Notes from a 45 minute trip through Best Buy:
Wow, premium PC games are looking weak. A small display area, and few games of note. It seems like more than half of the PC shelf space is pushing much older titles and/or budgetware. Railroad Tycoon 2, released almost 7 years ago, is on sale on the jewelcase shelf for $9.99. Railroad Tycoon 3, released almost 2 years ago, is nowhere to be found.
I’ve long been interested in doing a good game for kids (i.e. edutainment), but, as always, that market looks awful. Four feet of shelf space, with every single title either a movie/TV license, or something that was developed 5+ years ago (i.e. old Reader Rabbit titles). You simply cannot develop a new edutainment title these days that is not a license (or, rarely, a sequel to an old brand like Pajama Sam). That’s a shame – imagine if PBS and Nickelodeon completely stopped making new kids shows, or Disney stopped making new movies and just kept re-releasing the old ones and making the “Lion King 4 – Pumba Gets Even More Flatulent!”.
Unfortunately, as bad as the title selection is at Best Buy, it’s better than the local Target, and EB Games and the other strip mall vendors have virtually stopped selling PC software.
On the bright side, you can buy really good PCs for about $600 now. E-Machines has one with a Athlon 3400+, a 200MB hard drive, 1GB of RAM, and a respectable video card for about $600. Wow – that’s a great machine.
They also had a 37 inch flat screen display, basically a TV that they were pitching as a monitor, for $2300. Its resolution was 1920 x 1080, progressive, which is quite good. Running a video loop, it looked really nice. But when I exited that and looked at the Windows desktop, it was clear that this would not be a good monitor for normal PC uses. Text was blurry and hard to read, and you had to sit back about 3 feet from the monitor to really see the whole thing.
My lone purchase of the trip was a couple of new Putumayo CDs. I’m a big
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| Anonymous | Posted: 2005/8/11 15:27 Updated: 2005/8/11 15:27 |
 Re: A Walk Through Best Buyi bought the Paradox Strategy 6 pack at EB a few months ago - so at least some definitely carry PC games - EB really tends to vary from store to store.
EUplayer |
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| Anonymous | Posted: 2005/8/12 3:37 Updated: 2005/8/12 3:37 |
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Re: A Walk Through Best Buy Text was blurry and hard to read and you had to sit back about 3 feet from the monitor to really see the whole thing.
The display was mostly likely set at a non-native res. A friend uses a Samsung 31" TV as a monitor, and it looks great, IMHO. |
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| Phil Steinmeyer | Posted: 2005/8/12 8:32 Updated: 2005/8/12 8:32 |
Webmaster   Joined: 2005/2/7 From: Fenton, Missouri Posts: 33 |
Re: A Walk Through Best Buy No, I checked in Desktop settings, and it was at 1920 x 1080.
Then again, I may have high standards for text crispness - I use a Dell 2005 (20" LCD) which is very sharp. The big TV monitor would have been ok by the standards of 5 years ago, but against a good LCD, it doesn't hold up. |
| Anonymous | Posted: 2005/8/12 9:32 Updated: 2005/8/12 9:32 |
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Re: A Walk Through Best Buy And take a gander at the PC sales list at the moment... http://biz.gamedaily.com/articles.asp?section=news&email=&article_id=10294
The fact that Roller Coastery Tycoon 3 -still- goes up is a bad sign--it means not that much recent is selling. And I'm pleased for the folks at Her Interactive, but can the unit sales of a Nancy Drew title really be that high? PC gaming is a total afterthought now. We need to find some other way to make this work. |
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| Anonymous | Posted: 2005/8/12 10:30 Updated: 2005/8/12 10:30 |
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Re: A Walk Through Best Buy You go to a bookstore, and its not unusual for a book to stay a couple of years on the bestseller lists no? and big sales for very old titles. Cause its not all driven by the latest tech. Maybe PC games are reaching that point, where the marginal improvements of technology arent enough to obsolece moderately old games.
OTOH books are a much larger market than PC games, so the lack of sales for new titles is more of an issue. But the question than becomes if PC games can stabilize as a smaller market, vs the "death spiral". EUplayer |
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| Anonymous | Posted: 2005/8/13 6:21 Updated: 2005/8/13 6:21 |
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Re: A Walk Through Best Buy Interesting post and often the topic of my local game magazines in one way or another.
I am not sure what to make of it though. Part of me says that maybe it is good to finally get rid of the old model which seemed to focus in putting out sequels of same few genres out time after time. Sure it is a risk to do something new/something that everyone else is not doing, however given that you have for example 10 FPS titles and maybe 2 of them are good, isn't the odds of having your title in the 8 mediocre titles quite high? If you create something new you probably have little competition and perhaps don't even need to spend as much money since if your thing is really "new" there maybe no established standard for what is "perfect". I used to think programming and designing was great since it allowed to create things no one had thought, go where no ... Sure there seems to be new belief in this, for example what I've heard Nintendo say - but since the PC game market seems to be drying up it would be time to consider going back to the drawing board, come up with something that's infeasible on consoles and great on PC and forget even trying to make a console port of it ever. The power and fast network connections of new PC's allow doing a lot more than what we've seen so far and it doesn't have to be another MMORPG or FPS title. What a lack of imagination. Wrights Spore is interesting, but I think the some of the ideas could be used as a base for whole new type of games. I hope Spore succeeds and brings some needed life to the PC games.. |
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