With consumers feeling the pinch in their pocketbooks, this holiday season may turn out to be more cutthroat than usual for the hundreds of video games set to hit store shelves.
Analysts predict that only top-tier titles and those that are highly rated by critics will thrive as consumers pare down spending in the fourth quarter, when the game industry typically pulls in 40% of its annual revenue.
This will be particularly true of shooter games. The genre is highly sensitive to quality rankings doled out by reviewers, generally on a scale of 0 to 100.
"It is pretty detrimental to sales for a shooter game to achieve a score below 80%," said Jesse Divnich, director of analytical services at Electronic Entertainment Design and Research in San Diego. "Simply put, if you want to make a first-person shooter, aim to achieve quality scores above 80%. If not, don’t even bother."
This is the conclusion Electronic Arts came to earlier this week when it pulled the plug on Tiberium, a science-fiction shooter game that had been several years in development. The chart below shows just how brutal buyers can be when it comes to low scores. Add the current economic fear factor and the pressure becomes even greater.
-- Alex Pham
Chart by Electronic Entertainment Design and Research
The swoon in video game shares this week, as with the rest of the stock market, can make any investor queasy.
Activision Blizzard has seen more than $4 billion in market value vanish so far this week, or close to a quarter of the Santa Monica company's value. Electronic Arts has lost more than $2 billion. What's more, the video game sector has dropped further than the overall market. The following are the stock performances of select game companies from Friday, Sept. 26 to today's close, as compared with the Nasdaq:
Theories abound about why game companies are suffering worse than the broader market -- and calling into question the notion that the sector is recession proof because it provides more entertainment bang for the buck.
One explanation is that no good deed goes unpunished. ...
Electronic Arts Inc. today canceled Tiberium, a spinoff of its popular Command & Conquer franchise of shooter games, and said it would lay off an unspecified number of employees at its Playa Vista office.
"The game was not on track to meet the high quality standards set by the team and by the EA Games Label," said EA spokeswoman Mariam Sughayer.
EA declined to say how many workers would be lose their jobs or how many employees had worked on the project. Sughayer said the Redwood City, Calif., developer would strive to place most of the affected workers into other EA projects. "This is not about cutting back financially," she said. "We still have tons of positions open, and we're hiring throughout the company."
Earlier this year, EA pushed back the launch of Tiberium to 2009. After spending more than a year developing the game, EA said it decided to cut its losses rather than put out a mediocre product that could mar the company's recent efforts to revitalize its reputation for producing high-quality titles in an increasingly crowded market for video games.
"There were fundamental problems with the design of the game, which the team struggled to correct," Sughayer said. "In the end, we didn't feel we can reach a higher level of quality with the time and resources left."
EA's shares gained 99 cents to $36.99 today after slipping $3.22, or 9%, on Monday amid the general stock market avalanche, especially among tech companies.
"The Command & Conquer brand has gotten stale over the years," said Jesse Divnich, director of analytical services at Electronic Entertainment Design and Research in San Diego, who said sales of the series had been dwindling.
Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities, said the decision to cancel a major title was a departure from previous practice at EA. "The old EA would have shoveled it out anyway," he said. "They're showing that they have the discipline to not throw good money after bad."
Mattel, which owns the international rights to Scrabble, said today it would appeal last week's court ruling in India that the Scrabulous online word game did not violate Mattel's copyrights.
The court did, however, say Scrabulous infringed on the El Segundo toy company's Scrabble trademark, handing both parties a mixed victory.
"Clearly, we’re pleased with the trademark decision in India regarding Scrabulous," Mattel spokeswoman Julia Jensen said. "We disagree with the ruling on the copyright portion of the decision and plan to appeal."
Jensen noted that the court's jurisdiction does not reach outside India, although Mattel has so far filed suit only in that country.
Mattel first sued the creators of Scrabulous, Indian brothers Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, in February. Hasbro, which owns the rights to Scrabble in North America, filed its Scrabulous lawsuit in July, prompting the Agarwallas to remove their popular game from Facebook and replace it with a new version called Wordscraper.
Until recently, some players were still able to access the old version on a website called Scrabulous.com, which the brothers took down and replaced with a new site, Lexulous.com.
Zack Snyder, the director of "300," "Dawn of the Dead" and the upcoming "Watchmen" films, has agreed to help develop three games for Electronic Arts. The deal, to be announced this morning, includes the option to turn original game franchises created during the collaboration into movies that would be controlled by Snyder's production company, Cruel & Unusual Films.
Snyder is the second Hollywood director to sign on with EA to make games. Steven Spielberg also agreed to a three-game contract. The first fruit of that partnership, "Boom Blox," was released in May and sold more than 450,000 units.
At 42, Snyder is among a new generation of Hollywood elite who grew up with video games. So it's inevitable that some see creative cross-fertilization between the two art forms. Another director, Gore Verbinski, said earlier this year that he was exploring an undisclosed game project. In the meantime, the "Pirates of the Caribbean" director has agreed to direct the movie adaptation of the sci-fi shooter game "BioShock."
"I think video games are cool because they offer an opportunity to tell a story in an entirely unique way," Snyder said in a statement.
-- Alex Pham
Photo: Zack Snyder. Credit: Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times
The creators of Scrabulous sent their fans a spot of good news this morning.
Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla, the Indian brothers who came up with the Scrabble-style word game for Facebook, told fans that the Dehli courts ruled that their game did not violate Mattel's copyrights. It did, however, consider the name "Scrabulous" a trademark violation of Scrabble and ordered the Agarwallas to stop using the word, the brothers said.
"We will take a call on whether we will appeal against the decision on the Trademark after consulting our legal advisors," the Agarwallas wrote in an e-mail to fans. Bottom line: The Indian court believes that the Scrabulous game is legally in the clear; it's just that it can't be called that.
Mattel, based in El Segundo, did not immediately return calls requesting information and comment.
Mattel, which owns the international rights to Scrabble, sued the Agarwallas in Indian court in February. Hasbro, the owner of Scrabble in North America, followed suit in July. Several days later, the Agarwallas pulled the application from Facebook and put up a new game called Wordscraper, a similar game that lets players modify their own board.
The Agarwallas today said that fans had taken to the new version, playing 1 million Wordscraper games in the last month.
Despite Electronic Arts' good-faith effort last week to relax copyright restrictions in Spore, gamers aren't buying it — the digital constraint tactic, that is. The game, on the other hand, is selling faster than you can evolve a virtual amoeba.
Spore has already sold a million copies since hitting stores earlier this month, but critics of the game's digital rights management have been vehement, bringing their protests to Amazon.com reviews, message boards, blogs and now federal court.
On Monday, just three days after EA apologized for the DRM controversy and increased the number of computers each game could be activated on (from three to five), a lawsuit seeking class-action status was brought against the company in the U.S. District Court for Northern California.
The case targets SecuROM, a DRM technology meant to prevent PC game piracy. Spore installs the program on users' computers without their explicit knowledge and cannot be easily removed, according to the 36-page document (PDF download) filed by Melissa Thomas and law firm KamberEdelson. In trying to protect its own intellectual property, EA compromises the consumer's own property — their computers, said Scott Kamber, the firm's managing member. EA says it doesn't comment on matters of pending litigation.
Similarities will no doubt be drawn between this and the Sony BMG rootkit case, in which the Federal Trade Commission ruled last year that the company couldn't install hidden software on users' computers without their permission. KamberEdelson, which commonly covers class-action technology cases, is the same firm that led the rootkit suit. And perhaps more ironically, the SecuROM software that EA uses with Spore was developed by Sony.
KamberEdelson also won a 2006 suit against game developer UbiSoft for its invasive StarForce PC copy-protection program. "These corporate executives don't see anything wrong with putting this uninstallable program on people's computers," Kamber said.
The presidential race between Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama is a virtual dead heat in much of the real world. But it's not so close in one virtual world.
Obama leads McCain 43% to 31% among the nearly 100,000 votes cast as of Friday on Xbox Live, according to Microsoft, which runs the online game service. The voting is part of a partnership between Microsoft and Rock the Vote, which allows Xbox 360 users to cast their presidential preferences via their game controllers.
The initiative also allows Xbox Live members to register to vote for real. So far, 55,000 registration forms have been downloaded since the program began on Aug. 25, the first day of the Democratic National Convention. (You've got to be 18 to vote, but there's no age restriction on the Xbox Live poll.)
Rock the Vote, which mobilizes young people to get involved in the political process, wants to register 2 million young voters for this fall's election. The group noted that if XBox Live were a state, its 12 million members would make it the country's 7th largest, with the same number of electoral votes as Ohio.
But Xbox Live isn't a state in play. It's a state of play, where making a presidential choice can be done with a flick of the thumb in about the time it takes to slice up a Jawa in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Casting a real ballot is much harder: You can't do it from the comfort of your home; it often involves more cumbersome technology; and the lines can be long (for gamers who've never voted, think of the wait some people endured to get their hands on the Xbox 360 when it was released).
So although Xbox Live users represent a chunk of the youth demographic, which could swing key states such as Nevada, a big question remains: Will online gamers rip themselves away from the likes of Guitar Hero and Madden NFL 09 to go to the polls Nov. 4?
-- Jim Puzzanghera
Photo: Xbox 360 controller. Credit: Dominic via Flickr
The consumer is always right. Electronic Arts, stung by a siege of criticism from gamers who took issue with the copyright restrictions the company placed on its Spore game, this morning issued an apology and said it would loosen the electronic locks on the game.
Spore, one of the most hotly anticipated computer games of the decade, was released two weeks ago after more than six years of development.
"We've received complaints from a lot of customers who we recognize and respect," said Frank Gibeau, president of EA's Games Label, the division responsible for Spore. "We need to adapt our policy to accommodate our legitimate consumers."
Trying to avoid widespread unauthorized copying of Spore, EA had restricted, to three, the number of computers on which players could install the game. But buyers chafed at the limit imposed by the digital rights management policy. They complained that the Redwood City, Calif., company didn't adequately disclose the policy and that it treated them all like software pirates. Some customers also said the policy failed to recognize that players often upgrade their computers and need to migrate their software to new machines.
The customer anger erupted largely on video game message boards and in user reviews on Amazon.com's Spore page. The game's ratings have been hammered by critics of the installation restriction, with nearly 2,500 of the 2,900 Amazon reviewers giving Spore only one star.
EA officials said the controversy caught them off guard.
The company said today that it would boost the limit to five computers. It also will allow players to transfer the game an unlimited number of times so long as each copy is installed on no more than five computers at the same time. EA also said it would sometimes let players go beyond that limit, depending on the circumstances.
"We assumed that consumers understand piracy is a huge problem," Gibeau said. "We have found that 75% of our consumers install and play any particular game on only one machine, and less than 1% ever try to play on more than three different machines."
The firestorm in which players flooded forums with negative reviews of the game marred one of the company's most important game launches this year. Developed by Will Wright, who also created the Sims franchise, the game lets players build creatures that evolve into civilizations and eventually take over distant galaxies.
Analysts said EA took the right approach.
"The key to making copyright restrictions work is to offer value," said Billy Pidgeon, analyst with IDC. "In the end, this will blow over because Spore is a fun game, and people will want to try it."
What grabs more attention than a supermodel in a string bikini? How about Madden NFL video games?
At least when it comes to kids, that is. Sports Illustrated, the magazine famed as much for its annual swimsuit issue as for its thorough sports coverage, has dedicated the October issue of its younger sibling, Sports Illustrated for Kids, to electronic games. SI for Kids splashed the theme on the cover and sprinkled stories about video games throughout its glossy pages.
The magazine has been around for 20 years, but this is the first time it has put out an entire issue with a video games theme. The decision stems from a survey the magazine conducted of its readers, which found that 4 out of 5 of play video games with their friends and spend an average of $77 a month on games.
"Our readers are huge video game fans, so we decided to tie the two together with our October issue," said Karen Dmochowsky, a Sports Illustrated spokeswoman.
No kidding. A survey released this week by the Pew Internet & American Life Project estimated that 97% of kids age 12 to 17 years have played games on computers, consoles or cellphones. They spend an hour or more each time they play. Half said they had played the day before they were surveyed.
So the topic is likely to have a wide appeal for the magazine's readers, who are generally 7 to 15 years old. Possibly even more so than the women in bathing suits who grace the covers of Sports Illustrated for grownups.
Adhering to an old saying -- "If it's too good to be true, it probably is" -- might have saved money and prevented headaches for hundreds of people who are unhappy with websites claiming to offer irresistibly priced video game systems.
The premise was innocent enough: a factory-refurbished Wii for $19.99, or an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 -- including a one-year warranty and free shipping -- for $34.99. That's less than the price of a game remote.They were offered on several related websites, such as PS3-Bargains.com (pictured above) and RefurbishedWiis.com. The websites' lists of frequently asked questions say the "slightly worn" systems are offered at such a low price — more than $150 less than anywhere else — because the site gets paid by sponsors "for every survey you fill out."
But customers are complaining that although their credit cards were billed, they never received the game consoles, let alone any surveys to complete.
According to analyst Aaron Naternicola of the Internet Crime Complaint Center (a collaboration among the FBI, the National White Collar Crime Center and the Bureau of Justice Assistance), 18 related websites have generated hundreds of complaints about unfulfilled game console orders, and four other websites -- apparently connected to the first group -- generated more than two dozen complaints about software related to the World of Warcraft game that didn't work as promised. (The 22 websites are listed after the jump.) Efforts by The Times to reach the proprietors behind the websites were unsuccessful.
As of Tuesday morning, the IC3 had received 324 complaints from consumers about the game console websites since August 2007, which the IC3 says amounts to about $17,100 in lost money. The magnitude is rare, reaching a level hit by only a dozen or so cases a year, Naternicolasaid in an e-mail.
"Any time you have double-digit complaints, that's considered more than just noteworthy," said Craig Butterworth, spokesman for the National White Collar Crime Center. "The higher those numbers go up, the more serious it becomes."
The Better Business Bureau also has received a series of complaints claiming "delivery issues." (A spokeswoman said the bureau doesn't
disclose the specifics until after cases have been resolved.)
Thanks to Better Business Bureau reports, the IC3 was able to draw connections among ...
* Updated at 5:35 p.m. with comments from Strauss Zelnick, chairman of Take-Two, and game industry analysts.
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Electronic Arts said today it has terminated talks to acquire Take-Two Interactive Software, ending a nearly yearlong effort by the world's largest video game company to buy the publisher of the Grand Theft Auto game franchise.
"After careful consideration, including a management presentation and review of other due diligence materials provided by Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., EA has decided not to make a proposal to acquire Take-Two," the Redwood City, Calif., company said in a statement released this afternoon.
The two companies have been locked in a stand-off for months, after Take-Two rejected EA's $2-billion offer as too low. EA brought the offer directly to Take-Two shareholders and extended its deadline for the bid to expire several times as the Federal Trade Commission reviewed the proposal for antitrust implications.
EA executives said today that their offer had been based on the ability to close the transaction in time to take advantage of the upcoming holiday sales.
"We've always maintained that time was of the essence," Owen Mahoney, senior vice president of corporate development and EA's chief deal negotiator, said in an interview. "We've said that the value of this transaction deteriorates over time."
EA's offer, valued at $25.74 a share, represented a 64% premium over Take-Two's stock price when the bid was made public in February. "In the end, we had a very different view on the value of Take-Two, and we have moved on," Mahoney said. Take-Two shares had gained 24 cents to $21.89 Friday.
Mahoney said EA would consider other acquisitions, as long as they fit with the company's two priorities -- improving the quality of its core game franchises and developing an online distribution business with higher operating margins than packaged games sold at retail stores. The company had nearly $2.7 billion in cash and short-term investments as of June 30.
In an interview, Take-Two Chairman Strauss Zelnick said his company had "a bright future ahead of us." Zelnick, who took the helm in a boardroom coup 18 months ago with a mandate to turn around the beleaguered company, said Take-Two has paid off its debts and is accumulating cash, thanks to a blockbuster launch of Grand Theft Auto IV in April. Zelnick also expressed optimism about the October launch of Midnight Club: Los Angeles, a racing game developed by the same studio that created Grand Theft Auto IV.
Analysts said Take-Two could still thrive as a standalone company. "As a smaller company, they would have to take their risks strategically," said Billy Pidgeon, analyst with IDC. "But they can't be jack of all trades. They're just not big enough."
Pidgeon said the company may have to focus its business more tightly around that while Take-Two's basketball games are well respected, its overall sports games business is a "moneypit."
Take-Two could still be an attractive acquisition target for a company with deep pockets, including Sony, which manufactures the PlayStation 3 game console, or Microsoft, which makes the Xbox 360 console, Pidgeon said. "Take-Two has a lot of development and marketing talent," Pidgeon said.
Zelnick confirmed in an interview that his company is in talks with a "strategic partner."
"We remain actively engaged in discussions with other parties," he said, but declined to give further details.
Analysts said EA still could return to the table. "If Take-Two's stock price settles back into the teens, we could see them come back again in a few months," said Michael Pachter, analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities. "They walked away, but that doesn't mean they won't look at it again."
-- Alex Pham
Grand Theft Auto image from Silvio Sousa Cabral via Flickr
For the last year, Electronic Arts' PC game Crysis has been the butt of innumerable jokes on Internet message boards. It's not because the first-person shooter is bad — on the contrary, reviews from 56 websites and magazines average a 91% rating, according to MetaCritic. No, Crysis was met with endless criticism because many people simply couldn't play it. Their computers weren't powerful enough.
You couldn't go a few clicks on most technology-related Web forums without seeing the ubiquitous phrase "But will it run Crysis?" The phenomenon started with a number of users asking, "Will my computer run Crysis?" and followed by a list of technical specs.
Then the innocent question hit meme-hood, being applied to every new computer or gadget in the news. The MacBook Air, a $100 laptop for third-world countries, the iPhone, an alarm clock -- "But will they run Crysis?"
When the game hit stores last November, its technology was well beyond most PC games on the market — and the capability of many computers in gamers' homes at the time. "Let's say it was kind of ambitious back in the day," said Bernd Diemer, the game's producer at developer Crytek. "We're the early adopters of a lot of new technology."
"Ambitious" is putting it lightly. Even today, only roughly a quarter of the desktop and notebook computers sold by Dell, the second-largest PC distributor, meet the game's minimum system requirements.
In most of Dell's default PC configurations, it's the graphics cards or processors that aren't up to Crysis standards — the game calls for a 256-megabyte graphics card and at least 2.8 gigahertz for Windows XP or 3.2 gigahertz for Vista. Because few consumers are looking for gaming-centric rigs, computer manufacturers don't usually design with hardware-intensive, science-fiction action games in mind.
But many computers are just an upgrade or two away from playing the coveted game. For its debut last year, some — including the game's own developers — "took it as an opportunity to upgrade," Diemer said. "That's the way I do my own upgrades at home. I look at a game I really want to play and buy what I need to play it."
Now, as EA prepares to release the stand-alone expansion Crysis Warhead next Tuesday, gamers are faced with the same dilemma and the same set of system requirements. "We tried to make Crysis future-proof," Diemer said. "What we did this time [with the expansion] was focus a lot more on the middle range. That was our target group."
For Warhead, Crytek staffers built a $650 computer they kept in the middle of their office. They would periodically use it to test the game to make sure it still worked well on more modest machines.
Diemer says the last 10 months should have been enough time for gamers to get their computers up to speed. But if your rig still isn't up to snuff, UltraPC sells a $700 Crysis Warhead PC, based on counsel from Crytek and graphics card manufacturer Nvidia.
And I think it's a pretty safe bet that it will, indeed, run Crysis.
Warner Bros.’ decision to delay the next film in the Harry Potter franchise from November to summer 2009 has already shaken up the fall movie schedule. Now the move is affecting the video game industry.
Electronic Arts said today it would delay the release of its game based on the sixth Potter film, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," a title it expects to bring in $120 million in revenue and 13 cents per share in profit.
Although the decision had been widely expected since Warner Bros. rescheduled the movie in August, EA shares fell 1.2% to $45.94 on a day when the major stock indexes surged.
Originally set to debut Nov. 21, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" was shifted to July 17 to bolster Warner Bros.’ schedule for the lucrative summer season. The decision came in the wake of the Hollywood writers strike that has prompted studios to reconsider release dates and the strong box-office performance this summer of "The Dark Knight," which will leave Warner Bros. facing tough revenue comparisons next year.
Analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan Securities, who rates EA a "strong buy," said the stock market "way overreacted" to today's news.
"What’s the difference whether they make that 13 cents a share this year or next year?" said Pachter, whose company does not perform investment banking business for EA. "It's not like they're saying it was a badly designed game or there was a major production glitch."
-- Josh Friedman
Photo: From left, actors Oliver and James Phelps from the Harry Potter movies, at Electronic Arts' booth during a trade show in Germany. Credit: Waltraud Grubitzsch / European Pressphoto Agency
On Sunday, Electronic Arts will release Spore, one of the industry's most anticipated game in years. The title lets players design creatures, develop tribes and civilizations and, eventually, take over the universe. Spore sprang from the quirky imagination of Will Wright, who also came up with Sim City and The Sims, a game franchise that's sold more than 100 million copies in the past 8 years. What's Spore like? We caught up with Wright at Comic-con in San Diego.
Watch Wright fashion a digital creature from scratch using the Spore Creature Creator.
Face it. We love to play god. And Electronic Arts began tantalizing our inner megalomaniac in June by releasing a game called the Spore Creature Creator, made by the studio that also produces The Sims. The game can be downloaded for free here, although there is a more deluxe boxed version for $10.
Within minutes of firing up this title, players with no gaming experience can spawn a unique bouncing, gurgling creature of their own design. They can then upload their creature to an online database being kept by EA, called the Sporepedia.
This week, the number of creatures uploaded surpassed 3 million, according to Lucy Bradshaw, the game's executive director. Why does EA want all of these beasties?
The answer is simple: to colonize the universe.
On Sept. 7, EA will release one of its most important games of the year, Spore. The game, which can be played on a computer, iPhone and Nintendo Dual Screen console, will give players a virtual sandbox where these creatures can frolic, reproduce, form tribes, build cities and, eventually, take over the world. The iPhone version, called Spore Origins, takes place in a primordial soup and lets players fiddle with microbial evolution.
In the meantime, Spore fans must content themselves by crafting all manner of weirdly shaped critters.
"I’m fascinated by how players pushed the boundaries," Bradshaw said. "The magic of Spore is that you can run into anything."
How about a creature that looks like sushi? Or an airplane? Even though the software goes out of its way to prevent users from making things that resemble humans or real world animals, players find ways around that, making elephants, robots, gnomes and moose, to name a few examples.
It seems spontaneous generation, at least in games, isn't just a hobby for God anymore.
Despite strong sales of such music-based games as Guitar Hero and Rock Band, or maybe because of them, tensions are rising between record labels and video game publishers.
The labels get royalties for licensing their songs so Guitar Hero and Rock Band enthusiasts can jam along. Plus, the players often buy original versions of their favorites. But Edgar Bronfman Jr., chairman and chief executive of Warner Music Group, has publicly complained that that's not enough. And other music executives are quietly agreeing.
Read the full story for the game publishers' response and more details about the economics of the popular games.
-- Chris Gaither
Photo: An image from Rock Band: Aerosmith. Credit: Activision Blizzard
Video game sales are on a tear, showing no signs of being fazed by the economic malaise hitting just about every other sector of consumer spending.
In July, consumers spent nearly $9.5 billion on video games, consoles and peripherals, up from $7 billion in July 2007, according to estimates released Thursday afternoon by NPD Group, a market research firm.
Consoles accounted for $3.3 billion of the sales, and software sales totaled $4.9 billion.
But the rising tide hasn't lifted all boats equally. Nintendo captured much of the boom, selling 555,000 of its Wii consoles, compared with Sony's 224,900 PlayStation 3s and Microsoft's 204,800 Xbox 360s. Nintendo's DualScreen hand-held device rung up sales of 608,400 units, giving Nintendo a Christmas in July.
"PlayStation 3 gained momentum in July," said Jesse Divnich, director of analytical services for Electronic Entertainment Design and Research, a San Diego-based market research firm. "But the reason why the industry is up so much is because of Nintendo."
Electronic Arts' NCAA Football 09 was the top game, followed by Nintendo's Wii Fit and Activision Blizzard's Guitar Hero.
Here are the year-over-year monthly growth rates of U.S. software video game sales to date:
January: 12%
February: 48%
March: 64%
May: 69%
June: 61%
July: 48%
UBS Analyst Ben Schachter said in a research report released today about the July figures: "The industry keeps chugging along."
-- Alex Pham
Photo: Nintendo game designer Shigeru Miyamoto plays Wii Music at the E3 Media & Business Summit in July. Credit: Nintendo
A Drexel University researcher today presented a game that lets players control the action on the screen merely by concentrating. The game, called Lazybrains, uses a technology that measures oxygen levels in the frontal cortex of the player to determine neural activity. By thinking hard enough, the player can perform various actions on the screen, such as moving obstacles out of the way.
The technology, called functional near-infrared imaging, measures oxygen levels in various portions of the brain by projecting infrared lighting into the brain via a headband. The device was initially developed at Drexel's School of Biomedical Engineering in Philadelphia as a way to detect when patients under anesthesia were conscious but unable to move.
Its use as a game controller came about when students from Drexel's RePlay Lab on Computer Gaming sought out the biomedical engineering students. Voila! Lazybrains was born. The game stars Morby, a couch potato who was transported into another dimension as punishment for failing to use his noodle. To make his way back home, he has to strain his brain to remove objects that stand in his way. The game is not commercially available but was presented as an academic project in Los Angeles at this year's Siggraph, an annual conference for computer graphics researchers.
Though such research is in its infancy, mind-machine interfaces are not entirely new. Duke University earlier this year demonstrated that a monkey that could control a robot halfway around the world by using his brain. Eventually, amputees would be able to control prosthetics just by thinking about what they want to do.
In games, several companies have also explored this concept, including ...
Which is the worst thing for your 17-year-old to do? Drink beer? Smoke pot? Watch porn? Or play Grand Theft Auto?
While marijuana took the No. 1 spot of worst offenders, GTA finished second in an online poll of 1,650 people by What They Play, a site that reviews games from the parents' perspective. Pot-smoking was listed by 50% of the respondents as the thing that would most concern them if their 17-year-old did it during a sleepover at a friend's house. Next were GTA with 19%, watching porn with 17% and drinking beer with 14%.
It's not a scientific survey, but it does give a provocative insight into Americans' attitudes about video games.
Cheryl K. Olson, co-founder of the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media and coauthor of the book "Grand Theft Childhood," thinks parents see games as the devil they don't know and therefore dread it more than porn or alcohol.
"Although these findings seem surprising at first, they hint at fears parents have about video games," Olson said. "To some parents, video games are full of unknowable dangers. Of course, parents don't want their children drinking alcohol, but that's a more familiar risk."
The survey is skewed by the particular demographic of visitors to What They Play, which has about half a million unique visitors a month. About 86% of those identify themselves as parents looking for ...
We all love lists, especially when they mean something. Today's list was brought to you by the Game Critics Awards, an independent group of game reviewers from 36 news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times.
Unlike critics of other types of entertainment, game critics have not been rendered redundant in the age of the Internet, where everyone is a critic. This is largely because game journalists have access to "playable" game versions long before the public gets its hands on the title. And because serious gamers devote lots of time researching hot titles to determine what to buy weeks before they even hit store shelves, the opinion of the game critic is even more important.
As a result, game companies often reward developers with bonuses if their games achieve high marks, as tracked by websites such as GameRankings and Metacritic, or win awards. The Game Critics Awards, now in its 10th year, today released its pick of best games from this year's E3 Media & Business Summit.
Does the list matter? According to UBS Securities analyst Ben Schachter it does. Schachter analyzed sales of the winners from the last nine years and concluded that games that snag the Best Console Game award go on to sell an average of 2.4 million copies, a hit in the world of video games. Best of Show winners, however, are hit or miss when it comes to retail success. Nintendo's Wii, which won the award in 2006, is the No. 1-selling console. But Nintendo's GameCube, winner of the award in 2001, flopped.
"Video game quality impacts sales," Schachter wrote in a note released today.
When were you last at a classical concert where the audience cheered, clapped, whistled and sang? Probably never.
But this happens regularly whenever Tommy Tallarico and Jack Wall put on their concert, called "Video Games Live." The show features orchestral scores either inspired by video games or composed directly for video games. No, the pieces aren't just bleeps from Pong or the sound of things blowing up. Most of them involve an entire symphony to perform. Some even call for a chorus and the occasional soprano.
The first Video Games Live concert in 2005 took place at the Hollywood Bowl and featured the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The following year, there were 11 shows sprinkled throughout the country. This year, the schedule lists 50 shows worldwide, including in San Jose, Paris, Moscow and Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Last week, Wall and Tallarico put out an album of the same name through EMI. Two days after, "Video Games Live" shot to last week's Billboard list for the top classical crossover albums at No. 10, right next to Josh Groban and Andrea Boccelli. The album, recorded with the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra, features tunes from games such as Tetris, Halo, Tron and World of Warcraft. You can listen to 30-second clips of the album here.
Sonic isn't going to give Stravinski much competition as musical genius, but game composers do get inspired by the classics, said Tallarico, who has composed music for more than 300 games over the last 18 years. His "Advent Rising Suite," one of the tracks on the album, takes its cues from 13th century Italian sacred music.
"We wanted to show the world how culturally relevant and artistic game music has become, while ushering a whole new generation of people to come and appreciate symphonic concerts," Tallarico said.
The appreciation often manifests itself in unusual ways.
"Sometimes the cheers are so loud, you almost can't hear the music," Tallarico said. "The audience is going absolutely nuts. But the musicians don't mind. They almost never get this kind of reaction."
-- Alex Pham
Credit: Video on YouTube posted by bmh1 of a 2006 Video Games Live concert in the San Jose Civic Auditorium to a sold out crowd.
A new report out today revealed some unsurprising information: Marketers spend a lot of money trying to get kids hooked on foods such as Shrek cereal and Pirates of the Caribbean waffles. What's a little more surprising is that they don't spend much money marketing food to kids where so many of them hang out -- on the Internet. In 2006, the time period that the online-spending portion of the report covered, food companies only allocated 5% of their youth marketing dollars online. (Of course, the online advertising market is growing by double digits every year, much faster than overall ad spending, so the percentage has probably increased since 2006.)
The marketing-to-kids report (PDF download) released this morning by the Federal Trade Commission, with the pithy title "Marketing Food to Children and Adolescents: A Review of Industry Expenditures, Activities and Self Regulation," says that the relatively low price tag for marketing to kids on the Web doesn't mean that companies aren't reaching kids there, however.
"A focus on expenditure data may underestimate the degree to which food and beverage marketers have relied on the Internet to advertise to children and teens," the report says. Translation: Internet advertising is cheaper than TV advertising, so companies can still have a big presence there without shelling out the big bucks.
In fact, the report says, kids are spending a lot of time on websites such as Wrigley's Candystand.com ("the hottest online games"), Postopia.com ("a fun site for kids") and Millsberry.com, a General Mills-sponsored site with games encouraging kids to watch Lucky Charms webisodes and play games hunting for Reese's Puffs online. They spend more time than they would with a TV commercial, in fact; between March 2007 and March 2008, kids spent as many as ...
Facebook just issued the following statement regarding its role in the Scrabble vs. Scrabulous conflict: "We’re disappointed that Hasbro has sought to draw us into their dispute; nevertheless, we have forwarded their concerns to Scrabulous and requested their appropriate response."
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Hasbro made its move. The owner of Scrabble today filed suit against the developers of Scrabulous, a popular word game played by millions of Facebook users each month.
Filed in New York federal court, the suit against Rajat Agarwalla, Jayant Agarwalla and their company, RJ Softwares, claims copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
"We view the Scrabulous application as clear and blatant infringement of our Scrabble intellectual property," Hasbro's general counsel, Barry Nagler, said in a statement. Hasbro also sent a letter to Facebook this morning, requesting that the social networking site shut down Scrabulous. As of noon Pacific, the application was still up.
What pops in your mind when you think of free online games? Cute penguins? Scrabulous? Bejeweled?
How about a full-on first-person shooter? Nexon, the Korean company that has 5.9 million registered users playing its free online games, has launched Combat Arms, a game in the same vein as Counterstrike or Halo. Unlike these other shooters, Combat Arms doesn't cost anything. Teams of up to 16 players can join game sessions that last anywhere from a couple of minutes to about 15 minutes (it doesn't take long to get picked off by foes).
How does Nexon, which has U.S. headquarters in Los Angeles' Koreatown, propose to make money? The company makes about 85% of its revenue by selling glam outfits, colored contact lenses for characters and other virtual items that can be used in its online games, which include MapleStory, Mabinogi and Audition (the remainder of its revenue comes mostly from advertising). To pay for these items, which cost anywhere from 30 cents to $25, players buy prepaid cards at stores such as Target, where Nexon cards are the second best-selling gift card after those for Apple's iTunes store.
Somehow, we just couldn't picture players of a hard-core shooting game buying pink feather boas for their characters, no matter how well they might match the camouflage fatigues. The other option -- buying weapons and other items to give players an advantage in game play -- is also a no-no. If there's anything serious players insist on, it's that everyone earn their stripes, not buy them. So the developers at Nexon came up with cool sunglasses, fancy "skins" to make their weapons look
deadlier and outrageous effects. The business model isn't fully
deployed, yet. So for now there's nothing to buy on the site. But there
will be, said Min Kim, Nexon's vice president of marketing in the U.S.
"If you think about the car culture, some guys love to mod their cars and make them look cool," Kim said.
One idea, said Kim: Instead of smoke and fire that comes from
exploding a grenade, your enemies could be smacked with a cloud of
Hello Kitties. Now that's something we might even pay to see.
Seeking female gamer fluent in first-person shooters, role-playing and combat adventure games. Must be graceful under pressure, deadly with a controller and have hair-trigger reflex. Knowledge of DOT spells a plus. Pay ranges from $15,000 to $30,000 a year. Part-time job comes with lots of perks, including free games, travel to major U.S. cities and invites to killer LAN parties.
Sound like a dream job? That's the life of Alex Hebert and Morgan Romine, who jet-set around the country playing games and kicking butt. The two are members of the Frag Dolls, a team of 9 competitive female gamers sponsored by Ubisoft Entertainment, the French video game company.
Hebert is among the world's best players of Halo 3. For fun, she plays World of Warcraft. Romine also plays World of Warcraft and Rainbow Six Vegas 2. At competitions, they're often the only female players out of hundreds of contestants.
We caught up with the dynamic duo this week in Los Angeles at E3, a video game industry convention that ended Thursday. Read more after the jump to see what they have to say about their jobs ....
Nintendo vaulted past Microsoft into the console race's pole position in June. The Japanese game maker has sold 10.9 million units of its Wii console in the U.S. since launching the device in November 2006, according to the NPD Group. Despite having a year's head start, Microsoft fell into second place with 10.5 million Xbox 360s sold since the console launched in November 2005.
Sony's PlayStation 3 got a boost from the release of "Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots," which helped the company sell 405,500 PS3s last month -- nearly double the 220,000 Xbox 360s sold.
"PS3 unit sales were the highest of any month outside of that recorded during previous November-December holiday timeframes," NPD analyst Anita Frazier said.
But the Wii outsold its two rivals combined, moving 666,700 consoles off store shelves in June, according to NPD. Nintendo also sold 372,000 copies of its Wii Fit game in June, making it the fourth best-selling title last month. The top selling game in June, Metal Gear Solid 4, sold about 1 million units, including discs that were bundled with PS3 consoles, Frazier said.
Traditionally, summer months are less eventful, with most game developers working up to the holidays, when publishers ring up two-thirds of the industry's annual game sales. But Nintendo has been struggling to keep with high year-round demand for its console.
Oops! In an earlier version of this post, we said Sega discontinued its Dreamcast console in 2000. In fact, it cut the cord in January 2001.
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Sega, the publisher of Super Monkey Ball and Sonic the Hedgehog, is making a comeback.
The game company, once the king of the video game hill, dropped into near oblivion after it dropped out of the console business in 2001. Its Dreamcast console suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Sony's PlayStation juggernaut, and it looked as if it was game over for Sonic.
But the blue hedgehog (pictured at right) lives on. Its publisher, Sega of America, has clawed its way back. As of May 31, Sega had snagged 4.6% of the video game software unit sales in the U.S., according to NPD Group, a market research firm. It has risen through the ranks of game publishers, from No. 9 in 2006 to No. 7 last year. Now it's No. 6 and closing in fast on THQ, which has 5.2% of the market, according to NPD.
Sega got a boost this month from Super Monkey Ball (pictured at left), a franchise that landed on the iPhone last week. It quickly became the No. 1 most downloaded application on Apple's App Store for iPhone software.
Up next: Sonic Chronicles, in September. Developed by BioWare, the title will mark the first time Sonic, who mostly confines himself to the action-adventure genre, appears in a role-playing game.
For those who have fond memories of the Dreamcast, Sega will be bringing back Samba De Amigo for the Wii console in September. The rhythm music game won a large and loyal following when it first came out in 1999 for the Dreamcast.
Said Sega's new marketing chief, Sean Ratcliffe: "Sega is going through a renaissance."
Id Software, the developer of the Doom and Quake games, has worked up a version of its beloved Wolfenstein franchise for mobile phones. John Carmack, an Id founder and the company's lead programmer, has cranked out an all new rendering engine to give the game a three-dimensional feel.
Old-school gamers will remember that the first version -- Wolfenstein 3D, which came out in 1992 for the PC -- is considered by some to be the original first-person shooter game.
When Wolfenstein RPG, which will be published by Electronic Arts, arrives on cellphones this holiday, players old and new can once again take on the role of BJ Blazkowitz, an American soldier trying to blast his way out of a Nazi prison. Whereas most cellphone games confine players to a two-dimensional horizontal plane, Carmack came up with a way to let players angle shots up and down. Hello, 3D! The game packs nine levels, 17 weapons and about eight hours of game play in about 2.5 megabytes, thanks in part to Carmack's hyper-efficient code.
"We could have just made a couple of games on the old technology," Carmack said, referring to the engine he wrote for the Doom RPG and Orcs & Elves mobile games, which collectively sold 2 million copies. "But we wanted to make a game we were really proud of."
What Carmack really wanted to do, but couldn't, was make a game for the iPhone. "I'm sad we didn't have anything at launch for the App Store," Carmack said, referring to last week's launch of the Apple App Store for iPhone applications. "I'm super excited about the iPhone."
By the time Apple released its software tools for iPhone developers, Carmack and Id were already overcommitted. Although Id has a big reputation, it has a relatively small team of 60 people, six of whom work on games for cellphones and the Nintendo DS hand-held console.
Wolfenstein 3D will be ported to the iPhone eventually, but Carmack said he wanted to make a game that's specifically designed for the Apple device. We already know consumers are gaga over the large screen and, to some extent, the touch screen. Why does it appeal to a hard-core programmer such as Carmack?
One answer: Its processing speed. "The iPhone is far more powerful than the DS," he said.
Also, instead of being limited to a few megabytes, iPhone games can be far larger because they can be downloaded via computer or streamed via Wi-Fi.
Carmack promised an original iPhone game in the not-too-distant future. He said he has a game in mind but wouldn't divulge details.
Halo Nation has been abuzz since Bungie, the developer of the blockbuster
video game franchise Halo, put out a cryptic letter on its website
Tuesday apologizing for not making an appearance at E3, the game industry
conference taking place this week in downtown Los Angeles.
"For the last several months, we've been building toward a reveal of something exciting that Bungie is working on," studio President Harold Ryan wrote. "We were looking forward to sharing that with our fan community during the week of E3. However, those plans were changed by our publisher."
"We realize that many of our fans are disappointed by this turn of events" Ryan said. He added a note of the spurned partner: "Members of the Bungie team share that disappointment."
This morning drew an explanation from the publisher not named in Bungie's note -- Microsoft.
Turns out that Bungie's latest Halo project was originally part of
the program for Microsoft's press conference on Monday, but it was taken out of the lineup at the last minute. Don Mattrick, senior vice president of Microsoft's Xbox games business, said the company decided to pull Halo ...
Activision announced tonight that its first game based on the James Bond license, a franchise that once belonged to rival game publisher Electronic Arts, will hit stores Nov. 7, the same date as the release of the new Bond movie "Quantum of Solace." The movie features the return of actor Daniel Craig, who played Bond in "Casino Royale."
The Santa Monica-based game publisher also showed off a new version of its Guitar Hero franchise. Scheduled for release in the fall, Guitar Hero World Tour adds a drum kit and microphone, as well as a new guitar that has an accelerometer and a touch-sensitive slider bar.
Activision's newest entry in the music game genre also adds a recording mode that lets players create songs from scratch, using a library of beats, sounds and samples. Players who record their own tunes can upload their tracks to a website and let other players download, play and rate the songs.
Some analysts question whether some of the added features will make the game too complex for the mainstream players who bought Guitar Hero because it was easy to learn.
"I was blown away by some of the features," said Billy Pidgeon, analyst with IDC. "But I'm concerned that the game is losing some of its accessibility. One of the reasons why Guitar Hero is so successful is because anybody could play it."
Ubisoft at E3 today demonstrated its knack for creating visually lush games with a slate of titles that included Tom Clancy's EndWar, Farcry 2, Prince of Persia and I Am Alive.
The Paris-based company earned its place in recent years as the world's third-largest game company with franchises such as Tom Clancy, which has sold more than 55 million copies worldwide over the last 10 years, and Rayman Raving Rabbids, with 22 million units sold since launching the offbeat title in 1995. Tom Clancy's Endwar, its latest installment of the combat franchise set for release this fall, can be controlled entirely by voice commands. "Your voice is the ultimate weapon," said Laurent Detoc, president of Ubisoft's operations in the U.S. Players can tell the game to "open fire," "drop in more troops" or "send in the fighters."
Farcry 2, a first-person shooter set for release in the fall on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, incorporates the open game-play style pioneered by the Grand Theft Auto franchise. "We set out to reinvent the shooter genre," said Clint Hocking, the game's creative director. Players can either choose to go through the game with guns blazing or in a quieter stealth mode within 50 kilometers of an African jungle.
Ubisoft, which tends to build and nurture original intellectual property rather than license existing ones, also announced at the E3 Media & Business Summit a new franchise called "I Am Alive." Set in post-apocalyptic Chicago, the survival game is set for release in 2009. The company has a teaser trailer that you can check out above.
For those who still think videogames are just shooters for hormonally charged boys, Ubisoft has news for you.
The French game publisher behind Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia has slowly built a sizable business by going after an underserved market -- girls 15 years and younger. Its Imagine games, which lets girls play at being a rock star, veterinarian, fashion designer, figure skater, chef or babysitter, have sold 4 million copies since they were launched in November.
Today, Ubisoft unveiled a new suite of games dedicated for 'tween girls. Called Ener-G, the titles revolve around sports. Rather than dress up Madden Football in pink, Ubisoft developed the lineup around dancing, gymnastics and horseback riding. "In 1972, one out of 27 girls played organized sports," said Tony Key, Ubisoft's senior vice president of sales and marketing. "Today, half play sports."
Like the Imagine line, these games will be available for the Nintendo DS, a hand-held console. Key estimates that about 80 million people own DS consoles and that a quarter of them are girls, adding up to roughly 20 million potential buyers for Ubisoft. "It's the fastest growing customer segment of DS owners," he said.
They're also turning out to be just as obsessive as their male counterparts at playing games -- provided that the games speak to them. Girls tended to buy multiple games in the Imagine series, and they often played the games all the way through, Key said. "They're hardly casual gamers," Key said. "They're just non-traditional."
That meant Ubisoft had to find out what girls like to play. The company has invited hundreds of girls to its San Francisco office to ask why they play sports. Many say they like being part of a team, socializing and supporting their teammates. When asked whether winning was a motive, most said no. "So we designed our games, based on those nuggets of insight," Key said. "We're serving an underserved and growing market. That's a recipe for success."
Ubisoft: You play like a girl and that's a good thing!
Sony Corp. is finally launching its long-awaited video download service for the PlayStation 3 video game console.
The company said it would start selling and renting movies and TV shows through its PlayStation Network tonight. MGM, 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate, Warner Bros., Disney, Paramount, Turner Entertainment and of course Sony Pictures are making titles available.
PlayStation 3 owners will be able to buy TV shows for $1.99 and up. They can also rent movies for $2.99 to $5.99 and buy them for $9.99 to $14.99. For example, “Cloverfield” can be purchased for $14.99 or rented for $3.99. A high-definition version rents for $5.99.
Videos purchased through the PS3 can be transferred to Sony’s PSP hand-held game console.
Studio executives told us in April that the online video service was coming as soon as this summer. We wrote then:
It would follow two other disappointing online ventures backed by Sony in recent years: Movielink, which attempted to become the online equivalent of the video store for mainstream Hollywood movies before being sold last year to Blockbuster Inc.; and Sony Connect, the company’s response to Apple’s iTunes download service. It shut down in March.
The latest service, provided through the online PlayStation Network, is Sony’s attempt to stage a comeback in digital entertainment distribution. The maker of the once-dominant Walkman portable music player is still smarting from its defeat by Apple in the online music revolution.
Sony’s service does have a leg up on the Apple TV set-top box, because ...
CORRECTION: The headline on an earlier version of this post incorrectly said Grand Theft Auto was coming to the Wii. Grand Theft Auto is actually coming to Nintendo's DS hand-held console.
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Nintendo today jumped into the rapidly growing genre of music-themed video games with its own title, Wii Music, designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Wii Fit, Nintendogs and other hit titles.
Wii Music lets as many as four players at a time jam on virtual instruments, including violin, drums and guitar. Nintendo showed off the new game at a press event in Hollywood and put a video of the game on its website.
The Japanese company also gave hard-core game players a present: Take-Two Interactive Software is bringing its Grand Theft Auto franchise to the Nintendo DS hand-held console, which mostly features casual fare. Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is expected to be available before Christmas.
Nintendo said it had sold 10 million Wii consoles and 20 million DS devices in the U.S., generating $5 billion in retail sales. The Japanese company said further that it had sold more than 70 million DS consoles worldwide and projected that it would sell 100 million by the end of March 2009.
Nintendo also announced Wii MotionPlus, an attachment to the Wii controller that will allow the remote to better capture wrist and arm movements. It will let players turn the Wii controller into virtual drums, Frisbees and saxophones.
Nintendo notably did not announce any new installments of its Zelda or Mario franchises, which are purchased mostly by serious gamers. "There's not a lot for core gamers here, but that's not what Nintendo is about anyway at this stage," said Geoff Keighley, editor of Gameslice.
Electronic Arts showcased a broad suite of games at E3 today, demonstrating that one of the world's largest game developers has the breadth of titles to reach virtually any player on the planet, and the chops to bring on dozens of new games each year.
For sports fiends, there are new versions of Tiger Woods Golf and NBA Live. For music buffs, there's Rock Band 2, which will come with more than 100 songs. Boxing fanatics can feast on Facebreaker. And action addicts can take in Mirror's Edge, an original title being developed in EA's European studio.
For everyone else, there's Spore, a cosmic evolution game from Will Wright, whose prodigious yet quirky mind brought us The Sims. That game, which shipped a "creature creator" software a few weeks ago as a preamble to the actual game set for launch in September, has already garnered more than 2 million "creatures" from players who have uploaded their beasties onto the Spore website, Wright said at the press conference. Players have also uploaded 85,000 YouTube videos.
To see a sample of the titles EA unveiled at E3, watch the trailer.
The event reflects EA Chief Executive John Riccitiello's emphasis on innovation and new intellectual property to reinvigorate the storied game company. With a few exceptions, including The Sims 3 and NBA Live '09, most of the titles highlighted at the event were brand new franchises. And NBA Live had a fresh twist -- the ability to download NBA game statistics and individual player performances every day. The updates would affect the strengths, weakness of players and teams within the video game, depending on how these they did in real life games.
"I frankly believe it's the best lineup in EA's history," Riccitiello said at the conclusion of the event.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this post included a typo. Final Fantasy XIII, not XXIII, is joining the Xbox 360 lineup.
UPDATED 2:35 P.M.: Over lunch, Microsoft executives fleshed out the Xbox/Netflix arrangement announced this morning at the video game industry's annual event, the E3 Media & Business Summit, here in Los Angeles.
The Xbox/Netflix announcement is part of a battle being waged over which device and service will be the entertainment hub in people's homes. For those who want to watch movies downloaded from the Internet on their TVs, having an Xbox will make it easier, executives said. (Netflix already has a partnership with a company it backed called Roku that sells a box that also streams video content from Netflix over the Internet and on to television sets).
Although the Xbox Live online platform has had video content, Microsoft's partnership with Netflix, which built its business sending DVDs through the mail, will add 10,000 movies and TV shows. The Netflix service will be available free to people who pay for the premium Xbox Live Gold membership, which cost $50 a year, and who are also Netflix members. Microsoft said a majority of its 12 million XboxLive members pay the annual fee but did not say exactly how many.
Microsoft executives said they were continuing their PacMan-like gobbling of games, wooing developers who were once close allies with Sony's PlayStation platform.
Today Microsoft added more friends to its lineup, including Capcom Entertainment Inc., which will bring its Resident Evil franchise for the first time to the Xbox. Also joining the Xbox lineup is Square Enix's Final Fantasy XIII. The franchise that has shipped more than 85 million units.
"Final Fantasy joins a list of former PlayStation franchises finding a new home on Xbox 360," said Don Mattrick, Microsoft's senior vice president for interactive entertainment.
-- Alex Pham
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Get your Netflix through Xbox Live.
At the E3 video game industry conference, Microsoft announced a partnership with Netflix, the video store, that enhances the ability to watch video on the Xbox 360 video game console. The deal doubles the number of TV shows and movies available on the online game network Xbox Live, Microsoft executives said.
Microsoft also gave out some gaming data: Xbox Live now boasts 12 million members on the online game network, double last year's membership. Microsoft said those members had spent $1 billion on downloadable games, movies and TV shows since the game network was introduced two years ago.
Microsoft said it had sold 10.3 million of its Xbox 360 consoles in North America since launching in November 2005. Executives onstage here boldly predicted that they would ultimately sell more consoles than Sony's PlayStation 3.
And the Xbox is a force to be reckoned with in music. Microsoft's Shane Kim said Xbox Live accounted for 80% of all songs downloaded through the hit games "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band."
On Sunday, Microsoft announced that it was trimming the price of its 20-gigabyte console to $300. It also unveiled its Xbox 360 Pro system with a 60-gigabyte hard drive, to go on sale in August, at $349. That's a hunk of a hard drive, the better for downloading movies and TV shows. To that end, Microsoft said the NBC Universal studio would start offering content for downloading, joining Walt Disney Co. and ABC.
Microsoft showed off a new look for Xbox Live that will be deployed through a software update this fall
Mattel, which owns the international rights to Scrabble, said today it would appeal last week's 
The creators of Scrabulous sent their fans a spot of good news this morning. 
Despite Electronic Arts' good-faith effort last week to 
The consumer is always right. Electronic Arts, stung by a siege of criticism from gamers who took issue with the copyright restrictions the company placed on its Spore game, this morning issued an apology and said it would loosen the electronic locks on the game.
What grabs more attention than a supermodel in a string bikini? How about Madden NFL video games?
In most of Dell's default PC configurations, it's the graphics cards or processors that aren't up to Crysis standards — the game calls for a 256-megabyte graphics card and at least 2.8 gigahertz for Windows XP or 3.2 gigahertz for Vista. Because few consumers are looking for gaming-centric rigs, computer manufacturers don't usually design with hardware-intensive, science-fiction action games in mind.
Electronic Arts said today it would delay the release of its game based on the sixth Potter film, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," a title it expects to bring in $120 million in revenue and 13 cents per share in profit.
Face it. We love to play god. And 
Video game sales are on a tear, showing no signs of being fazed by the economic malaise hitting just about every other sector of consumer spending. 
A new report out today revealed some unsurprising information: Marketers spend a lot of money trying to get kids hooked on foods such as Shrek cereal and Pirates of the Caribbean waffles. What's a little more surprising is that they don't spend much money marketing food to kids where so many of them hang out -- on the Internet. In 2006, the time period that the online-spending portion of the report covered, food companies only allocated 5% of their youth marketing dollars online. (Of course, the online advertising market is growing by double digits every year, much faster than overall ad spending, so the percentage has probably increased since 2006.)
Hasbro made its move. The owner of Scrabble today filed suit against the developers of Scrabulous, a popular word game played by millions of Facebook users each month.
Oops! In an earlier version of this post, we said Sega discontinued its Dreamcast console in 2000. In fact, it cut the cord in January 2001.
Sega got a boost this month from Super Monkey Ball (pictured at left), a franchise that landed on the iPhone last week. It quickly became the No. 1 most downloaded application on Apple's App Store for iPhone software. 
Old-school gamers will remember that the first version -- Wolfenstein 3D, which came out in 1992 for the PC -- is considered by some to be the original first-person shooter game. 
What Carmack really wanted to do, but couldn't, was make a game for the iPhone. "I'm sad we didn't have anything at launch for the App Store," Carmack said, referring to last week's launch of the Apple App Store for iPhone applications. "I'm super excited about the iPhone."
For those who still think videogames are just shooters for hormonally charged boys, Ubisoft has news for you.
Sony Corp. is finally launching its long-awaited video download service for the PlayStation 3 video game console.
CORRECTION: The headline on an earlier version of this post incorrectly said Grand Theft Auto was coming to the Wii. Grand Theft Auto is actually coming to Nintendo's DS hand-held console.