New Year — Old Games? Has Microsoft Has Lost It’s Mind ?

While CES is dropping all the cool gadget geekery eye candy Microsoft and Sony are dropping news about things to come. This one though –  The Xbox Live Game Room –will either be a huge success or a colossal failure.

Here’s the breakdown
Xbox live will have a new feature this spring called the Game Room — essentially it will create an arcade, 80s style, where you’ll have all the old cabinets from games like Centipede and Tempest (if you’ve never heard of these games well them you’re probably not gonna care about this) and you can then play them alone or online. You can buy the games for $5 for both your console and PC (or $3 separately) or play them arcade style for 50 cents until you lose (21st century inflation — the standard fare for these games originally was 25 cents)

You and all your avatar friends (minus the Naviim) can hang out in the virtual arcade playing games like you went into some time machine and have competitions and get achievements. Now in the real old arcade days often times you would have the one dude racking up a jillion points on the Asteroid machine while a crowd of folks gathered around. These machines for the most part were not so much multiplayer but at least you were in a room with a bunch of other kids with pockets full of quarters to waste.

Target Audience? Us Oldy McOldies who want to hearken back to the first golden age of gaming and the casual gaming market that can handle games that only require a button and a thumbstick. And of course the young whipper snappers who have never heard of these games but dig that whole “retro” thing. Certainly a multiplayer session of pac-man will pale in comparison to a Modern Warfare Ground War but then again, it’s a yellow circle eating dots.

Marketing Strategy: If they do it right they may garner success in the retro gaming market and with the causal gamers, parents and people who just like to keep things simple. Unfortunately this retro gaming wave crested a couple of years ago. Going for them is the fact that this games really are retro now as we’ve now entered a new decade leaving the remnants of gaming past in the  shelled out game cabinets of  Galaga and Street Fighter.

Price Points: The pricing is right, 5 bucks is certainly a deal these days and getting to play online with your buddies continues to give credence the always strong Xbox live market.

Question: With the mobile and portable gaming market doing so well (Iphones, Ipods, Zunes, the Sony thing and their ilk) why hasn’t Microsoft added another layer of accessibility through mobile media? Especially since according to the company they’re looking to have more than 1000 games in the next couple of years? No idea. Maybe they will. Perhaps they’ll have to see how well it does on the console PC split first.

Good Videogame Marketing? Maybe. Is this a too much too late or have they figured out a way to compartmentalize this genre to make it more accessible? Hard to say at this point but at least for now it seems like something they can definitely use to get more subscribers to  Xbox Live. As to whether or not people in an age of draw dropping graphics and gameplay will want to shoot at pixelated mushrooms with a bug spray shooter — well that remains to be seen.

New Year — Old Games? Has Microsoft Has Lost It’s Mind ?