Hasta La Gadget!

I worked Circuit City when the PlayStation 2 launched. For weeks, we were sold out, and there was always a crowd around the blue demo unit in the gaming department. It’s easy to see why the PlayStation 2 was a hit looking back. It was powerful, inventive and excelled at local gaming. It was the right system for the time.

If Nintendo’s recent success proves anything, building for the time is more important than making for the future.

Nintendo is coming off a massive quarter that saw 88% year over year operating profit on the back of the Nintendo Switch. The company has sold nearly 20 million Switch systems since its launch, surpassing the total amount of Wii U systems sold and closing in on Gamecube’s tally of 21.7 million units.

The Switch is great. I can’t get over how good it is. Again, like other systems before it, the Switch is the right system for the time. It’s portable, it’s small, and it leans heavily on cloud services. It’s not the most powerful system on the market nor does it pack 4k gaming or VR capabilities. The Switch doesn’t even have YouTube or Netflix. It’s a game system.

The Switch was a big bet for Nintendo. The company was coming off of the nascent Wii U, which besides Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon, was a game system without good games. It seemed Nintendo had lost its edge. The Wii U, in a way, was a trial for the Switch. It brought gaming off the TV and into the hands of gamers — but those gamers had to be in the same room as the Wii U base station. The Wii U didn’t go far enough in all sense of the phrase.

By the time the Switch came out, the looming threat of mobile games seemed to be over. A few years earlier, it appeared that the smartphone was going to take over and eat up the casual gaming market. Even Sony got in on the theme, releasing a hybrid smartphone and game system called the Xperia Play. While the smartphone game market is alive and thriving, it never gobbled up the home console market. The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 launched and gamers settled into the couch. The Switch offers something different and timely.

To state the obvious, the Switch is mobile, and that’s what’s needed in today’s environment. It’s different from the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 and in the best way possible. Like previous Nintendo products, the graphics are below the market average, and the capabilities are less than competitors. But that doesn’t matter. The Switch’s gaming experience, to some, is superior. I take my Switch on long flights. I can’t do that with a PlayStation 4.

Gamers agree. With nearly 20 million units sold since it launched in 2017, the Switch is nearing the sales amount of the Xbox One, which launched in 2013 and has sold between 25 and 30 million units. The PlayStation 4 is the clear winner of this generation of game systems, though, with nearly 80 million units sold — and an argument could be made that Sony built the Playstation 4 for today’s gamers too, bypassing all the extras Microsoft included in the Xbox One and instead focusing solely on games.

Nintendo has done this in the past, too. Think back to the Wii. It launched in 2006 and went on to sell over 100 million units. In 2006 Sony and Microsoft were pushing heavily into HD gaming with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. And for a good reason, too. Consumers were heavily shopping for their first HDTV at the time, and Sony and Microsoft wanted to build a system for the future. Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 went on to long, healthy lives but they never saw the runaway success of the Wii.

The Wii was the must-have Christmas gift for 2006 and 2007. It was novel more than beautiful. Compared to the graphics of the PS3, the Wii looked childish. But that was part of the appeal. First generation gamers were aging and having families, and the Wii was built for all ages. Anyone could pick up a Wiimote and swing it around to hit the tennis ball. To many outside the core gaming crowd, the Wii was magical. It was the right system at the right time.

The next part seems to be the hardest for Nintendo. Now that the Switch is a success, Nintendo needs to maintain it by building and supporting a robust ecosystem of games. And Nintendo cannot be the source of all the best games. Nintendo must court developers and publishers and keep them engaged in the advantages of the Switch gaming system. If it can do that, the Switch has a chance to be a generational product like the Wii before it.

We have seen a modern resurgence of insanely high-performance sports cars called hypercars today. We have them from Bugatti, McLaren, Porsche, and Ferrari among others. Mercedes doesn’t really have a car that competes at the highest echelons of the hypercar market, but back in 1998 it certainly did. That car was called the Mercedes-Benz AMG CLK GTR and it was … Continue reading

Sony’s PlayStation 4 console is one of the better consoles of the current generation, which is why it doesn’t come as a surprise to learn the total number of units that Sony has shipped to date is at 82.2 million. This is thanks to the 3.2 million units that the company managed to ship in the past quarter.

However as we have mentioned many times, shipping figures does not necessarily equate to units sold. These are units shipped to various retailers and stockists around the world, but to be fair companies as big as Sony typically have a good handle on the demand of their consoles and generally ship as many as they think will be sold, so perhaps the units sold versus units shipped might not be too different.

That being said, there is a slight dip in sales from the same period in the previous year, where Sony actually sold 100,000 units more than this year. There could be varying factors as to why that might be, but it definitely is not all doom and gloom for the company. That being said, Sony seems to be optimistic about the next year.

The company has increased its forecast of 16 million units sold in the fiscal year of 2018, to 17 million units sold between the 1st of April, 2018 to the 31st of March, 2019. Whether or not they will succeed remains to be seen, although interestingly enough Nintendo is forecasting that they will actually sell more as the company predicts that they will hit 20 million units in the same period.

Sony’s PS4 Worldwide Shipments Top 82.2 Million Units , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Earlier this month, Activision and Treyarch confirmed that they would be hosting a beta test for the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 game. For those who are excited to see what the multiplayer version of the game will entail, you’ll be interested to learn that a new multiplayer beta trailer has been released.

The trailer gives us a look at some of the content in the upcoming beta, where it is expected to feature six multiplayer maps and various modes that players will be able to check out, along with a objective-based mode called Control. The beta is expected to kick off on the 3rd of August for PS4 gamers, and if you’re playing the game on the Xbox One or the PC, you can expect access about a week later.

This beta will be quite a major thing because as you might recall, Black Ops 4 will not feature a single-player campaign unlike previous Call of Duty titles. This means that success (or failure) of the game rests solely on how well its multiplayer plays, so we imagine that Activision and Treyarch will be putting a lot of emphasis on this.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is set for a release on the 12th of October where it will launch on the PS4, Xbox One, and the PC via Battle.net.

Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4 Multiplayer Beta Trailer Released , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Why “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” is the best Cruise movie yet, according to HuffPost’s resident Tom Cruise superfan.