HomeWeekly News Roundup (27 April 2008)
I’m very excited. Next week, hopefully, I will get to play GTA IV. This is why I’m excited. Okay, I understand that this game has been hyped to death, but there might be just a small chance that it will not only live up to the hype, and also exceed it. And yes, I realise GTA is not everyone’s cup of tea, but even if you don’t appreciate the violence, you can still appreciate the attempt by Rockstar to basically make a city simulator (albeit with a lot of black comedy and cynicism thrown in). And if you still don’t like it, then there’s always Mario Kart.
In copyright news, it looks like bad news for proponents of digital fair use, as the Managed Copy provisions in the AACS specifications (AACS is the copy protection used on Blu-ray discs) seems to be fading into obscurity. MC basically allows users to make legal copies of movies to enable backup and multi-location home usage, while with enough security precautions to prevent mass piracy. A little bit of a history lesson: MC was something that the IT companies were demanding to be added to AACS, which at that time was used for both Blu-ray and HD DVD. The HD DVD people liked MC, while the Blu-ray people didn’t. I don’t know the exact reason why the IT companies were so insistent on having this feature (HP even dropped support for Blu-ray due to it, and Microsoft cited this as one reason to choose HD DVD over Blu-ray), but they were quite forceful and it was eventually made a mandatory part of the AACS specifications, and hence, mandatory on both Blu-ray and HD DVD. But now that HD DVD, and the MC loving crowd, have lost, MC looks to be on the way out as well. The problem with MC might be that it was too consumer friendly, and studios perhaps want to do their own versions of MC that are a bit more restrictive. I certainly hope MC doesn’t go away, as without a proper legal framework for making backups and copies, people will just use “illegal” means to do so, which is exactly what the studios are trying to prevent.
Another part of the studio’s prevention policy is to shut down torrent trackers. Unfortunately, not all torrent trackers are illegal, and some only hosts things like royalty free documentaries and other educational resources. This didn’t stop one such tracker being wrongly shut down for copyright infringement, which just goes to show that in the area of digital copyright enforcement, you are guilty until proven innocent. To further prove this point, music label EMI says online file storage, even private storage for backup purposes, is illegal. Sometimes I wonder what these music and movie studios really hate? Piracy or just actual backup. Piracy provides content to people who usually never spend any money anyway, while preventing backup might make your paying customers re-purchase content in case it was lost or damaged. Only one of these scenarios actually make studios more money. Think of all the cases where a simple hardware change disables usage of all your DRM infected files … is this really an anti-piracy measure, or is it an anti-backup measure? Alright, enough conspiracy theories for today.
In HD news, the jubilation over Blu-ray’s victory has finally settled down, and analysts are predicting doom and gloom again. It seems that while Blu-ray has helped studios recoup lost income due to lower DVD profits, it is not enough to stem the tide. I think studios have to realise that lower DVD profits occurs because people are not willing to pay as much for movies as they have before. Plus, people have better ways to spend money like on video games, which can give you at least 20 or 30 hours of interactive fun for not much more money (and the Wii is helping gaming gain new users whom never would have considered gaming as a source of entertainment before). Another problem for Blu-ray, according to analysts again, is that the uptake of Blu-ray hardware is too dependent on the PS3. As an owner of a PS3 that uses it only for Blu-ray playback, and having recommended it to everybody as the Blu-ray player of choice, I kind of agree. But people like me and people that I recommend to are not the problem, it’s the people that bought the PS3 as a game console that’s the problem: they’re simply not buying enough movies. The BDA has used the PS3 to say how successful it has been compared to HD DVD, but in reality, a lot of these figures are “fuzzy maths”. 
To compare DVDs with Blu-ray, at the same stage of development, more DVD hardware had been sold and each player had 30 movies attached to it. For Blu-ray, which has sold less hardware even with the PS3 thrown in, the attach rate is down to 3 … only a tenth of DVD! The same analysts are saying that Blu-ray ownership won’t reach 25% of US households until 2011, by which time I wonder if a disc format will still be the most preferred method of digital distribution. So it looks like the format war was a case where HD DVD wasn’t as bad and Blu-ray was as good as the BDA had claimed, and neither (even combined) are as good as good old DVD. This is what happens when PR triumphs over fact.
And to help the matter along, Netflix will raise Blu-ray rental costs as they have threatened to do for quite a while now. Whatever the format war produced, it was costly, and it produced a format which costs more to produce, and add on top of all of that there is the cost of introducing any new format, and you start to wonder who will be paying for all of this. Netflix’s answer is obvious that the consumers should be the ones to bear the burden. The consumer’s response may be a collective “meh” as they choose to their money on essentials such as food, gas, home loans and video games.
Onto gaming now, the next week shall now be known as GTA week. Expect everything and everyone to be talking about the latest game from Rockstar, that’s if they’re not calling in sick and spending the whole day playing the game. The first reviews are out and basically the game has received perfect marks in everything. Reviewers getting a bit too excited, or is it geunine excitement generated by an excellent and genre defining game? We’ll find out soon enough. For us analysts, it’s all about sales figures and whether the PS3 or the Xbox 360 version will sell more. The IGN reviews says that the PS3 has the edge over the Xbox 360 version, but only minor things such as texture pop-ins, looks a little sharper and has slightly faster loading due to the use of HDD storage. The 360 version has better colours, and of course exclusive downloadable content (DLC) in the form of two episodes, that rumours suggest will be new cities that are as big as San Andreas or Vice City (London anyone?). So which version should you get? I know people with both consoles that are getting the 360 version for the DLC and getting the PS3 version of general play (since the PS3 is quieter). An often given advice is to check which version your friends will be getting and then get that version for multi-player fun.
But if you own one console, simply get it on that format and you won’t be disappointed – I don’t think the differences are worth getting a new console for, certainly not for pop-ins and load time, but not worth if for the DLC until there are more concrete details on it. If the reviews are correct, this is one hell of a game and the difference are so trivial it’s just as silly as comparing the different plastic packagings used to package the games. I also visited a few online stores to see how well the game is selling, and it’s doing extremely well as expected. Also as expected, especially if you’ve read my March 2008 NPD video games sales figure analysis, is that the 360 version seems to be outselling the PS3 version on all the online stores (Amazon US/UK/Canada, Ebgames, HMV UK, GAME UK …), well at least the online stores that had top 10 seller lists. Make of that what you will.
Meanwhile, the PS3’s “Home” service is still not ready, and it looks like late 2008 or early 2009 is the likely release date, as the beta period has been extended to autumn/fall of 2008. One thing the 360 has over the PS3 at the moment is the greater community and online multi-player support, which will help it sell. I would also like to see a PS3 version of the 360 achivements system, which is nothing but a high score function for the 21st century, but a very nice feature indeed (I look very much forward to completing 100% of GTA IV like I have for past GTA games, and getting all those sweet achievement points … juvenile, I know).
Okay, that it for this week. Next week’s WNR might be a bit delayed if I manage to get my copy of GTA IV in time. In fact, everything next week might be a bit delayed. Blame Rockstar if you must, as they get blamed for everything that’s wrong in the world already anyway.