Digital Trends
You play video games. We play video games. But with developers struggling to stay afload in turbulent financial seas, will the industry as we know it survive another decade, or disappear beneath the waves the way arcade machines did after their heyday?
Having made the case for the doom of video games in part one of the Players Only season opener “Are Video Games Dead?,” Scott Steinberg revisits the subject for part two to find out about the potential salvation of the industry.
In a move to avoid having their industry subject to more regulation and legislation, a coalition of online advertisers have pledged to support a set of “self-regulatory principles” that will offer greater transparency to consumers about what information in collected about their online activities and how that information is used; the participants also pledged greater transparency and protections for information about children and data that could be used to identify individuals. The broad industry pledge is in part an effort to stave off criticism from privacy advocates, government regulators, and legislators who have criticized the amount of information the industry gathers and shares about Internet users, as well as how long that information is retained.
The usage model for a netbook is to wed it with a desktop computer to get the best of both worlds: a mobile computer that is light, capable and very portable, and a desktop that is powerful, but in which both together are affordable.
Traditional notebook computers are typically designed to be a blend of desktop performance and portability. But to get there, you end up with either a notebook that is too big and heavy to carry easily, or performance that significantly lags that of mid-range desktop computers. If you close the performance gap, the weight becomes unacceptable to most people, and battery life drops to unacceptable levels. If you optimize on the portability side, your performance drops, and in both cases, the cost of the notebook gets up into nose-bleed territory, between $1,800 and $4,000.
Gary Shapiro, head of the Consumer Electronics Association, the organization behind CES, gave his 2009 forecast for the industry as the show opened, and was hopeful even in economically bleak times.
“The CE industry is resilient but not immune from the business cycle. In a tough economy our products offer high value for entertainment and an entry point for entrepreneurs creating new businesses,” he said. “Innovation will kickstart the economy. The 2009 International CES is a cause for optimism with some 20,000 new products and 300 new exhibitors.”
There are 81 video games degree courses now offered at British universities, according to games industry campaign group Games Up?, but only four of them are accredit by the government body Skillset. And that, they say, is one reason why universities are failing to equip graduates with the skills really needed by the games industry.
David Braben, chairman of Frontier Developments and a spokesman for "Games Up?", told the BBC:
"95% of video gaming degrees are simply not fit for purpose. Without some sort of common standard, like Skillset accreditation, these degrees are a waste of time for all concerned."
There’s no question that gaming has its blockbusters. The recent release of high-profile, high-budget titles like Halo 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV set sales records and captured as much publicity as their big-screen brethren, but is it really these megagames that are driving the industry forward, or smaller indie studios? Scott Steinberg makes the argument for the little guy in this week’s episode of Player’s Only.
Once upon a time, the closest most game companies could come to claiming that they targeted women gamers was with a handful of token female heroines in otherwise blood-soaked, male-oriented titles. But those days are quickly fading. As this week’s episode of Players Only shows, women are getting behind the controls more than ever these days, and the industry is rushing to accommodate the new audience.
Scott Steinberg explores what has drawn women to gaming in recent years, from titles that specifically cater to them to more gender neutral titles, as well as the stereotypes that gamers and game companies alike have overcome on the gender front. The show also gives viewers a look inside the industry to see how women are helping to drive gaming forward from the developer’s chair.
Gamers looking to dive beneath the latest cheat codes and game reviews to find more in-depth reporting on their hobby have a new place to turn with the recent launch of Players Only with Scott Steinberg, a weekly video program hosted by Digital Trends. The very first episode of the series, available for free online, went live on Thursday.
The show is hosted by Digital Trends’ own Scott Steinberg, author of Get Rich Playing Games and industry expert. Steinberg steps behind the scenes to discuss trends in gaming with notable industry names, including heavyweights such as Sid Meier (Civilization), Warren Spector (Deus Ex), and Peter Molyneux (Dungeon Keeper, Black & White).
Despite a market for digital music that is finally picking up steam, global music sales suffered a significant overall decline in 2007. According to John Kennedy, chief executive of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), sales took a 10 percent dive in 2007 as compared to 2006, a decline the industry still mainly blames on piracy.
In a section of the IFPI’s Digital Music Report 2008, bluntly titled Copyright Theft is Choking the Growth of the Digital Music Business, the industry made it quite clear who they blame for the year’s lackluster numbers. It claims the ratio of illegal tracks downloaded to legal tracks downloaded is still 20 to 1, and that broadband penetration is helping to drive the expansion of illegal peer-to-peer sharing.
In a move sure to raise legal hackles in Europe, Swedish police have executed raids in 10 locations with the intent of shutting down ThePirateBay.org, which claimed to be the largest search index site for the BitTorrent file sharing technology. The raids were carried out at data centers of Rix|Port80, a large Swedish Internet and colocation provider. Reportedly, servers belonging to The Pirate Bay as well as other hosted sites were taken down by police, and three people were detained for questioning.
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