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The
gaming market is fraught with danger, everyone knows this, or at
least learns it soon enough. You can spend five years making the
most unique, innovative and visually astounding piece of work you
can imagine, only to have someone release a game one week before
that has a few of the same features, so people start calling your
game a cheap cash-in with a few added extras. It’s a risk everyone
takes; that your idea will be taken by someone that was just a
little quicker off the mark than you.
This is the reason why when it comes to new release time
companies spend all of their money and effort making sure everyone
knows that their game is coming out, that their game had the idea,
and that it’s their game that will give you the ultimate enjoyment
when it’s released. This is now essential, as it’s now clear
that games with a blank face – ones that haven’t spent a lot of
time and money showing the consumers what they do – really don’t
sell at all compared to games that get a large amount of coverage.
As I’m sure you can imagine, hardware releases follow a
very similar format. Developers really need to put in time and money
in once the product is finished - this was proven in the huge
Handheld war that broke out earlier this year. A huge amount of
consoles to choose from all with their own unique benefits and
disadvantages, and yet even before they were all properly released
you could see company’s with full and complete consoles - and
titles to support them - just fall out of the race into the
background, as they either ran out of money or got pitted to the
post on innovation points, back in March, on release day, it seemed
to be between the NintendoDS, the N-Gage and the Gizmondo. Nintendo
reported that the NintendoDS had sold out of all its units in the
first week, the N-Gage and the Gizmondo failed to report.
For all the mistakes that software developers have made and
all the flunks hardware developers have had to clean up, none,
absolutely none what-so-ever are going to be of the severity or
sheer stupidity that one, now very well known, hardware developer is
going to make! I am talking, if you hadn’t guessed, about
Microsoft’s next attempt at a console, or how it looks at the
moment, Microsoft’s next attempt at a console release, cause I
doubt it will get much further than that!
Microsoft’s deft technique in all of this has left me
absolutely bewildered; maybe it’s just too advanced for my
understanding, and the top sharks in the Microsoft Corporation have
a whole string of numbers proving that this will work, but I’m
really am failing to see it.
There
is nothing wrong with the marketing technique for the Xbox360,
it’s plenty enough to get hundreds of innocent people running down
to their local videogame store to find out what it’s all about -
there’s nothing wrong with the information available; all the
press releases I’ve seen have told you exactly what you want to
hear. It’s just the bit after the marketing that’s starting to
go downhill. In fact the main-bit after the marketing, the selling
of the console it's self.
I
don’t know how Microsoft have done it but they’ve managed to get
to a console’s release without enough units, and we’re not just
talking a few short here. Sony on the UK’s PSP release date
shipped more than 500,000 units to be sold. Causing queues and
rushes to buy the handheld console. Microsoft, having seen this
happen, decided to ship half a million units to the ENTIRE of Europe, allocating merely 50,000 for sale in the
UK. Yes 50,000 units - that’s less than the amount of cornflake
packets sold each day, and a tenth of what the PSP managed - and an
absolutely ridiculous number to give an entire country that
represents nearly 20% of the world’s videogame market.
Not
only is Microsoft not supplying the demand they have so willingly
created, but they are also insulting every single fan that had dared
even hope to get one for Christmas. This wouldn’t be so bad if
this was just a stunt and there’d be plenty of units around in the
January Sales, but no, Microsoft have gone so far with purposefully
not making enough units for launch that the most we can expect is a
“slow trickle”, probably right up till May.
So
we are left with a choice, do we let the marketing men get away with
royally doing us over and queue outside the shops every day, just in
case one might turn up, or should we just wait for Microsoft to sort
their act out and actually SUPPLY the market, by which time, all
signs are telling us the Revolution will be here and SONY’s
PlayStation3 will be breathing heavily down our necks – which,
according to leaked manufacturing reports, are both looking
infinitely more available from launch.
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