Daily Filter: Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13: The Masters, Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Dear Esther Mac port confirmed
Killing Floor hits a million sales, discounted on Steam
Jam Live Music Arcade announced for PS3, Xbox 360
Metal Gear Online to quietly die this summer
Evening Reading: A November to Remember
by Garnett Lee, Dec 10, 2009 5:58pm PSTI just finished cranking out the story on the November NPD video game sales numbers. The top of the lists came with no surprises as Modern Warfare 2 and Nintendo hardware laid the smack down. Beneath them, though, were the interesting developments. In hardware both HD consoles arguably post a win. For the PS3 that comes as the lone platform to show a rise in sales over last November, almost 90% at that. For the 360 the raw number is king as it edged out a total sales win in the face of many prediction is would fall to the PS3.
For game publishers those 360 hardware sales continue to translate into good sales for their games. Along with the note I made about the margin for both Modern Warfare 2 and Assassin's Creed 2 on 360 vs. PS3, Left 4 Dead 2 made a strong showing. Moreover, the ability to get the RPG Dragon Age: Origins into the top ten against a number of strong and heavily marketed holiday titles says a lot about the strength of the 360 as a platform. The next test will be to see how these top ten games fair over December as gift givers hit the shops and few new releases challenge them.
Here's how we fared today:
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat Coming in February
- Mass Effect 2 Celebrity Cast Unveiled
- Borderlands DLC 'Underdome Riot' Announced
- Dante's Inferno Demo Impressions and a Glimpse Deeper
- NPD Videogame Sales Show Second-Best November Ever
In an interview with Q Magazine Paul McCartney says getting married again this decade is a prime contender when asked what one thing he wished he adn't done.
A failed Russian missile put a great show in the night sky over Norway
After the ill-conceived Frosty TV ads from CBS the other day I guess ABC decided they were not to be outdone and seriously chopped up the classic Charlie Brown Christmas in the name of the almighty dollar.
And up in Sheboygan an intoxicated driver who urinated on the arresting officer learned he'll be spending a year in jail.
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The problem is the minimap still shows way too much, like every single guard as bright red dots, and blue hiding spots when you are being chased. I want to have to spot the guards with my own eyes and not have them pop up on the map even when they are out of sight around the corner. You know, maybe make the game somewhat challenging? Well when I put the minimap on those stupid dots are always there drawing my eye. Even when I'm not looking at it, I know I need to be cautious it's a damn warning signal right there. Wish there was a way to just toggle the minimap on when you select a waypoint on the main map and have it show nothing else. Or be able to toggle what the minimap shows. I'd even take just the little bar that only shows your distance from an objective but you can't toggle that independently of the minimap. :( That thing is rad.
The other little big wrinkle is that the full page map doesn't show your character's direction, which makes not using the minimap pretty hard as you can get lost fairly easily the many sections of the game that look exactly the same. It's less of problem if you just climb a roof and look for landmarks you know which is fine with me but dammit I can't find a configuration I'm happy with.
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my D:\Games\: 327GB
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Let's talk about piracy, okay?
I'm not a business or anti-piracy person, so I can't really say [how bad DS piracy is] exactly. I've seen the figures for PC and iPhone piracy (from a number of sources, included a complaint from Bill Gates some 20-30 years ago complaining about BASIC piracy) fall into the 80-95% range (that is, around 2-3 of every 20 copies is legitimately licensed). Part of me wants to think it's not that bad on consoles, because we've sold like 80-gazillion DSes. They can't have sold 72-gazillion piracy units, right? Sure, a hardware-only hack limits piracy to some extent, but it usually doesn't take much longer for someone to find a software solution (I suppose the DS is a little unique here in that there's no internal storage, so a little bit of HW becomes necessary). But I don't want to fool myself; I'm sure it's a big number.
Goldfish makes a good point, which comes up often; a pirated copy does not necessarily equal a lost sale. Some do, no bought, but not all. The ideal solution to piracy does this: converts pirated copies into money. It does not need to convert pirated copies into sales.
Because really that's not the root of what we (i.e. our investors) want. What we want is more money*. We don't necessarily need to sell more copies to do it. Hell, selling physical copies costs money, so it's possible (in some crazy goofy land) that "piracy" could be a win.
We don't have to make pirates pay for the whole price of the game--obviously they don't want to (or can't) do that. I don't know what the best way to monetize it is. The obvious first solution is advertising, but I hesitate to trend toward that. No one really likes advertisements, but I'm not sure if paying $50-60 (or $20-40 in the case of the DS) is worth not having them. Maybe someone will work out some new payment scheme where you pay a small fee for each month you don't want ads. Who knows.
There might not be enough advertising money there (on the DS, at least, advertising would have to be somewhat static. It's not an always-on device like an iPhone or a PC where you can always be serving the latest ads).
I don't think we're ready to chalk piracy up to some nebulous gain of "free marketing." At least not how things currently work, because you can't measure the amount of mindshare you're getting and it's hard to measure it's effectiveness (that is, money brought in because of it). And if your primary (and only) means of making money is selling a product, then your marketing probably shouldn't be giving away that product.
You also want to prevent pirated copies from being a burden on legitimate copies, which we've seen with Demigod and I'm sure other MP games where servers are overloaded with nonlicensed copies and legitimate paying customers get boned.
So, shack - given that you're not going to be able to eliminate piracy (Hell, it isn't even worth trying if it costs you more than the income from sales you've lost), what would you do to make some money off of lost sales?
* ignore for now that some of us might want to expand the boundaries of what games can do, artistic recognition, self-expression, end world hunger, or whatever. I don't think business folk have souls anyway. Surely investors don't.
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http://www.nhl.tv/team/console.jsp?catid=616&id=53843
So glad they included that play-off goal against the Rangers. A thing of beauty.
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http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118012601.html?categoryid=13&cs=1&nid=2563&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+variety%2Fnews%2Ffrontpage+%28Variety+-+Front+Page+News%29
hell. yes.
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I have a huge list of URLs (about 1400). I need to remove the http://www and everything after the .net or .com. In other words, I want a list like:
amazon.com
buy.com
shacknews.com
It's easy to remove http:/www; they're already gone. The question is, how can I remove everything after the .com, given that the stuff that follows that varies dramatically from site to site?
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Live this morning
http://twitter.com/fourzerotwo
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A V A T A R
I posted in MD about the avatar review that just came out http://www.empireonline.com/reviews/reviewcomplete.asp?FID=133552
I'm a little surprised but pleased to see it so well received, at least by that reviewer. I'm especially excited because this is the first film I've worked on.
old thread: http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?id=21626308
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I've noticed people either tend to think Danny DeVito is the best thing about the show, or the worst thing about the show. Where do you stand?
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http://detnews.com/article/20091210/METRO03/912100391/Attorney-suspended-over-clients--sex-allegations
The Attorney Discipline Board has suspended an 83-year-old attorney after he allegedly asked his female clients to work off their legal fees by performing sex acts on his "couch of restitution."
So which shack lawyer will end up like this in 50 years?
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http://www.oglaf.com/skulls.html
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AITOO noticing horrid web browser scrolling post patch in the default browser? Dolphin browser is a little quicker, but damn, scrolling through mmo-champion.com is a super lag fest now, and it was smooth as butter pre patch. People are reporting that this patch disabled the "pixelization" of website text while scrolling, ie: when you scrolled pre-2.0.1 on a website the browser would make the text low resolution, resulting in quicker scrolling. post patch, that pixelization is gone, causing the lag. :(
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it's probably the dream of everyone in here when he was a little kid but seriously there's no word on it or any research or anything, it seems like everyone has abandoned it and that's pretty stupid especially with today's hardware. I would sell a kidney for a one.
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That one dude is divorcing his wife because she is addicted to WoW and wasn't showering for weeks and not taking care of their children. The best part was that the dude's MOM was also playing and in the same guild as his wife. She has five (!!!) level 80 characters. Some random guy in the guild was sending nude pictures around and the mom told her son and that's when he drew the line.
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The Raiders offense looks revived under Gradkowski, who has thrown six touchdown passes in his three starts, leading two fourth-quarter comebacks.
"Guys are just making plays around him," Russell said. "That's what a quarterback needs, his surrounding players. That's what was going on."
http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=4732159
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