Eclectic Dreck said:
So you advocate that a company give away a product at a loss of hundreds of dollars in the hopes that the average customer will buy the dozens of games it takes to make up the difference and turn a profit? I'm pretty sure that's an unsound idea.
I believe the entire po
jFr[e said:
ak93]****Disclaimer****
(I am not trying to start a revolt or encourage piracy in any way. I am just a gamer that would eather like cheaper consoles or far cheaper games.
I don't mean to sound complainy or whiny I just wish someone would do something!!!)
In no way am I saying we should do this, but it makes for good conversation!!!
Consoles sholud be free. As extream as that sounds... it's true. Think about it for a minute. At $300 a PS3 Slim is not cheap (though cheper that a PS3 once was) a Wii... $220 at least Xbox arcade packs are only $200, but still! After that inicial price, come game after game after game all startin upwards of $50.00s (except for chepo Wii titles which should be illigal [I'm kidding]). This is where the free consle idea lies.... the games. If companies offer consoles for free via EB game or Best Buy pick up or mail... whatever and charged an aditional $20.00 on a game, that would pay for the console.
Say the average gamer owns 10 games (low as that is) that becomes $200.00s in console revenue.
Some people own 30 games... $600.00s additional revenue for free consoles. The only company that may get bitten by this would be Nintendo as there are A LOT of Wiis in seniors homes where all they play is Wii Sports.
To prevent multple consoles being given to the same person, they could implement a complexe registration prosess that would ensure one console per person.
There you go.... Consoles should be free (this does exclude PCs and MACs as that would be imposible to do).
Make sense? What do you think?
Hmmm, well I can see it happening but not for a while.
I understand where your coming from unlike many though. The industry does claim that they sell their consoles at a loss (except for Wii) and what your talking about is basically selling them for an even bigger loss.
The thing is though that with games already costing $60 a pop, I think making them say $80 a pop would do more damage than the one time payment of a couple hundred dollars that defers their cost. Truthfully I think that extra $20 makes a BIG differance.
I expect something similar will happen eventually though, but I suspect it will be done as a move towards globalization. It won't be towards the end of our human generation though if we ever see it.
A lot of science fiction authors have predicted the idea of access to information becoming an inalienable human right, and one catered to by corperations if not goverments. This was one of the themes of "Cyberpunk" and works like "Max Headroom" even if they also (well mostly) focused on the down side.
The idea being that by providing everyone with free access to a global network, which we will call "Vidnet" for no better generic term, it allows the relatively easy tracking of the population as well as piping information directly to every single person on the planet, allowing goverments and corperations to advertise easily, distribute propaganda, and of course sell products to everyone within a single format.
Given how cheap mass production might get, giving everyone the equivilent of a Ipad at least for free would probably be made up by the numbers.
While it's very retro, for the right atmosphere think of say "Max Headroom" where they would show pictures of bums who had televisions all over their squats, even if they had nothing else. That's pretty much the right idea (and was tied in to some absolutly pitch black humor).
I won't go into the details, but the bottom line is that I can see it as a possibility, and science fiction writers have predicted a lot of things going on now fairly accuratly.
Of course the reason why this is relevent to game consoles, is because as much as I dislike it (for reasons related to where this can go) is that I feel all vidnet receptors will effectively be game consoles along with everything else. Sort of like what services like Onlive want to try and do.
Though basically we're dealing with this happening in steps, and basically the biggest one before it goes here will be enough corperate mergers and such that some of the current monopolies effectively break up a bit, and everyone decides that instead of competing over format it's better to establish a universal, global format, and compete purely on content and manufacturing frills. Once that establishes itself, arguements like the ones over the "digital divide" will lead to it becoming viewed as a nessecity, at which point you'll gradually get to the point of socialized distribution for "humanitarian" reasons which will also put ridiculous amounts of power into the hands of those who control that technology and can track it. Imagine having every person from the meanest homeless dude, to the most successful politician effectively "bugged" because they are all dependant on the same tool/system. Plenty of stories about it.
Not saying it WILL happen, just saying I can see it happening down the road, and based on some other predictions, it actually seems fairly likely even if it seems outlandish to people now.
