From the MSNBC Website....THE NEXT GENERATION PLAYSTATION
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ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ If any system seems to have its future assured, it?s the next generation PlayStation (PlayStation 2, for the sake of brevity). Nearly every major game company in Japan is lining up to make games for it, consumers are anxiously waiting for it, and the manufacturing process seems to be moving exactly on schedule.
ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ Everybody agrees that PlayStation 2 will be powerful, and though some people challenged the specifications Sony has released, nobody is arguing the system?s power any more. The only cloud hanging over the system is price. Irimajiri says that PlayStation 2 will retail at $400, and a lot of people seem to agree with him.
ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ When asked if he believes PlayStation 2 will cost more that Dreamcast, Hudson Soft senior managing director Tadahiro Nakano, the No. 3 executive in the company, says that it probably will. ÿWith the obvious exception of Sega, every company I met with planned to make games for PlayStation 2. Square Soft, one of four companies that had system demonstrations at the March launch of PlayStation 2, showed a tape of their demo game at their shareholders meeting, and Namco has a television running a PlayStation 2 demo in its lobby.
ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ One thing is certain: Namco, Hudson Soft, Square Soft, Konami, and Capcom all confirm that they have received development systems and have begun working on PlayStation 2 games.
ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ On the other hand, Sony?s vision of the changes that will constitute the next evolution of games remains unclear. In the early eighties, 8-bit systems such as Atari 2600, Intellivision, and ColecoVision specialized in maze-chase games. The Nintendo Entertainment System was largely a platform for side-scrolling games, and the biggest games in the heyday of Genesis and Super Nintendo were fighting games.
*Caution * Caution* caffine induced rant......
They seem to be saying that it will cost more, but that consumers don't care. This is the Mindshare that RMBS needs to build.... To have people think, OK, I can't afford it now, but when I have the money, I know what I want to buy. The product is sold, They only have to wait for the cash to show up in the consumers pocket. Even if consumers don't need something so powerful, they still buy it, for the same reason that we own cars that top out at 120 MPH.... We are a society that likes power, look around the roads..... and even in countries that don't worship the muscle car, they still worship the muscle-processor, or muscle-bus, as it will soon be called.
I think one of the big aids to the BUS will be voice recognition software. It sucks up a lot of power, but lets face it, it has the same allure as the TV remote, and people will pay to have a machine that will do the work for them. They will walk twice the distance to the TV to get the remote. As my brother, a fund manager says " never bet against the laziness of the American consumer".
Rider of the Bus.... |
