Big Tech Firms Just Playing Games

from the acting-cool dept

Thu, Oct 5th 2006 8:29am — Joseph Weisenthal

It's been clear for some time that many of the older IT firms have entered a period of much slower growth than what they've been used to for most of their existence. And many of these businesses aren't likely to ever return to their heady years. One area that is growing strongly is the videogame industry, and many older companies are looking to buy in. Earlier this year, Dell bought out Alienware a maker of high-end boxes designed for gaming. Just recently HP copied the move and bought out Voodoo, which does the same thing. Also, this summer, AMD bought out ATI, a maker of graphics chips, which has benefited by the growth in the videogame industry. So naturally rumors are now swirling that Intel may buy out ATI's rival Nvidia. At this point, it's very speculative, and there are plenty of reasons why it might not be a good fit, but the trend still seems pretty clear. Still, even with these acquisitions, it's going to be hard for these companies to counteract the slowdown in their core businesses. It makes Microsoft's decision to develop its own gaming franchise, well before its peers were looking at the space, look rather prescient.

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DittoBox, 5 Oct 2006 @ 9:40am

Nvidia though...
To be fair, a sizable portion of the nvidia marketshare is making visual effects for movies and TV, making CAD drawings, architectural renderings, CAID and CADD and doing hardware rendering with their nvidia hardware...many possibilities with Quadro.
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chris (profile), 5 Oct 2006 @ 10:22am

next stop... PORN!
gaming is big money, business loves them some big money, so i am not all that surprised.

now, when big tech companies start getting in to porn, that's when i will be surprised.
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Republican Gun, 5 Oct 2006 @ 12:00pm

Something new
Something new in the gaming world needs to be invented. Something like what Id did back in the day with thier 3D engine. Lately everything seems to be the same, a 3d enviroment with textures and sprites. I'm bored...guess I'll just play CS again.
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Anonymous Coward, 5 Oct 2006 @ 1:43pm

its kinda hard to go anywhere new since you cant really go to 4d... since there isent one(that we know of =P) the only thing game developers can really do is move to better grafix and different gameplay, like when i had a sega gennius (like 16 bit grafix i think) we all thought it was the best grafix ever and now you look at it and its all blocky... sameway with everyother older game compared to a new one...

also i think theres way to many wwII games... theres a few that a great(cod 1&2, bf42, and some of the MOH's) but all the other ones suck... we just need another game that combines all the different game types ie its a shooter rpg and rts, might be hard to push a game like that though...
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Anonymous Coward, 5 Oct 2006 @ 2:58pm

orgasm for
I would orgasm for a game that combined Tribes 2 with an MMORPG. I find myself watching videos of Tribes instead of playing WOW and the such.
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Tyshaun, 5 Oct 2006 @ 3:04pm

where's the innovation/new business model tall....
I'm a little disappointed with techDirt today. Seems like this would have been a perfect opportunity to talk about how the big tech firms need to innovate and need new business models and such, but nothing except a half-hearted pat on the back to Microsoft for doing what it always does, lead the marketspace (not necessarily in quality).

As per video games, I think there is still much to be done. When you are playing a video game and can't tell the difference between it and a HD television movie, we've pretty much hit the technological limit. There are still serious advances to be had in game AI, graphics depth, and general playability.

Finally, for years there have been rumors that big business have used subsidiaries to invest and hold controlling interest in porn. Also, the success and scale of companies like Playboy, Hustler, and others are examples of big business and porn being "in bed together" so to speak.
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Wizard Prang, 6 Oct 2006 @ 8:29am

Well said
I built an "old-skool" retro gaming rig (700MHz) for my old Win98 games (Freespace 2, Flight sims, Battlezone II, Conquest: Frontier Wars etc).

I spend more game time on this machine than on my "top-end" (2.4GHz) gaming rig.
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