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Sony is only four years into it's ten-year PlayStation 3 lifespan, but it's already doing some preliminary planning for the next console in the line. Develop reports that Sony Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida talked frankly about the company's new direction and future plans in a recent interview. "When Ken Kutaragi moved on and Kaz Hirai became the new president of SCE, the first thing Kaz said was, 'get Worldwide Studios in on hardware development'," Yoshida said. "So he wanted developers in meetings at the very beginning of concepting new hardware, and he demanded SCE people talk to us [developers]." He also said they are "undergoing many activities that we haven't yet been talking about in public. Some future platform related activities. The move was probably a smart one. Ken Kutaragi may get credit as the father of the PlayStation, but he also took the blame for the PlayStation 3's lackluster launch. Hirai's differing philosophy means we'll see a very different kind of launch for the PlayStation 4 or even PlayStation Portable 2, whenever they happen to come.
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Obsidian is teaming up with Square Enix to create Dungeon Siege III, but what if the studio behind Fallout New Vegas had a chance to work on one of Square Enix's classic properties? Siliconera posited that scenario to Obsidian CEO Feargus Uquhart, who joked that he would love to work on Chocobo. But thinking about it more seriously, he said, "If I could come across everything that I played I would have to go with Chrono Trigger. I think Chrono Trigger was one I really enjoyed.” Urquhart and lead designer Nathan Chapman went on to note some of the key similarities between Chrono Trigger and traditional western RPGs, such as its open-ended design.” There are lots of differences, like you can beat Lavos at different parts of the game and you get different endings based on that. There are obvious answers like dialogue trees and all of that good stuff. The seeds are there for that kind of development," Chapman said. The pair are also interested in the setting, which Urquhart described as a "is a weird mix of fantasy and sci-fi mashed together. “An Obsidian-developed Chrono Trigger remains purely wishful thinking on their part, but Square Enix has recently been farming out well-known properties to western developers. One example is Front Mission Evolved, which is an action-oriented take on the classic strategy franchise developed by Double Helix. Don’t expect Obsidian to take on Chrono Trigger anytime soon, but with Square Enix continuing to experiment and expand its brand, anything is possible.
Microsoft recently announced that half of the 25 million Xbox Live user account more than $600 million dollars in revenue from Gold subscriptions. Add up revenue generated by DLC, movies, and TV shows sales it looks like Xbox Live revenues topped a whopping $1 billion in a single fiscal year for the first time ever. That’s a lot of money and in an Bloomberg reports, Microsoft says that sales of DLC, movies, and TV shows exceeded the revenue brought in from subscriptions for the first time this year. This is big money Microsoft is talking about and if you combined the numbers of everything there generating revenue from it quickly exceeds the $1.2 billion mark. None of this can really be confirmed since Microsoft doesn't release detailed sales and revenue figures for Xbox Live. Sarah Frier of Bloomberg put her own estimate for Xbox Live revenue this past fiscal year at $1.1 billion, far exceeding the $800 million she estimated for the prior year. With Microsoft making such a hefty sum from their online network, it's no surprise some third parties are becoming increasingly more vocal about revenue sharing. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick claimed to the Financial Times that 60 percent of Xbox Live users were there "principally because of Call of Duty," and Activision isn't seeing a fair share of the revenue.
Most in the industry recognize that Microsoft's Kinect and Sony's Move and 3D pushes are ways to extend the lives of their consoles. Capcom Europe head David Reeves, however, only expects the stop-gap solutions to last a few more years. Speaking about the new technologies in a GamesIndustry.biz interview, Reeves said, "Capcom is definitely going to embrace it and just as the first-parties are doing, we see it as another blip before we come into the next cycle. Anything they can add to revive and pique interest in the games until we have another clash of the titans in two years time." He says he hasn't been given any inside knowledge of future hardware plans, but expects "two to three years" before we see new systems. "All the first-parties have got to be working on something," he said. "The tricky thing is when do you put a stake in the ground on technology? That's the problem. You can be waiting a few extra months to implement something, but you've got to set a date to go with a certain chip at a certain point otherwise you're going to miss the key milestones." Reeves also cites titles like Wii Fit and Guitar Hero as making the most money for the industry in the last few years. "And then on the other side you've got the Activision and EA hardcore titles," he said. "They're in a box. Publishers don't want to give up their core values but they need to reach out to this wider market." He says only the games that are "purpose built for Kinect and Move" will be successful on the devices. He may be right in his predictions. Sony's proposed 10-year life cycle for the PlayStation 3 didn't necessarily mean new hardware wouldn't be introduced before it was over -- the PS2 lived healthy along the PS3 for quite a while, after all. The Xbox 360, on the other hand, is borrowing time with Kinect and treating it like a new hardware launch, but they're likely preparing for the next generation as well. Nintendo is the biggest mystery, since years of speculation about a Wii HD have constantly turned up nothing.
You'd think Satoru Iwata would be making some serious bucks for being the top guy at a company as successful as Nintendo. According to an recent shareholder meeting the president and CEO don’t bring as much bacon home as you would expect. Andriasang interpreted a story out of Japanese site Asahi regarding Nintendo's shareholder meeting. Their report puts Iwata's annual salary at just ¥78 million (about $768,000), with an additional ¥109 million (a little over $1.2 million) in performance-based bonuses, reaching a grand total of ¥187 million (roughly $2.1 million). For comparison, Sony president and CEO Howard Stringer makes a cool ¥816.5 million (more than $9 million) annually. Yoichi Wada takes home ¥240 million ($2.7 million) each year as CEO of Square Enix. Meanwhile, Apple's Steve Jobs only pulls in $1 a year from his position as chairman and CEO of the company.
One of the biggest aspects of the Nintendo's 3DS, that is not talk about much, is the built-in tilt sensor. Until most developers have been silent on the matter or they do not have any plans in the works to utilizes the feature. Team Ninja is the first developer to reported they intend to implement motion controls in Dead or Alive 3DS. Picked up on by Blogger "Silconera" a Japanese investor who spend some hands on time with the 3DS; claims to have spoken with Tecmo representatives about their plans for Nintendo's upcoming handheld. According to a Tecmo employee, players will be able to tilt controls to jiggle female characters' breasts in the 3DS version of Dead or Alive. Shocking right ?, Nope not really Team Ninja games like Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 and Extreme Beach Volleyball all have utilized motion capabilities for similar effect. Plus bouncy boobs are kind of Team Ninja's calling card.
I feel bad for Microsoft and Sony right now accorded to an news report that suggests most gamers are aware of Sony's Move and Microsoft's Kinect peripherals, but few intend on buying them. Despite the core gaming community have a high awareness of the two new peripherals, both failed to break top twenty charts say analysts at EEDAR. The report also said more gamers in total are interested in Kinect than Move, only because more Xbox 360s are in more homes than PlayStation 3s. "When weighed on a relative basis (number of consoles vs. interest in the new controllers), Move and Kinect "showed near equal popularity"EEDAR stressed. The data does not mean the Move and Kinect will have poor sales, but as new game come out the purchase sales will go up. Please note that EEDAR's report is based off of traffic data from IGN.com, which tends to skew "hardcore." Purchase intent may be much higher among the more "casual" gamers once they're aware of the products.
Well, we've gone a full month since the last episode of NVIDIA's and Intel's ongoing public feud, but it looks like Intel has now stoked the flames once again (albeit inadvertently) in a paper presented at the recent International Symposium on Computer Architecture. That attempted to debunk the "100X GPU vs. CPU myth," but it also contained the tidbit that GPUs are "only" up to 14 times faster than CPUs in running application kernels, which NVIDIA has more than a happily latched onto. In a blog post, NVIDIA's Andy Keane says that it's a "rare day" when a competitor states that their technology is only14x faster, and that he can't recall another time when he's "seen a company promote competitive benchmarks that are an order of magnitude slower." Of course, he then further goes on to note that Intel's tests were done with NVIDIA's previous generation GeForce GTX 280, and that the codes were simply run out-of-the-box without any optimization -- but, still, he seems more than happy to accept this bit of "recognition." In Intel's defense, however, the overall finding of the paper (linked below) is that the performance gap between a GTX 280 GPU and Core i7 960 processor is actually just 2.5X "on average," which NVIDIA hasn't highlighted for some reason.
Man, talk about burn; the StarCraft Professional League Kespa has permanently banned a host of players involved in last month's cheating scandaled. Some of the greatest players to ever grace the game won't be able to play professionally anymore. Reports say team Liquid not only barred the eleven players from playing again but also took there awards and professional recognitions out of the record books. Goes to show that South Korea takes their Star Craft very serious, and how its an deep part of there cultural. So deep that matches are regular aired on T.V the way football or basketball is watched in America.
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