I'll try to be as spoiler free as I can with this, but if my predictions turn out to be true...then I guess that would technically make them spoilers too ;)
So I've been thinking this for a while now, but what "Ms, Weaver" said to Ellison in the elevator in episode 20 makes me almost certain of it now. Through out the series they have hinted and alluded that perhaps there are some computers/robots/ai that wish they could find a way to live in peace with the humans in the future. I believe Weaver/T1001 was sent back to create a new AI that would be able to stop SkyNet from starting the war. The only way to beat a malevolent AI, is to make a benevolent one with empathy and compassion that will defend us. This is what I think John Henry is meant to be. This is why they have now revealed his "evil brother." That AI, which is apparently already killing people in full force and mighty powerful, is the one that will become SkyNet. John Henry's purpose is to prevent SkyNet from ever setting off Judgement Day. This would also explain why Weaver has shown no interest in looking for the Connors.
Unfortunately, what will probably happen is that Sarah, John and/or Cameron will kill John Henry by the end of the season, only to learn afterward he was meant to be their protector.
If I'm right, I'll be extremely happy with this narrative-wise. It has always bothered me that people just assume a SkyNet/Matrix like future is inevitable if we create true AI one day...but no one ever thinks about how to prevent it, offering a solution rather than just an empty warning. iRobot (the recent movie, not neccessarily the book as I've yet to read it) kind of hinted at this before, but I think it needs to be explored more. Why do humans not kill all the "lesser" life forms below us? Sure we need food, and we have the forethought to know we couldn't live without some of them...but the real core reason is empathy. It's built into our dna. When we empathise with things, when we humanize things that arent human, we give them some sort of importance. We value their life. So if we're going to create real AI someday, even if it's hundreds of years from now...empathy must be a fundamental feature of that program. And perhaps the writers of TSCC have realized this too?
Update 2009-04-11 (Spoiler Alert!):
Ha! I was totally right about Weaver and John Henry....and I'm very glad to see they didn't kill him off like I was expecting. I also just realized that Weaver is the T1000 that was in "the box" on Jesse's sub. Now where they've taken it...wow, I have no idea what's next. It's looking like we get to see a future without John Connor. I'm loving this show right now, I really hope Fox doesn't kill it off
2009-01-03
Netbooks, UMPCs, and the like will converge with the new smart phones
I made a little tweet about this yesterday, and apparently I need to expound upon the idea a little from all the negative response it got.
In the next couple years, maybe even this year, the niche market that netbooks and UMPCs have been working to fill will shift to the new generation of smart phones including the iPhone and the Android G1.
Next week at CES, it is undoubted that many new phones of this class will be announced and shown to the world. Motorola is already working on moving most of their new high-end smart phones to the Android platform, and surely other companies will be doing the same. This new class of phone is hard to define right now, but lets just say the iPhones and the G1 are pretty much the only phones that qualify at the moment. The Blackberry Storm tries to do it, but from reports I've seen it doesn't quite make the grade and worthless little knockoffs like Samsung's Instinct are definitely out. Eventually though, a common name will come up for the class, we may even want to go back to the dated term "pocket pc" at some point, or perhaps just MobilePC would suffice since apparently outside of the US most people already refer to cell phones simply as "mobiles."
Now, the primary purpose a netbook or UMPC is supposed to fill is to allow you full fledged web browsing on the go. Some may say the UMPC never really took off here, and for the most part you'd be right, but Nokia's N700 and N800s have sold fairly well, even if the more powerful (and more expensive ones) didn't. Clearly the iPhone and G1 already meet this requirement, albeit a little slower with the current gen's lackluster processing power and RAM. The only thing they are both missing is Flash support, which for many sites is an absolute requirement. I'm fairly confident this will change in the next year, if not for the iPhone, then definitely for Android powered phones.
The next thing netbooks/UMPCs are used for is email/chatting/IM, which both the iPhone and G1 already have numerous options thanks to their app repositories. Some would argue Android is lacking here with no support for things like Microsoft's Exchange server, but businesses aren't really the ones buying netbooks and UMPCs in the first place.
Some people use their UMPCs and netbooks for multimedia (primarily video or music playback) and obviously Apple's iTunes/iPod inspired iPhone does this to a pretty decent extent assuming you are using the Apple approved file formats. I'm not sure what the state of this is on the G1 right now, but I'm sure it can hold it's own.
Now, anything beyond these features really goes outside the scope of what these devices are being sold for. Yes, you can take notes and write papers on the netbooks, but forget about it on a UMPC. In fact many people still complain the keyboards of most netbooks are still too small to do any "real" typing. In the case of our smart phones many people are already working on solutions to the problem, although they're still not quite there yet. I personally think a nice roll-up keyboard would be the perfect accessory for these phones if they had proper USB ports and support from their OSes.
Another thing people complain about is that these phones' screens are still too small, and I guess that's really subjective. I currently own an iPhone, and 9 times out of 10, the screen size really hasn't been a problem for me like I thought it would. There are rumors right now of 4" and 6" models of the iPod Touch coming out this year, so if that turns out to be true, Apple will probably try the same with their 3rd generation of iPhones too (current model is just over 3"). Just remember, at the end of the day, no matter how big we would like these screens to be, at some point it stops fitting in your pocket. I think 4"-4.5" is the sweet-spot personally.
Now obviously these smart phones can boast they have things most UMPCs and netbooks (not counting what are referred to as ultra-mobile notebooks....that's a different class) can't do, like play videogames, work as a camera/camcorder (jailbraking required in the case of the iPhone) and of course, making phone calls.
No matter how much we fight it, people love convergence. The ability to carry just one device in your pocket is great. Just a few days ago on New Years Eve I saw one of my friends carrying around both a semi-smart phone and a separate digital camera and it's sad because you would think that'd be the easiest thing to add to a smart phone. There are already some cell phones, like the Nokia N82, with nice camera abilities, but they're still too expensive. My current gen iPhone's camera is damn near pathetic at only 2 megapixels, no flash, no zoom...but I'm sure the next revision will have to finally try a little harder in that department if Apple knows anything about what its customers want. And with the diversity Android brings to the table, there's no doubt a few companies will get it right.
The only other hurdles right now are price and wireless availability, and I don't think these will be much of a problem for too much longer. In fact this is the one part of my prediction I'll be so bold to say will definitely happen this year... AT&Ts 3G service is already plenty fast, and many other companies are already working toward 4G. Sprint already started rolling out their WiMax service in a couple test cities last year, and hopefully we'll see AT&T and Verizon do something worthwhile with the 700Mhz spectrum they bought up almost a year ago now. Even here in rural Mississippi, there are many places where you can not get a broadband land-line, but you can pick up a decent signal for broadband wireless (3G/EVDO/etc...but I don't count Edge, it's pathetically slow).
In the price department, we were already close in 2008. The iPhone 3G sells for $199.99 and the T-Mobile/HTC/Google G1 sells for just $179.99 (with a two year contract of course). This year, I can almost guarantee you'll find someone drop these guys down to $100 or less, and that's when these things will start to go mainstream. Remember when the Razor came out and people ooh'd and aaahh'd, but no one bought them because they were $500 at launch? Then when they dropped below $100, everybody and their momma (literally) had one. Expect the same thing to happen when iPhones and Androids hit that price point.
At the end of the day, people just want a small portable computer that they can get online with no matter where they are, and while the netbook took on that mantle briefly this past year, I think they've already hit their saturation point and the new gen of smart phone WILL fill that need in 2009. If these phones aren't capable of doing what you want/need, then a netbook or UMPC wouldn't have cut it for you either... I can't wait to see what new unknown goodies get announced next week ;)
In the next couple years, maybe even this year, the niche market that netbooks and UMPCs have been working to fill will shift to the new generation of smart phones including the iPhone and the Android G1.
Next week at CES, it is undoubted that many new phones of this class will be announced and shown to the world. Motorola is already working on moving most of their new high-end smart phones to the Android platform, and surely other companies will be doing the same. This new class of phone is hard to define right now, but lets just say the iPhones and the G1 are pretty much the only phones that qualify at the moment. The Blackberry Storm tries to do it, but from reports I've seen it doesn't quite make the grade and worthless little knockoffs like Samsung's Instinct are definitely out. Eventually though, a common name will come up for the class, we may even want to go back to the dated term "pocket pc" at some point, or perhaps just MobilePC would suffice since apparently outside of the US most people already refer to cell phones simply as "mobiles."
Now, the primary purpose a netbook or UMPC is supposed to fill is to allow you full fledged web browsing on the go. Some may say the UMPC never really took off here, and for the most part you'd be right, but Nokia's N700 and N800s have sold fairly well, even if the more powerful (and more expensive ones) didn't. Clearly the iPhone and G1 already meet this requirement, albeit a little slower with the current gen's lackluster processing power and RAM. The only thing they are both missing is Flash support, which for many sites is an absolute requirement. I'm fairly confident this will change in the next year, if not for the iPhone, then definitely for Android powered phones.
The next thing netbooks/UMPCs are used for is email/chatting/IM, which both the iPhone and G1 already have numerous options thanks to their app repositories. Some would argue Android is lacking here with no support for things like Microsoft's Exchange server, but businesses aren't really the ones buying netbooks and UMPCs in the first place.
Some people use their UMPCs and netbooks for multimedia (primarily video or music playback) and obviously Apple's iTunes/iPod inspired iPhone does this to a pretty decent extent assuming you are using the Apple approved file formats. I'm not sure what the state of this is on the G1 right now, but I'm sure it can hold it's own.
Now, anything beyond these features really goes outside the scope of what these devices are being sold for. Yes, you can take notes and write papers on the netbooks, but forget about it on a UMPC. In fact many people still complain the keyboards of most netbooks are still too small to do any "real" typing. In the case of our smart phones many people are already working on solutions to the problem, although they're still not quite there yet. I personally think a nice roll-up keyboard would be the perfect accessory for these phones if they had proper USB ports and support from their OSes.
Another thing people complain about is that these phones' screens are still too small, and I guess that's really subjective. I currently own an iPhone, and 9 times out of 10, the screen size really hasn't been a problem for me like I thought it would. There are rumors right now of 4" and 6" models of the iPod Touch coming out this year, so if that turns out to be true, Apple will probably try the same with their 3rd generation of iPhones too (current model is just over 3"). Just remember, at the end of the day, no matter how big we would like these screens to be, at some point it stops fitting in your pocket. I think 4"-4.5" is the sweet-spot personally.
Now obviously these smart phones can boast they have things most UMPCs and netbooks (not counting what are referred to as ultra-mobile notebooks....that's a different class) can't do, like play videogames, work as a camera/camcorder (jailbraking required in the case of the iPhone) and of course, making phone calls.
No matter how much we fight it, people love convergence. The ability to carry just one device in your pocket is great. Just a few days ago on New Years Eve I saw one of my friends carrying around both a semi-smart phone and a separate digital camera and it's sad because you would think that'd be the easiest thing to add to a smart phone. There are already some cell phones, like the Nokia N82, with nice camera abilities, but they're still too expensive. My current gen iPhone's camera is damn near pathetic at only 2 megapixels, no flash, no zoom...but I'm sure the next revision will have to finally try a little harder in that department if Apple knows anything about what its customers want. And with the diversity Android brings to the table, there's no doubt a few companies will get it right.
The only other hurdles right now are price and wireless availability, and I don't think these will be much of a problem for too much longer. In fact this is the one part of my prediction I'll be so bold to say will definitely happen this year... AT&Ts 3G service is already plenty fast, and many other companies are already working toward 4G. Sprint already started rolling out their WiMax service in a couple test cities last year, and hopefully we'll see AT&T and Verizon do something worthwhile with the 700Mhz spectrum they bought up almost a year ago now. Even here in rural Mississippi, there are many places where you can not get a broadband land-line, but you can pick up a decent signal for broadband wireless (3G/EVDO/etc...but I don't count Edge, it's pathetically slow).
In the price department, we were already close in 2008. The iPhone 3G sells for $199.99 and the T-Mobile/HTC/Google G1 sells for just $179.99 (with a two year contract of course). This year, I can almost guarantee you'll find someone drop these guys down to $100 or less, and that's when these things will start to go mainstream. Remember when the Razor came out and people ooh'd and aaahh'd, but no one bought them because they were $500 at launch? Then when they dropped below $100, everybody and their momma (literally) had one. Expect the same thing to happen when iPhones and Androids hit that price point.
At the end of the day, people just want a small portable computer that they can get online with no matter where they are, and while the netbook took on that mantle briefly this past year, I think they've already hit their saturation point and the new gen of smart phone WILL fill that need in 2009. If these phones aren't capable of doing what you want/need, then a netbook or UMPC wouldn't have cut it for you either... I can't wait to see what new unknown goodies get announced next week ;)
2008-11-10
Deter videogame piracy, rentals and used sales with your pricing
Alot of big game companies have been whining and complaining about the rise in game rentals and used game sales over the past few years. They've been worried about piracy for much longer. All of these problems are directly related to the overinflated pricing of the average videogame.
Now I've been making this argument for over 10 years now, but apparently it's time to go over it again. All these problems are never going to go away as long as the industry keeps trying to treat the symptoms rather than eliminate the causes.
There are many reasons why people don't buy brand new games, whether it be way of buying used, borrowing from a friend, renting or piracy. In this post I'm going to focus on pricing, but some other reasons are poor quality, or perceived questionable quality. By that last bit, I mean how many gamers don't really know whether a game is good or not and don't want to risk their hard earned cash on it unless they know it's good beforehand. Besides the obvious solution of focusing more on quality (aka fun), offering free demos would easily alleviate the fear of buying a game that sucks. That being said, most demos I've played in the last couple years barely even give you a whole level to explore, so the gamer still isn't sure if they like your game or not even after playing your pathetic excuse for a demo.
So onto the easiest, quickest way to work on a solution: pricing. To put it frankly, videogames cost too much. Sure, there are a hundred and one excuses as to why they cost so much, but just like your business gamers only care about the bottom line. $50 is too much for a game, and $60 is absolutely too much for a game. The game industry loves to brag and boast at how much gross revenue they are bringing in in comparison to the music and movie industries; however, if you look at the actual number of products sold it still pales in comparison.
This summer the movie industry was disappointed in the new X-Files movie's opening box office sales of only $10.2 million in its opening weekend (just as a note, I'm not picking on the X-Files for any reason other than it was the first result for 'poor box office'). So, to do some quick anecdotal math...if each ticket was sold for $10 (which in my town they're more close to $7) then that means over a million tickets were sold. And that's just the opening weekend, I would say it's safe to assume that they continued to sell more after the opening weekend, and when it comes out on video a few more million will be sold. Now, in the movie industry this is considered to be so-so, or maybe even a failure; however, if a game was to sell a million copies or more it would be considered a blockbuster!
Whether we like to admit it or not, gaming has still yet to become mainstream, and I'd wager the number one reason is price. The rising budgets of $5-10 million for a AAA game's production are given as the primary reason the average Xbox360 and PS3 game cost $60. According to Wikipedia the X-Files movie mentioned before had a budget of $30,000,000. That would be an outrageous budget for a game, but the industry still wants to play the numbers like they're more successful than the film industry. Now also, the Wikipedia article claims the movie has grossed over $65 million so far simply from box office. So how come this supposed flop has been seen by over 6.5 million people before it has even been released to video...while one of the industry's most popular games of recent, Halo 3, has just only sold a little over 8 million copies? Seriously, there are over 6.7 billion people on this planet, yet only 1 in a 1000 people have played one of the most popular games ever (now of course to be fair over half of that figure comes from areas that couldn't ever afford to be gamers).
Now I'm not an expert in economics, but the basic principals of supply and demand are not hard to grasp. If you want to expand your user base, lower your price. Keep lowering it gradually over time until the market is saturated. With the enormous popularity of DVDs in the past decade, the movie industry seemed to have found a sweet spot of $20. At that price point many people felt comfortable enough to buy movies they had only seen trailers of or their friends had told them were good. People are much more willing to take a gamble of potentially buying a bad movie when there's only $20 at risk. However, with the average next-gen game costing three times that people are going to be 3 times more choosy. It has been suggested that the average gamer will spend $1000 per year on gaming (including consoles and peripherals), however keep in mind that is most likely for hard-core gamers which are still at the end of the day a niche market. I'd bet that for ever 1 gamer you can walk into the living room of and find a big rack of games, there are 10 if not 100 people where you will find a similar rack of DVD movies. Once again, I blame this on cost of entry. Blu-ray players have still yet to take off at prices of $200+ and it will probably not be until you can buy one for $100 that the average American will finally buy one. Now in game consoles, during the 8-bit through 32-bit generations all the consoles eventually dropped to $100 price point or less, but the original Xbox and PS2 have still yet to hit that price and probably never will. Not only do individual game prices need to drop, but so do the consoles that play them. The market has also shown that people do not want to have to choose between competing formats. HD-DVD and Beta both held back the home video industry until a clear winner was picked. Now I may be personally biased...but I see the only solution to the problem be an open standard for game consoles, but my experience in recent years has show that the industry is far from ready to accept this.
So, which would a game developer prefer? Sell 3 million copies at $60 ($180M gross) or 30 million at $20 ($600M). I think the benefits are obvious right there..but now, lets get back to the original topic: used game sales. If a gamer can buy a used copy of a game for $30-45 rather than $60 for a new copy, of course they're going to at the very least consider it. However, if your brand new game is sold at $20, why would anyone in their right mind want to buy a used copy for $15? If the game industry is tired of Game Stop and the like selling their games at these reduced prices, then they are going to have to reduce their own prices to compete.
Not only would this thwart the proliferation of used game resellers, this would also deter rentals and piracy. Once again, you ask a pirate why they don't buy games very often and I can guarantee you one of their reasons will be the cost is too high. Things like DRM and one time use DLC only attempt to block these people's attempts, but does nothing to stop their motives. In fact it actually drives many gamers who might normally buy your game to download a pirated copy instead. Just look at the backlash to many recent EA PC releases.
Now the flip side of the coin is how to accomplish such a massive price drop. Sadly, if you drop your AAA titles to launch at a $20-30 price point quite a few people will see it as a sign your game is not very good. At first the only safe way to do this would be with big name franchises which are guaranteed to sell, like a Madden or a Halo or GTA. New franchises could easily be hurt during this transition. Also, if one company decided to go this route while their competitors stuck with the old pricing, once again human psychology would put you at an unfavorable place, with people almost always assuming the worst. You can't come to an agreement with your competitors to all drop your prices at the same time, or else you might get in trouble for some sort of price-fixing or something. So the only way for this to really happen is slowly, and with big name titles. Of course, this has been tried before to some extent, a few years back many PC games were sold at almost half the price of their console counterparts, but it couldn't stop the fact that hardcore gaming was dying in that market regardless..or perhaps it was just too little too late. Sega tried selling it's NFL 2K5 at $20 to better compete with Madden, but then EA bought exclusive rights to all NFL games so that killed that little experiment as well.
Honestly the best place to try out a new pricing level is in the online sales arena (ala Xbox Marketplace, Steam or even the iPhone App Store). However, this still has the problem that to make money at this lower price point we need many many more consoles in potential buyers hands first. So, this is a complicated and potentially dangerous concept at this point really...however, it's going to have to happen at some point if the game industry ever wants to become a truly mass market medium. The same goes for stopping used game sales from out numbering new game sales, which is going to eventually happen if it hasn't already with the current pricing schemes.
$20-30 games will hopefully eventually be the norm, but the entire industry will have to work together. The nice part is it's a win-win situation for both developers and gamers alike...it's just a matter of time.
Now I've been making this argument for over 10 years now, but apparently it's time to go over it again. All these problems are never going to go away as long as the industry keeps trying to treat the symptoms rather than eliminate the causes.
There are many reasons why people don't buy brand new games, whether it be way of buying used, borrowing from a friend, renting or piracy. In this post I'm going to focus on pricing, but some other reasons are poor quality, or perceived questionable quality. By that last bit, I mean how many gamers don't really know whether a game is good or not and don't want to risk their hard earned cash on it unless they know it's good beforehand. Besides the obvious solution of focusing more on quality (aka fun), offering free demos would easily alleviate the fear of buying a game that sucks. That being said, most demos I've played in the last couple years barely even give you a whole level to explore, so the gamer still isn't sure if they like your game or not even after playing your pathetic excuse for a demo.
So onto the easiest, quickest way to work on a solution: pricing. To put it frankly, videogames cost too much. Sure, there are a hundred and one excuses as to why they cost so much, but just like your business gamers only care about the bottom line. $50 is too much for a game, and $60 is absolutely too much for a game. The game industry loves to brag and boast at how much gross revenue they are bringing in in comparison to the music and movie industries; however, if you look at the actual number of products sold it still pales in comparison.
This summer the movie industry was disappointed in the new X-Files movie's opening box office sales of only $10.2 million in its opening weekend (just as a note, I'm not picking on the X-Files for any reason other than it was the first result for 'poor box office'). So, to do some quick anecdotal math...if each ticket was sold for $10 (which in my town they're more close to $7) then that means over a million tickets were sold. And that's just the opening weekend, I would say it's safe to assume that they continued to sell more after the opening weekend, and when it comes out on video a few more million will be sold. Now, in the movie industry this is considered to be so-so, or maybe even a failure; however, if a game was to sell a million copies or more it would be considered a blockbuster!
Whether we like to admit it or not, gaming has still yet to become mainstream, and I'd wager the number one reason is price. The rising budgets of $5-10 million for a AAA game's production are given as the primary reason the average Xbox360 and PS3 game cost $60. According to Wikipedia the X-Files movie mentioned before had a budget of $30,000,000. That would be an outrageous budget for a game, but the industry still wants to play the numbers like they're more successful than the film industry. Now also, the Wikipedia article claims the movie has grossed over $65 million so far simply from box office. So how come this supposed flop has been seen by over 6.5 million people before it has even been released to video...while one of the industry's most popular games of recent, Halo 3, has just only sold a little over 8 million copies? Seriously, there are over 6.7 billion people on this planet, yet only 1 in a 1000 people have played one of the most popular games ever (now of course to be fair over half of that figure comes from areas that couldn't ever afford to be gamers).
Now I'm not an expert in economics, but the basic principals of supply and demand are not hard to grasp. If you want to expand your user base, lower your price. Keep lowering it gradually over time until the market is saturated. With the enormous popularity of DVDs in the past decade, the movie industry seemed to have found a sweet spot of $20. At that price point many people felt comfortable enough to buy movies they had only seen trailers of or their friends had told them were good. People are much more willing to take a gamble of potentially buying a bad movie when there's only $20 at risk. However, with the average next-gen game costing three times that people are going to be 3 times more choosy. It has been suggested that the average gamer will spend $1000 per year on gaming (including consoles and peripherals), however keep in mind that is most likely for hard-core gamers which are still at the end of the day a niche market. I'd bet that for ever 1 gamer you can walk into the living room of and find a big rack of games, there are 10 if not 100 people where you will find a similar rack of DVD movies. Once again, I blame this on cost of entry. Blu-ray players have still yet to take off at prices of $200+ and it will probably not be until you can buy one for $100 that the average American will finally buy one. Now in game consoles, during the 8-bit through 32-bit generations all the consoles eventually dropped to $100 price point or less, but the original Xbox and PS2 have still yet to hit that price and probably never will. Not only do individual game prices need to drop, but so do the consoles that play them. The market has also shown that people do not want to have to choose between competing formats. HD-DVD and Beta both held back the home video industry until a clear winner was picked. Now I may be personally biased...but I see the only solution to the problem be an open standard for game consoles, but my experience in recent years has show that the industry is far from ready to accept this.
So, which would a game developer prefer? Sell 3 million copies at $60 ($180M gross) or 30 million at $20 ($600M). I think the benefits are obvious right there..but now, lets get back to the original topic: used game sales. If a gamer can buy a used copy of a game for $30-45 rather than $60 for a new copy, of course they're going to at the very least consider it. However, if your brand new game is sold at $20, why would anyone in their right mind want to buy a used copy for $15? If the game industry is tired of Game Stop and the like selling their games at these reduced prices, then they are going to have to reduce their own prices to compete.
Not only would this thwart the proliferation of used game resellers, this would also deter rentals and piracy. Once again, you ask a pirate why they don't buy games very often and I can guarantee you one of their reasons will be the cost is too high. Things like DRM and one time use DLC only attempt to block these people's attempts, but does nothing to stop their motives. In fact it actually drives many gamers who might normally buy your game to download a pirated copy instead. Just look at the backlash to many recent EA PC releases.
Now the flip side of the coin is how to accomplish such a massive price drop. Sadly, if you drop your AAA titles to launch at a $20-30 price point quite a few people will see it as a sign your game is not very good. At first the only safe way to do this would be with big name franchises which are guaranteed to sell, like a Madden or a Halo or GTA. New franchises could easily be hurt during this transition. Also, if one company decided to go this route while their competitors stuck with the old pricing, once again human psychology would put you at an unfavorable place, with people almost always assuming the worst. You can't come to an agreement with your competitors to all drop your prices at the same time, or else you might get in trouble for some sort of price-fixing or something. So the only way for this to really happen is slowly, and with big name titles. Of course, this has been tried before to some extent, a few years back many PC games were sold at almost half the price of their console counterparts, but it couldn't stop the fact that hardcore gaming was dying in that market regardless..or perhaps it was just too little too late. Sega tried selling it's NFL 2K5 at $20 to better compete with Madden, but then EA bought exclusive rights to all NFL games so that killed that little experiment as well.
Honestly the best place to try out a new pricing level is in the online sales arena (ala Xbox Marketplace, Steam or even the iPhone App Store). However, this still has the problem that to make money at this lower price point we need many many more consoles in potential buyers hands first. So, this is a complicated and potentially dangerous concept at this point really...however, it's going to have to happen at some point if the game industry ever wants to become a truly mass market medium. The same goes for stopping used game sales from out numbering new game sales, which is going to eventually happen if it hasn't already with the current pricing schemes.
$20-30 games will hopefully eventually be the norm, but the entire industry will have to work together. The nice part is it's a win-win situation for both developers and gamers alike...it's just a matter of time.
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