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Analyst believes Star Wars: The Old Republic had a $500 million price tag
Is Star Wars: The Old Republic the next big thing in MMOs? The same old thing in a new shell? Innovative? Routine? Polished? Buggy? Ask seven different people and you'll get nine different opinions. The one thing that everyone can agree on is that the game was expensive, and while most analysts are estimating somewhere between $100-$300 million, analyst Doug Creutz suspects that Electronic Arts has sunk nearly half a billion dollars into the project. This is in stark contrast to the estimate from analyst Michael Pachter, who targeted the price tag at roughly $80 million when all was said and done. Unfortunately, the precise cost won't be known unless EA decides to release the game's official budget and how much was spent on development, which seems unlikely. What is certain is that the performance of Star Wars: The Old Republic is going to be under close scrutiny over the coming months among both fans of the game and fans of financial speculation. [Thanks to Ben for the tip!]
UK government spends £2.8 million on road safety browser MMO
Children are generally far more interested in video games than in mundane things like crossing the road safely. You can almost understand why the UK's Department of Transport would have something like Code of Everand developed -- it's a browser-based game that's meant to help teach children proper road safety procedure, and in that light you can also see why the game would be free to play. The fact that the game has cost a grand total of £2.8 million in development and operation, however, is a bit harder to justify. The game's active playerbase is suspected to number in the low thousands, with 170,000 total registered accounts. Unlike other free-to-play games, the game is meant as a public service and thus doesn't have any sort of cash shop, meaning that its future is in a fair bit of doubt. A quick perusal of the game's play guide makes the connection to actual road safety rather dubious, which would mark the game as a novel and interesting idea that's remarkably expensive. The game's future past March is in doubt, contingent upon subsequent evaluation.
Nemoptic's Active Matrix Binem displays look perfect for your low-power Game Boy (video)
While the grocery stores in our hood are apparently a little too low-tech for the stuff, Nemoptic has made quite a name for itself in produce circles with its tiny, cheap e-paper price tags, able to reflect the continually rising costs of Cap'n Crunch. Now the company is branching out with rather more high-tech but still tiny displays called Binem Active Matrix E-paper, which show a variety of interesting tricks in a series of videos from June that Technology Review is just now bringing to light. The two-inch, 170dpi screens can manage a 30ms refresh rate -- just fast enough to handle video -- and can do partial refreshing, changing only portions of the display. Perhaps most interestingly the screens can be backlit, meaning they use a rather different construction than traditional E-Ink, but exactly how they work has yet to be disclosed. Check out the thrilling demonstration after the break and see if you can solve the mystery.
Sharp brings e-ink displays to the supermarket
While e-books might still be a bit out of the price range for most consumers, that quick trip to the store for a jar of mayonnaise might give the lowly proletariat its first glimpse at the wonders of e-ink, thanks to some new price tags from Sharp. The tags will include price info, along with extra data like place of origin and a sell-by date. Supermarkets will be able to update tags wirelessly from a central computer, and thanks to the battery sipping technology of e-ink, the batteries should last up to five years on each tag, leaving stocking jockeys with quite a bit less to worry about. Sharp plans to start selling the tags on the 25th, and will charge 2,000 yen ($16.61 US) for a 2-inch version, while the 3-inch display goes for 2,300 yen ($19.11 US) -- both prices we're guessing are wholesale, and there's no word how much the back-end will cost. Sharp hopes to sell about 10 billion yen ($83 million US) of these things in 2007, but we've no idea when they'll start shipping 'em over to our beautimus supermarket meccas in the States.[Via Plastic Bamboo]
