I once asked an electronics store employee if he could shave off 75 percent on the $600 video card I considered purchasing. I said it was for "cost effectiveness." I think he choked on something then, because he wouldn't stop making laughing sounds until I left.
News Blips:
Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto discusses the Wii U's balance between power and affordability. "We're very sensitive to pricing, because people have generally only a certain amount of their spending that they'll devote to entertainment," he said in an interview with GameSpot. Miyamoto also felt that acknowledging advances in technology plays a pivotal role in determining a suitable price point — a more critical factor over pure bleeding-edge performance. "So I don't know that we would be able to sit here and say that it's going to necessarily dramatically outperform the systems that are out now," he said. "It's part of the balance that we strike in terms of trying to find entertainment that is new and unique."
Microsoft rolls out interactive advertisements on the Xbox 360 that use the Kinect. In a YouTube video posted yesterday, Microsoft Advertising Senior Product Planner Enrique de la Garza demonstrated how users can tweet their love for a certain commercial with just one voice command. While your Twitter account presumably buckles under the onslaught of new followers, your clever self can participate in product-related polls and search for nearby shops while watching even more commercials. I feel a Bill Hicks rant coming on, but I'll get around to it after I've finished voting on which Maybelline shampoo looks more like melted chocolate.
Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida thinks the company botched the PSP's potential. "We looked back on the PSP and what we did right and what we didn't do right with the platform," he told Kotaku. "We were too happy with ourselves, having a PS2-like experience on a portable at that time. We didn't go too much further from there." Yoshida believed that the handheld's charm quickly faded once consumers realized its hardware limitations, saying, "When you compare the gaming experience on PSP to what you get on the PS2 and PS3 — such as the bigger screen on the TV and the dual analog sticks — [players] feel compromised playing on the PSP."
Epic Games Design Director Cliff Bleszinski is "itching" for something new beyond the Gears of War franchise. "It’s just a matter of opportunity and figuring things out," he said. "So all hands are on Gears right now, in the foreseeable future. But we’ll see how things go." Bleszinski said that while Epic's subsidiary studios (such as Bulletstorm developer People Can Fly) get the lion's share of other projects, "If you’re a body in [Epic headquarters] Raleigh, you get sucked into the Gears vortex." [IndustryGamers]
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