New Zelda bonus disc coming for GameCube!!!

[YoshiM]

Crikey. I hope I didn't start all this. I shall never again speculate about the wisdom of a company's particular moves, because I can hardly guess at how they work.

Nonetheless...

Stats or no, the PS2 was gobbled up like it was a Thanksgiving turkey. Even in the 50K people metropolis known as Sheboygan where I work there were people LINED UP OUTSIDE OF STORES. That has NEVER happened before for a game system here.

It wasn't too long ago that the N64 (with Ocarina of Time) was selling out at stores during the holiday season, and some merchants had to resort to putting up signs in their windows stating as much.

True, but were N64/Ocarina of Time bundles going for $400 to $1,000 on eBay at time of release? Didn't think so. I was stating the fact that seeing people in the town I work in stand in line for something that wasn't a)free b)cheap or c)didn't involve beer or the Green Bay Packers is an amazing event.

Even with the bundle, N64 with Zelda still didn't unseat Sony then and the bundles hasn't done anything now.

As for Soulblazer's comment on the market competition: yes there was more competition but I don't think it really meant a whole lot in the long run. In the early to mid 90's before the N64 we had the 3DO, CDi, Jaguar, Amiga 32 and TurboDuo along with the SNES and Genesis/32X/Sega CD platforms. Who pulled through to the next era of Saturn vs. PS1 vs. N64? Nintendo and Sega. So while there was a heated competition, I don't think it was nearly as cut throat as one may think.

[sisko]

And the reason Sony probaly makes money on PS2's? Those things are the cheapest POS I have ever played on. Nintendo systems you can drag through hell and back and they STILL work! (maybe they are built TOO well?)

You do have a point here. If Sony for once built a quality hardware product that didn't crap out after the first two or three years on the vast majority of users, they wouldn't have had to constantly replace theirs and Sony wouldn't be anywhere close to the 60 million mark.

Oh, God, not THIS tired urban myth again. Can ANYONE provide anything other than anecdotal evidence to prove this ludicrous statement? Does ANYONE really think that, if PS1s and PS2s were breaking down at such a rate that "the vast majority of users" had to "constantly replace theirs," consumer-protection agencies wouldn't take swift notice?

Also, please point out the many ways in which the GameCube is less "cheap" in its construction than the PS2.

-- Z.

Consumer agencies can't do crap. Sony has the legal federal warranty on their unit and thus they are protected. Also most units tend to last for a full 1 - 2 years, well past the 90 day warranty.

I state this because
A) I as well as most of my friends have had to replace theirs by now,
B) Rants left, right, backwards, and forwards I see on newsgroups, websites, message boards, and the like.
C) Dozens upon dozens upon dozens of customers who bought their PS2 at the electronics store I worked at told me they were replacing theirs, and finally
D)Dozens upon dozens upon dozens of customers who bought their PS2 at the video game store I also worked at told me they were replacing theirs.

If you say that none of that is true, you're just lying to yourself.

[ozyr]

I think that Queen of the Felines or Sniderman should move this to the BattleZone. This was supposed to be a posting on the New Zelda bonus disc coming for GameCube!!! Not a bloody, Nintendo is dead, PS2 is great, yadda, yadda, crap. Keep to the point!!!

[lendelin]

I think that Queen of the Felines or Sniderman should move this to the BattleZone. This was supposed to be a posting on the New Zelda bonus disc coming for GameCube!!! Not a bloody, Nintendo is dead, PS2 is great, yadda, yadda, crap. Keep to the point!!!

Oh yeah, to the point...the Zelda bonus disc is great!! GREAT, I'm tellin' ya!

Ozyr, this is a heated debate and has only a slight link to the original topic, but nevertheless it's a good one with intelligent arguments. A heated battle is a good battle as long as it doesn't get insulting. I genuinly enjoy discourse, in particular if you have to change your own opinion confronted with better arguments. A good thought is one of the few enjoyable things in life, like good food and good sex.

I think a lot of you see the current situation a bit too dramatic. It's actually a common restructering of the market which was foreseeable. The more the videogame market became successful and expanded from a kids market to an equally important adult market, the more it became attarctive for big powerhouses. The traditional toy manufacturers (Nintendo, Sega) are either in trouble or dead as hardware manufacturers. One electronic giant and THE PC giant entered the market, and they entered the market becasue they followed the money trail. MS introduced W95 and W98 as THE gaming platform of the future, at exactly the time the PC game market started to loose in a landslide to the console market.

It's easy to criticize Nintendo for past flaws and mistakes we're all aware of, but Nintendo didn't do so far not so bad considering the two financial giants they have to deal with. I seriously doubt that a "normal" CD format or a DVD playing capability of the GC would have helped at all. I think that the unfortunate design of the Cube with the launch color had certainly a more negative impact for sales up to today becasue it reduced Nintendo imagewise to a niche market, an image they have to loose if they wanna be competitive. There is a retro-gaming negative bias which is a big obstacle for N.

They tried a lot of good things though. They made the Cube developer- friendly, they paid money for exclusive deals with publishers to get rid of the kiddie and old-skool gamer image, they terated third party developers better than in the past, they presented an unprecedented line-up of their strongest franchises within six months, they're trying to open the burdened realtionship with SquareEnix to get an even better line-up of games. They tried a lot, and still nothing helped becasue it turned out that once you give an already established system with a "cool" image a headstart, it's difficult if not impossible to catch-up. Even MS with all its clout, "cool image", great hardware specs strategy, and adult oriented market strategy was unable to manage it. The market is overheated right now with a high number of great quality titles, which means that certain developers (and increasinly more so in the future) in trouble will go for the most established system as the example of Acclaim and Eidos show.

Nintendo is in trouble, but I don't hear the death bells ring. Key is that N will hold on to the monopoly in the handheld market to compensate for losses in the console market; but this won't happen. At least one of the giants will enter the handheld market becasue there is a lot of money to earn, and second it's a startegy to get one competitor out of the market. If you recognize that one of your competitors stands on one leg, you try to cut it off or at least cripple it so he can't walk..

For the next gen systems, Nintendo has to do much better in the console market; but this will be very difficult, and can only be managed with an image change. How? I have no idea, there are no easy receipes. One thing is for sure, Sony won't get a headstart anymore from Nintendo or MS. Nintendo might recover, but it's probably their last chance.

...and, yep, Japanese firms know bankruptcy and competition, oh how they know both very well.

[Duncan]

I punched in with what I thought was a pretty solid and well-reasoned post back on page two; apparently no one noticed it in the least. Thanks for that!

Anyway...

If there is a decline in the gaming industry, as some have said that might happen, Nintendo could survive it, where I think Sony would cut it's losses and pull out of the gaming market.

...does anyone else think that Sony is perhaps causing a "second crash"? Some of the same signs are appearing -- lots of crappy and rushed-to-market licensed games (the Matrix and Tomb Raider franchises for starters), new developers arriving out of nowhere to turn out a bunch of titles on the cheap, retailers and companies putting all their eggs in the most profitable basket. Plus, there's a definite over-reliance on the success of one company that even makes it hard for other industrial giants to gain competitive ground.

The familiar "PS" logo starts to look a little like Atari's "A" symbol when you squint the right way, doesn't it?

Maybe I'm being a bit premature, but consider the current "dung-to-gold" ratio among PS2 games at the moment. How many games now being released have definite long-tem star quality, honestly? And note that many marginal titles nowadays have to drop somewhere under $30 before they start to see any real sales.

Think also about the growing backlash against violence and immoral behavior in video games. It's something that's been an ever-present theme through the medium's history, but is now gaining even more prominence as the world grows increasingly more worrisome. (Remember the crime waves of the 1980s and early 1990s, and how people tried to point to various video games as part of the problem? Now compare those tame little diversions to something as realistic as Grand Theft Auto...see the point?)

And on a related note, realize that we're right in the middle of a major generational and political attitude shift -- some have postulated that this same sort of societal upheaval may have contributed to the first video game crash.

I'm not saying it's definitely going to happen, but maybe we ought to start preparing just in case something untoward occurs in our beloved hobby.

Duncan

[hydr0x]

Not true; Sony makes money with every PS2 sold, and has since about the 20-million mark, when the company's enormous R&D costs were recouped.

-- Z.

where do u take this bullshit from????? Sony recently announced they will reach break-even (get all development costs back) in the mid of 2004

I know that SONY and Nintendo are looking at the next gen of consoles (as they should be), and that Nintendo will have ONE more chance to do things right. They have to offer something better than what SONY does in terms of hardware. They HAVE to make it affordable, and/or compatable with the GC in some way. They MOST definitely have to make it play DVD. AND most importantly, they absolutely have to have a decent sized library of truly innovative and kick ass games at launch.

do u really think DVD compatibility will be of any importance in 2005????? in 2005 no one will NOT have a dvd player, there will be (and already is) no need for a console that is able to play dvds in mediocre quality

[Mayhem]

Do you know though... how many people are happy with playing DVDs in mediocre quality? Answer... a lot! In fact a lot of early Japanese sales of PS2 were so people could have a cheap player, the buyers hardly touched the games at all

[NvrMore]

How does it make me a Sony fanboy to cite facts and figures? As I've said before and will say again, it would personally benefit me if the PS2, Xbox, and GCN were all thriving; I'd have more things to write about and more opportunies to make money. But as it stands, it's a Sony industry, and I just freelance in it. On a professional level, Sony treats me like dogshit, whereas Microsoft is wonderful to work with, so I certainly have no motives in that regard.

Without trying to drag individual specific critisism into the focus, but the point is the majority of the time your "facts and figures" are either conveniently one sided while turning a blind eye to other equally relevant "facts and figures" or your arguments are decidedly clouded by personal opinion and bias.
Taking for example your jaunt into the PSP at the beginning of this thread you're essentially pimping for a piece of hardware which isn't even developed yet, has no proven capabilities, has initial hardware specifications that would push manufacturing expenses beyond a limit by which even the money bazooka that is MS would be hesitant to front the financial hit in order to put it below $250, and which even by the predicted power delivery/consumption standards of 3 years from now would have a battery life of a Lynx running on rechargables. Indeed you're openly declaring it to be the gaming tech miracle of the new millenium based on little more than Sony's on PR routine and and an ill percieved perception of Sony having some miraculous manufacturing capability which simply doesn't exist, especially given to their inability to produce a standard PS2 at a cost below $100 and the shortcommings of their other divisions (all of them) resulting from their manufacturing cost proving higher than the competitions (thereby resulting in their higher shelf price).

In the meantime, you condemn (for example) Nintendo as being the "first loser" for being second in the console hardware market.. yet given the fact that N are making a healthy profit and have statistically maintained/gained market share given the higher state of competition in the market, as far as businesses and business aims (key point: profit) go N are actually performing better in relation to the other competitors given that they started out making profit on their hardware from the word go and continue to build fanancial grounding and future backing in the forms of their 2nd party investments and developments (*deep breath*), whereas in Sony's case despite their being #1, their other divisions are draining Sony's reserves and placing increased pressure and drain on the computing and gaming division in order to compensate for their losses, thereby compromising it and limiting current and potential advantages it may have had otherwise.

What this all means is that for future product releases, Sony is unable to take a significant financial hit in order to place their products initial pricing at an acceptible price to the consumer if the manufacturing cost proves costly, especially if they also plan the release of another significant hardware product (ala PS3), otherwise they will inevitably compromise said other product. So if/when manufacturing costs prove too high they cannot underwite them ala MS because unlike MS they don't have other divisions capable of supporting the burden until the manufacturing costs drop and the marketshare has been gained and because of the company's overall relevantly (relevant to holding #1 spot and the performance of the company as a whole) poor past financial performance they don't have the massive financial grounding/reserves to underwrite such a double expense.

...

With regard to Nintendo stopping production (again), if you're going to bring up the point of demand then it worth noting a few things.

Firstly, all of the console manufacturers have significanly lowered their predicted sales forecast and have acknowledged a significant downturn in demand for console hardware, that includes Sony who have in turn lowered their estimates by several million units for this and the upcoming fisical year. This is in relation to a growing slump in the gaming market despite the PR generated image to the contrary depicting a thriving, limitless bountiful market. Indeed market analysts have predicted said slump to continue and increase at least until the next revision/generation of hardware is released after which the state of the market can be reassessed.

Secondly, in tune with the above, all of the manufacturers overestimated market demand, largely based on a poor perception that the "boom" would continue indefinately - the only difference is the face that they put on the whole thing, whereas some put their hands up and say "oops" others put a brave face on and cover for the market downturn for the sake of not cracking the previously mentioned PR image of a booming and popular market.

..

With regard to Sony's massive output figures and the point of the quality of their hardware.

Well, firstly Sony declares how many units it has shipped as opposed to sold, there is a massive difference. This isn't to say that Sony isn't the market leader and doesn't have a significant lead, of course they are. However figures for shipped units take into account additional factors which don't relate to a systems sales, including backlogged stock held by retailers and mid-shipping storage and returned hardware (if a sold unit is returned faulty, another is given to the cust, thereby accounting for 2 units shipped despite the purchase of only 1) which given the PS2's high rate of return works out nicely.

Which leads on the the PS2's hardware quality (or lack thereof) issue. Yes the PS2 has far poorer construction than other consoles, you'd have to be blind, deaf, dumb and deluded not to recognise such an issue. Everywhere accross internet people (even the devoted PS2 fans) admit and vent about the issues encountered, the return rates in games and electronic stores are far higher as most store clerks will state, I couldn't even begin to tell you the number of people I know who have had a PS2 pack up on them (in some cases several times) only to be met by a unsurprised and expectant member of staff at the store, the lawsuit brought against Sony regarding the issue, the loss of dvd and game playback functionality.. it goes on and on.

It certainly doesn't happen because the units are "used so much more", it's far higher than is proportional to the number of units sold and it's certainly not a crack group of ninja pigmies flooding the net on a vicious campaign to slander Sony x_x

..

Oh yeah.. disk format choice. The GOD's are an excellent gaming medium and are more aptly designed for gaming than DVD's. They have far more tech advantages than people realise and on a cost basis they not only prove as cheap as DVD media but also given to N's deal with the manufacturer reduce the cost of prducing the gamecube hardware... plus they have the whole anti-piracy deal going on. Benefits for gamers, benefits for business, sweet.

[back on topic]

New free zelda disk..

[mikeetler]

With regard to Nintendo stopping production (again), if you're going to bring up the point of demand then it worth noting a few things.

Firstly, all of the console manufacturers have significanly lowered their predicted sales forecast and have acknowledged a significant downturn in demand for console hardware, that includes Sony who have in turn lowered their estimates by several million units for this and the upcoming fisical year. This is in relation to a growing slump in the gaming market despite the PR generated image to the contrary depicting a thriving, limitless bountiful market. Indeed market analysts have predicted said slump to continue and increase at least until the next revision/generation of hardware is released after which the state of the market can be reassessed.

Secondly, in tune with the above, all of the manufacturers overestimated market demand, largely based on a poor perception that the "boom" would continue indefinately - the only difference is the face that they put on the whole thing, whereas some put their hands up and say "oops" others put a brave face on and cover for the market downturn for the sake of not cracking the previously mentioned PR image of a booming and popular market.

Only thing wrong with the above is that Sony announced an increase of production from 2 Mil/month to 3 Mil/month within weeks of Nintendo's production halt. You don't increase produstion just to please shareholders and the PR department.

While I would love to see the Gamecube thrive, the last time we saw a company "temporarily" stop production was Sega and we know how that turned out. I'm not saying the Gamecube is finished, but Nintendo is definitely having a hard time defining and marketing to their customer base.

[Ed Oscuro]

Words, words, words...

Facts will say whatever you want them to say, ESPECIALLY if you find the right ones reported the right way ;P

I'm not getting into it for just that reason, and I would like to say that I think anybody who's interested in keeping their credibility should not contribute any further to the confusion in this thread.

[zmeston]

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[zmeston]

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[zmeston]

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[zmeston]

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[SoulBlazer]

I just think if you're going to bash something or someone you should throw in some good things also. Or maybe that's just the kind person in me.

And there are many things Sony and Microsoft have done right, just like Nintendo. (Heck, Sega has done a lot of right things also -- perhaps their biggest is saving themselves from going under and focusing on cranking out what they have ALWAYS done best -- great games! )

[Ed Oscuro]

[quote="zmeston"]

Ooh, a little fanboy flare-up at the end.

While DVD players are indeed the fastest-selling home-electronic doohickey ever, DVD compatibility will still be of importance in 2005, yes.

-- Z.

Well, nevermind...guess you've just got your mind set on disproving every one of the little bastards, eh? :P

I wouldn't have had the time to go research the facts, but it's nice to know that somebody's willing to back up what they say.

[zmeston]

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[zmeston]

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[digitalpress]

I enjoy debates like these IMMENSELY. Thanks for keeping it flame-proof fellas. And thanks for opening up and showing "how the other side thinks".

See? Logic is our friend.

[Ed Oscuro]

I never have a happy-gamer hat on, except in real life I'll let people tell me that the new Mac G4s (yes, not a typo there) absolutely blow the PC out of the water. Heh...

[zmeston]

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[hydr0x]

Not true; Sony makes money with every PS2 sold, and has since about the 20-million mark, when the company's enormous R&D costs were recouped.

-- Z.

where do u take this bullshit from????? Sony recently announced they will reach break-even (get all development costs back) in the mid of 2004

I'd ask you to provide me a link or source for Sony's announcement of a mid-2004 break-even, then I'll gladly share mine.

-- Z.

no problem, i couldn't find an english news item but a german one (no help to you though), i will shortly translate it:

"In an Interview with the japanese Business-Magazin 'The Nihon Keizai Shimbun' Sonys Chief Financial Officer Takao Yuhara said (and this is a quote): 'As planned, we expect that our investment in the PS2 will be (sorry i just don't know the english word for this, he means the break-even) in the mid of 2004' "

oh, and to your fanboy comment, just because i think dvd compatibility will not be a point in 2005 makes me a fanboy of some brand/console?? that's an interesting connection...

[sisko]

[quote="zmeston"]

And the SP is the best portable game system ever made. Masterful design. (Hey, that's a current thing-done-right!) I can almost understand why Nintendo was so publicly nonchalant at E3 about the announcement of the PSP.

-- Z.

True, I can only think of one design flaw with the SP. No interchangeable batteries! What were they thinking?!

Honestly, thats the only reason I haven't gotten one yet. I probably will in due time (IE when my GBA dies), but interchangeable batteries are a huge necessity.

[zmeston]

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[Ed Oscuro]

If I was Nintendo...more portables...more MERCHANDISE and special stuff, books etc for the fans (that's what they used to do, after all, and it can sell well if you know how...less e-Reader!) and less major consoles would be good.