- Keith Vaz is an idiot. He said that players can rape women in video games. How is he allowed to represent people in Parliament when he doesn´t know what he is talking about? There is plenty of rape in books which have no age rating and plenty of rape in films which do. Why doesn´t the idiot do something about them? If you read the quote he is even confused about the different consoles. How can someone so ignorant be given any power at all? He is pathetic. This is just like when Gordon Brown said that games cause knife crime. These people are not fit to govern.
- SCI/EIDOS restructures. The new management have done what is necessary with a 25% reduction in the workforce (which will be a pain to implement with stupid British employment law), a move to product quality and a change to a studio system. Jane Cavanagh and her team have left a messy legacy of ineptitude which will take a lot of cleaning up. Personally I would have sold or got rid of the publishing side of the business to become just a developer, then the sales and distribution rights to each product could have been sold off to the highest bidder.
- Microsoft licenses Silverlight to Nokia. Another significant step on the route to the universal portable device. More phone manufacturers are rumoured to be imminent sign ups. Ultimately there will be a lot more game consoles in people´s pockets than in their homes.
- Warner get rid of music DRM. A very significant move in the online distribution of entertainment IP. It will be very interesting to see what happens next.
- Take Two executive chairman Strauss Zelnick thinks that it will remain independent. And he is wrong. The economies of scale for boxed chart games are so great that the industry will consolidate down to a handful of publishers. This is inevitable and we are watching it happen right now. There are only two ways out, online distribution and niche products. Then you bypass the economies of scale.
- Rumour of Xbox 360 price cut on 14th of March. Which will come as no surprise to regular readers. This is the year of the HD console price war. And Microsoft need the benefit of price elasticity of demand more than Sony do. Also, by not having a hard drive in their base model they can cut sooner and further.
- Casual gaming reached 145 million people in 2007. The AAA boxed cardboard and plastic business model is coming under severe threat here. Like everything else in our industry casual gaming is still in it´s infancy. There is a massive amount of growth yet to come.
- Social networking in mobile phone gaming set to boom. No surprise there then. Social networking and gaming are inextricably linked. It is part of the fundamental nature of gaming.
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Add Jack Thompson along with Keith Vas as an idiot please 🙂
EA were right to tell Jack to effectively “bugger off” over a collaboration if EA are successful in acquiring Take Two.