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So, I hadn't heard the claim that Halo 2 had the most profitable launch day in the history of entertainment before, and since you provided no evidence, I assumed you were just spewing garbage.

I decided to look it up, and I admit I was wrong.

GameDaily has Halo's opening day sales (first 24 hours) at 2.4 million, which multiplied by the $60 price tag (which isn't a static value in itself, as some collector's editions were made, and I assume sold at a higher price) gives us $144 million.

has Revenge of the Sith at $50 million on opening day. I was curious how much this would have been affected by the fact that big name movies like that usually relase on a Thursday (I imagine the number would have been higher if it were released on a Friday), but the biggest opening weekend was Spiderman at ~$115 million.

The most paid for any piece of artwork was Picasso's Boy with a Pipe at $104 million.

So I guess I have to admit you were right. But in the future, please back up your claims a little better.

First, you have the most expensive console on the market by $200. Then, the head of SCE rolls out and says the PS3 is too cheap, as if Sony is doing us some kind of favor by making the game console so "reasonably" priced. The games, pressed to the higher priced and rare Blue-Ray format, will likely be more expensive than the competition as well.

Now, Sony is going to try to limit resales on top of that? This is corporate suicide 3DFX style. Sony thinks they can use their market momentum to shoo in the PS3, but I think they will find otherwise. There is no _way_ I would lay down 6 bills for a stinking game console. I could get a pretty loaded Dell with a 19" LCD for that.

IMHO, it's the Wii that's going to dominate - $200, a back to basics fun game approach instead of PC shovelware, and a really innovative control system? Hell, I'm thinking about signing up for one of those...

No, people do not respond like that everywhere. Thank god.

What disgusts me the most of ActionAL's unconstructive criticism is his implication of a rather outdated stereotype that women don't/can't play video games. In today's video game market, more women play games now then in the predominately male-oriented industry of twenty years past. http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/feature/?id=1242 4/ On another note, even though Nintendo Wii is a rather odd name, changing it again would be a disaster as the dubious name has created a huge amount of publicity for Nintendo. I don't think Revolution would have created as much word-of-mouth marketing (the 'golden egg' of marketing) as Wii has. Besides, it doesn't matter about the name as most people know that Nintendo makes great gaming consoles and the name Wii isn't going to circumvent it. BTW, speaking of names... ActionAL???... what are you a porn star?!

"Now is the time for the blogs, the fervent fan sites and news aggregators to step up. The game blogs and alternate videogame news sources should do everything possible to keep this story alive while maintaining their own integrity. If these compromise stories are distasteful to their core alternative videogame readership, then they should become a focal point for change. These guys should do everything possible to keep this story rolling, because they provide alternatives that aren't wholly supported by the game makers themselves."

Being a member of the "media" I was able to play Tabula Rasa at E3 last year. Frankly, I was blown away... not to mention hooked - line and sinker! Won't be making it to E3 this year, but some of my http://www.gamedaily.com/ compadres will be checking it out in my absence to see how much, if anything, has changed. If it's still similar to what it was last year (it completely changed between '04 and '05 - FOR THE BETTER)... TR is gonna rock!!

Go to the main page, here. See the picture?

In addition to pointing out all the bad journalism out there, these sites help identify blogs and magazines that strive to offer better writing and reviews. Visit those sites and click on a few ads. Marketing-driven articles continue to appear because game publishers pay the bills. That only changes if game mags and sites can develop business models where they are accountable primarily to you - their readers - rather than game companies.

This is an interesting topic for me. I'm not so much of a gamer as I am a gamer cultural analyst. I hear all the time from teachers that gaming is destroying our youth, blah blah blah. Same arguments probably could be heard about TV long ago. Anyway don't fight the inevitable but roll with it and use the medium to work for you. good economist article on morality and gaming: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id =4246109 Eric Jones http://www.gamedaily.com/

The N-Gage was a complete failure, and is in fact a joke among gamers. For instance, on the gamefaqs board you can insult someone's intelligence by saying "You bought an N-Gage didn't you?" Recently there was a topic posted on the boards whose title was "I...got...an...NGAGE...for...Christmas". The topic got over 250 responses (most topics don't get more than 20) nearly all of which were other users who wrote "LOL" or some form of condolense.

http://biz.gamedaily.com/features.asp?article_id=1 1198

Albeit 4 months old, can be found at:
http://biz.gamedaily.com/features.asp?article_id=1 0257&filter=
where it can be seen that the DS and PSP are damn close in terms of US sales, and the DS is miles ahead for Japanese sales.

He's no longer backing Hillary Clinton.
I certainly did, however, lose respect for Senator Clinton when she decided, after that, to attend a fundraiser thrown for her by the video game industry and by ESA's Doug Lowenstein. To me, that was a sell-out for campaign cash.

http://biz.gamedaily.com/features.asp?article_id=1 0830

And I don't see why the parent post was modded Redundant, seeing how TFA doesn't link to www.pennyarcade.com. *sigh*

Liberals, like you, love to label things and then think that the labeling has accomplished something. If that had been the case, then Churchill's calling Hitler a Nazi would have ended the war. But no, people like me had to get into the trenches and stop the Nazis. And there were always those tut-tutting back home about what a nasty business it is to stop the bad people, and can't we all just "get along."

...which does so sort of indirectly I guess. The far more disturbing thing to me is that he compares himself to people like our fathers and grandfathers who actually fought against Germany in WWII. He does not have that kind of honor and dignity.

Well, that would really get at the heart of the question: if consoles are closing in on PC capabilities, but are a more consistent (easier) and profitable environment for developers, what if anything will keep PC gaming going?

You mean besides the fact that PC gaming is a $1.1 billion a year business, and that companies want a piece of that money? PC game sales may only comprise 15% of the market, but I'm pretty sure that's money that anyone on the chain of game profits doesn't want to throw out. Just because something is only 15% doesn't mean that it's small.

Or were you suggesting that everyone is going to relegate their PCs to email/word processing and buy a game system? As consoles have approached PC capabilities, their prices have approached PC prices. They add DVD players and internet connectivity for games- my PC already has those. When consoles have all PC capability... I'll already have a PC so don't need to buy one.

Not to mention adaptability- a graphics card that will run modern games on decent settings runs $150 or so at any given time. This will last 2-3 years. The current next-gen consoles will run $400-500. Each console gets more expensive than the last, and you are stuck with the internals it ships with- absolutely static hardware for 4 years or so until the next console.

I'm willing to bet that a large number of people don't really care about the distinction between PC and console (I'll go way out on a limb and wager that comes to about 85% of gamers) and just get the easiest thing. And I have no problem with that. But PC gaming isn't about to dry up and disappear.

Honestly, what percentage of computer users play complex 3D games... I don't know, but according to this article, 15% of all games purchased are for the PC, the rest being console games. PCs will still be sold, but as a niche item for the hardcore gamer/media designer/engineers (who will always need mega number crunching power), which would mean that Sun-president-dude is right.

The high end user PCs don't have to have to die to become a relic, you could say that record players are relics, but hardcore audiophiles still buy their media in record form and buy/maintain the players. The point is, web-based services WILL marginalize the PC, and ultimately console games will win out over PC games. Gaming consoles are purpose built devices, and it is very difficult for a multi-purpose swiss army knife of a computer to do a better job than a similar cost console that had every design decision directed towards game performance.

Its not about you getting your 3GB/s gaming link to your low end terminal at home, its about the other 9/10 people getting their 2Mb/s link to surf the web. We PC gamers have been playing on borrowed time, and the false notion that Sally actually needs to buy a 3.8 GHz machine to write that letter to gramma will is in the process of being debunked. Intel/AMD build faster processors because they can make people want them, but I don't think they can do that forever...Enjoy it while it lasts!

I'm not sure how many PSP users are buying those PSP movies, but they've sold 5 million so far, and expect to generate $250M in revenues this year from the movies. One user or one per user, that's a lot of cabbage.

read this and learn something about that.

http://biz.gamedaily.com/features.asp?article_id=1 0225

some of the largest companies in asia and china are MMO game companies.

The brochures all confirm that a hard-drive is needed for backwards compatibility

Oh, that's right -- "Backwards Compatibility" is only for NEW purchases of Xbox games so they'll play on the X360 , not for Xbox owners who are upgrading their systems and want to continue raising havoc in [insert favorite havoc-raising game title here].

Where does that leave the PS3? Well, it's already been covered that the PS3 is moving away from the traditional PS1/PS2 memory cards in favor of supporting many other memory card formats... but it is certainly possible for a manufacturer to come out with an adapter that could be used to load/copy data from the old memory card to a PS3-supported card. (maybe a copy "service" would be more cost-beneficial than a one-time-use peripheral. Even so...)

After all, how many places can you pre-purchase a games system without buying their game&system bundle? This would be the next step, at least for the lower priced system. While this is strictly paranoia fodder, would companies be willing to sacrifice selling what might be niche products (light guns, steering wheels, etc) for more sales within their core markets, which are more than likely basic corded controllers, and a promise from MS to not compete in that area (i.e. Ok, but not great controllers, like the orginal behemoths?) If MS were to make a wireless controller hub/adaptor of some sort to sell at a premium price, would their additional controller sales be worth more than the potential loss of sales from developing, manufacturing and selling their own wireless solution?

Btw, if this does happen, I'll go down the the Apple store and make mean faces at the Mac Mini...

"First of all, I'm not so sure that MS want the 360 to be a Windows-gaming-killer."

I think the goal is to allow developers to write once and deploy on both Windows and XBox.

http://biz.gamedaily.com/features.asp?article_id=9 950&filter=interview

"CD: With XNA, which incorporates both DirectX and the Xbox/Xbox 360 Development Kits, we're making the tools to make it easier to make games for Microsoft's gaming platforms. We're looking to the game development community to surprise gamers with new ideas of what they can do with these tools--and of course, we're helping developers build games that can take advantage of the huge power of the next generation of hardware, both Xbox 360 and Longhorn."

http://www.ndsupdates.com/2005/06/nintendo-ds-outs ells-sony-psp-and-ps2.html

http://biz.gamedaily.com/features.asp?article_id=9 815&filter=movers

I am not sure where all of this bad publicity os coming from, I am annoyed at the errant flaming that goes on in these forums on people who are ill-informed

Some of the listed titles are innovative, but many aren't spectacular, or even fun (at least for me)

The only game in this list that could realistically be described as "not fun" is probably Killer7, but either way, we're talking about innovation, not fun.

Have you played Katamari Damacy yet? Did you like Nintendogs better?

Nintendogs is one of the five games to get a perfect score from Famitsu, so it seems that I'm not the only one who thinks it's better than Katamari Damacy.

How about a URL?
http://biz.gamedaily.com/features.asp?article_id=8 854&section=feature

"Taking a closer look at the data reveals that console software sales reached $5.2 billion (up from $4.9 billion) on 160.7 million units, portable software sales expanded to a record $1.0 billion (up from $903 million) on 42.3 million units, and PC game sales were $1.1 billion (45 million units), which is down from the $1.2 billion total that PC games posted in 2003. Despite the long-awaited releases of high profile titles like id Software's Doom 3 or Valve Software's Half-Life 2, the PC market only accounted for 15% of overall console and PC software sales. And only two PC games managed to surpass 500,000 units sold. In 2003, total PC game sales represented about 17% of the market."

"Although Frazier acknowledges that there will always be a handful of "AAA" titles, she doesn't think 2005/2006 will be much better for the PC games market. "I actually don't see it rebounding. I think it's just a natural evolution of the video game space... the less hot titles are doing less and less business," she said."

"Because the console market has become such a big generator of revenue, more and more publishers seem to be shifting their business away from the PC, or at the very least are including console titles when they used to be PC-only. "I think there already has been [a shift]. Definitely, there were publishers that had most of their business on PC and they made a real concerted effort to go into the console space," Frazier told GameDAILY BIZ."

If this directive is passed, European software researchers like my firm are basically put out of business.

It also has the potential to severely damage the UK games industry - there are around 400+ game development teams. These would be seen as a cash cow for McKool Smith given their litigation with Electronic Arts, Take-Two Interactive, Ubisoft, Activision, Atari, THQ, Vivendi Universal Games, Sega, Square Enix, Tecmo, LucasArts, and Namco Hometek

Read this interview. It seems like some lawyers do speak like this!

I think I probably believe it's real.

For a normal professional, respectable lawyer, you might be right. But you clearly haven't met Jack Thompson, who loves to talk about destroying his targets. From this GameDaily interview:

GD: What is the ultimate goal here?

Thompson: To destroy Rockstar.

GD: What does that mean in terms of...

Thompson: (cutting in) So they don't exist anymore.

GD: How are you going to seek to do that?

Thompson: By taking all their money. It's very simple. You wipe someone out economically, they don't have any assets and therefore they cease to exist.

GD: You think one lawsuit can do this or do you see yourself filing some suits against Rockstar in the U.S.?

Thompson: There have been dozens of murders that have been tied to their products throughout the world, so it's just a matter of piling on, and we will do that. These people will not stop, they will not stop marketing the games to children and therefore since they will not listen to reason, since they won't even communicate with me and others, we will destroy them, it's that simple. David didn't reason with Goliath, he killed him.

I only hope that the man's absurd ranting and grandstanding will help those outside of the gaming world to see how ridiculous he really is.

Of course, the telling evidence of Starforce's carpetbaggery is the following quote (highlights mine):

" We havent done any official studies, other than know for a fact we have protected many titles this year alone that are still not cracked. It is up to the developer to put forth as much effort as it takes to install a great protection and the payoff is obvious. I dont have any specific numbers to share, but economic advantages can be significant. Let me give an example..."

Also, to clarify a point. Let's use the Madden 2003 version as an example. According to NPD, the PS2 version of Madden 2003 was the #1 selling video game for all of 2003, yet the game was released in August 2003 (giving it just a scant 4+ months of sales compared to other titles on the list). Pretty significant for a single title on a single platform (add to it what the XB/GC/PC/etc versions pulled in as well).

Let's backtrack a little bit: From the day it was released through the end of September, Madden NFL 2003 moved approximately 1.7 million units in the U.S. at $50 each. That would be $85m in sales just for that timeframe.

Digging further, GameDaily said that Madden sold "3.8 million to date", which would be around the time that Sega pulled out of the sports market a few weeks ago -- still not looking at a full year yet. 3.8m games @ $50 comes out to $190m. Extrapolate these numbers over the course of a year and I can definitely see where EA can afford to spend $250m per year on this title alone.

disclaimer: i hope i carried the one when calculating those figures. i was never the best at math

That said, while I am still quite scepticle of the whole thing, I have to admit I no longer think the console is just vaporware. Between the press demo they did a few months ago for a few select members of the press (which at least had photos of the thing), to fact that they will have an 8,000 square foot booth at E3 I think this might not be vaporware. It could still fail miserably and be nothing like they've promised, but at least they seem to be doing more than saying "we have a great console, we'll prove it later" like they did for so long.

The proof is in the pudding. Nintendo's DS, the Phantom, and more are going to be shown at E3. It should be very intersting.

And let's face it. Suing someone priting facts about you that don't look good more than a year after they were posted (and when you still haven't shown any real proof to anyone yet) just doesn't look good for your company.

If your figure of $10 per copy to madden is correct, I think that he likely makes more than $5mil a year. That would equate to 500k units moved, and at $50 a pop, would be $25 mil in sales.

Madden sells far far more than $25mil a year for EA.
In fact, according to this article, Madden NFL 2002 sold nearly 4 million units. For a $10 royalty, that would be $40mil.

I have no idea how much Madden makes per copy, so he may in fact make $5mil...that just means that his royalty is $1.25 per copy...

Nintendo's poor showing?????

As a side note, in November1999 (The only month I can remember details from), 4 of the top 5 selling console games were from Nintendo. They were Donkey Kong, + 3 Poke'mon games.

For all of 1999, 7 of the top 10 games were Nintendo (DK64 + Poke'mon + Super Smash Brothers) From www.gamedaily.com

Off-hand, I'd say that Nintendo is doing very well for itself. Don't ever underestimate the power of hordes of screaming children.

We want Poke'mon!!!!
We want Poke'mon!!!!
We want Poke'mon!!!!