October 2007 - Posts
Yes, I have one and love it - though I'll admit that at this point I don't see a difference between visual quality on well-encoded HD-DVD or BluRay discs. They both look fantastic! That said, I just saw the following on Evil Avatar:
As most of you already know Best Buy had an awesome promotion this week. With the purchase of a Xbox 360 HD DVD drive you would also recieve Heroes Season 1 for free (a $99 value!). Yes, great deal, but was that not enough for you?
In this same ad there was another HD DVD deal which allowed you to pick two free HD DVD movies with the purchase of any HD DVD player. Originally Best Buy intended this deal to only apply to Toshiba set top boxes, but due to poor word choice they have chosen to honor the promotion for the Xbox 360 HD DVD player due to being overwhelmed with complaints.
Now with the purchase of the Xbox 360 HD DVD Player you recieve:
- King Kong (packed in with the drive itself)
- Heroes Season 1
- 2 Free HD DVDs of your choice priced $34.99 or below
- 5 Additional free HD DVDs (via mail in rebate)
That is 9 Free HD DVDs with the purchase of the drive. If you've already purchased the drive just take in your receipt to recieve the two additional free movies.
Heroes is a fantastic series, and it looks great in HD. If you had been considering picking it up anyway, this deal makes it a no-brainer IMO.
[Edit: Just came across a similar offer, except online at Buy.com. $165 gets you the HD-DVD drive, King Kong, Heroes Season 1, and five HD-DVDs of your choice (from a preset list). Seriously, if you have an HDTV do yourself a favor and pick one up!]
Interesting Gamasutra article out today on a study from research group Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) that shows better achievements can drive better sales. Achievements have been a bit of a phenomenon, and it's been pretty obvious that other platforms would be following Xbox LIVE's lead soon enough. (To be clear, I'm not saying that the idea of awards or badges for achieving certain tasks is new; however, LIVE enabled the concept seamlessly for all games on the platform. There was lots of initial skepticism from partners, but I think folks are pretty well bought in now.)
Here's an interesting snippet from the article:
Can you break down the different types of accomplishments you've identified?
GZ: We broke them down into 16 different types, and we've got very specific definitions about what each one is. They go from action accomplishments which reward you for doing an action to something as specific as one related to user generated content, or games that do unlocks, time based or score based accomplishments, initiation, elimination, customization, collection, community, challenges, advancement. They really track to different player types.
We've found that games that incorporate a wider diversity of accomplishments, they hit more people with the things that they really like, and they tend to do better, they tend to get reviewed better, which isn't necessarily terribly surprising. The same goes for quantity.
It's interesting -- we actually have time graphs over the years since the release of the Xbox 360, showing that while it didn't start out that way, it's definitely that way now. As people learned what the accomplishments do, it's actually rather striking. When you look at sales figures for the first five or six months, it really didn't matter as much, but as the consumers have got used to them, they now really seem to be focusing on games that [have more and diverse accomplishments].
I've been on a bit of a "we need to really go enable asynchronous gaming" kick, and you'll see more in that vein going forward. The main thing I wanted to point out here was that achievements are, in many ways, nothing more than another form of async gaming. It's a game where you compete across games to collect Gamerscore, and within games to collect achievements - in many cases, challenging friends to get the same achievements. You don't have to be online at the same time to play, and you can play at any time, and from multiple platforms. Today those platforms include the Xbox 360 and Games for Windows - LIVE... tomorrow, who knows?
Oh - since I know my bringing up G4WL is going to cause some reaction from people who aren't thrilled with our early implementations (in Shadowrun and Halo 2), it's worth saying that I'm still personally excited to where we're going with it. Microsoft is (for better or worse) known for iterating and improving products continually. The old joke is that it takes three versions to deliver what people are happy with - frankly, I think we did pretty darn well with v1 and v2 of LIVE (for Xbox and Xbox 360), and I know folks will be very pleased with what's coming down the pipe for both LIVE and G4WL. Can't talk details for obvious reasons, but let's just say that we fully know things that we need to deliver. Time and space, my friends... time and space.
Could be, according to this Next Gen article:
Halo 3, released on September 25, grossed a whopping $170 million in first day sales, a figure that had swelled to over $300 million by early October. In contrast, North American movie box office takings have been dwindling, reports Advertising Age, and Master Chief is being blamed by a number of film executives.
Total industry film ticket sales were only $80 million for the Oct. 5 weekend, down a massive 27 percent year-over-year. According to research firm Media by Numbers that’s the industry's worst performance for an October weekend since 1999. Fall domestic receipts are also down 6 percent compared to last year.
It's pretty interesting to see that gaming has gotten big enough to impact what was once a pretty much unassailable and invulnerable industry. After all, everyone wants to be entertained, no? And back in the day your major choices here were basically reading, dining, theater, live music, and movies. Appears gaming has gotten added to that list by enough people to impact the movie-going public.
What's really interesting to me here is that Halo 3 is definitely a game for the hardcore gamer - and that audience is pretty small compared to the vastly wider audience of people to whom casual or broader games can appeal to. Give us another ten years and I suspect you'll see gaming taking even more of an entertainment mantle.
... also known as "games you can play with your friends without having to be online at the same time." In this case, it's a Wall Street Journal article from this weekend that focuses on Scrabulous, a Facebook application. It's basically Scrabble, except you can play turn-at-a-time with multiple people over whatever timeframe works for you.
I've written about this before, but I think one of the biggest things we as an industry can do is focus on enabling async gaming on gaming platforms. People can't always sit down and play a marathon Halo 3 session together, and it's pretty obvious to me that one of the major reasons Scrabulous is so popular is that it both allows you to play on your own time, as well as play from different locations (thanks to being web-based). This is actually one of the reasons I'm so excited about Microsoft's LIVE Anywhere initiative. Over time, LIVE will be one of the largest online gaming networks that allows you to play with single identity across multiple platforms wherever you wish. Async gaming fits naturally here.
Don't believe the potential? Here's a quote from the article:
Since its Facebook debut in July, Scrabulous has grown to about 950,000 players. According to Facebook's data, 36% of those players (about 342,000 people) are "daily active users," or people who have logged in every day over the last 30 days. That's compared with an average of 7% for the site's top 50 tools and games, according to SocialMedia, a social-advertising company that tracks Facebook activity.
Just last night Halo 3 had just under 600k users online when I was playing. Scrabulous has over half of that playing at least once a day already - and that's just one game. What happens when we start seeing hundreds of these sorts of games? Time will be easier to find (since you're looking for bite-sized slices), but you'll have to filter through and find the worthy games. Guess there will always be challenges to overcome.
Note: if you're interested, make sure to read the Wall Street Journal article soon. It's only free for a limited time.
Just a quick post to point you to The Orange Box. For those of you living under a rock, The Orange Box is a compilation of five games from Valve: Half-Life 2, HL2 Episode 1, HL2, Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. I'm one of those people who never finished the original Half-Life 2, but always regretted it. Kept meaning to come back to it but held off when I heard it was coming to Xbox 360. And the wait was well worth it - the games are great in themselves, and the ports are beautifully done with fantastic sound, physics, and visuals. Valve also did some nice work with achievements, enumerating them within the game and even giving detail to multi-part achievements in the UI. I could go on and on, but I'll just point you to the Metacritic summary of reviews (where it's currently scoring an average of 97 percent.) Definitely check it out if you weren't sure!
Saw a link over on Slashdot to a Japanese article arguing that Wii's popularity may be a bubble. To quote:
"The report goes on to discuss the likelihood that many Wiis are gathering dust in owners' cupboards, citing one software house president as saying, 'People bought it out of curiosity, and it's likely a lot of them haven't used it.' Given that September saw Wii sales fall sharply in Japan for the second consecutive month, it seems reasonable to speculate that the bubble inflated by the novelty factor is starting to deflate, but writing Nintendo off at any stage is a perilous course to steer."
I only point to this because it's similar to my personal opinion. I like the Wii, but I just don't play it - haven't turned it on in months. I'd argue that's just my taste, but I know a lot of people who are in the same boat. Doesn't matter to Nintendo since they appear to be making money on every box sold, but I do wonder if demand will hold up past this holiday.
Just to be clear - I do think that Nintendo has changed the face of the market permanently with their focus on approachability and innovative controls. Not trying to take anything away from them there. I just suspect the platform is going to slow in the coming year... but I guess we'll see.
Had a bunch of folks pinging me about today's PS3 price cut (and removal of back compat support). Although currently only announced for Europe, it's very likely a US announcement is in the works.
As a quick bit of background, I wrote multiple posts on the subject in the past. I also wrote that I'm not going to be commenting further on competing platforms since some press have taken my thoughts as official Microsoft statements. To quote myself:
...even though it was my personal opinion, some press (particularly some gaming blogs) spun those opinions as official Microsoft statements, even though they quite obviously weren't. And that isn't cool, especially as it can cause extra work for folks (and friends!) here at work who have to deal with clarifying that fact.
The ironic aspect to this is that unfiltered and unfettered access to the thoughts of people working in the industry is what the "gaming press" (however you care to define it) most craves. Unfortunately, taking a sensationalistic tack for the sake of driving traffic simply causes that access to dry up. I'll still be posting things of interest (for those of you who care!), but in general I'm going to avoid commenting on console platforms for a while.
What I will do to close this out this topic is answer the most common question I've gotten today: "How did you know?" Unfortunately, the answer won't be satisfying to most of you.
Simply put, it was an educated guess. There's a lot that's predictable when you understand how the console market works and what it takes to build a platform (both hardware and software). I've been lucky enough to work in this industry for almost 20 years (scary thought, that), and it gives a lot of perspective. The interesting thing is that that perspective is shared by a lot of industry folks - even those who are friends while working on opposing platform sides. Conversations happen all the time, and I can tell you that many people expected price cuts this year - there was no surprise there.
Many of the more specific predictions were based on likely price-cutting targets. It was obvious BluRay wouldn't be removed, but memory card slots, hardware support for backward compatibility, and WiFi were all candidates for removal (as well as reducing hard drive size). Some of those removals only save a dollar or two, but over millions of units you're talking real money. I guessed all three would be removed; I landed on two out of three (plus hard drive reduction).
Anyway, hope that gives a bit of perspective on this whole thing. As I've said, I won't be commenting on this subject beyond this post, but will look forward to a fun, conversation-filled evening with a friend over steak sometime in the coming year!
Just saw this saved Halo 3 clip on Joystiq - one of those Hail Mary throws that you'll never be able to duplicate no matter how much you try. Love it!
Although Windows Vista has a lot to recommend it, one challenge some folks have is trying to install and run some older/legacy Windows games. This is most often due to a title expecting to be able to write almost anywhere on the Windows machine (something that's just not the case anymore with Vista's new security model.)
Most recent games "just work" with no problems, thanks to some amazing efforts by the Windows gaming folks here at Microsoft. Older games can have challenges, and I just wanted to point out a useful site called Vista Game Doctor to help you get past those. These guys are testing a huge library of games (especially many of those old and obscure ones) and have put together a fantastic index to help you if you have problems. Good site to bookmark!