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By: Bruce Thursday, September 25, 2008 10:38 AM

Sectors: Computer and Technology
Symbols: AAPL, MSFT

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Microsoft to spend massively promoting the 360. With emphasis on the family and casual gaming. This is the hammer blow. Sony cannot afford to compete with Microsoft on price and they cannot afford to compete with Microsoft on marketing. In fact Microsoft have Sony so comprehensively beaten that they are now going after Nintendo.
Blu-Ray hits the skids. If you think about it Blu Ray video players are a bad purchasing proposition, even at $200. They don’t offer all that more than a DVD player with scaling and the amount of available content is minuscule compared with DVD and a lot more expensive. To compound the damage, legal film downloading is growing apace and offers many advantages over physical media. Could Blu-Ray become yet another failed Sony media standard?
Xbox 360 heads for one million sales in Japan. They were already the best selling console in Japan before the price cut. Now they have a succession of titles targeted at the Japanese gamer, something Sony have been strangely lax about. The Japanese 360 turnaround is a major feather in Microsoft’s cap and has surprised most analysts and commentators.
Phil Harrison enthuses about iPod, it is ”changing the way we consumer and interact with media.”The problem he has is the very low barriers to entry with iPod publishing and the very high online availability of pirated content. But still he is right, and he has the heritage IP to profit well.
Warhammer off to a great start. It is selling very well and the whole MMO infrastructure is working properly. There is a lot of positive feedback. If Mythic and Electronic Arts build on this they should soon be number two to World of Warcraft, which would then put them in position to chip away at the market leader.
Sony whinge about lack of third party development for PSP. Don’t they realise that the PSP business model has been destroyed by piracy and that valuable development staff are best allocated to more lucrative platforms?
Microsoft cancel Halo MMO being developed by Ensemble Studios. It would be more than fascinating to know why. The brand would certainly handle being extended in this way, done correctly. And MMOs can be huge revenue generators. Something obviously wasn’t right here.
Erotic Japanese iPhone games. These are quite funny. But beg the ongoing question of when will the mainstream game industry become less prudish and address the obvious demand for more grown up products?

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