Studios were getting bought up left and right this week.

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The Week in Review

April 8, 2006

Another week, another collection of tasty morsels come pouring off the news wire. There wasn’t anything hugely earth shaking in the news this week, but things like Sega’s little spending spree, potential European PS3 prices, and Microsoft officially buying up Lionhead proved interesting.

First off, we have some comments from SCEE, discussing potential price points for the PlayStation 3 when it launches in Europe later this year. Up to this point, we haven’t had a lot to go on as to what the console will cost. All we do know is that it will be expensive. There has been some mention from the company that at the low end, the PS3 may sell for no less than $420US. However, we had no idea just how high the price could go, although a number of analysts have predicted that the unit won’t sell for more than $500US if Sony doesn’t want to price out a large number of consumers.

Now, let’s look at the comments to come out of Sony Europe. Here we have a statement claiming that the PS3 may sell for 499-599 Euros. After converting this to American dollars, we have a price point in the $600-$700 range. It seems highly unlikely, though, that North America will see such an astronomical MSRP for a number of reasons. First, once one factors in that the PlayStation 3 will likely be put into bundles by merchants with a bunch of games and peripherals being crammed down consumers’ throats if they actually want the console, we’ll be looking at paying nearly $1,000US for the thing. After the first shipment of PS3s sell out to the people with ridiculously deep pockets, it seems doubtful many more units will sell regardless of how popular the PlayStation brand may be. Second, there’s the fact that Europe always gets the shaft with pricing on new consoles. Even if this is

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the price over there, it seems unlikely that North America would do the same. Last, there’s the habit of Sony to appear that the left hand seldom knows what the right hand is doing. There’s a very large disconnect between what Sony of America, Sony of Europe, and Sony Japan do, so it wouldn’t be surprising if a 499-599 Euro launch price was an isolated incident.

While Sony was doing some hinting at consumer spending this week, Sega has been on a bit of a buying spree itself,

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acquiring a pair of development studios. Snapping up both Secret Level (creators of America’s Army, and a studio with which Sega already had close ties with), as well as Sports Interactive, these moves show that Sega still wants to diversify the types of games they ship out. I’m not so sure how much Secret Level can bring to the table. Their titles have been decent, but certainly not of the calibre of other development studios that Sega has acquired like Creative Assembly (Total War), and now Sports Interactive (Football Manager). Of the two acquisitions this week by Sega, Sports Interactive looks like the one with the most potential. Given that they make one of the most popular series in Europe, Sega stands to line their pockets quite nicely.

Microsoft was in on the “Let’s Buy a Game Development Studio” act too this week. As was touched upon last week during the Game Developers Conference, Microsoft was busily courting Lionhead Studios, creators of Black & White, Fable, and The Movies. For all intents and purposes it looked like a pretty sure bet that Lionhead would be sitting on Microsoft’s mantle in the not-so-distant future, and that’s exactly how things panned out, as the two companies officially announced Microsoft’s acquisition earlier this week. The thing I can’t help but wonder about this whole affair is why it was necessary in the first place. All of Lionhead’s games of recent years have only shown up on Microsoft platforms, and there were no signs of this changing any time soon. So, why did Microsoft blow a huge wad of cash on the studio? It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, at least from this editor’s eyes.

Then again, there are a lot of things about the videogame industry that don’t make a lot of sense, and I’m sure we’ll see more instances of that as time passes. Until then, see you all next week!

Mr. Nash


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