First off, sorry for the hiatus in posting over the last month, the combination of massive busyness with work things and the pressures of finding just the right Christmas gift meant that blogging kept getting shuffled off the bottom of the to-do list. But here I am, bright eyed and bushy tailed, with a big stack of Chrimbo goodies, a newly printed end of year corporation tax return, and a big pile of unfiled paperwork, ready to bore you all to tears again.
It’s a miserable day in Edinburgh today, and the bus on which I write this is filled with coughing, sniffling people. Since it takes me about 45 minutes to get across town to Barco in the morning, I’ve been using the time to get some re-factoring done on the code, as well as writing up various project tenders and plans. There are NDAs to be faxed off too, although that’s mostly because we need to be under NDA to get costs on the development hardware to fill out the rest of the business case. Pete’s proposed a technology project that is interesting, but we need to work out all the numbers to see if it’s a profitable use of our time.
I’m still waiting to see the fall-out of the Christmas period’s sales, but it seems much as I expected so far. Microsoft ‘hit’ their target of 10m X-Box 360s shipped, although I suspect at least some of that is telling retailers and wholesalers to hold stock and they can pay for it later. But some fudging of the numbers seems to be standard practice. Sony seem to be much the same – claiming 1m PS3s shipped, although there are quite a few sightings of PS3s beginning to pile up in shops – the initial surge in demand has been mostly from people buying to re-sell, and its not been backed by any sort of real consumer demand since then. Nintendo are claiming similar but slightly higher numbers, but the crucial difference is that people are actually buying them to use, and its still quite hard to find consoles (and in fact extra controllers or copies of Wii Play) around Edinburgh. But that’s probably to be expected given the lower price point.
Looks like Phillips have finally got a title worthy of recognition supporting the ambX hardware that they were trying to persuade me to develop for last July at Develop Brighton – Supreme Commander were making a big fuss about their ambX support last week. I must admit I like the concept, and it sounds very easy to support, but it can only ever be an afterthought – a polish point for a good title – since the number of people out there who are serious enough to buy it has got to be pretty small. But then I don’t know market demographics on that sort of thing. Certainly I’m happy with headphones for my games, I’m not desperate for a surround sound experience for PC gaming.
Anyway, I’m almost at my destination now, so time to wrap up. I shall endeavour to keep blogging higher up the priority list for the rest of winter; with any luck my schedule will be a little looser now the holiday season is out of the way and the girlfriend is distracted by Rayman Raving Rabbids.
