No surprises here - Game renters don’t buy the games they rent

Posted in Console, Games, World of Warcraft, by mskaggs on November 29th, 2007

Magid Associates confirmed through a study that when a gamer rents a video game, it’s unlikely they’ll buy it afterwards.

Their data shows that less than 1 in 10 gamers buy a game after they rent it and then those people only buy 1 game for every 10 they rent.

Some might say this is a reason enough to shut down game renting or even make companies who rent games pay more to game publishers for each rental. What if instead, we turned the situation around and asked game publishers(and developers) to build better games?

The reasons sited for “not” buying included the games being too short and the quality being too low.

Imagine that…gamers are tired of paying full price for games they don’t think are worth the money. Then again, maybe they only have $50 to spend and would rather rent 10 games and play them a few days each instead of buying one game they can keep (and beat) forever?

As the installed base of game machines continues to grow in the US and worldwide, it seems logical that there will be more console players with less money they want to devote to spending on games.

The economic model of online games like “World of Warcraft” solves the rent vs buy issues by having the triple win of great content, a huge amount of content (can’t finish it in a weekend) and only being available with a monthly subscription or prepaid game card. With all the money they are making, it only makes sense that some of those features and benefits will start migrating their way to console products as well.

Link to the article at PC World.

Mario Galaxy Hits the Shelves in Japan…

Posted in Casual Games, Console, DS, Mario Galaxy, Nintendo, Wii, XBox360, by mskaggs on November 8th, 2007

And immediately dominates by selling 250k units in the first week.

Apparently it also sold more units than the next 9 top selling titles put together (more in this article from GamesIndustry.biz).

The next bit of interesting data from the same charts is how many of the top 10 titles were on each platform.

The tally:

6 of the top 10 selling games were on the DS

2 of the top 10 selling games were on the Wii

1 of the top 10 selling games was on the 360

1 of the top 10 selling games was on the PS2

Another sign of the strength of hand helds for sure. I love it when companies know their stuff and just execute no matter what the conventional industry thinking is. Go Nintendo!

GPhone - changing the playing field

Posted in Console, GPhone, by mskaggs on November 6th, 2007

Google announced their new “phone OS” and everyone’s already talking about how it’s going to change the industry, the world and more.

More here at CNET

Wouldn’t it be great if there were an “Open Game Console Alliance”? Interesting timing between Gerhard Florin’s comments at EA and this.

One Gaming Platform

Posted in BBC, Console, EA, Electronic Arts, Gaming Platform, Gerhard Florin, PC, by mskaggs on October 26th, 2007

Gerhard Florin is one of the smartest people I worked with at Electronic Arts, and I would go so far as to mention, one of the smartest I’ve ever met. He “gets it”.

I like his comments in the BBC article about wanting an open standard single gaming platform, but I agree that it may be a long time coming.

It’s arguable that there are definite benefits to having multiple platforms each with their own technologies. Maybe we should just rewind a bit and ask Xerox, HP, Digital, Sanyo, Texas Instruments, Tulip and Wang if we could borrow their arguments for why their PCs in the early 1980’s were not true IBM compatible. We could even ask if they would change their mind given what they know now.

True, the PC hardware market is different than the console market, but if we did have a single platform for gaming, attention could be more squarely focused on creating content rather than re-jiggering code and graphics to work on another hardware platform.

You can see the full article here “Open Gaming Platform”.