Date: Tue, 15. December 2009 15:06:32

mr_sifter writes "PC gamers love to obsess over whether PC gaming is dying, but bit-tech thinks it's time to look at the other side and examine if console gaming is really as secure as publishers would have us believe. All three console manufacturers suffered from the recession mdash; this year, Sony announced its first net loss in 14 years; a stunning yen;989.9bn, which includes record losses of yen;58.5bn in its gaming sector. Microsoft also announced its first loss since it went public in 1986 in the second quarter of this financial year, with a $31 million US loss coming straight from the Entertainment and Devices division, which is responsible for the Xbox 360. Not even Nintendo has escaped the financial plague either, with sales of the Wii dropping by 67 percent in the US, 60 percent in Japan and 47 percent in the rest of the world. In addition to reduced profitability, casual games and the rise of the iPhone further suggest the current model is not invulnerable."pa href="http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/12/14/2010234/Is-Console-Gaming-Dying?from=rss"img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=09/12/14/2010234"/a/ppa href="http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/12/14/2010234/Is-Console-Gaming-Dying?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/xsUROwzmKvf4UP9g73I9RIMcaMI/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/xsUROwzmKvf4UP9g73I9RIMcaMI/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/xsUROwzmKvf4UP9g73I9RIMcaMI/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/xsUROwzmKvf4UP9g73I9RIMcaMI/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/w6NM5PL_f38" height="1" width="1"/

Date: Fri, 17. October 2008 20:45:31

NewsFactor - Sales of the Nintendo Wii game console rose 37 percent in September, but the rest of the industry saw losses. It was the first time in more than two years that the market for consoles and games has seen an overall decline.

Date: Fri, 17. May 2013 18:25:33

Friday, Nintendo took to its online Nintendo Direct platform to announce the latest batch of games for the new Wii U console. Most of the games showcased were standard Nintendo fare ? Mario, Luigi, and Pikmin all made big appearances. Except for the aforementioned hedgehog, however, the Nintendo Direct announcement demonstrated the same suspicious lack of third-party titles that has plagued Nintendo's new console ever since it launched late last year.

Date: Thu, 15. December 2011 05:56:21

Digital Trends - Based off a yearly comparison study of 3,000 consumers conducted by Nielsen, video streaming on gaming consoles is on the rise while the number of people watching physical media is dropping. During 2010, ten percent of Xbox 360 owners watched video-on-demand or streaming services like Netflix through the Microsoft console. That number has climbed to 14 percent in 2011. In a similar trend on the PlayStation 3, nine percent of PS3 owners used the console to watch streaming content during 2010, but increased to 15 percent in 2011. The Nintendo Wii had the most significant growth spurt growing from a fifth of all users in 2010 to a third of all users in 2011.

Date: Thu, 3. January 2013 19:47:09

Seriously Sony? Your new patent and potential big draw for a new gaming console is the ability to 'tag' a game disc with information such as which consoles the game has been played on, and which user on the PlayStation Network first played it? Information that is going to be recorded so each game disc will require permission to run, and effectively allow you to kill the second hand games market?

Date: Tue, 26. April 2011 04:16:09

AFP - PlayStation Network has remained offline as Sony worked to rebuild the service that connected PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles to games, films, and other digital offerings.

Date: Wed, 13. February 2013 19:40:27

There?s no doubt that the Xbox 360 is one of the best things Microsoft (MSFT) has going for itself right now ? not only has the popular console sold 76 million units, but it?s rapidly moved beyond the gaming sphere to become a well-rounded entertainment center thanks to popular content streaming apps for Netflix (NFLX) and Hulu. Per Engadget, Microsoft Interactive Entertainment Business senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi told the D: Dive Into Media conference on Tuesday that Microsoft really doesn?t see the Xbox as a mere gaming console anymore and now views it as a comprehensive ?entertainment console.? And what?s more, Mehdi said that this gives Microsoft a big long-run advantage over Sony?s (SNE) rival PlayStation console since it ?isn?t as good

Date: Thu, 29. November 2012 15:45:54

Both Microsoft (MSFT) and Nintendo (NTDOY) had a big week of console sales during Black Friday?s week of shopping madness in the U.S. So how did Sony (SNE) do in comparison? Sony Computer Entertainment of America president and CEO Jack Tretton announced on Thursday that the company sold 525,000 PlayStation 3 consoles and 160,000 PS Vita handhelds during the Black Friday week. Overall PlayStation sales of hardware, software and accessories are up 9% over the same period last year. Tretton was also happy to reveal that subscriptions to its PlayStation Plus grew 259% since last year with customer satisfaction flying high at 95% after Sony added the Instant Game Collection to the service earlier this year. Sony?s PlayStation 3 and PS

Date: Mon, 25. February 2013 08:54:26

The debut of the PlayStation 4 in New York City Wednesday (Feb. 20) was as remarkable for what it showed as for what it didn't show: Sony unveiled a raft of beautiful, incredibly realistic new games, but not the console itself. The device, perhaps in a straight-from-the-lab rough appearance, was somewhere offstage, driving the giant projectors that broadcast previews of upcoming games around the Hammerstein Ballroom.

Date: Mon, 27. April 2009 15:04:43

Hugh Pickens writes "June marks the launch across Brazil of Zeebo, a console that aims to tap an enormous new market for videogaming for the billion-strong, emerging middle classes of such countries as Brazil, India, Mexico, Russia and China. Zeebo uses the same Qualcomm chipsets contained in high-end smartphones, together with 1GB of flash memory, three USB slots and a proprietary dual analogue gamepad. It plugs into a TV and outputs at a 640 x 480 pixel resolution. 'The key thing is we're using off-the-shelf components,' says Mike Yuen, director of the gaming group at Qualcomm. This approach means that, while Zeebo can be priced appropriately for its markets mdash; it will launch at US $199 in Brazil compared to around US $250 (plus another US $50 for a mod chip to play pirated games) for a PlayStation 2 in the region mdash; and next year the company plans to drop the price of the console to $149. But the most important part of the Zeebo ecosystem is its wireless digital distribution that gets around the low penetration of wired broadband in many of these countries, negates the cost of dealing with packaged retail goods, and removes the risk of piracy, with the games priced at about $10 locked to the consoles they're downloaded to. Zeebo is not meant to directly compete with powerful devices like Sony's PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360, or the Wii. 'In Latin America, where there's a strong gaming culture, that's what we'll be, but in India and China we can be more educational or lifestyle-oriented,' says Yuen. One Indian gaming blog predicts Zeebo will struggle, in part due to the cultural reluctance toward digital distribution and also the lack of piratable games."pa href="http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/26/1555226amp;from=rss"img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=09/04/26/1555226"/a/ppa href="http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/26/1555226amp;from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/0tM6vozW6ggv8NaMupg9xc_1Q8k/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/0tM6vozW6ggv8NaMupg9xc_1Q8k/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/JfGxBZffGkI" height="1" width="1"/