Video Games
Wii Is Creaming The Competition
2007-06-12
With a competitor like WII, it's no big surprise that Microsoft is talking about changing its game. Those numbers from VGChartz represent cumulative sales, so the gradients are the rate of sale. Urlocker has more background and more links that show this was all predicted years ahead.
In less than two months there will be more Wii consoles than XBox360 consoles. If you go to the site and play with the graph controls you can see that things look dismal for Sony and Microsoft in Japan. Wii is outselling PS3 five to one.
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Failure In A Box
2007-04-20
Information Arbitrage has some perspective and discussion on the Xbox 360 and sales in Japan (and on Microsoft's home entertainment division's performance).
Bottom line, Microsoft needs to take a long, hard look at its gaming strategy - and, in fact, its entire H&E strategy. At what point, regardless of its virtually endless financial resources, does it say "enough is enough." Would we have been better served by returning the extra cash to shareholders rather than investing it in a franchise that seems to have questionable prospects for turning around? These are the kinds of questions Microsoft management should be asking. And hopefully, for shareholders' sakes, they are.
Lack of success is not all that surprising if you look at some of the results of surveys of potential customers in Japan. These originally came from Macromill in January 2007. The graphs below were published on Flickr:
Amazingly the Xbox360 was rejected by 71% and deemed a potential purchase by only 4%. 9.3% new nothing of the Xbox360.The Wii was already ahead of the PS3.
The PS3 doesn't do much better:
And supply is surpassing demand. It's pretty amazing that the PS2 will almost certainly outsell all of them in 2007. My kids still play tons of PS1 games on our PS2 machine. If it broke, we'd get another.
Apple TV Is Very Hackable
2007-03-24
The folks over at Something Awful are hacking Apple TV. Since the ATV runs Mac OS X, this is almost trivial: pop the cover, take out the hard drive, mount it on a Mac via a Firewire case, and modify. They have it playing Xvid movies, running SSH, and more. The hard drive can be replaced with a larger one too.
I notice that it contains a ForceFeedback framework too. That means games. Only games (simulators) use force feedback.
It may seem odd that the box is as open as this. After all, the XBox and other equipment like it is locked down just as tight as the manufacturers can make it. Not that it stops anyone. But it is not odd at all when you consider that Apple is in the hardware business. An open box sells more boxes, and that is all that matters. This is really the lowest-cost Mac on the market now.
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