Master of Ossus wrote:Your argument is that consoles have to play comparable games in order to be competitors. Neither console had competition in this regard. In any case, you are ignoring the point that even in an unregulated monopoly there is still a limit as to the price that the monopolist can charge, which is dictated by their profit maximizing point.
Oh, I'm sorry, that's right. The Game Gear and Lynx were technically SUPERIOR products compared to the Game Boy when it came to the types of games being played, rather like how the Neo Geo Pocket and Sega Nomad were superior to the only slightly updated Gameboy Light.
There was no game that the Game Boy had that could NOT have been made for its competitors. The only reason they were not was because of Nintendo's strength of titles. The biggest detriments for the other portable systems was the lack of battery life compared to the technologically inferior Game Boy.
Never claimed that consoles were cheaper, back then, but they are no less expensive, now, because of your vaunted competition. Moreover, in the 1980s and 1990s electronics as a class were more expensive: they've gotten much cheaper in relation to other goods and services since then.
You're under some strange assumption that Nintendo held a monopoly in the 1985-1995 period. It did NOT. It had market dominance, which is entirely a different thing and you should well be aware of that fact if you know anything about economics as you claim to. Let us be clear, by removing Sony from the playing field, the only possible competition for Microsoft is Nintendo, which is quickly trying to forge a separate market from the current Sony/Microsoft field. If you continue your mad desires, Nintendo would itself be excised from the gaming market, leaving only Microsoft. Then it becomes a gaming monopoly, which is a bad thing.
The 1985-1995 period, meanwhile, is vastly different, as around a half dozen different companies were all scrambling for a piece of the video gaming pie, apart from Nintendo. But hey, it's not like Nintendo was at ALL worried about any of its competitors taking a part of its gaming market. It certainly never worried about Sega.
So competition didn't even do anything to keep down the price of PS3? Thank you, competition. Well done.
Well, if that isn't one of the most idiotic statements you've made so far. Let's look at the sales. Wii, the cheapest, is on top. The 360, the average priced, is in the middle, and the PS3, the most expensive, is dead last in sales, attach rates, and exclusives.
Oh wait, looks like competition DID punish someone for charging a higher price. Looks like you're WRONG. AGAIN.
I have a degree in economics, fucktard. I know what competition is. The Wii and PS3 are not complements. They are substitute goods. Period. If you continue to claim that they're not, then you're truly lost to reason. The idea that the two consoles could NOT become substitute goods regardless of what other products exist in the marketplace is even crazier, since they obviously have substitute qualities.
For someone who has a degree in the subject, you sure seem to be a fucking idiot here. How many claims have you made that ended up being utterly wrong? I don't care what your degree is in, because you don't seem to be using even basic logic here. Your insistence that you could easily replace a PS3 with a Wii is fucking RETARDED and only shows that you know nothing about what their capabilities are. You seem to have this idea that two consoles are perfectly equal, when it is clearly not the case. Just as two cars with entirely different specifications are not equal, neither are the Wii and PS3 equal, you inbred little shit.
Jesus, a substitute good is something that is used in PLACE OF something else. Were I to list the features of the PS3 vs. the Wii, to say nothing of the available gaming libraries, it is fucking obvious to anyone that they are not comparable products. The only way, and I mean the ONLY fucking way anyone could argue otherwise is to say "They both play games", which completely ignores everything else about them and makes it so that a fucking NES is now a "Substitute Good" for a PS3. After all, they both play games.
You can know everything in the world about economics, but if you don't know shit about the industry you're analyzing, it's not worth a fucking thing, and it's becoming very apparent you don't know a fucking thing about the gaming industry.
That's not what it says, at all. Hybrid cars and gasoline are competitors, in the loose sense of the term, since they are substitute products. You are insane if you think that the Wii does not compete with PS3.
I didn't fucking compare hybrids to gas cars, you fucking idiot, I compared MINIVANS TO SPORTS CARS.
Jesus, do you not get the analogy? One is high performance, can do things the other can't in terms of speed, handling, and so on. The other is more utilitarian, more readily used by families, who need to carry multiple people or lots of things or mixtures of both. You cannot tell someone who needs what a minivan can give that they can do the same shit with a sports car, because it won't fucking work. If the only objective is getting someone from point A to point B, well then hey, both work, but that's incredibly simplistic and if that's all that we ever needed cars to do, well then we'd only need one fucking model of car, wouldn't we? Fuck, what do you DO? What sort of economist has this limited a view of reality?
What next? You're going to tell me that butter and garlic are both easily substitutes for each other, because they're common ingredients in cooking?
X-Bit found that it was a zero-loss as of November 2006. Where's your source that claims that this isn't true? In any case, that's not a huge benefit, IMO.
Fair enough. Still, there are considerable costs WRT shipping, repairing, and bad publicity from the RROD issue that do not help Microsoft's bottom line.
WHAT? Since when do console manufacturers sell most of their consoles in their first year?
Sorry, slight misspeaking on my part, they sell more consoles their first year than on subsequent years, as a general rule. I'll take the hit on that one.
I don't think that at all, but I also think people say "Well, gee. Sony wants $600 for the PS3 and Nintendo is charging less than half that for the Wii and a game. Fuck Sony." Moreover, your analysis of the competition is a simplistic joke, and do you want to bother to explain how the PS3 "has been reasonably successful" when it's lost $3 billion?
It's sold a number of consoles close to what the 360 had sold by the same time period. It's attach rate sucks right now, due to the general lack of good exclusive titles.
It has the potential to come back into the running and turn a profit before the next generation, if Sony gets off its ass. Let's remember that the 360 has been operating at an overall loss for a long time, and it's only recently that it's come around to turn an overall profit for Microsoft.
The SEGA Master system was released 3 years after the NES--I would hope it would be more powerful than its competitor. What is your source for the Genesis claim? Every hardware comparison I've seen shows that the Genesis was substantially inferior to the SNES, particularly in terms of audio performance, and never demonstrated anything remotely comparable to the sorts of FX-chip powered stuff that late-generation SNES games provided.
Sorry, I was looking mostly at clock speeds for the processors, you're right in that otherwise, the SNES was a better system. I've fallen into the modern trap of higher Mhz = better systems. I was partially blinded here by generally better games on the Genesis.
Again, N64 was only arguably more powerful because its storage medium was so much more limited than the PlayStation. As for the Gamecube, in terms of hardware it was slightly inferior to the X-Box, which as you said blew the PS2 away. So how does this show that the loss-leader model is better for consumers? By showing that the best and worst consoles of the generation used loss-leader?
Arguably, the obvious benefit of the loss-leader model is that consumers get more powerful hardware for a lower or similar price, while the price of games stays the same. Thus, the games you play are capable of being better overall. Classically, when someone has made a more powerful system and priced it accordingly (Jaguar 64, anyone?), it has failed miserably. However, a more powerful system can stay relevant for longer and produce potentially higher quality games.
The Windows comparison is total nonsense--Windows is not in any way comparable to a videogame console. What part of this do you not understand? There's a reason why Microsoft NEVER talks about things like attach rates for Windows--they're irrelevant. Nor does MS care about computer performance, hardware specifications, etc. They neither design computer systems, nor license them.
With Windows, it is the software, and in this case, the "attach rate" is how many systems have Windows installed, resulting in more money for Microsoft. The more they can do to make Windows the dominant OS, the better. They focused on making Windows better for gaming than other systems, and really, there are a lot of gamers out there today who would love nothing better than to forsake Windows entirely, but realistically can't.
It's not a perfect comparison, but it is an example of a choice without options. If you want to play games, you HAVE to buy a Windows-based system. The similarity here is that what you propose is that if you want to play console games, you HAVE to buy a singular system, which only relies upon itself to improve, and not competition from other forces. Look at Windows. It still stagnates overall PC development, especially on the gaming front. Until 64-bit versions of Vista and to a lesser degree XP, having more than 2GB of Ram was functionally impossible, due to the limitations of the operating system. While advancement has happened, that is largely due to the fact that Microsoft DOESN'T make the boxes. With consoles, that is no longer the case. This can only lead to problems later on.
YI would say that the fact that most people use Windows gives substantial networking externalities.
And I'd say that the computing industry in general, and in fact industry in general has been hampered by having Windows be the primary OS. How many billions of dollars have been lost as the direct result of security vulnerabilities specific to Windows and its bundled Microsoft Software?
But you assume that the consoles are additive when you yourself conceded that the PS3 and 360 are direct competitors. If there were only two console manufacturers, the same market base would be reached on only two systems instead of three. That's the difference, here.
Games that can go on all three consoles are the rare case of overlap. I never said they were mutually exclusive markets, after all. 360 and PS3's big sellers tend to be big triple-A titles, like GTA4, Mass Effect, Metal Gear Solid, etc. Wii's big sellers tend to be party titles. Are there some "serious" titles on the Wii? Sure, but they tend to be more niche, and similarly there are party titles for the 360/PS3, but they tend to be cheaper games overall, and not as popular.
Oh, I get it. XBLA competes with "serious" games, but the Wii doesn't.
Not at all. In fact, if you bothered READING what I wrote, I said that the 360 Dev Tools are being used to make cheap, simple games that ALLOW devs to move ON to bigger, better things.
What incorrect information? That the Gamecube, despite not loss-leading, was comparable to loss-leading systems and actually beat the tar out of the PS2 in terms of hardware? That consoles do not sell a majority of systems in their first year of life (PS2, for instance, sold a mere
ten million units shipped in its first year of sales--obviously not a majority of its total sales).
I made a list. That you conveniently forgot to clarify or respond any of those points is hardly my fault.
Yes. Competition with PC gaming obviously had nothing to do with it.
It has, sure, but with the line now blurred between consoles and PCs as far as capability, that competition goes away, especially if it's Microsoft left in charge of both markets.
Oh, please. MGS4 and Gears of War do not look massively better than multiplat releases like GTA4. The only system on which you have an argument is the Wii in comparison to the other consoles, and you've claimed repeatedly that they're not in competition.
They do look significantly better, actually. Texture details are better, animations are better, overall details...well, it just kind of goes on from there. In Gears, you certainly don't have phone booths suddenly appearing AFTER you've already hit the invisible hitbox. Can't talk about MGS4 specifically, as I've only seen HD gameplay movies compared to playing both Gears and GTA4 on a HDTV for extended periods of time.
Moreover, the benefits of the system does not just mean overall processor power. Multiplayer games benefit from being on the 360, because they actually went through the trouble of making a solid matchmaking service that they force on all the titles in their library that go online. Sony games get slightly better performance because it's overall better hardware, but also they can be bigger because of the Blu-Ray native tech. Meanwhile, the Wii can really utilize that funky motion sensor stuff, or at least they could if they buckled down.
It's been doing better in every single region since at least December 2007--hardly the sort of dominance you've been claiming.
Hey, I'll see if I can dig up the stats used by G4, but they mentioned it multiple times today in their E3 coverage. Meanwhile, the 360 still has a better attach rate than the PS3 or Wii.
Ah, yes. The fact that some games are exclusive to the 360/PS3 and some to the Wii means that they're not competing with each other. Oh, wait, you've actually argued that exclusives are good because they show competition. Come on. You can't seriously argue that exclusive games are good for consumers, and you've not even attempted to do so. That is a far more serious cost of "competition" than the mediocre benefits that you've cited and which you have hardly bothered to quantify.
That I've not cited specific benefits of exclusive games is a serious cost of competition? There's so much wrong with this statement, to say nothing of the deliberate non-sequitur designed to distract from your litany of erroneous assertions.
But let's consider what I've said thus far: Competition breeds advancement. From advancement comes things that only your brand can do. To take advantage of that spurs your competitors to copy your successes to their products and come up with their own improvements. Wii's motion sensitive technology is something that could become more mainstream in the next generation of consoles, just like Microsoft's Live system could become more commonplace.
Features, be they games or otherwise, that are exclusive are what makes one system better than another for any basic task. A car that has a more efficient engine than another of the same class of car has an exclusive feature: There's no reason they should share that engine technology for free, it's bad for business and when companies making competing products are forced to share technology and become carbon copies of each other, the consumer is generally the one that suffers in the long run because there is less incentive to advance the technology in the first place.
In essence, your view is terminally short-sighted, thinking of nothing but immediate gain for the consumer, without consequence of the long term benefits. I'm sure cheaper food for everyone seemed great in the late 20's, but I'm not sure it was so awesome in the long term.
