Hard-Core Becoming Synonymous With Broke
With the announcement of the PS3 mortgage like pricing, and following on the bundle-bundle-firstborn-bundle of the Xbox 360, it’s getting annoyingly expensive to be a hard-core gamer. You know it’s bad when even the general media pick up on it.
Yahoo recently ran a story entitled “Cost of being hard-core video gamer climbs“, proclaiming loudly to the entire world what we poor gamers have known for years. It costs a lot of money to be on the bleeding edge of the gaming industry, whether its trying to keep up with constant computer upgrades or the lastest-greatest console gadgets.
The article deals only with Microsoft and Sony, and places a great deal of emphasis on the importance of early adopters to help and dampen the shock-induced slow retail climb of the next-gen consoles. But, as prices continue to rise the old question of ‘how much will finally be too much’ arises and has started to cross the minds of retailing powerhouses such as Wal-Mart. And if the retailers aren’t happy, particularly the big boys that have a lot of say, we may begin to find next-next-next gen consoles only in specialty shops, or sitting pretty beside the 72″ plasma televisions.
The reason that I mention this piece at all is for the bit at the bottom that states that the price of the console is not the only debt incurred for these new systems. Sometimes I feel like this issue is completely overlooked between the folks mooning over how wonderful the 360 and PS3 are graphically, and other complaining ceaselessly about the high cost. To get the most out of these systems, in fact, the reason that the graphics are so good, is their high definition nature. The amount of improvement that you’re going to see on a regular old television will be noticeable, but let’s face it, unless you have an HDTV you’re missing out on the whole point of the next-gen-high-tech-look-at-my-pretty-face machines. So off you must go to Wal-Mart to buy your new television and out of your wallet flies another $900-9000 (depending on what you deem a suitable television size). Oh, and you’ll likely need a second controller, more if you want to have a party of four, a subscription to online services, and maybe a headset so you can talk smack…ah yes, and the games…that’ll be $yourleftleg, thank you.
The funny part about the whole article is the picture of Shigaru Miyamoto on the left hand side. Nowhere in the entire article is Nintendo mentioned except for in the caption, and the fact that he’s shown holding the Wiimote is a bit of an oops moment. Afterall, Nintendo is the only one that seems to be committed to keeping their systems affordable by innovating in areas other than the number of processors required to keep it running.
This article brought to you by my Dad. I’m not joking. Thanks for the tip!
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