E3 MMO movement

 Posted by (Visited 6452 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,
Jul 152008
 
XBox Live avatars

XBox Live avatars and new dashboard

From here, it sure like the virtual world-ish convergence that has long been predicted is hitting the consoles in earnest.

  • XBox Live is adding avatars, akin to the Nintendo Miis, but it looks like they’ll have a bit more spatiality and multiplayer interaction to them — and will be the basic interface for XBL from now on. Oh, and remember when I commented that consoles were turning into PCs? They announced the ability to install games to the hard drive as a major advance. Heh.
  • Nintendo’s next Animal Crossing game is also drifting towards online-world land, though still not truly massive in scale.
  • Club Penguin is jumping to the Nintendo DS, and don’t underestimate Disney’s new DGamer service, which is intended to network all the Disney online properties.
  • Sony has a 256-player action game coming, which qualifies as “massive,” certainly, though perhaps not as presistent. They’re also adding more real-world integration, with stuff like movie and TV downloads, weather service, news, etc.

Music game lawsuit chain

 Posted by (Visited 14846 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Jul 112008
 

Just to keep things straight…

Konami is suing Harmonix over music game patents. Harmonix is owned by Viacom, which bought them because they owned patents on music games themselves, which everyone thought made Activision’s purchase of Red Octane, which published Guitar Hero, kind of funny since they got the brand but not the underlying IP, though then Activision accused Harmonix of being imitative of… itself when Rock Band was announced; and proceeded to have a different developer make the game. Naturally, Konami started out by having patents on Guitar Freaks, though in fact MTV (Viacom) also owned patents on drum games themselves already, and Konami is now also making their own full-band game. Activision apparently has a license on the Konami stuff (did Red Octane?), but they’re getting sued by Gibson who have a patent on music games as well, even though the Gibson guitars were in Guitar Hero based on a licensing deal. Activision did buy a bunch of other patents, and lists them in the game’s docs, though. No word on whether the dispute over royalties supposedly owed to Harmonix, now Viacom, by Red Octane, now Activision Blizzard, over whether the Guitar Hero sequels are new games or the same game with new content, has been resolved. There was a lawsuit about that too, but they decided to negotiate instead.

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A la carting games

 Posted by (Visited 7241 times)  Game talk, Watching  Tagged with: , , ,
May 092008
 

At work, our biz dev guy forwarded around this highly interesting article about the future of paid video content on the Net: The Ala Carting of Video on the Net – Will it lead to disaster?

He commented that this had relevance for games — something about which I agree completely. I strongly suggest reading the full article, but here’s a brief sampling (which I gather is quoting a report from Bernstein Research):

On the web, early evidence suggests that consumers will tune out – click away – if they are forced to watch more than 30 seconds or so of advertising up front, and maybe another 90 seconds of advertising over the next thirty minutes. Hulu.com, for example, which has already been lionized by many as the future of TV, serves two minutes of advertising for every 22 minutes of programming(i.e. the programming duration of a typical half hour show from television). Assuming identical CPMs for web video and TV, and after accounting for lost affiliate fees, a 30 minute program on the web with two minutes of advertising yields approximately 1/8th as much revenue per viewer.

Are content producers prepared to reduce production costs…by 88%?

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