If you’ve been reading the papers, watching the news, listening to the radio or, if in New York, been wandering past the huge LED tickers that dominate Times Square, you’ll probably be aware that some of the world’s largest economies are in trouble at the moment. With oil and fuel prices rising and people having less and less money to spend, several big companies are reporting huge losses and announcing cutbacks in the epic economic slowdown known as the ‘credit crunch’.
The thing is…could this be affecting games companies?
Forget console wars: this is real, serious, deadly war. A story from Yahoo crossed our desk. It’s about how a metal that’s used in consumer electronics, most prominently the PS2 and PS3 has resulted in a blood feud in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, extending the bloody fighting that had previously been about diamonds.
Hit the jump for more on this and feel free to scorn Sony as much as you like.
We’ve been tipped off by a mysterious figure known only as ironfist74(or, er, Brian) on the subject of Sears, who’re currently selling Xbox LIVE points cards at an unreasonably high price. What is it with huge corporations and sticking vacuum cleaners in our pockets every time we make a reasonable request?
For that price in full and some comparisons with competitive stores (and a lot of unnecessary math) hit the jump.
Some more community blog goodness, this time in the form of that rarest of articles on Sarcastic Gamer: genuinely useful advice. These tips for economical gaming come from Peace Bunny’s own forums blog. You can have one too, just by swinging by the forums. As always we’ll be keeping a vigilant eye on the blogs for the cream of the crop, which will end up here. Onwards into Peace Bunny’s top tips!
I am the budget gamer. The bargain bin burrower. The discount-disc discoverer. The second-hand software sorcerer. At the end of the day, we all have some sort of budget and financial limitations on our entertainment; the biggest challenge is to make the most of what you have.
We would all love to have every new blockbuster delivered to our houses moments after their official release, but in the real world this just isn’t possible for 99% of us. So how should we game on a budget? Well, I’ve put together this brief list of tips. Please feel free to comment extra suggestions!
Thanks to the mighty and wise U.S. government, anyone who filed a tax return for 2007 is getting a hefty check to, of course, stimulate the economy. Now, we could go into the politics of it all, but that just leads down a bad road. We’re all getting some free money, and as gamers it’s our right.. nay, our duty to stimulate the economy by growing our game libraries or adding a new console to our entertainment center.
So how do you do your duty and blow $300 or $600 dollars on? Follow the jump to find out.
It’s a recession here in the US of A and that means belt-tightening times for many Americans. Less money for frivolous expenditures like say… video games and consoles. It also means that the value of companies that sell those games can take quite a dip, if forecast revenues don’t measure up to reality. This isn’t a bad situation to be in if you’ve been saving trillions of pennies to buy one of those companies. You get where I’m going with this? Hang in there… (more…)
In a move, sure to cause virtual headaches for avatars and their masters the world over, Second Life proprietors, Linden Labs, have shut down the entire virtual economy by closing their banking system. (more…)
