An analysis of eBay auctions from the last week shows that the average selling prices for the Wii and PS3 have fallen precipitously from highs reached late last week, though the systems still auction for significantly more than their retail prices. At the same time, supplies of the systems on the popular auction site have skyrocketed since launch, with thousands of auctions closing for each system every day.
Remember the days when games had to fit on a few 1.4MB floppies or they were physically impractical? The extent to which those days are long gone was put into stark relief by a recent Eurogamer interview in which Sony worldwide studio head Phil Harrison said that some PS3 games were already nearing the 25GB capacity of current Blu-ray discs. In the same interview, Harrison said he expected PS3 games to fill newer 50GB-capacity discs by the end of next year. It’s enough to make us wonder — what’s going in to all that space, and what are we as gamers getting out of it?
At 8 a.m., these four hearty souls waited with me in the near-freezing weather for the Wii preorders to open up at the EBGames on Route 198 in Laurel, MD. University of Maryland students Adam McClure (second from left) and Tristan Edmondston (far left) had been driving by the store to check for potential lines since midnight, finally parking to stake out the location at 5 a.m. Their main motivation for coming out: There was nothing better to do. "It’s more of an adventure than anything," McClure said.
The line to fork over $100 to reserve a Playstation 3 started at 6 a.m. at the Gamestop on Route 1 in Laurel, MD. Mike (the red-shirted gentleman in the picture above, who refused to give a last name) lined up at the early hour to ensure he got a system for himself and said he planned to go to another local store to reserve a system "for eBay." By 9 a.m. the line had grown to the seven hearty souls above, who still had an hour to wait before the store would open and take their money.
We’re here live at Microsoft’s premiere European promotional event, scheduled to start at 7 PM Barcelona time (1 PM Eastern, 10 AM Pacific). Continue reading and keep refreshing for all the announcements and updates straight from Microsoft.
After some mistaken information about start times and a few false starts around the internet, it looks like Nintendo’s Japanese press conference is actually set to start at 2 p.m. Japan time (1 a.m. Eastern time, 10 p.m. Pacific time, 0500 GMT). Though Joystiq doesn’t have anyone on the ground in Tokyo, we’re working to attain the best feed and translation services available for the event. We do plan to cover any big news from the conference by monitoring a purported live online feed, with translation services provided by ittousai of Engadget Japan. If that doesn’t work, we’ll monitor our sources into the night to bring you this information as soon as it’s available.
When Microsoft allows would-be developers to develop Xbox 360 games from their own homes, it won’t be the first time a major console company has opened up its hardware to consumer coders. In 1997, Sony released the Net Yaroze, a system of coding tools that allowed consumers to develop for the original PlayStation.
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