Monthly Archives: April 2007

Sony needs to fire their PR department #57

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As you may have heard, Sony had a goat carcass on display at a promotional event for God of War 2. This really caused a stir when the UK’s Daily Mail caught on to the story (there are pictures).

Now, it should be noted that the Daily Mail is not considered a reputable paper at all. However, they didn’t make up the story. It was printed in the European edition of OPM, after all. So we do know that a decapitated goat carcass was present at the event. We don’t know if, as alleged by the Daily Mail, guests were actually invited to reach into the cavity and pull something out. And we don’t know if the goat was excessively abused (sure, it was killed, but Sony says it came already dead from a local butcher).

I will say up front that I don’t object generally to killing animals. I eat meat, and although I’ve never actually eaten goat, I wouldn’t refuse if it was offered. This is not an issue of animal abuse or cruelty to me. It’s just stupid. Even worse, it’s actively stupid. Creepy robot babies might make the average viewer scratch their head in confusion. A dead goat just grosses people out. What was Sony trying to accomplish other than getting cheap attention? God of War 2 doesn’t need this kind of publicity. The game is good enough to sell on its own without any carcasses.

On another note, if you follow the second link up there, you will see in the picture that there is a topless woman standing next to the dead goat. Granted, she has had her breasts painted over, but she’s still topless. I would be envious of European gamers, but then again, they’re still paying hundreds more than Americans for a PS3.

Just how huge are they?

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If you read any videogame news sites, you probably know that Nintendo has announced record-breaking profits and revenues for the past fiscal year. The company reported 966.5 billion yen in revenues and 226 billion yen in profit. That translates to about $8 billion and $1.9 billion respectively.

Keep in mind that Roger Ehrenberg reported that Microsoft’s Home & Entertainment Division lost $1.2 billion last year. It all just goes to underline how ridiculous this industry is sometimes. Everybody is always saying that Microsoft and Sony are the big giants while Nintendo is a nimble little company, but the truth is Microsoft and Sony would kill to have the kinds of numbers Nintendo is producing. Microsoft has spent the past 6 years losing almost as much as Nintendo makes, and all they have to show for it is some marketshare that’s still not terribly certain.

Meanwhile, I don’t know what Sony’s numbers are, but it is said that SCE (the games division) is losing a lot of money. Thus, Nintendo is currently the only videogame company on the market right now that’s turning a profit. Maybe Microsoft or Sony will catch up to them later, but right now Nintendo gets to sit back and watch the cash rolling in.

We also know that Nintendo has $10 billion just sitting in the bank gathering interest. The operating numbers we have here indicate that Nintendo’s operating costs are a little more than $6 billion. If Nintendo were to take the $1.9 billion they just made this year and put it into their war chest, they could literally stop selling anything and would still be able to pay all employees and costs for the next two years.

Incidentally, Nintendo is projecting sales of 14 million Wiis over the next year which would mean they are hoping to have 20 million units sold by April 2008. This is rather enormous because the PS2 was pulling 8 million in its second year and 18 million in its third year, so Nintendo is clearly aiming to have history’s best-selling home console. We’ll just have to hope they can continue to produce software that attracts interest.

Is he really?

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I’m not sure that Shigeru Miyamoto really is one of the top 100 most influential people in the world. I think one could come up with a reasonable list of 100 people without including him in it. All the same, Time is running a poll, and Shiggy is doing well. In fact, he’s in the top 5 as of the writing of this post, right above J.K. Rowling and below Stephen Colbert (see, now that’s just not right).

You can visit the link and rate Time’s candidates for the top 100 most influential people in the world too by visiting the link.

Considering the Xbox failure

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I like to harp on analysts a lot, but when they’re not making predictions about the future, I find that what they say can be thought provoking and useful. Maybe it’s because when they can’t just make numbers up, analysts have to actually say something intelligent for anybody to pay attention to them.

Such is the case with Roger Ehrenberg, an analyst whom I admittedly have never heard of but who is stirring up some attention in the blogosphere with his latest pronouncements. I should note here that Ehrenberg himself seems to be aware of the internet videogame culture and how it works which gives me a little more respect for his opinion.

Anyway, Joystiq caught notice of Ehrenberg’s article and wrote up a post about it accurately summarizing the gist of his whole article and discussing his ideas with some notable depth and intelligence.

Haha, of course I’m kidding! I was just doing that to make sure you were paying attention. They actually missed the point rather badly, so I wouldn’t even read their summary if I were you. You would be much better served by reading Ehrenberg’s actual article. You’ll find my discussion of his ideas after the fold.

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The new internet on the new consoles

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So both the Wii and the PS3 have the capability of surfing the web. It was only a matter of time before somebody decided to put them up for comparison. I highly recommend reading it at Games Digest. The results may surprise you. It turns out that the Wii tends to be better at displaying Web 2.0 sites than the PS3, perhaps because the Wii uses a browser developed by Opera. Inexplicably, there are some sites such as Google Maps which work fine on the Wii and don’t work at all on the PS3. On the other hand, the PS3 has a hard drive and the Wii doesn’t which means the PS3 has the capability of uploading photographs or videos (as long as it’s in a format the PS3 recognizes). So if uploading videos to YouTube is a big deal for you, you may want to go with the PS3. Of course, it might also be worth considering that the Wii comes with a pointer device whereas on the PS3 you’ll have to provide your own keyboard and mouse (although to be sure, typing on a keyboard is preferably to typing on the Wii’s on screen keyboard).

This article also gave me a lot of ideas for the potential of web browsers in a console. It never occurred to me, but it actually could be really handy to find directions using the Wii. Maps will be nice and big for everyone to see on your TV screen. And I never knew about last.fm giving you streaming music. I’ll have to check out Pandora to see if it works on the Wii as well. From what Games Digest said, any site that streams music, be it Myspace or Bebo, works fine on the Wii. I’ll report back later if I remember to check it out.

Games Digest also points out that these results may change. Websites may reformat themselves in the future in such a way that the Wii or the PS3 will stop displaying them properly. Or maybe they’ll specifically have new designs made to be viewable on consoles. If I had to guess, I would say it’s more likely that websites will reformat themselves to be viewable on the Wii. After all, more people own a Wii than a PS3, so if you’re going to spend the effort on a new design, you might as well reach the biggest potential audience. It’s a shame that the Wii browser will cost money a few months from now.

How Wii games use channels and what it means for online

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I have no idea what NiGHTS is about, really. I never played the original game, and all I can tell from the videos I’ve seen is it pretty trippy.

I still don’t really know anything about the game. But according to Joystiq, apparently it’s now going to make use of the Wii’s Forecast channel to create real time weather effects in the game. If it’s snowing outside, it will be snowing in the game, too.

Personally, I’m not terribly excited by this. It’s a neat feature, but you can imagine that people living in, say, Arizona aren’t going to be benefiting very much from it. So why am I posting about this? Well, even though the weather feature in NiGHTS isn’t a very big deal in itself, it offers some insight into the relationship between Wii games and their channels. And that, ultimately, might give us some guesses as to how Nintendo’s online plans will work.

We already know that games can make use of Miis that you’ve made (although only first party games have taken advantage of this so far). We also know that there is at least a limited amount of information that can be sent from one Wii to another in-game. Elebits allows you to design your own levels and then send them to people on your friends list. It does this by basically piggybacking on the Wii’s messaging system. Instead of sending the words “Hi how are you?” to your friend, it sends a stream of data that allows them to recreate the level you’ve made. And now we’ve found that NiGHTS can make use of data that’s been downloaded to the Forecast channel.

So it turns out that even third parties have access, at least to some extent, to the Wii Channels. And depending on future channels that Nintendo might release, we could be in for some really neat effects. Imagine walking around someone’s office in a videogame and seeing news clippings with real news stories on the wall. Or fighting different sets of monsters depending on how people are responding to polls in the Everybody Votes Channel. Or meeting a Psycho Mantis-like character who checks your Virtual Console downloads and then “reads” your mind to find out what kind of games you like to play.

What does this have to do with online play? Well, in direct terms, it doesn’t mean much. We still don’t know whether Nintendo intends to use individual friend codes for each game or if they will be content to simply let each game use Wii system codes. But the fact that they are letting third parties make use of content from the Channels suggests to me that Nintendo might be trusting third parties enough to let them fiddle around deeper in the Wii’s innards than you might think. Maybe we really will be using Wii system codes instead of entering individual friend codes for each game.

By the way, in the latest edition of IGN Wii-kly (which is a worthwhile listen), Matt Cassamassina reveals that Mario Strikers is going to allow you to either play online with your buddies or simply play with a random person from the world. I don’t know whether to believe him, but if what he says is true, this would be another point against the idea that the Wii’s online games will use individual friend codes.

News of PS3′s success were premature…

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Sometimes videogame news just seems so predictable and inevitable that it’s barely news when it arrives. Such is the case with the numbers from the second week of sales for the PS3 in Europe. Just a week ago, Sony fans and retailers were crowing over the fact that the PS3 was the fastest selling home console in the UK ever. Sure, the launch in France wasn’t so hot, but it was finally a piece of good news for a fanbase that had been starved of it for months. Many people pointed out that this didn’t necessarily mean very much because the Xbox 360 and the Wii, the two previous fastest selling UK consoles, were both severely supply limited. They might have sold even more than the PS3 did, but we will never know because they physically couldn’t sell any more units. So although it’s great to see the PS3 off to a strong start, said the skeptics, we sohuldn’t take that to mean anything whatsoever in the long run.

And unfortunately, they were right. Sales of the PS3 in the UK plummeted by 82 percent in its second week. That same story at GI.biz will tell you that game sales for Resistance: Fall of Man and Motorstorm fell by 60 percent. Nobody has said it yet, but I think this may be the fastest dropoff in sales within a launch period ever recorded. The Xbox 360 and the Wii continued to sell consistently well for months after they launched. The PS3 has dropped to terrible numbers in a week. And the UK is the one European territory where the PS3 has actually done relatively well. Everywhere else, from France to Germany to Australia, it’s been a terrible flop.

Sony spun the initial launch figures by saying that in absolute terms, they were actually pretty good. It’s just that they did such a good job of providing supply that even with record setting numbers, the PS3 still didn’t sell out. Now I find myself waiting with a morbid sort of interest to see how they try to spin this latest piece of news.

Have we forgotten what jokes are supposed to be?

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It’s April 2, 2007. I’m just writing that there so you know this post is for real. I wanted to expound a bit because I (and many I’ve talked to) have been thinking about the trend in April Fool’s Jokes these days.

Is it just me or do April Fool’s Jokes on the internet no longer have the ability to amuse? I’ve seen dozens upon dozens of fake web pages, faux hack attacks and non-existent products, and none of them have given me a moment of mirth (although in one case I ended up actually wishing the fake product was real). Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m just a sour downer. But I don’t think so.

Part of the problem, of course, is that any reasonably alert person these days realizes that if something unusual happens on April 1st, then it’s probably a prank. Thus, when you visit your favorite web page and find that it has been replaced by a shrine to Barry Manilow, shrug and then proceed to look for the link to the real website. The same thing happens when news sites post fake stories. I remember when EGM posted a fake story about a secret character in Super Street Fighter II: Turbo called Shen Long who you could only see by fighting M. Bison to a draw without ever throwing a single attack (or something like that). Judging from the letters section afterwards, dozens upon dozens of people bought the story hook, line and sinker.

And what do we have now? Bungie announces Halo Zero? Mario no longer exclusive to Wii? These aren’t just obvious. They’re also incredibly lame. How long did it take the people of Cheat CC to come up with the idea of the Mario story, I wonder.

The problem these days is people are pretty savvy about April Fool’s and especially so on the internet. If you’ve been an internet surfer for a few years, you’ve probably seen it all by now. Unless the prank is exceedingly clever, you’re just not going to be fooled because not only have you learned to detect when someone is trying to pull a fast one on you but you’re also in instant communication with dozens of other people (your IM buddy list) who will set you straight if you go wrong. Trying to fool people with a prank on the internet is a losing proposition.

Not all April Fool’s Jokes are about trying to fool your audience, of course. N-sider has a long tradition of creating obviously fake front pages every April 1st, and I particularly liked their parody of GoNintendo this year. We need more of that. April Fool’s Jokes are supposed to fool us, yes, but above all they are also supposed to be fun. And if you can’t fool anyone, you might as well have fun doing it.