EXTomar

It is a little late for the post but "The Rektreational" billed as a "Game Industry Dota 2 Tournament" starts today. This is a 16 team tournament made up of gaming personalities across a lot of companies and groups. Of GiantBomb interest, League of Legends a team made up of Brad, Crispy, Kessler, Pascual, Refleksy, and The Golden Doomling will be playing in this tomorrow 10am Pacific. Watch and cheer The Golden Doomling and Brad on!

Twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/rektreational

Schedule, Info, etc: http://rektreational.tumblr.com/

I know and recognize that and still say it doesn't matter anyway. China (along with India) is the fastest growing mobile market that dwarfs other regions like ALL OF EUROPE. If consoles are sluggish in Europe, why is China going to change this equation? If anything it is too late since "that ship has sailed" awhile ago.

Wasn't there a story where Dan was eating potato salad his mom made until he found it had mustard in it. And then threw it all out?

ps. This is how we make Dan's finicky tastes legendary by making up stories from half remembered stories told and retold!

And I missed it before, but what sales records are any of them setting? As already mentioned there are billions of phones and tablets out there and not 100 million console in households combined worldwide.

We are already have TVs that are Android platforms and interface directly into Google Play. We have already seen how well Stream streaming play works as a thin client. The days of buying another box you buy and stick under your TV maybe done let alone something so expensive and highly specialized in features and function like a console.

Why would they do better in China? It was also reported that part of Sony's losses this reporting quarter was losing out on mobile market in China. I have the sneaky suspicion China doesn't care about any console from any vendor as well.

The problem with the counter argument against "the all digital future" is that a lot of games are no longer built or designed to be anything but all digital. Take for instance CoD4: If you still have a disk of this it is pretty worthless by itself because to get it to run on any of the platforms it ran on requires patching of the platform and CoD4 itself. There are definitely platform and software version combinations that will work but one will never know if it is compatible or not until they try it.

But this is a problem that isn't new either. I have the disks for Ultima V for the Apple IIe. It is actually easier to get that working in emulation on a modern MacBook Pro than to drag together all of the parts necessary to even try let alone if the media or hardware is good any more. It turns out it is way easier to embrace "the all digital future" than it is to keep this junk around.

I am looking at a headline from Business Insider that popped up in the feed this morning: "Nintendo Post Yet Another Loss, Despite Mario Kart 8". According to their(BI) stats they globally shipped 510k units for spring/q3. A big jump from the 150k units in the previous year same quarter and improvement over the 310k q2 but lagging way behind the PS4 or Xbox One. They too cite issues with competing with Apple and Google.

I've got news for you: Consoles aren't doing well in other regions either due to the growth of mobile. The amount of households in the US who own 1 console is tiny compared to the number of people who own phones/tables.

Do you know what would be an interesting deal? Offer "DLC for all EA Games for free". That could be worth the subscription fee that offers value where the gamer is offered maximum flexibility instead of from a select list of blessed games.

Really, offering free and discounts on games that are old is a lame offer because we all get that today for free.

EA has for a couple of years done some pretty questionable moves which may sway people one way. For me, I'm not sure what you mean by "absolutely fantastic deal for anybody who plays EA games" because I wouldn't want to play they offer now along with coming up with 6 or more EA games I'd actually play over an entire year to make it worthwhile.

If you need an analogy: This would be like Time-Warner saying "We are announcing 'Time-Warner Access' where you subscribe for $30 a year and you can get access WB movies (from a selected list) for free where right now we are offering 'Terminator Salvation', 'I Am Legend', 'Dolphin Tale', and 'Oceans Twelve'! You can watch any of our movies for 30 minutes with an option to buy the digital version for 10% off."

Yeah that is a deal that some maybe interested in but others may think is pretty worthless. It isn't EA or the idea of a subscription service from EA but the deal itself is questionable in value.