Games Industry Wire

Gamingandtech.com Podcast – Episode 2
I interviewed Jeremy Hague of Waxmail and Skylook.
He’s gonna be at CES along with all the people I know. grr…

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And, apparently the cigarette lighter was never used… Uh, ok. Thanks for that important bit of info.
I’m a sucker for these Ebay auctions from weirdsville. Here’s Bill Gates’ car. I have to admit I actually read the entire auction listing. This fellow has a way with words.
(as seen on Major’s blog)

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Tnkgrl is one impressive girl-geek IMO and she’s recently posted a very detailed mod for her laptop which allows her to create internal bluetooth w/o losing either of her USB ports.
Tnkgrl’s Laptop Mod
Here’s a Dell-mod, heavily inspired by Tnkrl’s work.

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Nintendo DS sales hit 5 million in Japan
“Selling 5 million units in less than 14 months means DS is the fastest among any game machines ever launched in Japan to hit that level,” Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told a news conference.
See what I mean when I say smart product design and smart marketing is why the PSP (arguably a fabulous handheld) is lagging in sales?

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Slow PS3s?
Sony’s batting a thousand (not) here… Now it seems their beloved, and very much anticipated PS3 might not be all it’s cracked up to be. And, anyone who reads this blog knows I was very much looking forward to it.
The current Playstation 3 developers kit is 10X slower than it should be according to an executive who spoke on condition of anonymity to BusinessWeek.
I guess I can stop crying about not going to CES. I had hoped to see them unveil the PS3 there, but if it aint ready right now, what are the odds …read more

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Yeah, you read that correctly, World of Warcraft just topped 5 million subscribers (not counting those with expired subscriptions and promotional subscriptions). Blizzard charges around $15 per month for WoW (on top of the $30-$50 customers pay to BUY the game in the first place).
So, let’s see, I’m going to estimate, conservatively that all their subscribers are the only ones who bought the game (which we know is not true) and that they all paid $35 for the game, which is very low, considering it was $50 when it came out and many stores still sell it for that, …read more

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The THQ story got me to thinking, isn’t it unfair to ask me to fork over $60 (roughly) to play a game you’ve already gotten sponsored?
I guess it is similar to product placement in movies, but NOTE the decreased attendance at movies. Let’s see, they added a goodly amount of product placement, raised the ridiculously-high ticket prices, continue to charge a ridiculously-high amount of dough for yucky food, and show us 70% crappy movies (most just teenage-angst/sexual innuendo-ridden cliches) and wonder why we don’t come.
Hmmm… You could say much of the same about the trend in …read more

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THQ announced today that it’s using Massive Inc. to deliver online ads in their videogames.
No comment. Does it seem just a little unfair to have to pay for a game ($60) that is ad-sponsored?
Update: THQ will use Massive to deliver the ads in their upcoming titles, like Juiced. Massive’s other high-level clients include Ubisoft, Konami, Vivendi Universal, and Atari. Supposedly this will ‘enhance’ the gaming experience by offering upgrades, schwag, level loads, etc. that weren’t there before.

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Dave Taylor points us to the NeoPets’ site. It’s a fantasy world, a MMORPG (massive multiplayer online roleplaying game) for the under-12 age group. From Dave’s highly informative and in-depth article:
Here are some facts about Neopets to whet your own appetite:

Neopets has 25 million members worldwide.

Neopets is translated into 10 different languages.

The Neopets site gets more than 2.5 billion pageviews per month.

The average Neopet fan – Neopian in its lingo – spends over six hours per month on the site, making it one of the two or three “stickiest” sites on the entire Internet.

Neopia has a demographic that …read more

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$680M will buy you a lot of downloadable content for your cell phone, huh? EA just bought Jamdat, maker of around 100 games for your cell, for roughly $27 a share, including a pretty popular Doom RPG. These are fairly simple games but with the way phones and flash memory are heading, certainly this is one way games are going. There are plans to launch around 50 games over the next year. This is a great Podcast that goes into a little more detail (and it’s my original source for the article). MercuryNews’s RSS Feed …read more

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