Karl Kuras wrote: > > vs. Capcom 2). Also, lets face it, console games were starting to get > really held down by the lack of things such as harddrives and network cards, > and there is no reason (or financial sense) in reinventing the wheel when > these things already exist.
Actually, it makes perfect sense to reinvent these things since one of the whole points of consoles is to keep costs down so that you can make money on the hardware. You can add these things to any new console design. The only reason Microsoft is getting away with selling a fairly powerful PC as a console is because they're losing $150 per sale (they make money on game licensing, which is why you pretty much can't buy an X-Box or GameCube without buying a "bundle" deal). They're also riding the success of the PC as a consumer device in general; only in the last two years is something like this even possible with today's consumer computing power. Sony is betting the farm on this concept as well; they're losing something like $70 per console. Only GameCube makes a little money on the console hardware itself. (So did Dreamcast when it first came out but at $50 nowadays they're a *steal*.) The concept of making money off of licensing only is significant enough to note in its own paragraph. ;-) For the first time in history, consoles are being manufactured *to sell at a loss* so that they can sell the games and try to make money off of licensing. It's the same concept behind the world of e-commerce (and the spectacular failure of many dot-coms in the last 18 months). That model doesn't work too well; I'm very curious to see what happens in the next 2 years. These licensing costs *are* passed down to the end-user, which is why the PS2 version of Red Faction retails for $49 while the PC version retails for $39. I'm not looking forward to paying kRaZy m0n3y ($59 and higher) for console games. That flew last decade when the market was smaller but it doesn't fly in today's world. Speaking of cost: Does everyone remember the first time they saw some N64 games that were $69 when they were first released? That travesty of pricing is what happens when you combine licensing with the high cost of hardware (the carts use up to 32MB of ROM, which is very expensive in terms of manufacturing and materials). I'm curious: Why do you think consoles were getting bogged down by not having internal hard drives? Regarding X-Box as being "the most powerful": A very strong argument can be made for console hardware being less powerful on paper but more powerful when specifically used for gaming. The PS2, GameCube, and Dreamcast all have "vastly under-powered" graphics subsystems when compared to a GeForce3 (the nvidia chip inside an X-Box), but the PS2 has a faster bus subsystem between it's dual procs, the graphics hardware, and the memory controller. Dreamcast has a PowerVR as its graphics controller, which does smart tile-based rendering and makes games like Sonic Adventure possible (when you go to the top of a building or mountain and look 180 degrees down and you realize you can see then entire game world below you *and there's no slowdown*.) Stuff like intelligent tile-based rendering can "fix" inconsistent coding on the part of the 3D engine programmer(s). > (p.s. notice that I make no mention of my terrible spelling error from the > last post) :-) As won't I. ;-) Sorry for noting it -- I'm usually not that snotty -- but it just whacked me so hard that I had a hard time blinking my eyes in unison for a couple of minutes. ;) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/swcollect@oldskool.org/
