Titanic Panic

 

Buy up all the third party developers, then kill
your video game brand! Oh, the stupidity!

When you've been in the hobby for as long as I have, you start noticing industry behaviors with predictable outcomes. For instance, when a major game console takes a major price dive, chances are high that the company who made it is already planning to give it the old heave-ho. By way of example, there's the hundred dollar Dreamcast in 2001, the hundred dollar GameCube in 2004, and this, right now.

I bought the budget model of this system, which was already experiencing its own steep price drops. Given the currently dim fortunes of the Xbox brand (and grumbling from third parties who are openly wishing they'd just axe the damn thing and get it over with already), I'm glad I chose to pinch pennies. Who wants to pay five hundred dollars for a game system that's destined to surf on the lip of a two figure price tag a year later?

I'm less glad that I paid $120 for a memory card, when they'll probably tumble to a fraction of that price at Best Buy in three months. Don't think I don't remember what happened with the Playstation Vita's stupidly expensive proprietary storage!

By the way, I remember Chris Kohler, one of the major figures of the second wave of video game fanzines, sharing an anecdote about Trip Hawkins in a feature he wrote for Wired years later. (Yeah, some people actually get paid for doing this "video game journalism" shit. It's increasingly infrequent, and comes with the risk of literally being lynched by GamerGaters, but it happens.)

"I told him that a friend (editor's note: me) bought a 3DO a few years after it launched for $25, and his face just dropped. It was the same face I would have made if I had bought the latest Final Fantasy game and found a copy of Army Men in the box."