Has Apple Changed the Rules?

MARCH 12, 2013 • Sometimes life just isn’t fair. You can work and study hard, make the best grades and be praised for all your efforts.  But then some glib, fast-talking upstart with no experience or credentials sweeps in to take your place. That is how it must seem to many of the competitors in the consumer technology space that have seen once struggling PC manufacturer Apple Inc. become a powerhouse in every category in which they compete. .....

Strong & Weak Among the Video Game Market Players

MARCH 6, 2013 • Technology is an inherently disruptive undertaking. At the very least that disruption is relentlessly incremental, and at most, seriously transformative. The iPhone, for example, made its debut back in 2007, elevated smartphones up to a must-have status with consumers, and as a result, permitted Apple to muscle itself into the games business. Looking forward, DFC thought it would be useful to take a hard look .....

Battling for Entertainment Dollars: 7 Major Companies in the Video Game Market

MARCH 5, 2013 • As we discussed recently in Can Sony & Nintendo Recover? one of the great ironies of 2012 was that Sony and Nintendo were not able to take advantage of strong consumer excitement over digital devices.  Hardware is clearly not a commodity and this should be good news for game hardware manufacturers that specialize in providing unique, proprietary systems.  Unfortunately, w.....

Can Sony And Nintendo Recover?

FEB. 21, 2013 • The year 2012 clearly showed that even in the age of easy digital distribution consumers love their physical products.  Among other things, this has included expensive hardware designed mainly to play digital content.  Having the coolest hardware device to access the Internet has suddenly become an important status symbol in society.  Unfortunately for the game industry, traditional game hardware manufacturers were not able to ride that trend.....

DFC Intelligence: Research You Can Trust

DEC. 22, 2012 • DFC Intelligence was founded in 1994 with a stated goal to provide strategic data research that would better enable companies to understand the growing video game industry and the emergence of what people back then were calling by such quaintly antiquated terms as Multimedia and Information Super Highway. The philosophy driving DFC then, as now, was distinguishing between what was real, what was hype, and from .....

Microsoft SmartGlass Examined

OCT. 31, 2012 • The Kinect motion controller was a tremendous boon to the Xbox 360 released far back in 2005 – helping to extend market share for the console at the very time that sales should have been trailing off.  While much outside attention is being focused on what the next Xbox will look like and when it will arrive, Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division has launched a new complementary input technology, SmartGlass. Although Kinect can e.....

[a]list Summit: Did theSocial Bubble Just Burst?

SEPT. 05, 2012 • At the [a]list summit in February, keynote speaker Michael Pachter took exception with an observation by DFC Intelligence president and principal analyst David Cole. Cole’s statement that there is a “bubble” in social games, which was used in the summit’s opening address, presented by your co-author of this piece Steve Fowler. “I think David Cole said something that’s wrong,” Pachter, researc.....

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