HomeWeekly News Roundup (4 May 2008)
Finally got my copy of Grand Theft Auto IV from gamehubs.com (quick delivery, at a great price … good customer service too, well recommended). It is certainly very impressive, but since this is the first GTA game I’ve not played on a PC, I’m still getting used to the controls and playing it on a big screen TV (which to be honest, is making me quite nauseous). The city feels much more real and alive compared to previous GTA games, although I’m a bit tired of being thrown through the windshield all the time while driving (don’t they have seat belts in Liberty City?). Anyway, a lot more play time is needed before I can truly say that it is my favourite game of all time. As expected, news this week has been dominated by GTA IV.
In copyright news, and while on the subject of GTA IV, pirated Xbox 360 copies of the game are already available on several torrent sites. I understand that some people only downloaded those so they can play prior to the release date, but it’s a shame that people are not paying for a game which has reportedly cost over 100 million dollars to make and received great reviews. If you like the game, buy it!
On the other end of the scale, there’s the RIAA claiming that making music files available in “shared folders” constitutes piracy. Fortunately, a judge has ruled that this act alone does not mean piracy, and many other steps afterwards (such as other people actually downloading the shared music files) must happen before piracy can be declared. There was another ruling which said that the burden of proof must be on the RIAA’s side (you mean innocent until *proven* guilty? What a novel concept!), and that third party anti-piracy agents must first download the pirated file from the defendant’s hard-drive before they can accuse anyone of piracy. Some common sense at last!
Now that RIAA’s “everyone should use DRM” crusade is at an end (with DRM being defeated quite comprehensively), only now are some of the bad side effects of DRM are beginning to show. The MSN music store, which made way for the Zune Marketplace, sold many DRM’d files and with the closing of the store and the DRM validation servers, these files no longer play because it cannot connect to the store to authenticate the license. That’s the trouble with DRM, especially those that from time to time require online validation … the content owners at any time could decide not to give you rights to play the file, or even make you pay for them again if you want to “re-activate” your license. Thank goodness that DRM is dead, for music files at least.
In HD news, Paramount, the last studio not to announce their Blu-ray plans, has finally done so with big titles such as Bee Movie and Cloverfield, as well as the Oscar nominated There Will Be Blood, all making their ways onto Blu-ray by the end of May. Universal has also announced that they will use the lossless DTS-HD MA format for their releases (Paramount wants to use Dolby TrueHD, also lossless). This should help Blu-ray, although reports suggest that the only company it will really help, more than any other at least, is Sony. The in-fighting amongst the other Blu-ray backers could actually hurt the format, since the BDA is far from a united front and consists of companies that have conflicting interests (as opposed to the HD DVD people, which really didn’t have that many supporters and only one major one in each field). Another problem identified is that Blu-ray is too dependent on the PS3, and not all PS3 users are movie fans that are willing to buy lots of Blu-ray movies, even though Blu-ray usage on the PS3 has increased. And the expected surge after HD DVD’s demise has not happened, and sales even dropped 40% from January to February. Of course, seasonal variations means that February (and March) are always slow months, but the victory certainly hasn’t been a catalyst for mass acceptance of Blu-ray … that will take another year or two at least. 
And to further prove this, the latest Nielsen VideoScan data (which is now updated weekly on our forum) shows that with only 6% of the market compared to DVDs for top 20 titles by volume on both formats, Blu-ray still has a long way to go. In fact, the 6% is actually generous, because a large percentage of DVD sales occur outside the top 20 titles, whereas Blu-ray sales are much more concentrated in the top 20 – I don’t have exact figures, but Blu-ray probably only accounts for 2 to 3% of all sales at best).
And just before moving onto gaming, the rumour that never seems to die resurfaced again, with an OEM partner of Microsoft claiming that a Blu-ray enabled Xbox 360 is on the way. I’m fairly certain we will see a new Xbox 360 model by the end of the year, with new GPU and possibly CPU parts to aid cooling and noise reduction. Will this model, codenamed Jasper I think, include Blu-ray playback? I’m 100% certain there won’t be Blu-ray games on the 360, so is including the drive and thus increasing the cost a sensible thing to do for Microsoft? Time will tell …
In gaming news, or more precisely, GTA IV news, the first set of sales figures from the UK have been released, and the Xbox 360 version is holding the lead. Somewhat surprising because, while the 360 has sold more overall, it is the PS3 has been selling more than the 360 for month to month figures for quite a while now. Microsoft themselves have announced that, for US sales, GTA IV on the 360 is outselling the PS3 version by 2-to-1, no doubt helped by stores like Amazon offering GTA IV/360 bundle deals of their own in absence of an official one from Microsoft. Sony countered by saying that GTA IV has helped to sell loads of PS3s, as expected. Neither of these statements conflict with each other of course, and so with Sony not arguing against Microsoft’s claims, then 2-to-1 is not bad for a series that has been synonymous with the success of the PlayStation brand. 
Sales of the PS3 version has not been helped with reports of freezing problems (and while the 360 versions has had a few freezing reports, it is not as bad as on certain older models of the PS3). It was also revealed that the PS3 version is only 630p, while the Xbox 360 versions runs at a higher resolution. Some of the shadow effects are extremely harsh on the higher resolution 360 version, which probably explains why the slightly more blurrier PS3 version looks better according to most reviews. If you want to see a video comparison of the two versions for yourself, then Gametrailers.com has the HD version up.
Meanwhile, Mario Kart is probably selling loads on the Wii, but nobody cares (well I do, since I might buy a copy).
That’s all folks for this week. I think shall spend the next week in between doing some work and a lot of time spent playing researching GTA IV.