Mario Mints Money

In one of Harry Turtledove's alternate universes, a series of subtle changes during the Civil War caused a ripple effect that eventually led to a world in which I could do complex mathematics without tragedy occurring. Moreover, in this alternate universe, I happen to be a businessman working at a box company, with a big 'ole picture of "Stone Cold" Locke with the caption "Never Give Up!" hanging in my cubicle.

In honor of this alternate me, I still read up on business news that catches my fancy. For example, the site Information Arbitrage. About every fourth post I confess that I have no idea what the hell he's talking about. Usually that's followed up by a post about video games. For example:

Gaming and Razors: A Hopelessly Broken Metaphor

A loose summary of the article would be this: Spending a billion dollars on developing a system, and then expecting to recoup this money through games that are primarily made and sold by other people is not a very good market strategy.

This brings up another point in my mind. So, the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 have better graphics and computing horsepower than the Nintendo Wii. But of course they do. The Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 come from the future. When both were introduced, they were stuffed with technology that had not yet become viable to be mass produced for the consumer market. That's why each of those systems was sold at a loss.

And why would they do this? Because both Microsoft and Sony expected their cyberpimped systems to be so impressive that it would instantly devastate any company that tried to produce a game system using present technology. Neither company has spent their millions expecting never to get them back. The reason they subsidized their systems is because they expected to get those millions back from you, on top of the millions you already would have given them.

Things have not worked out quite like they hoped. Meanwhile, Nintendo circumvented the whole "Ante a billion dollars or fold" trap that was set for them by inventing a stick you can wiggle waggle.

I can remember the days when Nintendo was the giant monolithic bully of a company that lusted for the blood of their enemies. But damn if I'm not rooting for them these days.