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- New Nintendo DS on the way with two, slightly larger, touch screens. And presumably some built in anti piracy measures. Nintendo only introduce new hardware when they need to and for the DS that means pretty soon.
- Rumble cost Sony $90 million and Microsoft $5 million. Is this a measure of how clever their respective managements are?
- Brain training 80 weeks in UK top ten. This record breaking performance is well deserved as Nintendo show the rest of the industry that there is a big world out there.
- Electronic Arts and Take Two sign confidentiality agreement. So that T2 can explain to EA that they are worth more than the offer price. This could go to an agreed price takeover. Or another hostile bid. This soap opera could have a few more plot turns left in it.
- Ontario need to increase tax credits to game companies. This is just like an arms race spiralling out of control. Governments both national and regional seeking to outbid each other to capture the holy grail of this now fashionable business.
- Assasin’s Creed PC. 700,000 copies stolen in a few days online. 40,000 copies sold in a month. And still the piracy apologists bleat. These thieves can be tracked down and punished. They should be.
- GameStop see no threat from digital distribution. Well the dinosaurs had an excuse for not seeing the meteorite coming, but when it comes to game retail the writing has been on the wall for a few years now. Maybe they need it in Braille.
- New iPods imminent, with fairly large price drops. This is important to us as these increasingly become gaming machines. And to Microsoft who are trying to hit a moving target when they compete with their Zune MP3 players.
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*sigh* piracy is bad …blah blah
How many of the 700,000 would translate into sales? I’d imagine a lot of people downloaded AC to test it and give it a little go, given that it got slated on release for being pretty and not much else.
People are not going to waste their cash on something they know is poor, but their curiousity will win out to pirate it. Did they make a demo?
Also, this game was leaked to pirate long before the release date. How many of those downloads were before the release date?
Again, like an comment in an earlier post, I don’t have much time to play many games these days so I wouldn’t even think this would be worth the download bandwidth for a demo of it. People should at least just stop pirating crap.
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I’m no piracy apologist, but they guaranteed with all their decissions that they would sell very little: bugs (including the INTENTIONAL one that didn’t let you finish the game, for which someone sould sue THEM), delays (months of reviews saying the game is boring and repetitive after the first couple of hours), the usual over the top DRM…
In any case, I have to laugh at that 700K figure. It’s the usual inflated number, in this case extra inflated, so they can ask for more damages.
Plus, it is Ubi. If they don’t stop treating us, their customers as ****, they deserve to go bankrupt.
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I think you missed the most interesting bit about the real source of the AssCreed PC piracy story, Bruce, namely the leak itself and especially when it occurred (six weeks prior to the release date). Those 700.000 illegal copies added up during those two months, not only during the release month.
It’s often said that illegal versions coming out before the actual release of a game do the most harm, which is pretty much why a company like Valve has resorted to distributing a working .exe through Steam on the day of release of their titles.
The disc manufacturer of that AssCreed prerelease version (with bugs mid-game included) is being sued by Ubisoft as it should be. Ubi often makes quite a number of annoying mistakes when releasing PC games or porting console games but this action is the only right one. If you take away the early leaks I think a lot of potential sales (not saying that all illegal downloads are lost sales in the end but still) could be recouped.