Daily Archives: November 3, 2005

Big news: Bioware and Pandemic are merging! Pandemic is maker of Full Spectrum Warrior, Destroy All Humans, and Star Wars Battlefront; Bioware produced Jade Empire, Knights of the Old Republic, and Baldur’s Gate.

The merging of two high-profile studios (as opposed to their eventual absorption by publishers) makes a lot of sense. Scale = bargaining power (and, as Bioware noted, much-craved independence). Everybody wants scale nowadays … hard to do business with the Walmart and EAs of the world otherwise.

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Merrill Lynch predicts that next gen component costs will result in Xbox 360 selling at half the price of the PS3 by end of 2006. They’re blaming this primarily on Cell processor and Blu-Ray costs.

Inelastic fan demand and the forces of “luxury branding” notwithstanding, this prediction (if true) implies a serious advantage for Microsoft. Remember the famous Nintendo GameCube pricedrop to $99 — pretty much saved that console from failure.

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• Xbox 360 launch price details
• Explanation of Cell processor architecture
• More rumors about PS3 launch price

Steve Salyer, president of IGE, predicts that worldwide virtual asset trading in video games could balloon into a $2.7 billion market by the end of 2006. This figure probably doesn’t reflect the fact that the majority of that value cannot be extracted into the real world, and most if it will evaporate when a game’s popularity fizzles out (and its virtual world is abandoned.) That said, maybe my WoW hunter really is as money as he looks…

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• Offshore “game currency farming”