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iPhone users come in all ages but probably live near a big city
The end of this week has brought a little flurry of information about the differences between iPhone and Android users. First up, Admob has released the results of a survey that says the iPhone is twice as popular as comparable smartphones in both young and old demographics. Unfortunately, we can only guess as to why (it would be a little more interesting if either age showed a preference for one phone over another), but it seems the iPhone has yet another remarkable trait: appealing to users of all ages. No wonder Apple is jumping in on the iPad -- they really do have a pre-release audience. But they can't sit on their laurels for too long -- according to a report at Myxer's Boombox (via Fortune), the Android OS is picking up the pace, especially in what city folk call the "flyover states." Android use of the program has actually surpassed iPhone users in Montana, the Dakotas, and Arizona and New Mexico, and the numbers are close in the Midwest, including Kansas and Missouri. That's interesting -- that could have something to do with the distribution of Apple retail stores, or maybe just more urban center dwellers are drawn to the iPhone. DC seems to be the exception, as Virginia and Maryland are much more Android, but otherwise, if you're in a state with a big population center, odds are that you own an iPhone. Fascinating.
Google waxes poetic on Nexus One's design in video series, new docks shown off
Curious about the bright minds behind the OLED-wrapped, Android-powered Snapdragon in your pocket? Google's just posted its first in a series of videos about the Nexus One's magical journey from concept to production, and this particular episode calls in Mountain View's own Erick Tseng alongside HTC project manager Tomasz Hasinski and Lloyd Watts of Audience, which provided the phones dual-mic noise reduction tech. Don't expect too much depth here -- the entire video's only four minutes long -- but after Erick talks about the Nexus One's unprecedented fusion of bleeding-edge hardware and software design, we get to hear a little bit about HTC's selection of soft-touch materials and a large display for the device and Audience's involvement in improving voice quality before getting a super-brief glimpse at three docks. One of them is already available -- the desktop dock -- but the other two appear to be a standard desktop dock with an integrated spare battery charger and the nav-friendly car dock on the left and right, respectively. The video gives no clues when we might actually see these available for purchase -- but since they've finally shown them off here, it can't be long, right? Follow the break to check out episode one in full.
Four out of ten IT professionals would buy a tablet, but would you?
Macworld is reporting that their partner Network World recently did a poll and came up with the figure of four out of ten Network World readers willing to buy a tablet on day one sight unseen. That's an interesting result (and it's not the only one seen along those lines), but I want to know what you TUAW readers think. We've got a pretty good group of professionals, "pro-sumers" (ugh, sorry, I'll never use that word again), and just plain Mac fans in the audience here, and I think we represent a pretty good cross-section of Apple's core audience. Jump in on our poll below, and let us know, if the impossible became possible, if you'd plunk down the rumored $1000 for a tablet even before Steve's demo, or if you'd rather wait and see (or maybe not even buy a tablet at all, no matter what it does). %Poll-40508% Personally, I'm more of a "maybe," though I can totally understand the belief that this is already a revolutionary project (we've certainly been waiting long enough for it). Or perhaps those of us who already have an iPhone and a MacBook aren't really as interested in the in-between as Apple might think.
Is WoW's audience still increasing?
I'm not sure how much of this is legit, but stick with us for the information first, and then stay for the debunking. Edward Hunter over at Gamasutra decided to do some poking around in comScore's MediaMetrix application (which can track, based on a survey of a few million users, access to various applications on a computer -- which programs are run when), and he found something that surprised him: despite the economic downturn and the emergence of a few other popular MMOs recently, World of Warcraft's audience is estimated globally at 13.1 million. In other words, it's still growing from the last official numbers (11.5 million players worldwide) we heard.Now, the first issue we'd have with these numbers is the situation in China -- Hunter doesn't mention it at all, and in fact his graph (from comScore) doesn't have any dips at all in it, even though the game, and presumably its millions of players, went offline over there earlier this year. That right there throws a wrench into all of these estimations -- it's very likely comScore's information is just plain wrong.
A WoW player's guide to Free Realms
Our good friends at Massively have written up a post just for you WoW players about the new hotness in MMOs lately, a game called Free Realms. I haven't gotten a chance to play it, but it's all the team over there can talk about, and the game itself just hit a whopping three million players. It's a free-to-play game (with more premium memberships getting more features -- the minimum is about $5 a month) put out by Sony Online Entertainment that aims towards a more casual audience, with extra content placed in for more hardcore gamers. The questing and leveling itself is very forgiving -- you have a dotted green line leading you to quest targets, and combat only takes place in instanced areas. But the crafting and other various minigames (in order to do mining, you actually play a Bejewelled-style matching game, and there's even a "Kart Driver" profession) can get pretty hard. Just like WoW, those who want to collect pets or build skills can do that, while those who are more interested in dungeon crawling have that option as well.I've been meaning to pick up the game and check it out (on the free level, of course -- with my WoW subscription running, I'm not made of MMO money), and Massively's guide is an excellent first overview to how the game relates to our favorite MMO. If you're getting a little bored in Azeroth waiting for the next expansion announcement and are looking for something else to try, Free Realms might just be it.
Nielsen: WoW is most played core game by 25-54 females
Here's an interesting bit of info from the Nielsen folks: over 400,000 women are playing World of Warcraft in the US, which means it's the most-played "core" game for that gender. And even more interesting, females 25 years or older make up the largest block of PC game players overall, and they account for 54.6% of all gameplay minutes in December of last year. Girls don't just play WoW -- they're quickly becoming one of it's main demographics.You can read the report in PDF form over here -- the chart above might be the most interesting piece of information, as it shows that though males still make up a huge part of the PC gaming audience, many of them have now moved on to consoles, and women (especially older women, over 25), during the last month of last year, are making up a huge audience for PC games. Later in the report, you can see what kinds of games women are really playing: Solitare, Freecell, Minesweeper, and all of those other little attention grabbers on every PC. But among those widespread casual games is our own World of Warcraft. And while the 25-52 male audience of 675, 713 for that game still remains larger than the female audience in the same demo, the ladies aren't far behind.Neilsen also calculated some base stats for WoW, including the fact that 1.8 million unique people played the game, and the average time of gameplay per week was 744 minutes, just over 12 hours (slightly up from last year's average). Additionally, of those who play World of Warcraft, their second most-played game was Solitaire, followed by Warcraft III. Fascinating stuff. Remember that these are statistics, so they are more general trends than anything else, but it's definitely true World of Warcraft and PC gaming in general is no longer only the domain of the male demographic.
Ubisoft forum moderator explains forthcoming shovelware
It was only a few months ago that Ubisoft's Yves Guillemot was promising us all "Nintendo-like quality" games. Since then, the company has announced Raving Rabbids TV Party, Babies Party, Shaun White Snowboarding, and much, much less. It's a line-up that has generated only ripples of laughter on the internetz, rather than tremors of fear in Kyoto.The snickering is not limited to NeoGAF. Ubisoft's own forums have come under attack from those who are disillusioned by the company's planned Wii output, so much so that UK Forum Manager "Raide" recently had to ride to Ubi's defense. The gist of his argument seems to be: because the best-selling games on the Wii aren't necessarily the best games, it's actually okay for Ubisoft to release stuff that, well, doesn't have "Nintendo-like quality.""If you look at the most successful Wii games, they are not amazing new AAA games, they are predominantly family-orientated games/alternative games," explained Raide, adding that Ubisoft is pursuing the casual dollar because "parents who are buying a console for their children do not really care about Prince of Persia, Rainbow Six or Far Cry on the box."On one level, Raide's logic is fairly sound; after all, games targeted at the casual sector do sell well (particularly in the UK and Europe), and it's understandable that Ubisoft has shareholders to keep happy. But promising higher quality Wii games and singularly failing to deliver on that pledge? That's just weak. Hit the "Source" link below for Raide's full defense.%Gallery-23883%%Gallery-23972%[Via Kotaku]
Start-up debuts crazy new noise reduction tech for mobiles
A small company coming out of stealth mode at MWC this week is making some pretty wild promises about its new silicon -- and phone manufacturers must be buying the hype, because several have apparently have signed their names on the dotted line. The California start-up, Audience, is showing a 2.7 x 3.5mm chip that it claims uses some pretty wild algorithms to go beyond existing technologies like Motorola's CrystalTalk to reduce outgoing and incoming noise on calls by up to 25 decibels, enough to significantly reduce or entirely eliminate the sound of trains and yappy morons at Metro stops, car traffic, and loud music. The firm didn't disclose who its manufacturer partners were, only saying that there'd be further announcements later in the year. What's tha-- huh? No! We said, THERE'D BE FURTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS LATER IN THE YEAR.[Via New York Times]
Casual games get bad reviews, no one cares
It's a tale nearly as old as gaming ... critical darlings like Psychonauts and Shadow of the Colossus sell, like, three copies each while critically drubbed dreck like Carnival Games and Cars flies to the top of the charts. Why do people buy this stuff? Maybe because they don't care about the reviews."I get less concerned about game reviews because the casual gamers don't read any of those things," EA Casual president Kathy Vrabeck told Next-Gen. Don't casual gamers want to know what's good? Sure they do, but according to Vrabeck, specialist reviews don't cover the things casual gamers care about. "It's a little bit amusing, in that it's people reviewing games against measures that are important to core gamers yet are not important to casual gamers," she said.So do reviewers need to change their outlook or do casual gamers need to get better taste? Maybe neither, with sites like Gamezebo and Casual Review looking at the casual space on its own merits. Or maybe we should just ask casual gamers to put down the phone. "The measurement [of a game's appeal] for women aged 25 to 34 would more likely be whether or not they'd hang up on their girlfriend to play this game," EA Casual Marketing VP Russell Arons told Next-Gen. "'Would you hang up a phone conversation for this game?' That'd probably be a truer measure for that target audience."
The strange style of patch notes, real and fake
I don't know if you could call this "Guide to Writing Fake Patch Notes" hilarious, but I think it is at least chuckleworthy. Flibble of Draenor (the realm, not the shattered world) has put together a quick guide on how to trick sites exactly like this one into believing your patch notes. And in doing so, he hits upon some of Blizzard's more conspicuous quirks, i.e. that you should "at least try to glance at the Under Development page, so that you can convincingly lie about the things Blizzard convincingly lies about on their website."He also notes that every patch includes at least one change to a Mage spell icon (well, there are just so many of them), adding "several new items and recipes" that don't really exist, and has (faked, of course) bugfixes that "preferentially affect the 0.1% of WoW players who make no contribution to society [and] live in mom's basement at age 37." See what I mean? Chuckleworthy.Truth be told, I really like the way patch notes are written. I'm not sure who writes them (I doubt it's an actual dev, but it has to be someone associated with the dev team), but they are both formal and at the same time seem to have a lot of cool mystery and design behind them. Caydiem hit on this note to extremely comic effect with her fake patch notes (I like that the grass in enemy faction zones is "exceptionally green"), but even the real patch notes read like a kind of otherworldly poetry: "Cabal Zealots are now more threatening while under the effect of Shape of the Beast." To players who know what they're talking about, they import a very technical message. But for someone who doesn't know about that section of the game or the game itself, that's a pretty mysterious statement. As a student of audience and media, I find patch notes pretty fascinating.
The Wii on Dr. Phil
Dr. Phil, in his latest one-two punch at arch-nemesis Oprah, did one of those crazy audience giveaway things. They didn't get cars, of course ... oh no, they got something better. And in case your predictive powers are slightly out of whack, we'll lay it down straight for ya ... he gave everyone a bunch of Wii's.Heck, he even gave Wii Tennis a run-through. After dressing up in pretentious high-performance athletic gear, he proceeded to defeat his opponent amidst whining and blatant cheating. Check it out for yourself ... and wish you were one of those lucky, lucky audience members.[Thanks, Camran!]
Podcast audience growth
Remember when podcasts were modest audio files created and distributed by a handful of enterprising geeks? My, how times have changed. I still find it odd when I'm listening to a show on NPR or watching ESPN and I hear the announcer say, "You can hear more on our podcast." It's surreal.Research firm eMarketer has released projections of what the future podcast audience might look like, in size at least. Citing the portability and "...anywhere, anytime" aspect of podcasting as catalysts for continued growth, they expect to see numbers around the 80 million mark for active listeners by 2010. Wow. Of course, this can only mean advertisers will become interested, creating more podcasts. It's a runaway train.[Via Micro Persuasion]
