So much fluff to sift through when he's only stating one or two general points.

celine said: ------------------------------------------------------------ For a business exercise, I gathered some friends and said, “Nintendo is disrupting. Let us brainstorm a way of how to disrupt the disruptor.” Many ideas came, but what we agreed would be the way to disrupt the Wii would be to release a very simple console whose capabilities were not much better than the GBA. Such a console would be unique in that it would only use digital distribution; all the games would be as simple but as wild as the NES and Commodore 64 games. This console would be targeted at those who love 2d gaming but enjoy playing it on their television sets. Since online gaming came well after 2d gaming’s demise, online would give 2d gaming a new life. Our little console was a ‘crummy product for non-consumers’ and would attract former gamers. Following the disruption model, the console would experience growth on the population Nintendo was ignoring or didn’t seem desirable. As the little console grew in raking profits, we could make the console move upstream and slowly get more and more of the incumbent’s (Wii) market. We knew of how insanely popular flash games were on the PC market so a console version of them could really ride the wave! ------------------------------------------------------------ Me want

 Big problem.

This causes market segmentation from the start.

No matter how you upstreamed, the values through which they are introduced will cause it to be seen as a mere imitator(unlike the Wii when it arrived) and doom the product before it even hit the shelves.Nintendo's current business model ensures that they cannot be disrupted from below as it's values are still in conflict with another and the processes that they have taken also dictate that when their values become recognized as the norm their downmarket will be seen as the lowest possible.Anything lower will be seen as the plastic dog.

The Wii cannot be disrupted by anyone but themselves.

Only when Nintendo becomes the incumbent in the nest generation will its next console be open for possible disruption(i.e.another company disrupts the Nintendo console that's trying to disrupt the Wii).

They´re interesting. but tiring.

It's from Star Control 2 :) If anybody here hasn't played that game, I seriously urge you to try it, it's available for free from The Ur-Quan Masters sourceforge project for various platforms. If you do get it, let me know and we can try to set up network melee matches, I'd love to try my melee skills against other hunams ;)

Just finished reading the Shield part... took me 3 hours =.= wow.

Nothing new really, just more stuff that should of been obvious explained.
It's kind of wierd because I was just talking with my friend about that too, heck about 2 weeks ago he an I were talking about disrupting Nintendo.

We figured something like steam but open source and free past the initial install of the console and games themselves. He makes note of Asymmetric business models a lot, which seems a bit off - that would be wierd and I wouldn't invest in that... but what do I know.

Actually he didn't he refferenced someone that did talk about Asymmetric, but he did associate it with Nintendo... probably going to have to read it agian. =(

This is an interesting tidbit:

”Even as the videogame industry’s sales have eclipsed -movie box office take in the US, the industry remains hostage to Hollywood’s blockbuster mentality: big budgets, bigger production teams, sweeping prerendered cinematics, slavish photorealism. But, as with Hollywood, the game business is not booming. Total US sales – which include console and handheld titles, hardware, and accessories – have flattened since 2002, and -major gamemakers, like Electronic Arts and Atari, are posting big losses.”

-Kushner, David. 2006, Wired, “The Infinite Arcade”

And this:

If I'm reading this right, about $.90 of the $60 for a game is profit for the developers/publishers.

The shield article was very good. Now I have to read the Sword article. 

I'm not sure these were Malstrom's best articles - a lot of repetition of previous points, and they REALLY could have benefited from some editing down to smaller size. With that said, I still recommend them as important reading, especially for those who haven't read previous Malstrom articles. A lot of really stupid arguments floating around on the Internet are answered decisively by his writings.

Sorry, I've only played Star Control and Star Control 2 on PC, though I did have a hack program for Star Control that allowed editing pretty much all attributes of the ships... but even with the crew of 6, the Arilou (or Arilou Lalee'lay as the whole name reads) skiff is so hard to hit that if it had 30 crew, it would be borderline impossible to destroy it, and most probably the other player would just give up. Unless he had the Ur-Quan Kohr-Ah Marauder or the Chmmr Avatar, of course.

Oh man, the melee alone in SC2 has such incredible depth and different strategies to master, not to mention the main game and storyline. Actually, I should look up some memorable quotes from SC2 for the quotes thread :)