Because I Felt Like Being Snarky

I read too much gaming news, and there was a lot of it today. I guess the fiscal quarter transition brings it out. I'll never write for Kotaku or Joystiq, but for some reason I felt like writing for myself today. This post is simultaneously quite informative (if you don't read as much gaming news as me) and pointlessly snarky. If you enjoy that sort of thing, read on.

• Sony is halting 20GB PS3 production after less than six months on the market. I guess even pretending they had a low low entry point of half a grand was too much effort.
• Nobody is excited about the 1337 edition of the 360. (Maybe if it doesn't eat disks, charge for multiplayer and cheat codes, and break down in under year like many of the regular 360s seem to...)
• Sony is increasing production, which I guess is to reflect that they're now selling units in Europe, since they seem to have more than they need in the US.
• Microsoft is getting called out on horrendous channel stuffing. They put so many units in the channel last Q4 (4.4 million) that they're estimating only moving 1.6 million for the entire first half of this year.
• There are rumors that with the fiscal quarter sewn up, Nintendo may decide to unleash some secret stash of Wiis into the marketplace. On some level it seems reasonable since the Wii should be the easiest of all the systems to build, but it seems like Nintendo has been doing their manufacturing on the cheap to wring out every last penny.
• EA, and I think a few others, basically admitted they screwed up by not putting enough resources into Wii dev. The PS3 (which they put full resources behind) had production problems with blu-ray and slow adoption at a $600 price point. What $16 billion dollar company could have afforded the analyst coverage to have foreseen that?

In the interest of fairness, I've never made a game console. I'm guessing it's really, really hard. But even with that, I can see one simple thing, all three console makers got greedy, and it's probably costing them millions. In fact, I'd almost say game consoles are over. Sony and Microsoft are selling home media centers and Nintendo is selling to grandmas.

See if you can enjoy this analogy. We're gaming city. We're not the envy of the living room entertainment nation, but we've got a respectable economy. Our little city is just fine. Oh shit.

Everybody is screaming. Stuff is blowing up left and right. The news is going apeshit. Godzilla and Mechagodzilla (after all, they're largely interchangeable) are fighting for control of the nation. They're throwing DVR lightning bolts and myspace missiles at each other. Downloadable content is raining down like a friggin' meteor swarm. Although in this already laughably broken analogy, their real effect seems to be driving up real estate prices so that no one can afford to live here anymore. :) In the meantime, the army is trying to herd us (and everyone in the rest of the nation) into trucks to take us to some ghetto ass voting channel minigame refugee tent city.

So what do you do? Where are you going to be when the dust settles? Where do gamers really end up in the battle for the consolidated living room?

First to go. Last to know, eh?