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Game Consoles – January 2011 NPD Sales Figure Analysis

Saturday, February 19th, 2011

I know I promised the 2010 year in review post, weeks ago, but rest assured, it’s still coming. I had hoped I would get around to it before the January NPD figures came out, but it looks like I waited too long! In any case, let’s get the January 2011 NPD done before worrying about 2010. Once again, there were enough leaks to present us with enough data to get January’s NPD analysis up. For those that are new to this, this analysis looks at US video games sales figures compiled by NPD.

The figures for US sales in January 2011 are below, ranked in order of number of sales (January 2010 figures also shown, including percentage change):

Xbox 360: 381,000 (Total: 25.8 million; January 2010: 332,800 – up 14.4%)
Wii: 319,000 (Total: 34.5 million; January 2010: 465,800 – down 31.5%)
PS3: 267,000 (Total: 15.7 million; January 2010: 276,900 – down 3.6%)

NPD January 2011 Game Console US Sales Figures

NPD Game Console Total US Sales Figures (as of January 2011)

My prediction from last month was:

I loathe to make a prediction for next month, but I think the Xbox 360 will probably gain back the number one spot, and a very familiar top 10 for software as well.

And gained it back it did. In fact, the Xbox 360 even outsold the DS this month, making it the best selling video games console of any kind. It was also the only console to receive a year-on-year sales increase. The software chart does have a few new entries though, and we’ll discuss this later on as per usual.

Obviously, Microsoft are very pleased with the sales result for the first month of 2011, and it bodes well for the console for the rest of the year. With a 14.5% year-on-year increase, it shows that the console is more than just “the one with the least number of lost sales”, and that the Xbox 360’s market share is actually growing. And this has to be largely thanks to Kinect, as there are simply no other explanations for it (the sales bump from the “Slim” should have dissipated by now, and there hasn’t been any recent price cuts either). Of course, Black Ops may be responsible for some of the sales, but Modern Warfare 2 would have been equally responsible for sales this time last year, and so it can be ruled out as a factor for the sales increase. And with strong software sales (combine revenue on the Xbox 360 makes it the top selling platform once again, in the US).

The Wii continues its 30%+ year-on-year decline, which is alarming because the sales decrease does not seem to have slowed compared to the same time last year (January 2010 was down 31% as well compared to January 2009). The rapid and steady decline should encourage Nintendo to consider bringing out the Wii 2 sooner than what they had planned before. It’s still doing relatively okay in terms of software sales, with Just Dance 2 doing enough to actually earn 2nd place in the combined-platforms top 10 (which is difficult to achieve for a single-platform release like Just Dance 2). But even this is slightly alarming, in that for dancing games, the Kinect will most likely offer the better experience in the future (the Michael Jackson Kinect Experience game should tell us whether this theory is true or not). The Wii is a Xbox 360/Kinect price cut away from being totally wiped out, in my opinion, as price is really the only reason why it continues to outsell at least the PS3.

Speaking of the PS3, the recent PS3 hacking issue could be a distraction Sony can do without, because once again, its flagship console came last place in the home console charts (not counting the PS2, which it appears, nobody is counting any more, certainly not the NPD). But on the software front, there are at least a couple of bright spots, Little Big Planet 2 and the console exclusive DC Universe Online. But instead of bridging the gap between it and the Xbox 360, the gap is actually getting wider, although Sony is definitely doing better in worldwide sales numbers (but the Xbox 360 is showing signs of improvement there as well). It doesn’t exactly help that the PS3 is still the most expensive console around, and even though some of the extra price is justified due to the Blu-ray playback functionality, which has just recently been upgraded for Blu-ray 3D, the ever decreasing cost of standalone players means that it’s becoming harder and harder to justify the PS3’s price premium. At the very least, Sony should be looking for price parity between its console and the Xbox 360.

In software, the top 10 does have a few titles from last month, but there are also a couple of new entries, the most notable being Dead Space 2, Little Big Planet 2, Dance Central and DC Universe Online. Three of these titles were platform exclusive (for consoles anyway), with two of them belong to the PS3. Which is why Sony can’t be too unhappy with the results. The other platform exclusive was Dance Central, a Kinect title, and this is the first Kinect title I think to make it into the top 10 “all-platforms” chart, which is hard for a platform exclusive, and Dance Central is more than just a platform exclusive, since it also requires an optional add-on accessory (if 20% of Xbox 360 owners have Kinect, and the Xbox 360 accounts for 34% of the console market, then it means only 7% of gamers could actually play Dance Central, and that’s not even including PC and portable console gamers). The leaks have also resulted in some actual numbers for software sales, with Black Ops selling 750,000 copies, Dead Space 2 selling 441,000, and Zumba Fitness selling “over 300,000” units. Anyway, here’s the full software sales chart for January:

Call of Duty: Black Ops (Activision Blizzard, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PC, DS)
Just Dance 2 (Ubisoft, Wii)
Dead Space 2 (EA, Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
Little Big Planet 2 (Sony, PS3)
Zumba Fitness: Join the Party (Majesco, Wii, Xbox 360, PS3)
NBA 2K11 (Take-Two Interactive, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PS2, PSP,PC)
Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (Ubisoft, Xbox 360, PS3)
Dance Central (MTV, Xbox 360)
Michael Jackson: The Experience (Ubisoft, Wii, DS, PSP)
DC Universe Online: The Next Legend Is You (Sony, PS3, PC)

So, prediction time. My brain tells me the hardware ordering will be the same, but my heart tells me there could be some surprises. A resurgence for the Wii? Xbox 360 suffering a sales slump after the holidays? PS3 sales up thanks to Killzone 3? Speaking of Killzone 3, it is one of *the* titles for February, while Bulletstorm seems to be selling well right now, along with Marvel vs Capcom 3. And the recent hits will be in the top 10 too.

As for the 2010 review, I will aim to get it up during the week, but again, it’s a busy week for me so I can’t guarantee anything. Actually, I’ve already got all the graphs done and the conclusion is already pretty clear, so it may just be a very short analysis since there’s not a lot of data to play with, especially during the last few months of 2010.

See you soon.

Posted in Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, NPD Analysis, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | 4 Comments »

Weekly News Roundup (13 February 2011)

Sunday, February 13th, 2011

Sorry for the slightly late edition of the WNR, couldn’t be helped unfortunately. Luckily, there weren’t too many news stories this week, especially if you really count the whole PS3 jailbreak saga as just one story, so hopefully we can get through this rather quickly.

And don’t forget our Facebook/Twitter competition where anyone who likes/follows will enter into the draw to win some $20 Amazon gift cards. The more likes/follows, the more prizes (up to 15 GCs – I have to save the rest of the website earnings for food), and from the current count, I should be handing out something like 7 or 8 of these GCs. So get clicking, and good luck!

Let’s start with the copyright news. Last week. I talked about how increasing access to content reduces piracy, and if you take the same principle and use it for the other side, then decreasing access should lead to more piracy.

Making TV shows exclusive to a subscription channel could increase piracy

Which is exactly what experts are warning now that the UK has a new subscription channel that has made a lot of shows, previ0usly available on free-to-air TV, a channel exclusive. It means that for popular shows like Boardwalk Empire, the only way to actually watch these shows is to sign up to Sky Atlantic, or wait until the show hits DVDs/Blu-rays. Legally, that is. Illegally, well, you won’t really have to wait more than 2 hours after the original US airing date to find torrents posted everywhere for that particular episode. In fact, I bet that the torrent release schedule probably beats the airing schedule of Sky Atlantic, probably even by days or even weeks. So release windows, exclusive broadcasts, and no legal free option will only really drive people to pursue less than legal options. Those more adventurous (and technical minded) will go for torrents, while there are still plenty of file sharing and streaming sites that offer the rest the ability to watch the shows without the associated legal risk (since most of the legal focus is on BitTorrent downloads these days). Now, somebody will benefit financially from exclusivity and release delays, but it all seems very short term to me, and the reason why TV piracy is on the up. It’s more understandable for US cable based shows, that were never really on free-to-air anyway, but for shows that air in the US on the big networks, there’s no reason why these shows shouldn’t be shown simultaneously around the world (taking into account time zone differences). Do that, and I think piracy rates will be lowered by quite a bit. Yes, pirated shows don’t have ads, which is a big draw card, but with PVR/DVRs and a little bit of fast forwarding, it’s probably worth the pain to avoid the risk of receiving a letter from an opportunist law firm.

Hotfile is being sued by major Hollywood studios for promoting web piracy

Speaking of file sharing sites like Hotfile, Hotfile has just been sued by the MPAA and five movie studios it represents. Now, I don’t think anyone can deny that there are lots of pirated files on Hotfile, but it is an upload service, and it’s the users that populate their servers. Like how people upload pirated Viacom clips to YouTube, and look how that turned out for Viacom, in the court room. The MPAA claims that Hotfile rewards users for uploading pirated movies and TV shows, because Hotfile has an affiliate program where you can earn movie depending on how popular your downloads are and how many of your downloaders sign up for the premium service. Now, I think it’s also fair to admit that many pirates are probably making money this way, but then again, in my line of work, I see a lot of software publishers that also use Hotfile and other file hosting services to save money on file hosting, as well as make a couple of bucks back. So Hotfile’s affiliate program really is just about growing their business and rewarding their customers, whomever they may be, and can you really blame a business for trying to do this? As for the ratio of legal to illegal downloads? I have no idea. But what can a company like Hotfile do to fight piracy, other than not exist (which is the MPAA’s preferred option – in fact, I think they’d rather the Internet not exist either, the same opinion also held by quite a few dictators around the world right now). They can try and filter based on file names, but all users will do is to name their downloads sdkj3489sd.zip or something similar, and piracy will continue. They can actively scan downloads, but pirates can then simply password protect and/or encrypt files (if they’re not doing it already), and piracy will continue. Hotfile can put in a system where copyright holders can submit removal requests, but they already have such a system which the MPAA studios appears to be not very fond of (mainly because it means they will actually have to do a bit of work themselves). So what’s a digital file locker hosting website to do? What can they do? They can get sued, apparently. And the likes of RapidShare and MegaUpload are surely not immune from similar lawsuits, although it’s understandable why the MPAA chose a lower profile website like Hotfile to sue, since it’s like RapidShare, which already has a lot of experience in the courts, will put up a much stronger fight.

6,500 people have been added to the “The Expendables” mass lawsuit. Nothing really surprising there, because as long as you have producers who don’t care about public opinion and a negative backlash, law firms like the US Copyright Group will continue to have clients.

The PS3 jailbreak stuff will be posted under the Gaming section as per usual.

High Definition

In HD/3D news, again, not a lot happening. I did catch a few 3D Blu-ray titles on sales at Amazon and elsewhere online recently, and so even without Fox/Panasonic’s mean-hearted/short-sighted-ness in making Avatar 3D an exclusive (now selling for a little bit less on eBay, around $150).

The one I was tempted to buy was Piranha 3D. I loved the original Piranha movies, and this latest edition of the latest remake has both the 2D version, as well as the anaglyph version (red/blue glasses version), in addition to the 3D Blu-ray version, so it’s a good introductory package for 3D (because you can always go back to the 2D version in case 3D is not for you, or if you don’t have a 3D Blu-ray system right now, you can still enjoy the old fuzzy, washed out colours, style 3D with the cheap paper glasses).

While neither HD or 3D related, I did post a news item about publishers moving away from Apple’s iTunes towards Android and other more open marketplaces. While software restrictions are the real issue right now, it also I guess applies to movies, and some of these movies might be HD (I’m really stretching here, aren’t I). Basically, you have Apple who wants to control everything and then some, and it may be their right since they did produce the excellent iDevices in question, and most of their income is derived from having so much control. And there’s also the issue of quality control too. But being able to play any movie you want simply by using a USB cable to copying it, like you would do with any USB storage device, means that Android phones appeal to those who simply cannot stand iTunes or the idea of being locked to the software. And for publishers, it means they can publish without having to hand over 30% for every transaction, or to have to abide by Apple’s stupid licensing restrictions, which requires even free software have use Apple’s DRM (hence the whole VLC player for iOS debacle).

And finally in gaming, most of the news as you may have guessed relates to Sony’s legal action against the security researchers who uncovered the major security hole within Sony’s own security infrastructure, and famous/infamous PS3 hacker George Hotz, who did the awful thing is re-enabling homebrew on the PS3 (but not piracy).

The week started with Sony attempting to get the likes of YouTube and Twitter to hand over user information in relation to anyone remotely related to the PS3 hack, even those who simply watched the hacking video on YouTube. Their intention was to expand the case to include anyone who releases or distributes custom firmware and other security hacks. Basically, a fishing expedition. But one that was ultimately denied by the judge for the case.

I might have some sympathy for Sony if they only went after those that release firmware that included the ability to play copied games. But to go after fail0verflow, basically just a security research team, and also geohot, who has time and time again denounced piracy and went out of his way to ensure his custom firmware cannot play pirated games, it seems Sony have chosen the wrong targets really. And then to try and go after Linux hackers like Graf_Chokolo, whose sole aim was only to bring Linux back to the PS3, a feature that Sony once fully supported, it just seems unnecessary.

Major Nelson pokes fun at Sony's Kevin Butler "Battleship" SNAFU

And then Linux community responded by fooling fake PS3 VP and twitter personality Kevin Butler into re-tweeting a hacked PS3 security code. Embarrassing, and even Xbox 360’s Major Nelson poked fun at the incident, but what’s more worrying for Sony is that all of these are taking attention away from the console and the great games that they will have out this year, and that’s something they can’t really afford at the moment, not when the race with the Xbox 360 is so close and with the threat from Kinect hanging around.

And speaking of Kinect, the PlayStation Move’s creator (Dr. Richard Marks) seems a bit jealous of the attention Kinect has gotten with the PC community, and wants something similar for the Move, except to make it even more accessible. I suppose this means that instead of having access to just the raw data, some of the software and processing algorithms may be opened up too, if Dr. Marks is able to overrule Sony’s “we don’t like anyone poking their heads under the hood” stance. Of course, what most interested the programmers was the potential of Kinect, and how different it was to any consumer tech on the market (something like this would otherwise be thousands and thousands of dollars, for the professionals market). The Move, while somewhat innovative, is really just a more accurate Wii, and programmers have already had their fun with hacking the Wii-mote when it first came out. If anything, the PlayStation Eye is a more interesting device, but one that still can’t compare to the Kinect in terms of innovation.

And so, we come to the end of another edition of the Weekly News Roundup. Enjoy your week!

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (13 February 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (6 February 2011)

Sunday, February 6th, 2011

Welcome to a new month, the month with arguably the hardest to spell name (Febuary? Februarey?), and also the hardest to remember in terms of number of days it has (hint, it’s not 30 or 31, and it’s not always the same every year either). February is what you would call “high maintenance”, if it were a person.

The promised Facebook/Twitter competition should be launched in the next day or two. There’s nothing you actually need to do, if you’re already liked our Facebook page and/or followed us on Twitter, you’ll automatically be entered into the draw to win some Amazon gift certificates (those that signed up before early will receive a better chance to win). Full details to be posted when I make it up. Before then, we have this week’s news to go through, so let’s get started.

In copyright news, the big headline of the week, at least according to the MPAA, was that almost a quarter of the world’s web traffic was piracy related.

To be honest, I had expected a lot more than that, considering that out of the big files you can download, Linux ISOs aside, I can’t really think of a lot of legal content that’s 8GB or 12GB in size, whereas many pirated games are. Without iTunes HD movie downloads, and Steam, the quoted 23.8% of global traffic being pirated related, could have been a lot higher. The study was commissioned by NBC Universal, but it was the MPAA that screamed the loudest at the findings. Except, as usual, they missed some really important points in the report. One interesting note was that the US actually had a lower piracy rate than the rest of the world, which is strange because most of the pirated stuff comes from the US (movies, TV shows, games), and what with the poor economy and relatively cheap Internet, you just expected the US to be the lead in terms of piracy. Another interesting result was that only 2.9% of downloads on the BitTorrent networks that the study monitored were for music, with films and TV accounting for nearly half of the downloads (and 35.8% being pornography).

Envisional Piracy Study - Break down by content type

Music torrent downloads only count for a very small percentage of downloads, according to the Envisional report (graph credits: Envisional report)

The theory is that the US has greater access to legal content, and so there’s less reason for many to get content via illegal sources. This is definitely true with TV shows, since Hulu and the other streaming networks, which block access from outside the US, means that there’s almost no reason to download torrents of the latest episodes. The low number of music downloads could be because that torrents have never been the best way to download music, not when LimeWire was around anyway. But it could also be because music availability is greater in the US, and that music, unlike movies and especially TV shows, don’t suffer from the same sort of delay releases and release windows, that actively prevents people from purchasing in order to maximize profits for publishers from different channels. In this day and age, having to wait a whole week before you have access to the latest episode of say The Office or even months before you can buy Boardwalk Empire on DVD/Blu-ray, just doesn’t work. When your friends or co-workers are downloading/streaming illegally and then discussing the latest episodes, you almost have to download/stream it yourself. And porn? Well, nobody wants to have to pay for porn, or to have something less than innocent show up on their credit card statement, so that’s another reason why it’s so popular.

So the fact that “it’s free”, while I do agree has a lot to do with why pirated content is so attractive, but there are clearly other factors in play that should not be ignored, if one is really intent on reducing online piracy. Unfortunately, groups like the MPAA and RIAA’s goal is to eventually get legislation that guarantees their revenue stream, and online piracy just happens to be a convenient excuse at the moment. It’s an easy argument to convince ignorant politicians, unaware of just what the Internet is all about. With all the studies being done, none has even tried to find out the real financial cost of piracy, not the billions upon billions imagined by the MPAA/RIAA. Not in the US anyway. But a Japanese government backed think-tank has looked at the problem, and has found some interesting answers. In regards to Anime and online streaming and P2P downloads via the popular (in Japan) Winny software tool, the study found that these kinds of piracy not only did not hurt DVD sales, it actually helped. YouTube uploads of Anime episodes actually helped to generate more sales, while P2P downloads did not hurt sales at all, only rentals. The promotional effects of YouTube uploads, even of full episodes, has been known for a while now, and you’d be hard pressed to find one publisher that doesn’t utilize YouTube for promotional purposes. And as for P2P downloads, with DVDs so cheap and online piracy so easily accessible for so long, people who still buy DVDs will always buy DVDs (or Blu-rays), in my opinions, because if free and easy hasn’t convinced you do break the law, nothing will (and for people who like to collect things, like me, buying and downloading are two totally separate things).

Reasonable demands, or blackmail?

And the findings of these reports don’t really contradict a study by Warner Bros. back in December, where the conclusion there seem to be that a lot of people downloading pirated TV shows and movies are downloading the foreign dubbed version, which would otherwise not be available via legal means. And that by not fulfilling the needs of the market, that legitimate consumers are being pushed into pursuing content via other means, including illegal means. Which brings us to this week’s most interesting copyright related news story – the Don’t Make Me Steal manifesto. What is it? Well, it’s basically a list of demands, that if met, the people who signed the manifesto would all promise not to download pirated movie of TV content. It sounds a bit like a threat, which is why it’s controversial (and I don’t think the “Don’t Make Me Steal” title is a good one, because in the end, nobody “makes” you steal, it’s still a choice, even if it is sometimes the most sensible one). But these are not really unreasonable demands. They’re not demanding everything be free, and actually, a lot of demands match up perfectly to what the recent studies have concluded, that a lot of people are being under-served. Removing release windows, reasonable pricing (buying DVD/Blu-rays should not cost more than a movie ticket, and rentals should not cost more than a third of the same ticket), greater access to dubs and subtitles, no DRM, and a lot of others things I suspect that the movie/TV industry will eventually figure out on their own and implement. So if this manifesto can change the debate from one of “how should we punish those that pirate stuff” to “how do we encourage people not to pirating stuff”, then it has served its purpose. It shows there are plenty of things movie and TV studios can do to reduce piracy, and they should at least give these suggestions some serious thought before trying to shift the blame and responsibility to everyone else.

All of this comes as the number of individuals sued by mass piracy lawsuits reached 100,000 in the US alone. Both piracy and anti-piracy, in my opinion, has gotten out of control, and the only real solution is to examine the real causes behind piracy. Or it will end up becoming a futile fight, where the process becomes a daily grind of trying to put out millions of fires with no positive effect towards actually solving the problem, something that was addressed well by the TV show The Wire (in relation to the war on drugs, but the idea is the same). How many websites do you have to get Homeland Security to shut down before the war on piracy can be won? How many civil rights do we have to sacrifice in order for the entertainment industry to keep their dying business model? How many people must be sued for illegal downloads before people stop downloading? And how long would all of these actions take before the problem is solve. Years? Decades? Never?

And not wanting to enjoy schadenfreude, Intel’s problems with Sandy Bridge seems like karma biting back for putting in hardware DRM into the new chip, and then for not even admitting it was DRM, even though it clearly was. The actual problem appears not to be that serious, it’s a flaw on the motherboard chipset that Sandy Bridge CPUs rely on, and it has to do with the SATA2 controller part which will fail over time for a small percentage of chips. Disabling the rogue transistor, or simply use the provided SATA3 ports instead, would be a simple workaround, at least until Intel can provide details on how they plan to fix the problem. Still, had Intel spent more time testing Cougar Point, instead of getting all giddy at the prospect of adding hardware DRM, maybe they could have avoided the potential billion dollar problem.

High Definition

Onto HD/3D news, not a whole lot happening really in the world of Blu-ray or 3D. But for general HD, and I know I’m stretching a bit here, then the news that Microsoft plans to solve Google’s H.264 problem may be somewhat interesting.

Google dropping HTML5 H.264 support for Chrome may be an attempt to hurt Apple

Google dropped support for H.264 as part of its HTML5 implementation, and this means that HTML5 videos that use H.264 would not actually work on Google’s Chrome browser, which is a shame. Google quotes wanting to support “open software” as the reason, despite the fact that they’re the biggest supporters of the closed Adobe Flash software, being the only browser to bundle Flash with the default download. But Microsoft has been actively trying to get people to use H.264 for HTML5, no doubt because they own lots of patents on the format, and so they’ve released a Chrome extension that brings back H.264 support, for those with Windows 7 anyway (which has H.264 decoding built natively into the OS). They did the same thing for Firefox a couple of months ago, so this move wasn’t unexpected. And Google can hardly complain, considering their stance towards Flash.

You may ask what is Google’s motive behind dropping H.264, if it wasn’t for the sake of “openness”? Some would say it’s because they want people to use their own WebM format, for which Google owns the patents on (but has decided, for now, not to charge royalty). Maybe. But Google’s real target, in my opinion, is Apple. Apple loves H.264, they also only support HTML5 (not Flash) on their iDevices, and being a fairly closed system in which Apple has control over everything, it’s unlikely WebM support will be implemented without Apple’s permission for these devices and Safari in general. So Google’s move alienates Apple, while their own Android platform still manages to support H.264, Flash and WebM, with hardware acceleration too even. To me, this is a calculated move against Apple, forcing Apple to either accept WebM and implement hardware support for it, or to live with an YouTube app that runs poorly on iDevices. And Google’s alliance with Flash, and Apple’s anti-Flash stance, just further confirms what I and many others think.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that WebM will be adopted, not even by YouTube. In fact, this move most likely benefits Adobe and Flash, since it then becomes the only way to tie everything together, and get everything working, especially since Adobe has already announced they will add WebM support to Flash. And H.264 will be here to stay, as long as Flash is here to stay, and as long as Blu-ray and iTunes still exists.

Another week, and the cat and mouse game between Sony and PS3 hackers continue. Sony brought out the 3.56 firmware to counter the hacked 3.55 firmware, but the process of hacking 3.56 has already begun and it’s a matter of when, not if, it will get hacked (because once the master key and the method it can be obtained became public, it’s really game over for that security platform).

The unfortunate message that PS3 owners with upgraded HDDs are experiencing

And as expected, Sony’s war against hackers has caused its first piece of collateral damage, with PS3 owners that have upgraded their hard-drives being the first set of victim. Sony active encourages people to upgrade the PS3’s hard-drive, and even provides instructions on how to do it online (and it doesn’t void warranty either). They did this to counter the over-priced Xbox 360 hard-drive add-ons. But people who installed 3.56 found that their upgraded HDDs would no longer work, with a “The data is corrupted” error, even after reformatting. Apparently, Sony re-released 3.56 just now and it might have fixed the problem, but you need the original HDD to first upgrade to the new 3.56 (Sony didn’t call it 3.57 because they didn’t want to admit to their mistake? It’s not the first time either …), and then upgrade your HDD. Those without the original HDD (which has to still retains the original formatting) are still stuck with a bricked console, unfortunately. 3.57 will hopefully be here next week, but who knows.

So once again the advice is don’t upgrade your PS3’s firmware until at least a week after release. Yes, it’s a week that you may not be able to play online (or even certain games offline, which prevents play without an active PSN connection, which of course requires the latest firmware). I think if Sony is intent on releasing firmware updates so frequently, the least they should offer is a window in which both old and new firmware versions can be used, although I suppose there are huge technical issues related to supporting two firmware versions at the same time on PSN.

So that’s it for another week. Hope you’ve enjoyed this issue of the WNR. Have a good one and see you at the same time next week.

Posted in Computing, Copyright, News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Video Technology | 1 Comment »

Weekly News Roundup (30 January 2011)

Sunday, January 30th, 2011

It looks like my pathetic begging last week paid off, sort of, as I managed to get a few likes on Digital Digest’s Facebook page, and a few more on Twitter. All those that participated will be noted, and when the competition launches next week or the week after, you shall all be rewarded handsomely (with better chances at winning)!

This Android game I made may look crudely drawn, it's gameplay is only slightly better

The current set up means every news article posted on the Digital Digest website, plus every blog and posts in the deals & freebies section, will all be added to the feeds, allowing for an easy way to get notified of updates on the websites. And occasionally, I will post a few things that aren’t really big enough to make the news, but are nonetheless interesting. One thing I did post about was my first attempt at an Android app, a game based on a paper based game based on video games based a movie. Paper (Star) Wars is my take on a paper based Star Wars game that I used to play with friends in middle school. It’s my first app, so please be kind and tolerant of the numerous bugs within the game. There’s a free “Not Very Special Edition” and a paid for version for around a buck, depending on exchange rates.

Self promotion finished, time for this week’s news, and there’s plenty to go through so let’s get started.

Let’s start the copyright news, the UK may have seen a change of government, the non violent kind, but its anti-piracy policies remains unchanged it seems. Their proposed three-strikes system, which will first start with a warning-but-no-action system, is set to be introduced, and UK ISPs will have to pay 25% of the cost of enforcing this law which will see private subscriber data being given to copyright holders.

In other words, the UK government thinks that ISPs are at least 25% responsible for anti-piracy policing on the net, even though they don’t receive any benefits from it at all if this thing works (and the UK government optimistically thinks that it will reduce online piracy by 50% – amazing!). So it seems ISPs have been cast as a guilty party. But ISPs will no doubt pass on the cost to subscribers. So it seems, we’re all being cast as the guilty party. And with higher ISP costs, and so less money to spend online, and when people start getting booted off the Internet, all of these actions which will no doubt affect the Internet economy, most likely the legitimate kind. Pirates will be pirates, and they will find (and have found) ways around being monitored, so I would really like to see how the UK government comes up with the figure of £200m as the amount of benefits that will result from this. They would be lucky to get away with less than £200m of damages to the economy. But this whole thing has become an ideological crusade, so common sense went out the window ages ago.

ACS:Law may have quit the mass lawsuit game

The new UK law should come into affect as anti-piracy law firms in the UK might be starting to wrap up their profit seeking mass lawsuit enterprises, when the head of one of the most notorious anti-piracy law firms, ACS:Law, said in court that his firm was no longer involved in anti-piracy stuff due to “death threats and bomb threats”, amongst other things (no longer profitable?). Not to condone threats of this kind, which is totally unacceptable despite the number of people ACS:Law has pissed off in recent times, but that’s the side effect of the kind of business ACS:Law is involved in, just as its predecessor Davenport Lyons realised when they also quit the game. And they were in court because the judge found their lawsuit somewhat dubious and wanted to examine it further, despite ACS:Law’s attempt to drop the lawsuits against the downloaders in question, in a last ditch attempt to avoid having any kind of court ruling on the matter (because it could go either way, and it looks like it’s going the wrong way for ACS:Law). The best way to go after these law firms is to take a leaf out of the entertainment lobby’s latest doctrine on online anti-piracy: go after their revenue source. If no profit can be made via mass lawsuits, because perhaps it’s difficult to ascertain jurisdiction or that people are fighting back by tying up these law firms in paper work, then these kinds of law suits will stop.

Google is the net's new piracy cop

But these lawsuits are still gaining popularity in the US, where this week, hundreds more were sued for download the Paris Hilton sex tapes. I wonder if Paris Hilton gets a percentage of the settlement fees, and if she does, then that’s one more reason to fight these lawsuits as tenaciously as possible. And people seeking to download this “movie” illegally be warned – the publishers, XPAYS, is still monitoring download networks for potential targets. But finding a torrent of this film may have just gotten about 1.5% harder, thanks to Google’s new filtering scheme which became active this week, something they warned us would happen back in December. It’s no doubt Google’s way to try and appease the entertainment industry, not that they would be pleased much by this, since only the suggested search phrases as part of auto-complete and instant search have been filtered – the results are still the same as before. And the way Google has did it was full of inconsistencies, like why a BitTorrent client software like uTorrent needs to be filtered at all (and yet, other popular clients like BitComet or Vuze are not filtered), or why RapidShare is filtered, but not MediaFire. In any case, this latest move by Google sets a very dangerous precedent, and goes completely against the Mountain View company’s principles on the open web. And as mentioned before, it will do little to appease the entertainment industry and instead, it will just make them ask the question “if you can filter recommended search phrases, why can’t you also filter out the results”. An appeasement of groups backed by a Fascist launched organization, yeah that doesn’t sound familiar at all. Maybe it’s just me, but has Google abandoned their “do no evil” policy, since they’re very much acting like just any other corporation these days. Even their recent withdrawal of support for H.264 in Chrome was very much an exercise in protecting self-interests (dropping H.264 so people will have to adopt their own WebM, for example), as opposed to their stated goal of supporting open software – this is the very same company that bundles Adobe Flash with the same browser in question, so it’s a bit rich for them to lecture other on support of open platforms.

For all of the entertainment industry’s pomp and bluster, they still haven’t even managed to close down The Pirate Bay. They talk big about closing down a lot of websites, another 50 this week apparently, but they don’t dare mention how many new websites spring up the second they close down one, fairly obscure, torrent indexer. And if The Pirate Bay people are to be believed, the RIAA are in for a rude awakening when TPB launches its music sharing service in a few months time. No details as yet, or even confirmation as to whether this thing is real or not, but a TPB insider has promised that this thing will scare the pants off the RIAA. It’s set to be launched around the 78th birthday of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, and I thought it was interesting that this organization was launched by none other than Mussolini in 1933 (yes, that Mussolini). So when old Benito said that “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power,” he wasn’t that far off the mark it seems (ignoring the fact that he was talking about a totally different kind of “corporate” to today’s corporations).

And in potential silly DRM news of the week, how about DRM’d web images? Not quite, but it only takes a little bit of effort to turn this thing into the online newspaper’s favourite new toy, as expiring image links is quite effective at cutting down hot linking. Of course, those that really do want to steal your pics will just do so via a print-screen, while you make your legitimate visitors download and install plug-in after plug-in just to view the damn image. A totally ineffective DRM which only makes the life of legitimate users that much more painful. So definitely happening, then.

High Definition

Onto HD/3D news, price of Blu-ray players are tipped to drop below $40 in 2011. Not that surprising when you consider that it’s been available for around $50 already.

But this does mean one thing: if you don’t have a Blu-ray player now, you may just not want or need one. They’re so cheap now, when they’re not being given away freely with TV purchases, that there really aren’t any other excuses left for people not to have one. And with retailers often discounting Blu-ray/combo versions of movies below the price of DVD sets, it’s a no brainer. And so much for the higher premiums manufacturers had hoped that Blu-ray hardware (and movies) would bring on a more permanent basis.

Not everyone can enjoy 3D without wanting to throw up

So if plain old Blu-ray isn’t helping to bring in higher premiums, perhaps the 3D kind will. And when manufacturers and studios are not trying to kill the format by signing excruciatingly long exclusivity deals (I’m looking at you, Panasonic and Fox) on titles that will launch the format, there’s also the issue that many people just can’t stand watching 3D. I think I’m one of these people, since watching 3D for more than half an hour makes me uncomfortable, and watching something like Avatar all the way through would probably kill me (or at least make me very very sick). But I did still buy a 3D TV, and I’ve definitely paid more money for even less interesting gimmicks before. Expect all TVs to have 3D support by the end of the year though, and competition will ensure the higher premiums will be gone by then too.

And going back to the Chrome/H.264 decision I referred to above, there’s a new service that aims to end the problem of cross-browser compatibility for uploaded web videos. Vid.ly takes in your videos and then transcode them millions of times (or just a dozen times, I don’t know) so that it will work on any browser, regardless of whether it took the very corporate decision to back one of its own, albeit open, video standards, or whether it’s backing a video standard that it owns a lot of patent on. And the same for mobile videos, iOS, Android, Blackberry. I fed the service my recently uploaded Transformers: Dark of the Moon HD 1080p Trailer. Vid.ly ate it up, and spat out a link half an hour later, and I’ve put the sample embed video and mobile video links in this forum thread. For no other reason, it’s a great way to compare the various qualities of web video standards, H.264 vs WebM vs Theora, as the same embed code automatically detects what software you’re using and gives you the compatible stream (it looks by far the worst on Firefox at the moment, as it uses Ogg Theora). Anyway, an interesting service that may bypass the whole very confusing, and annoying, HTML5 format wars.

And last but not least, in gaming, Sony has reacted to the hacked 3.55 firmware by releasing the 3.65 firmware. And it was hacked within hours. Stable. Doors. Horse. Bolted.

Sony did have better success in the courts, with the judge granting a temporary injunction against, I don’t know what, geohot’s firmware or something. Because a temporary injunction on fail0verflow’s research into pointing out the security flaw on the PS3, doesn’t seem to make much sense, as it’s now common knowledge that Sony doesn’t know the difference between a constant and a randomly generated number.

Sony's Next Generation Portable is packed full of the latest tech, but at what price?

But Sony are at their best when they show off cool stuff, as opposed to trying all sorts of anti-piracy measures, and they did impress a lot of people and refocus people’s thoughts away from the PS3 security disaster, by revealing the NGP – the Next Generation Portable – the successor to the ailing (some would argue, dead and buried) PSP. It does seem pretty cool, all the best features from phones (Wi-Fi, GPS, multiple cameras, multi-touch), a kick-ass processor that can run PS3 games, albeit at the reduced resolution of the still kick-ass OLED screen (960×544). Still, it faces stiff competition from smartphones, the 3DS and tablets, all vying for a share of the portable gaming market these days (although Sony has promised a common development platform for its Android phones and the NGP, so we know at least Angry Birds will be on the NGP). Nobody knows what the price of the NGP will be, but with so much tech inside, it can’t be cheap, or can’t be cheaper than the 3DS, right?

Speaking of the 3DS, yes, it will have region-control, and downloaded games won’t be transferable to another console, at least not at first.

And so that’s it for another week. Have a good one and see you at the same time, same place, in 7 days.

Posted in 3D, Computing, Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (30 January 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (23 January 2011)

Sunday, January 23rd, 2011

You may have noticed something different at the bottom of this blog (if you’re viewing this post on my blog, as opposed to through the newsletter that is) – that’s right, WNR (via Digital Digest) has joined the 21st century social media thingamajig. This means that if you like this post, you can use one of the dozens of social media tools to let others know, and help me increase my readership numbers into double (or even triple!) digits. In addition, I’ve also set up what the kids call a ‘book of faces’ page right here (where every single news, deals and blog post will be pinned up on the wall, or something like that), and even managed to employ the services of that blue twittering bird here. So please, friend, follow, tweet, twang, hurl, zomg me on Facebook and Twitter, since I’m a bit lonely and pathetic on there at the moment and will soon have to resort to making up fake accounts just so I have some “friends”. And many of the news stories that I link to in the WNR will now be to the Digital Digest news section (as opposed to the forum thread like before, although a link to the relevant forum threads will still be located at the end of the news articles), and there, you will also see FB like buttons, Twitter tweet buttons, and even a FB powered comments section where you can point out the numerous speling mistakes I’ve made in the news post.

And there might be something in it for those of you that goes through the laborious process of clicking on a button to indicate your “friendship” or “cult follower status” with me, and the earlier you do it (and the greater number of you who do it) will increase the likelihood of something like this happening. Did someone say prizes? Amazon gift certificates? Details (if any) to be released soon. Just to be clear, yes, I am trying to buy some friends, so fingers crossed it works and I get enough likes and followers to make launching a competition possible!

Lots of news this week, so let’s get started.

Let’s start the copyright news. The big wigs at the music arms of Sony and Universal did some brain storming the other day and came up with a new brilliant way to combat piracy: allow people to actually buy the music!

Apparently, not allowing people to legally buy something actually encourages people to seek illegal ways to obtain the same content, which must have come as a big shock to the Sony and Universal execs when their million dollar research revealed these findings, or something. Currently, when new music is released, it’s given airtime on the radio during an exclusive period before it was possible to buy the music legally, but research found that people searching for the new songs peaked weeks before the start of the sales period, and so, naturally, people just managed to get the song from “other” sources. So now, music will be made available for sale at the same time as when the radio airplay period starts, in a bid to curb online piracy. And it will only take a dozen more research reports before Sony, Universal and others realize that the same thing works for TV shows and movies, and that rental, release windows and delaying new TV show episodes by as long as 6 month in overseas markets, all contribute to the online piracy phenomenon.

Still staying in the music industry, the RIAA this week issued more threats to companies and organizations that it perceives as potential partners in the CRusade Against Piracy (CRAP™). The RIAA knows that the only way it can get others to do their dirty work in the futile war against online piracy (FWOP™) is to threaten them. This time, it’s ICANN, the people responsible for making the domain name standards, and the RIAA warns them that piracy syndicates might hijack planned music based TLDs like .music. Like as if music piracy websites would need to bother with .music, not if .riaasucks is available. It’s very likely though that the warning comes because the RIAA wants control of .music, but doesn’t have the cash to bid for it, and so they’re dreaming up an imaginary threat to force ICANN’s hands, a tactic that has worked well with governments around the world.

Malware is a more serious problem than online piracy, yet it receives almost no attention at all

A threat that is not so imaginary is malware. Hands up those that *haven’t* been affected by malware, or know someone that has. Malware costs the economy something like $50+ billion a year, that’s even more than the imaginary numbers that the RIAA likes to invent, and yet it seems there’s hardly any action against the spread of malware, apart from the odd arrest of hacker or two, and only when the malware story makes national news (and this happens only because it infected all the computers at said news network). And yet, the US government alone is throwing millions of dollars and resources of the FBI, Homeland Security at fighting the online piracy problem, which may or may not even be a problem. I mention all this because of the story this week that malware writers are now using that old RIAA favourite, DRM, to protect their toolkits to sell or rent to those seeking to make a profit infecting unsuspecting servers and computers. But we already know for a fact the resources at the FBI have already been diverted away from investigating online and identity fraud, towards online piracy investigations, but I guess that’s because there is no such things as the “online fraud victims” lobby, or at least it doesn’t have as much cash to splash around compared to the entertainment lobby (probably because all of their cash has already been stolen via malware and identify fraud).

High Definition

Onto HD/3D news, I posted a story about LG’s plans to make people buy more 3D TVs that use passive glasses, but mainly, it was just an excuse to post a link to this video.

But 3D TVs using passive glasses do have some advantages, after all, cinema 3D presentations are mostly based on the same technology. Sure, you won’t get a 1080p picture, but if it means less headaches and cheaper glasses, then it’s probably a good thing. Having had my 3D TV for about 6 month now, I’m still firmly convinced that 3D is still very much a gimmick, although one that’s very likely to be in every TV pretty soon (but only the active glasses kind, since it’s very inexpensive to add active glasses 3D support to HDTVs).

Smell-O-Vision may be coming to games and movies for a low price, but not all smells are pleasant!

Something that also smells very gimmicky, possibly literally at some stage, is smell-o-vision. But what caught my eye about Scent Science’s new ScentScape machine is the low price attached to it. I don’t think it makes a huge difference to me if I can smell burning petrol or not as I blow up yet another car with my RPG in GTA IV, but for $70, the price of the ScentScape machine, it might just be worth a try. I wonder though what the most popular smells would be. Gunpowder would be one, blood another. But I do have reservations about playing a game like Fallout: New Vegas. I can’t imagine the post apocalyptic world and its inhabitants (and mutants) smelling very nice at all! Nor would watching Generation Kill (brilliant mini-series by the way) be pleasant if “a MOPP suit that smells like four days of piss and ball sweat” was made a reality, smell wise.

And Star Wars on Blu-ray now has a solid release date. September 27th, 2011. It will be the best seller on Blu-ray to date when released, I suspect.

And finally in gaming, some new developments in the PS3 hack saga. Sony’s court case against fail0verflow and geohot has been delayed due to jurisdiction issues relating to the fact that geohot, aka Geroge Hotz, does not live in California where the lawsuit was filed. Sony reasoned with the judge that, due to various clauses in the PSN user agreement and whatnot, it could still sue someone who doesn’t live in California, in California, but the judge has reservations about allowing Sony to bypass jurisdiction so easily this way. The EFF has also come out attacking Sony’s lawsuit, saying it sends a ‘dangerous message’, suing security researchers for exposing security flaws, when really, Sony should had worked with people like Hotz to plug any security holes before the console was released. Both fail0verflow and geohot stressed that they did this for academic purposes and for enabling homebrew, and all have made sure that piracy would not be promoted or allowed directly by their hacks (although indirectly, the hack can be further modified to enable piracy). So instead of suing those that actually use this hack to allow piracy, Sony are suing the guys that actually exposed the hack. It’s like arresting the guy who pointed out to you that your car is unlocked, as opposed to the guy who actually stole your car.

Waninkoko has a custom PS3 3.55 firmware that played backed up games, but it's bricking some PS3s (screencap credit: PSGroove.com)

More custom firmware has been released, this time by infamous Wii hacker Waninkoko, and this ones does allow pirated games to work. But the firmware apparently bricks older PS3s, those with 256MB NAND chips, a list of affected models here. The warning forum user Budreaux posted in the forum thread should be listened to … playing around with hacked firmware is a quick way to brick your PS3, void you warranty, and get you banned on PSN probably, not to mention possibly breaking the law depending on where you are. So do it strictly at your own risk!

And games that relied on the PS3’s now hacked security framework are beginning to feel the effect, with Modern Warfare 2 servers hacked to erase gamer scores and all sorts of other things that make the experience unbearable to gamers. Not all games are affected because developers wisely decided that solely relying on Sony’s framework wasn’t a good idea.

And the worst is yet to come, since Sony’s official response will almost certainly be harsh. Remember that this is the same company that thought a rootkit was a good idea. And so it comes as no surprise that Sony may be planning to bring serial keys to PS3 games in a bid to curb piracy. Not only do you have to type in the 16 character serial code into your PS3, which is painful enough already, these keys may only be reused 5 times, which makes selling and buying second hand games that much more annoying. And it will also mean that you won’t be able to play offline games without going online for authentication. But at this stage, this is just a unsubstantiated rumour, so who knows.

Another unsubstantiated rumous is that the Nintendo 3DS, still weeks away from an official release, has already been hacked despite Nintendo’s assurance of better anti-piracy measures. This does not surprise me one bit, if it’s true.

And even though geohot is busy defending himself against Sony’s legal onslaught, he still has time to hack, this time, Windows Phone 7. But Microsoft, probably giddy from the disasters befalling the PS3 at the moment, isn’t so mad at geohot, and has even promised to work together to “let dev creativity flourish”. This after Microsoft actively not caring about people hacking the Kinect … has the corporate monster changed?

Speaking of Kinect, the PR machine rolled on, and just like how the Wii gained public exposure due to the thousands of broken TV screens and vases, “Wii tennis elbow” and other medical phenomenons, the Kinect is gaining similar public exposure via YouTube ‘Kinect Fail’ videos and reports of even more serious injuries, and even a potential arrest. These fluff pieces may all sound like bad publicity, but there is no such thing as bad publicity, because everyone thinks that these things only happens to stupid people, not themselves, so there is no way one would get ‘Kinect Sports volleyball shoulders’ that is so painful that it makes sleeping difficult. Ow.

And that’s all for this week.

… checks FB and Twitter for the 15th time today … still no likes or followers 🙁

Posted in 3D, Computing, Copyright, Electronics, News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | 2 Comments »

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Archive for the ‘PS3, PS4’ Category

Game Consoles – January 2011 NPD Sales Figure Analysis

Weekly News Roundup (13 February 2011)

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Weekly News Roundup (30 January 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (23 January 2011)

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