spawn more overlords!

[erf_]

Game industry, I love you, but you're bringing me down.

Do you remember when the Xbox 360 launched at $400? And the PS3 at $500? It never crossed my mind to buy either of those consoles at launch. Not because the launch titles were disappointing (promises of then-distant Lost Planet, Halo 2, and Gears of War for Xbox and Metal Gear Solid 4,

Comments

[erf_]

Yeah, it's fascinating how consumer perceptions of what a video game console is have changed. In 1974 Pong was a frivolous luxury item, a useless but fancy tech toy (like those Sharper Image LED waterfalls). In 1977 the Atari 2600, while still a luxury item, was marketed as a useful everyday gadget that also gave the kids something to do--it was a low-end home computer. By 1983 the late Atari, Magnavox, and Coleco models were seen as over-expensive, under-useful toys in an emerging desktop PC market, and their advertisers fruitlessly tried to advertise them as accounting and calculating machines that did more than just play video games. It wasn't until after the crash that the Famicom/NES cemented the console's position in the American household as an affordable entertainment device, so much so that More Than Just A Console projects like the 3DO and the Jaguar never took off. And now, after 20 years, we're back in high-end luxury device land again. I guess a PS3 is now what a cable box was in the 1990s, or what a VCR was in the 1980s...

The irony is that from the end of the 1980s video game crash up until the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era, one of the major reasons why consoles have managed to stay competitive is because they are far cheaper than PCs, since PCs obsolesce quickly and require the frequent purchase of optional hardware. (For the price of an ATI Radeon 5870 graphics card, these days, you could buy an entire Xbox 360. And a Sound Blaster AWE 32 ten years ago was about the same price as an SNES.) Consequently, while PC games of that era far outperformed their console counterparts in graphics, PC games split off into a sort of high-end niche rather than dominating the gaming market overall. But as the price of consoles goes up, that distinction is weakening. So the idea that Sony and Microsoft's console divisions are aiming to compete with the PC market is itself kind of frightening--and bad for consumers' pocketbooks.

[erf_]

Sixteen. Sixteen years ago, in 1994, the AWE 32 was the price of an SNES. I forgot that it's 2010 already.

*sigh* We grow old fast these days.

[retch]

Man, I'm about to hit the point of being out of college 4x as long as I was in it...

[erf_]

For what it's worth, I keep forgetting just how much older you are than me.

[retch]

For what it's worth, younger people always come off as ridiculously young (so far), while older people can be progressively more years older than me without seeming older... Pretty much by the time I graduated, freshman seemed like small children. Now anybody in their mid-20s seems like a small child. On the other hand, when I graduated, people in their late 30s seemed old. Now people have to be in their 60s or something to seem old... :)

[erf_]

I guess age sort of compresses over time? I don't see you (and my other thirtysomething friends) as being all that different from me, age-wise, and even fortysomethings just feel like people who are really good at being thirty. But people five years younger than me seem really tiny, and ten years younger than me are children.

Marriage and childbirth change everything, though.

[retch]

pretty much, though my married friends with kids don't seem older, just more constrained in their lifestyles...