{"id":1041,"date":"2006-07-21T08:01:37","date_gmt":"2006-07-21T13:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/free-market-dance-dance\/"},"modified":"2006-07-21T08:01:37","modified_gmt":"2006-07-21T13:01:37","slug":"free-market-dance-dance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/free-market-dance-dance","title":{"rendered":"Free Market Dance Dance"},"content":{"rendered":"

BizWeek offers an essay on how failed videogame platforms are good for the business<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Of course, whereas a market leader’s role is to provide stability, there is a difference between stability and stasis. Ideally, the “big guy”, whoever it is, must represent the basic ideals of the medium as it currently stands; the moment it no longer provides that representational force, the entire industry begins to shift on its foundation. People grow restless, lose interest because videogames no longer “speak” to them. Intuitively, new users won’t be attracted by an industry that doesn’t seem in touch with where it’s going or where it is now. Sales slump; everyone blames everyone else, and the industry just becomes all the more conservative because if it doesn’t know where the draft is coming from it’s best just to wear a coat to work, leading the spiral ever downward until someone steps out of the crowd and realigns the industry with its principles, creating a new status quo — as Nintendo did twenty years ago, as Sega kind of tried to do five years later, as Nintendo’s trying to do again today.<\/p>\n

The thing is, by nature the most vital area of the game industry lies not so much the mechanics of the upper echelon of the industry \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u20ac\u0153 rather, it rests below the radar of your typical analyst, in the dark, greatly loved yet poorly exposed corners of the market. Though by popular definition you might well call them failures, without your Sega Saturns, your Atari Jaguars, your Amigas and GameCubes and NeoGeo Pocket Colors, the industry would be an autocracy, governed by a single dictate — indeed, one of limited perspective and shallow, if broad, concern for growth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For the record, official VM buddy Sang & I played the heck out of the NBA 2K2 game on the Sega DreamCast<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BizWeek offers an essay on how failed videogame platforms are good for the business: Of course, whereas a market leader’s role is to provide stability, there is a difference between stability and stasis. Ideally, the “big guy”, whoever it is, must represent the basic ideals of the medium as it currently stands; the moment it … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Free Market Dance Dance”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-gN","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1352,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/decade-dance","url_meta":{"origin":1041,"position":0},"title":"Decade dance","author":"Gil","date":"February 15, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"This morning's dumb lede comes to us from the New York Times. Reporting on Chrysler's announcement of 13,000 job cuts, Micheline Maynard writes: Every decade provides a new lesson for the American automobile industry. In the 1980s, automakers underestimated their Japanese competitors, thinking they would never build anything but small\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":660,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/auto-asphyxiation","url_meta":{"origin":1041,"position":1},"title":"Auto-asphyxiation","author":"Gil","date":"September 7, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Peter M. DeLorenzo is an automotive industry consultant who also writes a weekly column at the Autoextremist. He pulls no punches, despite the fact that some of his livelihood comes from the companies he criticizes in the column.Anyway, this week's column (it'll be replaced by Sept. 14, and the archives\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1025,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/the-hit-factory","url_meta":{"origin":1041,"position":2},"title":"The Hit Factory","author":"Gil","date":"July 12, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Since I've been writing about the drug industry (our magazine bowed in October 1999) I've been hearing that we're heading toward The Era of Personalized Medicine. This means that, as we develop more knowledge of the genome, proteome, and metabolome (you think I'm making this stuff up?), drugs will be\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Art"","block_context":{"text":"Art","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/art"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":963,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/market-down","url_meta":{"origin":1041,"position":3},"title":"Market Down","author":"Gil","date":"May 23, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Rachel Donadio at the NYTimes has an article about why literary fiction sucks. Okay, it's not really about why literary fiction sucks; it's really about why the market for literary fiction sucks. It has the dumbest concluding paragraph I've read in a while (soon to be topped by the conclusion\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "literature"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":388,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm","url_meta":{"origin":1041,"position":4},"title":"Pharma BluesGood post by Jane\u2026","author":"Gil","date":"October 11, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Pharma BluesGood post by Jane Galt (with TONS of great comments) about the problems with drug pricing in the U.S.In my magazine this month, I posed the following question to my Editorial Advisory Board members for the \"Ask the Board\" feature: \"How do you explain U.S. drug pricing to the\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1071,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/drug-deal-2","url_meta":{"origin":1041,"position":5},"title":"Drug Deal","author":"Gil","date":"August 9, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"I know this story about the generic release of Plavix requires some knowledge of how the pharmaceutical industry works, but it's a really funny tale of corporate manuevering. The CEO of the generic company (Apotex) gives an interview with the Times in which he goofs on Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1041\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}