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POPSIs Nintendo a snake oil salesman? It's true. Games like Wii Fit and Brain Age play to your mental and physical insecurities, but there's no real proof that they actually improve either. From experience, Wii Fit is more motivational tool than workout machine: http://is.gd/Bo3 EDIT: I should emphasize that this is clipped from an opinion piece, so it's not definitively declaring Nintendo's products bogus.
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POPSIdle PS3s cost you $250 a year in energy bills. This may convince you to turn off your consoles. According to research conducted by Australia-based Choice, folks who don't physically turn off their PS3 (by flipping the power button) will add $248.28 to their electric bill a year. An idle Xbox 360 costs $184.32 in energy consumption. Idle Nintendo Wiis cost a mere $23.26. The only consumer electronic product tested that rivals the PS3 is Plasma TVs, which cost $232.10 a year if left powered on.
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POPSMicrosoft says screw the Long Tail Way to go Microsoft. The whole point of the digital distribution era is it affords content makers the opportunity to sell their content without worrying about mass appeal (Long Tail economics). Microsoft is now eviscerating its digital distribution platform, Xbox Live Arcade, in favor of digitally stocking "good" games (and thereby deleting unpopular ones from its catalog). While the idea isn't unsound if Microsoft wants to build a robust library, it certainly goes against the entire grain of the digital age.
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POPSRockstar paid $100,000 for the voice of Niko Bellic "Had this been a television program, a film, an album, a radio show or virtually any other sort of traditional recorded performance, Mr. Hollick and the other actors in the game would have made millions by now," writes Schiesel -- and important sentence cut out by Clipmarks. Essentially the theory here is that videogame companies need to offer royalties to all the voice actors in the game. The problem, however, is figuring out where to draw the line once you start paying royalties. Is a voice actor more important than an animator? This is one of the concerns facing EA in the possible acquisition of Take-Two: The Houser brothers receive generous royalties from Take-Two that, if acquired, might cause insurrection within Electronic Arts' other studios.
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POPSFirst Netflix player launches Roku is the "small company" building streaming Netflix boxes that Reed Hastings mentioned during Netflix's April earnings call. The box is nondescript, but, according to Wired's Mark McClusky, it works. Now, like uncovering the final Cylon, we'll have to wait for the last two partners, who will join Roku and LG, to be revealed. One bet is on integration with Microsoft's Xbox 360. The second--who knows?--Tivo?
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POPSIs the ESA driving away game companies with dues hike? Over the past few weeks, companies have jumped from the Electronic Software Association's ship. Everything from president Mike Gallagher to the continual reinvention of the annual trade show E3 to increased costs have been blamed. Regardless, Activision, Vivendi, Lucas Arts, NC Soft, Atlus, and Foundation 9 have left the videogame industry's advocacy group. Kotaku's Leigh Alexander seems to have dug up the cause and effect. When the Electronic Entertainment Expo was moved from LA to Santa Monica, it incurred $5 million fine for breaking its contract with the LA Convention Center. Shortly afterward, membership dues were quadrupled.
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POPSElectronic Arts extends Take-Two tender offer, again Way to go Michael Pachter. Last week during the run up to the rather unexciting May 16 deadline, the Wedbush Morgan analyst suggested Electronic Arts should walk away from the deal (and of course return to scoop up Take-Two after the stock price plummets) but concluded the company was simply too lazy to go through with it. They'd extend the deadline, yet again, to avoid refiling paperwork because lord knows a company making $3.6 billion in sales can't afford an extra $85,000 filing fee.
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POPSGTA IV did not destroy the entertainment world as we know it Grand Theft Auto IV's effect on the world's entertainment consumption has been grossly overstated -- granted, GTA IV is expected to smash all sorts of videogame sales records. Leading up to its launch, many industry pundits hypothesized/contemplated/claimed that the game would impact everything from DVD rentals to book sales. Many expressed sympathy for Iron Man, which opened this past weekend. As it turns out, all this fretting was for naught. Videogames, apparently, aren't as mainstream as the Wii led us all to believe.
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POPSAmazon's Jeff Bezos invests in online games site And the Internet will soon be consumed by Facebook. Jeff Bezos' personal gift of $3 million to Flash-game collective Kongregate will be be used to fuel Facebook development. Look forward to a slew of new game invites you can ignore.
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POPSGTA IV development may have cost $100 million The Times scored an interview with Grand Theft Auto IV producer Leslie Benzies -- it's "harder to get to Benzies than it is to find a church service in Liberty City." (In fact, interviewing anyone had Rockstar is a major accomplishment.) Throughout the course of the conversation, Benzies touches on all sorts of GTA topics -- violence in games, media perception, development, and his own background. It's an interesting look at one of the "1,000" folks that helped craft GTA's latest opus.
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POPSMan stabbed whilst buying GTA IV Last night at San Francisco's Powell St. GameStop, I joked with a few friends waiting in line for Grand Theft Auto IV about the fact that law enforcement needed to police a bunch of gamers. "Well, we all know GTA turns people violent," he quipped. Now with one man stabbed and another with a shattered jaw, I don't find the idea as preposterous. Although I will continue to believe that games do not inherently make folks more violent -- at least until some presents me with hard proof. I would say this is tragic. And it's tragic because it strengthens arguments of anti-videogame crusaders and has brought to life many fears parents and watchdogs have held about the Grand Theft Auto franchise. And while the muggers obviously weren't directly influenced by GTA IV, it makes us all look bad.
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POPSApple plots a virtual (as in world) shopping experience The most prevalent example of the3D Web, oft bandied about by advocates, is the virtual mall. Imagine your avatar walking down endless virtual isles of Amazon.com in search of a digital SLR camera. Unable to decide between Nikon or Canon, he turns to another virtual shopper (who may -- but probably doesn't -- know what he's talking about) to ask advice. Obviously that's easier than simply searching for the product on a Web site and scanning reviews. Now it looks like Apple thinks this might be a true user interface revolution because folks who aren't comfortable enough to shop via Web site are going to have a far better time trolling through a virtual store front. What ever happened to thinking differently?
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POPSSecond Life is now mobile. The horror -- Samsung has built a Second Life “solution” for your mobile phone so you’ll never have have to deal with your first life again.
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POPSStay at the Westin, play a Wii It worked for real estate sales. Westin is trying to lure guests to its hotels and resorts with the promise of a *free* in-room Wii. Curious: It's part of the "WestinWORKOUT" program. I don't know that I'd put a rigorous game of Wii Tennis in league with running and workout equipment.
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POPSWill the FTC block EA's probable Take-Two takeover? Justin Blankenship, a lawyer formerly employed by the Federal Trade Commission, proposes that the FTC might do just that because the dissolution of 2K Sports into Electronic Arts would mean EA Sports would have the exclusive game publishing rights to: the NHL, NCAA basketball and football, NBA, MLB, PGA, NASCAR, FIFA, and the NFL. That leaves, oh, curling, cricket, and Major League Lacrosse for anyone who wants to participate in the licensed sports arena.
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POPSXbox Live as a content platform Xbox Live, Microsoft's online gaming platform for the Xbox 360, has always been more than a simple friend-finding service thanks to its iTunes-like offerings of TV shows, movie rentals, and Xbox Live Arcade games. Now it's trying to become an actual content platform rather than a simple delivery system. It'll be interesting to see whether Microsoft can transform XBL into an original content destination.
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POPSPuzzle Pirates' developer takes on the Whirled Fresh from the digital finger tips of Three Rings CEO Daniel James is news that Whirled has finally entered beta. Whirled is a do-everything Web destination that's a weird cross-section of MySpace.com, Pogo.com, and Second Life. You can play games, chat with friends, or build objects to populate your virtual room. It's crazy, endearing, and a whee bit chaotic -- and if it has any of Puzzle Pirates' spunk, it will be worth checking out.
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