“With every iPod model set to adopt a color screen this year, Apple appears ready to expand the music player’s extra capabilities, especially its bundled games,” Ryan Katz reports for Think Secret. “A recent job posting from Apple on Gamasutra, a recruiting site for the game industry, seeks a programmer with ‘experience working with embedded systems’ who would in part be ‘responsible for rapidly developing memory and performance optimized software solutions to complex problems.'”
“More intriguing than the general job description and qualifications are the optional qualifications, which include ‘ARM7 RISC processor experience.’ Apple’s iPods are powered by a chip from PortalPlayer that is based on the 32-bit ARM7 processor,” Katz reports.
Full article here.
Maybe it should be a game for the ladies. You dress up, put on your face, go out to a bar … and score points for shooting down dorks or scoring with hunks with an extended-foreplay kicker. Go to work the next day … score points for shooting down dorks or scoring a promotion. Go shopping … score points for the find with a discount kicker … build up your wardrobe. You lose if you get knocked-up, win if you become CEO and walk away with 42-million a la Carly. My 6 y.o. would kill for this. Of course, the female shoot-em-up or action game genre too is under-exploited [no pun intended]. Men could participate in online multiplayer games, scoring in the opposite way and maybe even making a connection.
Call me silly; just don’t call me Sally.
Back-o’-the-Napkin Guesstimate:
Microsoft spent $40-mill producing and promoting Halo (1). Assume that a game good enough to drive switches would cost the same. Making a paltry 35% return on investment (2) would require $54-million of revenue. Assuming you’d base-price it at $18 per unit wholesale, you’d need to sell 3-million units. Discounting obsolete machines running older operating systems and dedicated work machines, let’s say there are 10-million Macs that might run it; 9-million of which could afford to buy [and wouldn’t steal] it, and you’d need a sale for every three Macs — a phenomenal success rate. That ignores variable costs of media, manufacturing, packaging and transport.
(1) Halo 2 sold $125-million on its first day. Sales are usually hot in the first 3 months.
(2) Sony typically makes $5~$10 in royalties per game.
(3) Only 5% of titles reach the 1-million units sale mark.
(1,2 and 3 Source: BusinessWeek 28/2/05)
MAW: “trouble.”
Well, it might have to be a loss leader to induce switchers at first. Like I said later you could port it to the windows platform later and rake in some cash – just keep them 1 year or so behind in getting the new versions.