Eight news stories 26.2

• How about this for bad losers? Winners of games on Xbox Live are now having their internet connection hacked by the people they beat. DoS attacks are now a feature of online gaming. Someone, somewhere needs to get a grip of this before it starts to commercially damage our industry.
• Anyone who reads this blog knows that netbooks are going to be absolutely massive as a gaming platform. Now Wired magazine have caught on with this feature article, which is essential reading. And on page 4 of the article there is this gem: “AMD is working on an experimental 3-D graphics server farm that would run high-end videogames, squirting a stream out to portable devices so you could play even the most outrageously lush games without a fancy onboard processor.” Any game industry professional who has not woken up to netbooks will be in big trouble. There will soon be far more of them in daily use in the world than there are game consoles.
• Sticking with the netbook theme, Quake III is now available as a browser game. The future of gaming is in the cloud, then all the gamer needs is a thin client. This will lead to a veritable explosion in gaming as the hardware requirements drop to just a few dollars worth. It will cost an insignificant amount to build online gaming capabilities into every television, for example.
• The pathetic British government want everyone to have access to 2 Mbps broadband by 2012. You have to wonder what planet they are on. Korea has had 50 and 100 Mbps for years and by 2012 their major cities will have 1Gbps. Britain is heading for third world status at some speed due the the gross ineptitude of New Labour.
• Xbox Live revenues for the Xbox 360 have now exceeded $1billion. 56% of the 17 million users pay for the gold service. This is a fantastic business for Microsoft, their Xbox business has three massive revenue streams, hardware, license fees on boxed software and Live revenue. And Live will become by far the most profitable. And it is an area where Nintendo and Sony are being left far behind.
• An organisation called Common Sense talks common sense. You have to think that we are starting to win when pressure groups come up with a fair and balanced view of video gaming. People say that Rockstar push the boundaries, but what they do is very tame indeed compared with film. So an adult rated video game has full frontal male nudity, there are many thousands of adult rated films with this feature.
• At long last Electronic Arts learn the lesson about release dates. If  Jon Riccitiello and his executives took more notice of what they read here they wouldn’t be experiencing these problems. Overall EA are raising game quality, introducing new IP and cutting the flab out of their organisation. For this they must be admired. The industry needs well directed, well run companies to be in that small group of global publishers.
• Strong rumours that Sony are going to knock $100 off the retail price of the PS3. Just in time for the Christmas buying season then. To be fair to Sony (and Nintendo) the Japanese Yen has rocketed in value whilst the dollar and (especially) the pound have collapsed, which makes everything they do very expensive indeed. Personally I think it is probably too late for Sony and the PS3 in this generation. The momentum has gone elsewhere, which makes the competition much better ownership propositions. I could obviously turn out to be wrong on this, we will see.

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