Monday Muse: PS4 and Xbox strategies will closely reflect the commercial fitness of Sony and Microsoft
By Rob Crossley
What can we learn from that remarkable day in March 2001, when Sega killed off the Dreamcast?
Sony chief executive Kaz Hirai In an interview with The Guardian (published in 2008 but still illuminating in 2013), the former Sega of America chief Peter Moore gives insight into, among many matters, the difficulties in being beholden to a parent company.
"We [Sega of America] knew we could win," he said.
"We had a tremendous 18 months. The Dreamcast was on fire [in the US]. We really thought that we could do it. But then we had a target from Japan that said - and I can't remember the exact figures - but we had to make N hundreds of millions of dollars by the holiday season and shift N millions of units of hardware, otherwise we just couldn't sustain the business."
SEGA has announced Fearless: Year of Shadow, a campaign that celebrates Sonic the Hedgehog and his brooding acquaintance, Shadow.
GamesIndustry.biz writes: "Relic is best known for the Company of Heroes and Dawn of War games, and recently developed the new Age of Empires for Microsoft. Relic will transition to an independent studio and will no-longer be part of the Sega group of studios.
The majority of the 240 job cuts are across Creative Assembly and Sega Europe, while there will be a ‘small number’ cut from Sega HARDLight. There was no mention of other Sega UK studios, including Two Point Studios and Sports Interactive."
Sega had such a turbulent existence from the mid-90s to when they dropped out of console manufacturing entirely in 2001, it’s understandable if you’ve never heard of the Genesis Nomad.
There's this perception that Microsoft have this endless well of money they can use to simply buy their way into anything. While it certainly seems they can but they are still bound by the mechanics of business. Investors won't allow MS to just throw money at the games industry if they aren't seeing a return for that investment. I'm fairly sure that the money spent this gen on buying timed exclusivity deals was explained to the board as necessary to get a 'foot in the door', however, now that they have that, investors are going to be looking for a return.
Yes MS have 'deep pockets' but if they don't see a return they'll drop the investment like they did with the original Xbox and Zune.
There's an old Chinese proverb that goes "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
Microsoft are buying loads of fish but not teaching enough fishermen, if you follow.
This man definitely will:
http://www.youtube.com/watc...
Yeah.. "war." They play 'war' and make billions of our money and we here argue who should win.
Hirai will use Samurai spirit while Ballmer will use Kinect.
I think the biggest thing Nintendo and Microsoft has is a mascot. The mascot's for Sony has always been third party, not first party and sony never really promoted them properly. When you think of Nintendo, well they have their staple 4, Mario, Metroid, Zelda, Pokemon. Of course Mario trumps them all and when you think of Microsoft, you think Master Chief. Now Cloud is owned by SE, and you can't really have a mascot out of a car, ala gran turismo. The GTA's went multi so the success of 3, can't use that. Kratos maybe and Nathan Drake but they need to properly nurture those. Nathan looks more suitable as Kratos is a god killer and may not set well with parents. It needs to be pg-13ish and while MC does do a lot of killing, it is usually aliens. He fights to save and preserve humanity while Kratos is hellbent on revenge and whatever makes him tick. I haven't played too much of the God of War series so I am just taking things off of what I see. Plus you can't have a mascot that has been on other platforms. At least console platforms as Mario has been on arcade and Halo on PC/Mac? Bottom line is that Mario will never see the light outside a Nintendo console and MC will never see the light outside a Microsoft console.