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Activision CEO plays down potential of online distribution [update 1]
Bobby Kotick, the chief executive officer of Activision, stated that he believes digital distribution of full games is "so far in the future that it's almost incomprehensible as an opportunity" in the New York Times article we reported on the other day. He cites the current limits of consumer internet bandwidth and the size of hard drives as the primary concern. However, Mr. Kotick believes that there is a great opportunity for purchasing and downloading smaller add-on content like "characters, new weapons, new missions or auctioning off places".We mainly agree with Mr. Kotick's thoughts regarding the adoption of mainstream digital distribution being a while off. Even though broadband adoption and availability numbers (soon, 99.6% of the UK will have access to 4-8Mbps DSL) are increasing, figures from December 2005 suggest that only 15-20% of Japanese, American and British people actually own a high speed internet line. Those numbers need to be closer to the level that television enjoys if mainstream on-demand digital distribution is to work.However, the market for smaller games and episodes of larger commercial games which can be distributed entirely over the internet is on the verge of exploding; Half-Life: Episodes and Geometry Wars being the early signs. Writing off the internet as a medium for distributing games would be a bad move for many publishers, after all, the early bird gets the loyal customer! Services like Steam, GameTap and Xbox Live Arcade are already beginning to capture the mindshare of savvy gamers (i.e. gamers that are too lazy to walk to the store, lol, jk!), so if publishers want to maintain control of what they do best (publishing games), then surely they should be doing everything they can to get in first before the bogeyman middleman does.[Image credit: Gamasutra]Update: clarified statement regarding adoption of broadband by consumers.
Walt Mossberg gets his brain (DS) trained
They've sold Brain Age in Japan by the millions, used it to demonstrate disruptive market strategies (in multiple keynotes), and now the folks at Nintendo have dropped their brain-sharpening baby into the hands of Walter S. Mossberg.Mossberg, the powerful Wall Street Journal tech writer, has wielded quite a bit of influence in the gadget world, even giving praise (with strong reservations) to the PSP and Xbox 360 when each of those platforms launched. But what does he have to say about Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day (for the DS)?Walt actually likes the game... with a caveat, of course: his ability to knock down his purported brain age down to 20 (the youngest possible) in the course of a day "didn't inspire confidence in the program's scientific accuracy." But at least it was fun. And even if that creepy Kawashima head isn't fully localized yet ("the setting sun sure does put spots in my eyes"), at least the older mainstream--okay, Engadget--crowd will get some exposure to this supposedly beneficial game through this coverage.[Thanks, Michael; image from the Radio And Internet Newsletter (RAIN)]See also: GDC: The Nintendo keynote blow by blow [free Brain Age for all!] Japanese doctors recommend Brain Training for seniors Walt Mossberg on the 360 PSP: Wall Street Journal gives us its impressions
Mainstream media nails it!
Well done Kim Komando of USA Today. Well done. Projectors can be a great option for some consumers that seeks a HUGE screen but have space requirements. (and a budget) But they can be daunting because of the huge price range ($800 - $15,000) but Kim did a great job laying out most of the things you need to look for. She goes over LCD, DLP, and CRT options and talks about how important lumens is. Kim even talks about their Achilles heal: the pricey bulb.Ms. Komando covers most of what a person should look for but forgot to cover the different resolution. A lot of lower priced units do not produce a high enough resolution to be considered high-def. They will display the same image, but will do so by lowering the resolution of the signal to its native resolution. You can find good inexpensive projectors for under a thousand that does have a good resolution however; just stay away from the 800x600 units if you want to use it for HDTV.Check out Kim's guide to projectors if you have any questions about these mini-giants of TVs.
