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 Putumayo fan – they package the best songs and artists from around the world into themed CDs. I bought ‘Islands’ (Caribbean music), and ‘Brazilian Groove’ (newer Brazilian music). Putumayo is probably the best example of label branding and consistent high quality in the music business today. I wonder if any game company will ever be bright enough to be the Putumayo of the gaming world. Strategy First had the right idea – focused, niche publishing, but they cut corners on quality and lost their focus.
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