DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

The March 2008 NPD game console sales figures for the US has been released. It’s another month where all sides claim victory, and I guess it’s hard not to when the overall market has increased by a huge margin over the same time last year. I did predict last month that the Xbox 360 will out-sell the PS3, but barely, so was I right or was I wrong? You can read last month’s analysis here. The figures are from NPD, a marketing research firm that releases games console sale data every month.

The figures for US sales in March are below, ranked in order of number of sales:

A couple of surprises this month. First, just look at those Wii sales figures! Amazing! You would think the “hype” surrounding the Wii would end by now, after two holiday sales periods where it was the “must-have” item, but it just continues to grow stronger where this month, it out-sells both the 360 and PS3 combined! The other surprise was that, despite expert predictions, the Xbox 360 did in fact reverse the last two month’s trend and out-sell the PS3, albeit by the width of a hair. Could Microsoft’s excuse about stock problems actually be correct?

The PS3 came fifth this month, with only the PS2 behind it, which must be somewhat disappointing for Sony. Sony will say that compared to this time last year, the PS3 is doing much better compared to the 360, and that’s true: the 360’s next-gen market share has dropped from 51% to just 43% since September last year, with the PS3 gaining from 14% to 18%. But these stats are a bit of a lie (aren’t they all), since the Xbox 360’s market share had to drop considering it was the first next-gen console on the market and with 100% of the market share at the beginning, the only way was down. What is worrying for the PS3 is that while the 360 had a period which it totally dominated the next-gen market (first when it was the only console available, and then for the PS3’s fragile first few months), the PS3 has not had a comparable period. Despite the technical superiority that the PS3 has over the 360, the sheer number of 360’s on the market plus the much more mature Xbox Live multiplayer service means that the Microsoft now has a solid footing in the gaming arena which is something they didn’t have with the original Xbox. Quantity has a quality of its own, as someone once said, and that’s what the 360 earned by having an earlier release date. On a side note, looking into popular culture, how many times have you spotted someone playing the 360 on TV or in movies? South Park, Disturbia, Transformers are just some of the recent shows/movies I’ve watched where the 360 was featured. I’m sure that helps to sell consoles as well, despite all the bad press over the RRoD problems.

And Microsoft raised a point about “ecosystems” last month, where they said console performance should not just be based on hardware sales figures, but also on software and community. In this respect, Microsoft has a very healthy “ecosystem”, but it doesn’t mean the other companies do not. Nintendo is building something very strong with the Wii/DS combination, and Sony with the PS3/PS2/PSP combination. If anything, Microsoft needs a portable game console to compete directly with Nintendo and Sony to fully take advantage of their better online gaming system.

But Microsoft are right in that while hardware sales haven’t been great compared to either the Wii or the PS3, it’s the software sales that’s really driving the Xbox brand at the moment. Here’s the top 10 sales chart for games:

1. Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii, Nintendo) - 2,700,000
2. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (Xbox 360, Ubisoft) - 752,300
3. Army of Two (Xbox 360, EA) - 606,100
4. Wii Play (Wii, Nintendo) - 409,800
5. God of War: Chains of Olympus (PSP, SCEA) - 340,500
6. Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII (PSP, Square Enix) - 301,600
7. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (Wii, Activision) – 264,100
8. Major League Baseball 2K8 (Xbox 360, 2K Sports) - 237,100
9. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Xbox 360, Activision) - 237,000
10. Army of Two (PS3, EA) - 224,900

Another good surprise for Nintendo, as Super Smash Bros. Brawl outsold everything by miles - one of the criticisms of the Wii is that it doesn’t have good games that sell in great number, but I think this myth has been dispelled this month. Other than that, the 360 has 4 of the top 10, and all of them are multi-platform games that are available on the PS3. The PSP did well this month too with two titles in the top 10, but the PS3 is still struggling with only one title, and at the bottom too.

Last month, I predicted the 360 would out-sell the PS3 by a small margin, based on nothing but a gut feeling. I was right (well even a broken clock is right 730 times a year). I also said last month that the 360 will do very well in April due to GTA IV, if not in hardware sales, then in software sales, and I’m sticking with this prediction. What’s really interesting is to see if the Wii will continue to have another good month, or will it suffer from not being on the GTA IV bandwagon? But then there’s Mario Kart, so you never know.

See you next month.

You know how I said that this was going to be the 30th WNR? I was wrong. This is actually the 31st WNR. Special thanks to me not selecting the right post categories for one WNR post that made this miscalculation possible. And you know how I was going to do something special for the “30th” issue? Well I guess it will have to be for the 31st issue, and it was never going to be that special anyway (what were you expecting? Free PS3s for every reader?). I think you’ve already figured out what that something special is just by doing a quick glance at this new updated WNR …

Oh look at the pretty picture to the left. Wow! Amazing! In copyright news, despite (or is that because of) MPAA’s pursuit of torrent sites, torrent usage has increased. I don’t suppose the extra publicity given to the issue would have driven some, who have never used BitTorrent before, to test it out? But the MPAA won’t make public why they think torrent sites should be taken down, at least the legal arguments to why these sites, which don’t host any of the content, should be considered illegal. YouTube has tried to avoid major lawsuits by implementing a piracy filter. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be going very well. Unless they can hire people to check every single video that is uploaded, then I don’t think the problem is going to go away. The whole point of YouTube is for people to share interesting video clips, and it just happens that many interesting video clips are copyrighted. Who’d have thunk it?

In HD news, the big news of the week has been Universal announcing their first ever Blu-ray lineup. The first title will be available July 22nd, and it includes all their blockbuster releases of the year like The Incredible Hulk, Hellboy II and the new Mummy movie. Catalogue releases include American Gangster, The Mummy Trilogy and season one and two of Heroes. Gladiator, Casino and The Thing are also slated for International release later in the year. Warner is starting to provide more details on the Blu-ray titles that were previously HD DVD exclusives, like Batman Begins and The Matrix trilogy. It appears that they will use the same encodes as the HD DVD versions, with The Perfect Storm getting a new transfer due to problems with the previous one. With Universal, the studio that has backed HD DVD the most, now releasing their Blu-ray release schedule, it seems that’s that for HD DVD. But not according to Samsung, as they will release a new Blu-ray/HD DVD combo drive for PCs (with Blu-ray write capability, and HD DVD read capability). On the same story, LG’s combo drive (reads both formats) is getting discounted here in Australia and it’s even cheaper than the Pioneer Blu-ray reader drive. And in a new feature I’m doing on the forum, I will be posting the Blu-ray/DVD sales stats weekly (with HD DVD stats thrown in for good measure - these stats come from Nielsen VideoScan, which is publised in Home Media Magazine). Last week’s stats (for the week ending 6th April) was interesting in that HD DVD seems to have made a comeback, but it was just a slow week for Blu-ray. This week’s stats, for the week ending 13th April shows Blu-ray bouncing back, but not against DVDs which scored a whopping 95% of the video sales market as compared to Blu-ray.

Moving onto gaming, the GTA IV Australia/New Zealand censorship issue won’t go away, mainly because Rockstar refuses to say what has been removed from the game. New Zealander are a bit unlucky in that they have a 18+ certification for video games, but Rockstar apparently will release the Australian version there as well, so they get the cut version too. The rumour was that only a cutscene was changed, but that appears to be untrue from a statement made by Rockstar. If the changes are small, as Rockstar have claimed before, then they should just come out and tell the public what they are. If not, it will only force people to import. The March US NPD figures are out and as expected, the Xbox 360 beat the PS3 for the first time in 2008 as stock problems cleared. The more detailed analysis will be arriving later in the week. Two Xbox 360 updates recently, one for the defunct HD DVD drive, and now an update that is equally meaningless for most 360 users. It’s more like an update for an upcoming update, rather than anything new and exciting. No details of the annual Spring update yet. The Wii is doing extremely well in the sales charts. There are some great games on the system, but Wii Sports, the one that comes free with the console, still doesn’t have a proper competitor in terms of mini-game compilation or just general fun-ness. The nerd in me wants a Star Wars Lightsaber game so I can swing my Wii-mote around like a deranged maniac. My wish might be fulfilled shortly with the Wii version of Star Wars: Force Unleashed.

Ok, so that’s it for this week. Check back next week for another words, link and now picture filled edition of WNR.

Hello everybody on this beautiful Sunday. Actually it’s cloudy and cold here, but hopefully it will be nice wherever you are reading this from. Quite a bit of news to go through this week, so let’s not waste any time.

In Copyright news, apparently DVD piracy is so common amongst the South Australian Police force that it makes it impossible to prosecute. So basically if everybody does it then they can’t do anything about it? Or does having guns help? Or perhaps it’s more of a “one rule for them, and another for the rest of us”? It’s certainly seems that way since the President of the United States has now been caught with pirated music on his iPod. Only last week did the US Attorney General say that piracy leads to terrorism … so where does this act of piracy lead to then? New Zealand meanwhile has passed their new digital copyright laws. While new laws will always mean more, not less, restrictions - at least the New Zealand laws seem to have taken a more sensible approach in terms of fair use. The Europeans are taking a more sensible approach as well, rejecting the latest attempt by the RIAA/MPAA to have provisions to chuck users off the Net who are suspected of piracy. And if chucking you off the Net isn’t enough, you chucking a CD out might be construed as ‘unauthorised distribution’, and hence, piracy. And in a “well it was bound to happen eventually” type of story, hackers have broken the encryption on PlayStation Network games for the PSP, which will now allow piracy of these games to go ahead.

UK subscription television network Sky is phasing out component output on their HD set top boxes in an ‘anti-piracy’ drive. HDMI will be the sole video output supported since it includes HDCP copy protection. Speaking of copy protection, expect to see DisplayPort becoming the next big thing in PC-monitor connection. DisplayPort (DP) is not compatible directly with DVI or HDMI, although it can be made interchangeable through adapters - and yes, it includes HDCP. So that’s VGA/DVI/HDMI/DP - does the PC really need this many connection types? But to be fair, HDMI is not suited for PC connections, and DVI is starting to get a bit old.

Onto HD news. In a surprising turn of events, Microsoft released an update for the HD DVD add-on drive this week. The update is only needed for those that connect their add-on drive to the Xbox 360 for HD DVD playback. And for those that did purchase HD DVD players, including the add-on drive, from Amazon before Toshiba’s decision to pull out, Amazon will be giving them $50 credit that can be used on anything. A very nice move by Amazon, although how many HD DVD users will end up using the $50 credit on more HD DVD movies is hard to say (I know I will if I was eligible - with HD DVD movies so cheap, that’s maybe 3 to 6 movies that you can buy, compared to just two for Blu-ray, so why not?)

I’ve always been facinated with 3D movies, and Disney is about to release a 3D movie on Blu-ray. It’s only a Hanna Montana movie, but I wonder perhaps proper 3D support through electronic glasses could help Blu-ray achieve better sales through the “gimmick factor”? Meanwhile, those with iPhones might be able to interact it with their PS3 - I wonder if the iPod Touch might have been a better choice for the integration. The flurry of news in regards to Blu-ray price rises hasn’t dampened enthusiasm, with statistics (yeah, those damned things) showing people are actually willing to pay for higher prices. Not me though, even though I consider myself an early adopter and us early adopters are well known for wasting money on stuff that we know will be much cheaper in a few months time. The question remains about the general public, who are used to low low DVD prices, and whether they are willing to pay 10 times more for a Blu-ray player and twice as much for the Blu-ray movie? Sony seems to think so, and they are predicting that Blu-ray will hold 50% of the movie market compared to DVDs by the year’s end. Blu-ray actually only holds about 8% of the market at the moment, and there’s no sign that it will surge to much higher than that in the short term, so I don’t know what Sony are talking about. 50% of the movie market will need 50% of the hardware market as well, and I just don’t think Sony and co. can get a few hundred million machines into people’s home by the end of the year when they’ve barely sold over 1 million machines so far. But PR won them the war against HD DVD, so perhaps they’re hoping to do the same against DVDs. But you can’t really fight against low low prices (ie. “reality”) unless you fight fire with fire (or fire sales).

Before we move onto gaming proper, half-way in between is news that Sony will release the 2.30 firmware update for the PS3 that will finally include DTS-HD MA decoding (to LPCM). It is the one last major feature that the PS3 lacks in terms of Blu-ray playback, and I’m glad it has finally arrived since I’ve been telling people it will be here for ages now and have recommended the PS3 based on this assumption.

Onto gaming now. The Wii has scored a coup by signing up a deal with the BBC to add a iPlayer channel. Of course, it’s only for UK users only, but I’m sure Microsoft and Sony would have liked to have been part of the deal. Microsoft are rumoured to be developing a Wii like controller codenamed “Newton”. Not sure if trying to be more Wii-like than the Wii will help Microsoft’s cause, since I think they should concentrate on making a new version of the console that’s a bit more sexier and quieter to compete with the PS3.

And following last week’s news story about the censored Australian version of the GTA IV, the confirmation has come from Rockstar that the game is censored, although no details has been given as to what has been removed/changed. Well that’s it then, I will have to source the game from elsewhere. Expect Australian versions of GTA IV to sell extremely poorly then, which is a shame for Australian retailers.

Ok, that’s it for this week. Can’t believe this is the 29th issue of the Weekly News Roundup already. Will I do something special for the 30th issue? Wait and see (and don’t be too surprised if nothing happens …)

A somewhat quiet week, well not that quiet but there has been a spate of news items that I just did not want to reference on the website due to the tendency for them to be April Fools Day pranks. When you go through the news as frequently as I do, you start noticing that most of them turn out to be false. That’s just the nature of Internet news these days I suppose, but with AFD happening in the same week, you just can’t trust anyone. I’m pretty sure at least one of the news items I will reference in this blog will have been a AFD prank turned into “real” news, so please bear with me.

In copyright news, and my April Fools news was that the MPAA was going to introduce a $10 download tax. It was just believable enough to have been true, since the MPAA’s step sister (both of the ugly type), the RIAA, has been touting something similar for ages. The sad thing is this might just become a reality some day. And in another case of copyright/trademarks gone wrong, Engadget has been sued for using a colour, magenta to be precise, on their website. T-Mobile, who also uses the colour magenta, is the company doing the suing because the mobile section of Engadget also uses magenta. If there is genuine confusion over Engadget and T-Mobile using the same colour, then fine, but where’s the confusion? Downloading the latest episode of South Park is equivalent to providing explosives to terrorists, according to the U.S. Attorney General at least. Both leads to terrorism, and if you do have pirated music or movies on your computer, I suggest you go to your nearest police station and hand yourself in. I hear Gitmo is quite nice this time of the year. Of course, you might want to walk to the police station instead of driving, because your car might be DRM protected and it probably won’t let terrorists like yourself start the car, that or if you haven’t been paying your car payment bills. I’m pretty sure this might be an April Fools Prank, but you just can’t tell the difference between real news from The Onion news these days. And that, my friend, is a very sad state of affairs.

Onto HD news now. Not much actually. That’s the sad thing about the ending of the format war, the news stories have really dried up. There’s still all sorts of rumours about Toshiba and Sony and even the Japanese government having all agreed to drop HD DVD back late last year. And continued stories about how great and lovely Blu-ray is. At best, speculation, and at worst, trying to beat the last drop of blood out of a story that is no longer interesting. Even the news items about Blu-ray price rises seem a bit stretched, since prices fluctuate all the time and are seasonal based. If Sony had increased the RRP of their Blu-ray players from $499 to $899, then you have a story, but they haven’t, so you don’t. So about the only really interesting piece of news this week has been the release of PowerDVD 8. What is most interesting is that the Ultra version, which is the version that supports HD playback, has apparently dropped HD DVD playback. I can understand hardware manufacturers dropping HD DVD production, but why drop something you’ve already spent a lot of money developing and which worked quite well in the previous version, especially when your competitors (WinDVD and Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre) both offer Blu-ray and HD DVD playback, and most say in a more superior fashion. A very strange decision by Cyberlink, and perhaps a developing story that could well end up with a happier ending (a free patch to re-enable HD DVD playback would be nice).

Onto gaming now. A poll by IGN has shown that most users want the Xbox 360 version of GTA IV compared to the PS3 version, by a 2-to-1 margin. Of course, Xbox 360 users outnumber PS3 users by, you guessed it, a 2-to-1 margin in the US. More disturbing is that the Australian version of GTA IV (both PS3 and Xbox 360 versions) might be censored, due to our previous government’s stupidity and inaction in allowing a 18+ certificate for mature gamers. Especially stupid when the average age of gamers in Australia is 28! Unless this turns out to be another AFD prank, it now looks like importing is the only option for most people. The PS3 being region-free will hand Sony a big GTA IV win in Australia, although importing the UK un-censored version is actually still cheaper than paying the Australian RRP price for the Xbox 360 version.

Okay, that’s it for this week’s slightly shortened and AFD-disclaimer-laden edition of the Weekly News Roundup. See you next week.

Sorry for the lack of a blog entry during the week … I was a bit busy doing a few things (no, I didn’t spend all my time finding and buying HD DVD bargains … not all my time anyway). First up, I finished writing the Nero Vision 5 AVCHD Authoring Guide just before last week’s blog, and I was still recovering from the stress. I love (MPEG-4) AVC (H.264), since I believe it is the codec of the future, and AVCHD is a format that I think has some chance for success, since it takes AVC and gives it Blu-ray based navigation, and now that Blu-ray has won the HD war, AVCHD’s chance of adoption is now much higher. The guide I wrote will show you how to make a simple AVCHD disc, which is not all that different to authoring DVDs - Nero Vision isn’t the best software for authoring, but I hope the guide can at least be used as an introduction to AVCHD.

I also wrote a review for the new version of WinDVD, WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-ray (and yes, it plays HD DVDs too). I must say, I’m quite impressed with this new version of WinDVD, which in my opinion, is the best version of WinDVD for several years (although to achieve this wasn’t that hard, since previous versions were a bit “wobbly” to say the least). The Blu-ray and HD DVD playback function works great, better than PowerDVD Ultra in my opinion simply because it supports older (non HDCP) hardware.

I also bought some more HD DVDs (what a surprise!), but I think I’ll leave references to it to a minimum since I’m sure people are sick and tired of my HD DVD fire sale series.

Anyway, onto the roundup proper now. In copyright news, sort of, a dispute over LED patents could block Blu-ray and other related product imports. When I say “could”, I mean “won’t” because someone will pay up and settle the lawsuit or it will be dropped before it gets anywhere near a court. And in a week where the irony meter has been off the scale, the MPAA has been sued for piracy related activities. Actually, a Chinese site falsely accused by the MPAA of piracy (the MPAA admits the mistake) is suing them for defamation and I hope they win because the MPAA needs their activities looked at with more scrutiny. The RIAA is still not learning and they want ISPs to introduce a “piracy tax”. Basically they want ISPs to charge extra money that will go into the RIAA’s pockets for acts of piracy that you may or may not have committed. Sentenced before a crime is even committed! Still, some ISPs are standing up to MPAA’s tactics, if not in the US, then in Norway where ISPs will not act as the MPAA’s judge, jury and executioner in disconnecting people suspected of piracy. Still, some have given up the fight (and you can’t really blame them). TorrentSpy is finally dead, after months of legal battle and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs. Of course, about a dozen new torrent sites have sprung up in its place, so piracy has not been affected at all. And to show that Bittorrent isn’t this evil thing, the Canadian TV station CBC will use Bittorrent to distribute some of their shows in HD, and all DRM-free. And to round off the irony laden week, Sony BMG has been sued for, you guessed it, piracy. Not only that, their servers were seized by police and evidence of the piracy is now in the hands of PointDev, the company who produced software that Sony BMG allegedly used pirated copies of. In the words of Nelson on The Simpsons: “Ha Ha!”

In HD news, Hitman, along with several other Blu-ray and DVD titles, are now using an experimental feature called “Digital Copy”, which stores a portable (iPod, PSP) version of the movie on the disc that you can play on the PC or transfer to your portable video player. I like this, and my only concern with this type of feature is the possible price rise to account for the extra content. But as long as prices stay the same, then it’s a good feature to have. Meanwhile, both Samsung and LG have raised their concern and caution towards Blu-ray, citing growing use of Internet movie downloads as the major factor which could cause Blu-ray to fail. The chief scientist at THX also suggests something similar. I will have to write a blog on this issue, but I think disc formats are here to say, for at least another decade or so. Plextor are continuing with their release of a dual format Blu-ray/HD DVD drive, despite recent events. Good for them, as I think the million or so HD DVD users could become a niche market that will always need drives to service their huge movie collection (thanks to recent sales). Meanwhile, the Blu-ray PR machine is in full gear this week as news of Blu-ray movie sale reaching the 9 million mark, as well as above 10% ratios for some Blu-ray new releases (compared to DVDs), such as Oscar Winner No Country for Old Men. But if you look at the figures closely, and analyse the difference between DVD owners and Blu-ray owners, you’ll see that these numbers are a bit misleading, and that DVDs held a massive 16:1 sales ratio compared to Blu-ray for the week ending 23rd March, despite the NCFOM sales figures. It looks like the BDA still needs much more promotion, starting with sorting out the profiles mess and by releasing more movies at lower prices.

On the issue of profiles, it is slightly less confusing for the majority of Blu-ray owners, as they own the PS3 and it has just been updated to Profile 2.0 compatibility, just like I predicted it will last year - hooray for me (mainly because this means nobody is going to sue me for misleading them into buying the PS3 for Profile 2.0 compatibility, when at that time, nothing was certain). The update also includes some DivX playback fixes (2 GB and bigger files are not supported), although my testing showed that GMC and QPel DivX files still won’t play.

And on that note, we move onto gaming. Actually, the above was the only notable gaming news I saw in the week (if I see one more news story about “wii-habilitation”, I’ll scream!). GTA IV will be released in a month’s time, and I will pre-order my copy, not because I fear that I won’t get one, but mainly because I can’t be arsed to go to the store to get a copy. Plus, Xbox 360 owners who pre-order will get some bonus goodies (500 MS points and exclusive gamerpics), now not only for Australians but for people in the UK and US too (I may have already mentioned this news, but the US and UK thing is new). GTA IV will also feature a clever new music download system - something about phoning a special number whenever you hear music on the in-game radio while playing, and then download for them $1 from Amazon. It would be way cooler if somehow you could actually use phones in the game to make a call to get a special code to download/pay for the music, but I don’t think a career criminal like Niko is likely to pay for music, so perhaps it doesn’t quite fit into the game. No doubt there will be more stories about GTA IV in the coming weeks, and you can read the good ones here.

Okay, that’s it for this week. Don’t forget to enter into the Roxio competition to win yourself a iPod Nano - competition closes tomorrow! See you next week.