices for these downloadable games have been trending upwards lately, not because Microsoft is gouging its customers, but because the games themselves are becoming more substantial. To put it another way, they’re worth the money you pay for them, and the big numbers for Shadow Complex prove that this trend is worthwhile.

Shadow Complex is also a bigger game, in megabytes, than its peers. For a long time, Microsoft restricted the size of Xbox Live Arcade games to 50 MB. This allowed all games to fit on a memory card so Xbox 360 owners who didn’t buy a hard drive could play along, but it put constraints on game development. Since then, Microsoft has slowly let the size of Xbox Live Arcade games creep upwards. Shadow Complex measures 835 MB, and its strong sales show that Xbox Live Arcade games don’t necessarily need to hold back in file size to be successful.

Finally, Shadow Complex is a good, long-lasting game that returns to the 2-D platforming style of the NES and SNES era. It’s not retro, per se, nor is it a cash-in on an old franchise or a casual game with Wii Sports-like appeal, but it nonetheless caught the interest of Xbox 360 owners. Marketing and hype certainly helped, but so did uniformly positive reviews.

With the cost of big-budget game development spiraling upwards, the games industry is practically killing itself. Smaller, downloadable games could be the way out, provided they’re substantial enough to satisfy hungrier gamers. With all this in mind, we should be expecting and hoping for more games like Shadow Complex.

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Okay, Sony, Now You’re Definitely Competing With the iPhone

Posted by Jared Newman on August 31, 2009 at 4:40 pm

Remember in March, when Sony Senior Marketing Vice President Peter Dille dismissed the iPhone? “The iPhone games and apps are largely diversionary, whereas we’re a gaming company and we make games for people who want to carry a gaming device and play a game that offers a satisfying 20+ hours of gameplay,” he said in an interview with GameDaily.

I’d love to hear what Dille thinks now that Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is coming to the iPhone. The game, originally released for Nintendo DS in March, was announced for Sony’s PSP in June and will arrive on October 20. The iPhone version is scheduled for release some time this fall, 1UP reports.

This is the inverse of Sony’s recent announcement of PSP Minis, a set of small-scale, inexpensive games targeted at the upcoming PSP Go. While that move represented an attack on the iPhone’s cheap gaming marketplace (though Sony wouldn’t admit it), GTA’s migration to the iPhone is a counter-assault on the PSP’s 20-hour experience.

The announcement partly suggests that game developers and publishers are getting confident in the iPhone as a serious gaming platform. More importantly, if the iPhone version of GTA proves equal to its PSP and Nintendo DS counterparts, it opens the door for more ports of dedicated handheld console games.

I’m not simply talking about a paring down of big franchise games, such as Assassin’s Creed and Metal Gear Solid, because that’s already happening. What I’m wondering is, how long will it be before the same handheld video game is simultaneously announced and released for Nintendo DS, PSP and iPhone?

And if that happens, how long will it be before Sony finally acknowledges that there’s a third enemy in its midst?

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