Eight news stories 21.2

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  • Doctors use Wii Games for Physical Therapy. A nice positive story that shows the ever expanding use of games. Also a prime example of unintended consequence.
  • Just how embarassing can you get. A Microsoft demonstration Xbox 360 at GDC gets RRoD. The man from the BBC sees, films and reports it. The story spreads like wildfire on the internet. This is about as big a marketing disaster as you can get. It is going to cost Microsoft a lot of sales. They really should come public now with the problem and what they are doing about it.
  • $1 billion is too cheap. So says a VP of Epic in response to the rumour that Microsoft are going to buy them for this amount. There are plenty of good reasons why Microsoft would want Epic. But would they be able to get better value than they did with, say, Rare?
  • Amazon to launch digital game distribution system? This makes a lot of sense. They have a huge customer base, they understand IP products, they can see that plastic and cardboard distribution is going to die and they know how to market a big catalogue on the web.
  • PS2s for $99. In the Target sale. Here we see one of the advantages of a two model range. And it is strange to think that in just 5 years the current top end consoles will be in the bargain bin.
  • The best game industry analysts are only 60% correct. You are far better getting your background knowledge here. Already several predictions have come true.
  • Microsoft working on next version of Xbox live. Frankly it would be surprising in the extreme if they weren’t. There are areas in the existing offering that could be a lot better and there are a whole ream of features that need to be added. Plus there is engineering it to work with a forthcoming version of Zune.
  • Brain controlled video games. For $299 and goes on sale this year. Imagine Brain Training with this!

2 Comments


  1. I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.

    Jason Rakowski


  2. I had to laugh at the XBox incident, although I would have thought any console would have had problems stuck in a tiny perspex box with very little ventilation.

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