>Bart you appear not to like Edutainment. I happen to disagree with
>you on this note as well. Why get into a business where all they
>do is smash, kill, rip off heads, etc. Sure it sells...but not to
>family conscious parents who take an interest in what their kids
>learn!
If you think that the entertainment business is just about smashing, killing, etc., then I'd have to say that you don't know much about the game business. Sure, there are games that have content like this, but there are also excellent games that don't. What I was trying to say is that if SW wants to go this route, the scale of the operation should reflect the state of the industry. You can't support several high paid executives on the slim earnings offered in the educational software industry. This isn't to say that it will always be this way, but for now they have to change their ways.
And, for the record, I have no problem with the education/edutainment business. I was asked my opinion as to what I would do if I was in charge of the SW ship, and that's what I did. I know that my opinions aren't too popular here, but I do have almost 15 years of experience in the entertainment software field (I started programming games on the Apple II in 1982) and I've seen many small companies rise and fall in that time. The thing that really burns my cookies about SW is that the management was never interested and never cared what was being produced: they were too busy playing hollywood-globetrotting-highpower-executive, and that's what caused the crash. And with this latest round of pie-in-the-sky let's-get-rich-off-the-internet stuff, I can see the whole cycle starting again, and more investors are going to get burned. As usual the people in the trenches are the ones who are going to take the heat as witnessed by CW's laying the blame on the entertainment and publishing divisions of SW, even though the company still isn't making any money off software (ie. the earnings last quarter included a huge chunk from sales of entertainment properties.)
I have no problems with edutainment, and I think it provides a valuable service to parents. However, edutainment is not a gold mine (as CW has been trying to convince everyone that it is) and should probably he provided via a system like PBS. That's why we see excellent educational programming on public television and trash like the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers on private.
For what it's worth,
Bart. |
