I’m not going to ramble on today before I get to the meat of the blog. It’s early in the morning on 4th of July and I have cook-outs to go to.

Sony has finally had it’s Xbox Live moment. Yep, this Thursday I logged on to Playstation Network to see what trailers were for download, and lo-and-behold what was finally put up for purchase? The Resistance Fall of Man map pack. I use the term “pack” loosely as there were only two actual maps in it. How is that a pack? To think that the “map pack” was delayed multiple times and all it contains is two lousy maps?!?!? WTF was the hold up? Couldn’t decide on the number of crates and barrels? But the lack of content wasn’t the clincher. The clincher was the price, 8 bucks!!! Eight freakin’ dollars for two multiplayer maps?!?!?!?!? You can get over a 1,000 Sudoku puzzles for $3. Sony has finally had it’s horse barding moment. For a while I thought the PSN was going to be everything Xbox live wasn’t namely reasonably priced content and free access. This isn’t so, price creep has already started to happen on PS1 titles and I question the value of the PSN only games such as Stardust HD and Calling All Cars. I’m amazed that this hasn’t made headlines like the horse barding though, it is in the same realm of lack of content vs price. It’s sad to see that the average gamer is already used to paying higher price for less content in less than a year. Oh well, at least they haven’t started charging for PSN…..yet.

“NPD: Heavy Gamers Heaviest Spenders“.

The figure that matters most to me are the heavy game, buying 13.1 games a quarter and the casual “kid” gamer at .8 games bought per quarter. While the article does not give out numbers for the “adult casual gamer” I believe it is the same crowd as the article states this crowd has parental oversight. Now lets do a little math and come up with some numbers. The 3.8 million “heavy gamers” buy 205,200,000 games a year. This means that the game industry needs to more than double the number of people that even play games in order for the casual to rival the success of the “traditional gamer”. 16 casual gamers are needed to equal the same number of sales from a heavy gamer. Now none of this happens in a vacuum.Nintendo makes money off of every console…so they are laughing all the way to the bank already, and even the “heavy gamers” likely own a Wii. The “non-traditional gamer” is where the growth is, but focusing too much on the “growth” segment often alienates the avid user. As so often is the case as you try to make your product more accessible (in video games this means making the game easier and shorter) you often alienate your loyal customer base. In this case you better be bringing 16 people on board for every 1 you lose.

As people call down the PS3 for price we get a good look at what $100 less will buy you. Turns out that the hardware failure rate for the Xbox 360 is around 33%. Many not believing this number put an unofficial survey on Digg and it turns out that over 800 people in the comment section were going on their second, third, and fourth Xbox 360’s. What’s amazing is the number of people that forgive this. Apparently it’s the price of the console that matters to Xbots, not your ability to play it. PS3 failures are at less than 1% This would mean diddly squat if it wasn’t for the fact that these problems have been occurring since launch and Microsoft is still saying they are isolated incidents. It was noted that the 360 elite made use of a larger heat sink, but it did not move to an available 65nm to fix the problem. Why not fix the problem?? Unless this product is ending it’s useful life or it costs more to change the system and replace current consoles than to just replace faulty consoles. This has me wondering along with comments from the past , about the 360 not being a true sequel to the Xbox, if we will be seeing a new Xbox soon. Nothing right now, but I’m looking into my crystal ball and I’m seeing an announcement next year for a new Xbox. The announcement will be for a 2010 release which fits right in with previous statements for Microsoft that they see the Xbox with a five year shelf life. As much as everyone likes to think that Microsoft is doing this kick ass job I don’t see it….and my anti-Microsoft stance has nothing to do with it.

It’s a generally held belief that the first Xbox was a glorified computer that did nothing but cost Microsoft money, and that it’s main purpose was to allow Microsoft to buy it’s way into the console industry. I see the 360 as a continuation of this…..it is rumored that Microsoft is making money on the 360 now. How much of that is being spent buying up exclusivity and replacing hardware? I don’t see great games running the gammot of genres on the Xbox. Just FPS, FPS, 3rdPS, Halo3,Forza2, etc, etc. Where’s the platformers? Where’s the RPGs? Where’s the RTS? If you were ever a PC gamer you know that halo is over rated. Everything it has done was done years ago on a PC. In fact if you go back far enough you would know that halo started out as an FPS MMO for PC, then for Mac, then Xbox, then scaled back to a standard FPS. People talk up the “live experience”, but that experience is no different than what Gamespy has offered for years. Sure you have achievements but who doesn’t have those today. They are hardly difficult to get nor are they exclusive. The only countries Xbox is successful in is U.K. and U.S……Blu-ray has been widely adopted in the rest of Europe, Japan is nearly totally uninterested, and it is outsold in Australia by the PS3 and Wii. I think despite the hype the 360 still has the same problem as the origional Xbox.

Turns out not only did Sony lose exclusivity with Fatal Inertia it lost the game all together. It has also lost Beautiful Katamari Damancy. On the upside though there are several new exclusives announced for the PS3. But this has me wondering with Sony’s “no buying exclusive rights” and “we can do it. why can’t you” development stance. What is Sony’s strategy? Ported games look worse than the 360 when they don’t take advantage of the PS3 hardware and the Blogosphere (yay used a web 2.0 term) jump on this as proof that the PS3 is inferior. How is Sony going to prove it’s not?