The Great Geek Manual News

As people cut back on travel and going out, they are turning more to home entertainment, providing a boost to the videogame industry that is under pressure to keep gamers amused and beat the recession.

Analyst Toon van Beeck from industry market research firm IbisWorld said videogame industry revenue is set to reach $41.9 billion this year, having risen from $27.2 billion in 2004, with over 37 million consoles sold in the United States alone in 2008.

A new report from IbisWorld said the introduction of Nintendo’s Wii had helped bolster the industry by changing the face of videogamers, bringing in more female players who now make up 38 percent of the gaming demographic.

“Videogame sales have been impacted the least from the global recession and there are no real signs of it slowing,” said Michael Cai, vice president of videogame research at Interpret.

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Source: Reuters

Hi everyone, the last time you heard from me, I talked about the huge milestone that PlayStation 2 achieved – reaching 50 million units sold in North America. Today I’m excited to talk about another milestone in PlayStation 2’s lifespan. For the first time ever, PlayStation 2 will be offered at a price point under $100 (that’s $99.99 MSRP, to be exact), starting April 1!

Why is this so significant? Well most importantly, this new price means that more people than ever will be able to join in on the fun that so many of you PlayStation 2 owners have been enjoying for years, which means new families will become part of the platform’s record-breaking install base. With this new price, we intend to introduce a new generation of consumers – some of whom weren’t even alive when the system was first introduced in 2000 – to the immense entertainment value offered by PlayStation 2.

In the gaming industry, the typical lifecycle for a console is around five years, but because we build each of our platforms for a large and diverse consumer base, we design our platforms differently. With the original PlayStation and now PlayStation 2, we’ve proven that consumers can rely on our platforms for their gaming and entertainment needs for at least a decade. This speaks to the technology and features that were packed into PlayStation 2 from the beginning, as well as to the ongoing support the platform enjoys from the publishing and retail communities and, well, all of you fans.

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Source: PlayStation Blog

Adults who play a lot of action video games may be improving their eyesight, U.S. researchers said on Sunday.

They said people who used a video-game training program saw significant improvements in their ability to notice subtle differences in shades of gray, a finding that may help people who have trouble with night driving.

“Normally, improving contrast sensitivity means getting glasses or eye surgery — somehow changing the optics of the eye,” said Daphne Bavelier of the University of Rochester in New York, whose study appears in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

“But we’ve found that action video games train the brain to process the existing visual information more efficiently, and the improvements last for months after game play stopped.”

For the study, the team divided 22 students into two groups. One group played the action games “Call of Duty 2″ by Activision Blizzard Inc and Epic Games’ “Unreal Tournament 2004.” A second played Electronic Arts Inc’s “The Sims 2,” a game they said does not require as much hand-eye coordination.

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Source: Reuters

For all the talk about consoles, the PC remains the main worldwide platform for gaming.

Forget the Wii or the Xbox. According to a new report by the PC Gaming Alliance, the PC is the most popular platform for gaming.

The report was delivered on the opening day of the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, and claimed that the PC gaming industry took in around $11 billion globally last year.

A report by IDC says there are over 1 billion personal computers world wide. The PC Gaming Alliance (PCGA) claims that 250 million are those used for gaming, leading to the claim.

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Source: Digital Trends

Publishers of the online game Entropia Universe have been granted a real-life banking license by Swedish officials. They plan to open a government-insured virtual bank for the game within a year.

The sci-fi universe of Entropia already lets players exchange real money for virtual funds used to but items, business, and trade on the game’s fictional world of Calypso. The game’s currency, PED (Project Entropia Dollars), has a fixed rate with the US dollar, where 10 PED equals $1.

With a banking license granted by the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, Entropia’s publisher MindArk gets government insurance on deposits up to about $60,000 for each customer.

Gothenburg-based MindArk also plans to offer common bank services like lending, interest-bearing accounts, direct deposit of paychecks, and bill payment according to the Associated Press.

Sinking astronomical amounts of cash into Entropia isn’t unheard of. The game has twice entered the Guinness World Records for the most expensive virtual world items ever sold. In 2004, a 22-year-old Australian payed the equivalent of $26,500 to own a mutant-infested Treasure Island in the game. Later, the player Jon “NEVERDIE” Jacobs bought a virtual night-club asteroid for the equivalent of $100,000. Despite mortgaging his house to make the purchase, Jacobs claims to have made a profit on the deal by selling licenses to hunt monsters and mine resources on the asteroid.

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Source: The Register

Stupendously popular online game World of Warcraft’s second expansion, “Wrath of the Lich King” is being blocked by Chinese censors for showing too much bone.

According JLM Pacific Epoch, China’s General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) has twice rejected applications from Blizzard Entertainment and its domestic operator, The9, because of the game’s all-too-frequent depiction of skeletons.

The original release of WoW had required Blizzard to modify undead characters and enemies in the game to pass Chinese regulator muster. Among the changes were giving the walking dead extra meat and using graves to show where players have died rather than skeletons.

China had issued the usual People’s Republic governmentspeak, sating this is it’s way of promoting a healthy and harmonious online environment.

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Source: The Register

When Jerald Spangenberg collapsed and died in the middle of a quest in an online game, his daughter embarked on a quest of her own: to let her father’s gaming friends know that he hadn’t just decided to desert them.

It wasn’t easy, because she didn’t have her father’s “World of Warcraft” password and the game’s publisher couldn’t help her. Eventually, Melissa Allen Spangenberg reached her father’s friends by asking around online for the “guild” he belonged to.

One of them, Chuck Pagoria in Morgantown, Ky., heard about Spangenberg’s death three weeks later. Pagoria had put his absence down to an argument among the gamers that night.

“I figured he probably just needed some time to cool off,” Pagoria said. “I was kind of extremely shocked and blown away when I heard the reason that he hadn’t been back. Nobody had any way of finding this out.”

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Source: Phys Org

With investors battening the hatches and video-game developers shuttering their doors, times are turbulent for game makers. But even as the economy spins downward, some are seeing an opportunity to break away from the traditional funding model – and build more self-reliant game companies in the process.

When John Johnson left Relic Entertainment to form Smoking Gun Interactive, he and his cofounders wanted to do things a little differently. “Our goal is to produce intellectual property that we create and that we own,” Johnson explains from his Vancouver office.

Typically, the creation of a video game is funded by publishers, who either own the studio developing the game, or provide milestone payments to the independent developers contracted to make the game.

Under that model, publishers assume all the risk – whether the game gets made, whether it ships on time, whether it’s a financial success – and as a result require developers to give up not just the majority of potential profits, but often also ownership of the intellectual property behind the title.

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Source: The Globe and Mail

Worlds.com CEO Thom Kidrin is putting the entire virtual worlds industry on notice: His company claims the idea of a scalable virtual world with thousands of users is its patented intellectual property, and Thom told us he intends to sue anyone who refuses to enter into licensing negotiations — including giants such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, a property of Activision Blizzard (ATVI).

Already, Korean gaming firm NCSoft, maker of City of Heroes and Guild Wars, has been sued by Worlds. (In East Texas no less, a jurisdiction infamous in intellectual property circles for plaintiff-friendly rulings in patent cases.)

Thom told us if he succeeds in his litigation, he “absolutely” intends to pursue follow-up suits against industry leaders Second Life and WoW.

Last December, when hitherto-unknown Worlds.com claimed to hold a patent for the virtual worlds idea dating from the 1990s, we were highly skeptical. Whatever one thinks of Second Life, there’s no doubt that service was the brainchild of Linden Lab founder Philip Rosedale, who pitched the idea around Silicon Valley for years before gaining VC funding to make it happen.

But Worlds.com’s Thom filled us in on his backstory: Back in 1997, a developer created the Steven Spielberg-backed Starbright World, part of the Starlight Starbright Foundation’s work with seriously ill children. Even in the fledgling virtual worlds industry, very few people heard of Starbright World because its creators shunned publicity, seeing their product as a private wonderland for sick kids.

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Source: Business Insider

The £3.5 million project aims to create a machine that can open all obsolete files, including text, websites and games.

The team behind Keeping Emulation Environments Portable (KEEP) claim it is necessary to prevent data from being lost forever as formats become redundant.

“People don’t think twice about saving files digitally – from snapshots taken on a camera phone to national or regional archives,” said Dr Janet Delve, a computer historian from the University of Portsmouth who has worked on the project.

“But every digital file risks being either lost by degrading or by the technology used to ‘read’ it disappearing altogether.”

Her fellow researcher Dr David Anderson said: “We are facing a massive threat of the loss of digital information. It’s a very real and worrying problem.

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Source: The Telegraph

Sunday, NPD released its January video game sales figures, and once again, Nintendo dominated.

According to the research firm, Nintendo sold 680,000 Wii units and 510,000 DS units. Microsoft was able to sell 309,000 consoles in January, and Sony once again trailed the pack with 203,000 units sold.

On the software side, Nintendo’s Wii Fit, Wii Play, and Mario Kart Wii took the top three spots, while Left 4 Dead and Call of Duty: World at War rounded out the top five.

At this point, after well over a year of leading the video game industry, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Nintendo dominated the charts for yet another month. After all, the company has found a way to provide consumers with a fun and unique experience at a price that’s more affordable than its competition. And in this economy, that’s a necessity.

But as the months have worn on and more Wiis enter homes around the world, I’m left wondering if I’m an “old school” gamer who has been left behind. Sure, I own the Wii and I’ve played all the games listed here, but if we are to believe that sales figures can adequately determine the preferences of gamers, I don’t think it’s out of the question to say that I’m no longer the typical gamer. And it’s Nintendo’s fault.

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Source: CNet

Researchers ranging from psychologists to epidemiologists have wondered for some time whether online, multiplayer games might provide some ways to test concepts that are otherwise difficult to track in the real world. A Saturday morning session at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science described what might be the most likely way of finding out. With the cooperation of Sony, a collaborative group of academic researchers at a number of institutions have obtained the complete server logs from the company’s Everquest 2 MMORPG.

As the researchers who are dealing with this new resource describe it, it’s one of those “be careful what you wish for” situations—with nearly 60TB of data, the standard procedures for tackling social data sets just aren’t up to the job.

Dmitri Williams introduced the project and described how researchers have been approaching various game developers over the years. He paraphrased the conversation with Sony as:

“What do you collect?”
“Well, everything—what do you want?”
“Can we have it all?”
“Sure.”

The end result is a log that includes four years of data for over 400,000 players that took part in the game, which was followed up with demographic surveys of the users. All told, it makes for a massive data set with distinct challenges but plenty of opportunities.

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Source: Ars Technica

Videogames can be good for children, encouraging creativity and cooperation, a European Union report concluded Wednesday which ran counter to the violent reputation of some titles.

In conclusions that may either surprise or reassure parents of game addicts, the study by the European Parliament Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection found a number of benefits and no definitive link to violent behavior.

“Videogames are in most cases not dangerous and can even contribute to the development of important skills,” said Toine Manders, the Dutch liberal lawmaker who drafted the report.

“(They stimulate) learning of facts and skills such as strategic reflection, creativity, cooperation and a sense of innovation,” a news release on the report said.

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Source: Reuters

The economy is so bad that even the company behind “Guitar Hero,” the hottest video game franchise in the world, couldn’t muster a profit in the holiday quarter.

Activision Blizzard on Wednesday posted a $72 million net loss in the fourth quarter, compared with an $86 million profit last year. It was the first full quarter for the company since its merger with Vivendi’s game unit, so the comparison isn’t perfect.

Excluding deferred revenue and some charges, the company would have earned $429 million on net revenue of $1.64 billion. Those numbers beat Wall Street forecasts, but Activision Blizzard offered gloomy 2009 guidance, causing the stock to fall 4% in after-hours trading after rising 1% to $9.48 in the regular session.

Activision Blizzard predicted revenue this year of $4.7 billion, about $500 million shy of what analysts were estimating.

The recession, though, could provide acquisition opportunities in the near future, executives said on a conference call with analysts Wednesday. Video game stocks have been pummeled along with the rest of the market in the past six months: The biggest, Electronic Arts, is down 65%, and THQ is off 81%.

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Source: Reuters