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Weekly News Roundup (30 March 2008)

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

Sorry for the lack of a blog entry during the week … I was a bit busy doing a few things (no, I didn’t spend all my time finding and buying HD DVD bargains … not all my time anyway). First up, I finished writing the Nero Vision 5 AVCHD Authoring Guide just before last week’s blog, and I was still recovering from the stress. I love (MPEG-4) AVC (H.264), since I believe it is the codec of the future, and AVCHD is a format that I think has some chance for success, since it takes AVC and gives it Blu-ray based navigation, and now that Blu-ray has won the HD war, AVCHD’s chance of adoption is now much higher. The guide I wrote will show you how to make a simple AVCHD disc, which is not all that different to authoring DVDs – Nero Vision isn’t the best software for authoring, but I hope the guide can at least be used as an introduction to AVCHD.

I also wrote a review for the new version of WinDVD, WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-ray (and yes, it plays HD DVDs too). I must say, I’m quite impressed with this new version of WinDVD, which in my opinion, is the best version of WinDVD for several years (although to achieve this wasn’t that hard, since previous versions were a bit “wobbly” to say the least). The Blu-ray and HD DVD playback function works great, better than PowerDVD Ultra in my opinion simply because it supports older (non HDCP) hardware.

I also bought some more HD DVDs (what a surprise!), but I think I’ll leave references to it to a minimum since I’m sure people are sick and tired of my HD DVD fire sale series.

Anyway, onto the roundup proper now. In copyright news, sort of, a dispute over LED patents could block Blu-ray and other related product imports. When I say “could”, I mean “won’t” because someone will pay up and settle the lawsuit or it will be dropped before it gets anywhere near a court. And in a week where the irony meter has been off the scale, the MPAA has been sued for piracy related activities. Actually, a Chinese site falsely accused by the MPAA of piracy (the MPAA admits the mistake) is suing them for defamation and I hope they win because the MPAA needs their activities looked at with more scrutiny. The RIAA is still not learning and they want ISPs to introduce a “piracy tax”. Basically they want ISPs to charge extra money that will go into the RIAA’s pockets for acts of piracy that you may or may not have committed. Sentenced before a crime is even committed! Still, some ISPs are standing up to MPAA’s tactics, if not in the US, then in Norway where ISPs will not act as the MPAA’s judge, jury and executioner in disconnecting people suspected of piracy. Still, some have given up the fight (and you can’t really blame them). TorrentSpy is finally dead, after months of legal battle and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs. Of course, about a dozen new torrent sites have sprung up in its place, so piracy has not been affected at all. And to show that Bittorrent isn’t this evil thing, the Canadian TV station CBC will use Bittorrent to distribute some of their shows in HD, and all DRM-free. And to round off the irony laden week, Sony BMG has been sued for, you guessed it, piracy. Not only that, their servers were seized by police and evidence of the piracy is now in the hands of PointDev, the company who produced software that Sony BMG allegedly used pirated copies of. In the words of Nelson on The Simpsons: “Ha Ha!”

In HD news, Hitman, along with several other Blu-ray and DVD titles, are now using an experimental feature called “Digital Copy”, which stores a portable (iPod, PSP) version of the movie on the disc that you can play on the PC or transfer to your portable video player. I like this, and my only concern with this type of feature is the possible price rise to account for the extra content. But as long as prices stay the same, then it’s a good feature to have. Meanwhile, both Samsung and LG have raised their concern and caution towards Blu-ray, citing growing use of Internet movie downloads as the major factor which could cause Blu-ray to fail. The chief scientist at THX also suggests something similar. I will have to write a blog on this issue, but I think disc formats are here to say, for at least another decade or so. Plextor are continuing with their release of a dual format Blu-ray/HD DVD drive, despite recent events. Good for them, as I think the million or so HD DVD users could become a niche market that will always need drives to service their huge movie collection (thanks to recent sales). Meanwhile, the Blu-ray PR machine is in full gear this week as news of Blu-ray movie sale reaching the 9 million mark, as well as above 10% ratios for some Blu-ray new releases (compared to DVDs), such as Oscar Winner No Country for Old Men. But if you look at the figures closely, and analyse the difference between DVD owners and Blu-ray owners, you’ll see that these numbers are a bit misleading, and that DVDs held a massive 16:1 sales ratio compared to Blu-ray for the week ending 23rd March, despite the NCFOM sales figures. It looks like the BDA still needs much more promotion, starting with sorting out the profiles mess and by releasing more movies at lower prices.

On the issue of profiles, it is slightly less confusing for the majority of Blu-ray owners, as they own the PS3 and it has just been updated to Profile 2.0 compatibility, just like I predicted it will last year – hooray for me (mainly because this means nobody is going to sue me for misleading them into buying the PS3 for Profile 2.0 compatibility, when at that time, nothing was certain). The update also includes some DivX playback fixes (2 GB and bigger files are not supported), although my testing showed that GMC and QPel DivX files still won’t play.

And on that note, we move onto gaming. Actually, the above was the only notable gaming news I saw in the week (if I see one more news story about “wii-habilitation”, I’ll scream!). GTA IV will be released in a month’s time, and I will pre-order my copy, not because I fear that I won’t get one, but mainly because I can’t be arsed to go to the store to get a copy. Plus, Xbox 360 owners who pre-order will get some bonus goodies (500 MS points and exclusive gamerpics), now not only for Australians but for people in the UK and US too (I may have already mentioned this news, but the US and UK thing is new). GTA IV will also feature a clever new music download system – something about phoning a special number whenever you hear music on the in-game radio while playing, and then download for them $1 from Amazon. It would be way cooler if somehow you could actually use phones in the game to make a call to get a special code to download/pay for the music, but I don’t think a career criminal like Niko is likely to pay for music, so perhaps it doesn’t quite fit into the game. No doubt there will be more stories about GTA IV in the coming weeks, and you can read the good ones here.

Okay, that’s it for this week. Don’t forget to enter into the Roxio competition to win yourself a iPod Nano – competition closes tomorrow! See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, Gaming, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (30 March 2008)

Weekly News Roundup (23 March 2008)

Sunday, March 23rd, 2008

Hello everyone on this Easter Sunday. I’ve never really gotten the connection that easter has with bunnies. I understand that it presents birth and re-birth that comes during spring and what better represents reproduction than rabbits (although rats could also have been used, but who wants to eat rat eggs, chocolate or otherwise?). But why chocolate eggs? If I can remember correctly from biology class, rabbits don’t lay eggs, and certainly not chocolate ones. But I guess it would be more appropriate than eating a chocolate resurrected Jesus.

With blasphemy out of the way, let get to the copyright news. An anti-piracy company in Italy has been found guilty of illegally spying on P2P users. Is it me or is piracy and privacy becoming more and more related, and not just because they share 85.7% of their letters. On the other end of the spectrum, Verizon in the US is helping P2P users who share legitimate files by making downloads faster. As someone who has some experience in file serving, P2P is extremely useful in the way that it can deal with increased capacity – in fact, the more users that download, the faster it becomes is ideal for sharing popular files (and it saves a bunch in bandwidth hosting costs as well). And even for illegal files, the reality isn’t as bad as the content holders want to portray. An Oxford economist has claimed that piracy actually helps to promote products, and may benefit the very companies that want it stopped. I often read posts where people say they pirated something, found it to be great, and then bought the product, usually something they would never have bought otherwise. Unfortunately, Australian ISPs might not think so and one ISP is already starting to crackdown on illegal downloads, threatening to cut off Internet connections for people who download pirated content excessively. This means the ISP will have to monitor people’s usages, which goes back to the 85.7% similar word “privacy”. But as usual, the media tend to take a sensationalist view of things, and the ISP in question has been doing this for over two years now without people noticing, but it’s still something people don’t want an ISP to be in charge of (and I think most ISPs don’t want to be in charge of monitoring usage either). Before moving onto HD, the news this week is that Slysoft has broken BD+ copy protection for Blu-ray. At least for the time being. In their press release, they are still (somewhat optimistically) hoping that this will help to bring HD DVD back from the dead, as they’ve always preferred HD DVD’s easier to break AACS copy protection to Blu-ray’s harder to break AACS & BD+ combination. And of course, they also stated that BD+ is still in its infancy, and that over time, it will be harder and harder to break.

Onto HD, finally some more movement in the area of PC Blu-ray/HD DVD playback. Corel (who purchased Intervideo) has just released the first version of WinDVD that supports Blu-ray and HD DVD playback. Dubbed WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-ray (despite the fact it plays HD DVDs too, but I guess that’s just the result of the format war ending), it also has build in video/DVD upscaling and all the usual features you would expect. I will be reviewing WinDVD 9 over the next week (thanks again to Corel for providing a reviewer copy), but from first impressions, I’m quite impressed. WinDVD 8, to put it mildly, was somewhat crap. It didn’t even install on my main work machine, and it was sluggish. The new WinDVD is definitely much more responsive. The best thing about it so far is that it supports older video cards for Blu-ray and HD DVD playback, something that PowerDVD Ultra failed to do on my ATi Radeon 9800 XT. Obviously, performance wasn’t great on my old computer, but it at least started playback as opposed to just giving me an error message about insufficient hardware. So even on a P4 3.2 GHz (not even Pentium D) with the mentioned 9800 XT, HD DVD playback (via the Xbox 360 add-on drive) worked without any tweaking (but choppy playback, of course), including all the interactive features. HDCP requirements for both Blu-ray and HD DVD states that VGA output is supported, if only at a lower resolution, so PowerDVD Ultra not starting playback is the software’s problem, not to do with copy protection. Hopefully PowerDVD 8, to be launched sometime next month I think, will fix these issues. WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-ray supports Profile 1.1 Blu-ray playback, but there’s a good chance a patch will be released soon to support Profile 2.0 (that’s the great thing about software based playback solutions – upgrading is easy). I’m predicting this because the PS3 is about to get its own software update to make it into (the first?) Profile 2.0 Blu-ray player. That’s good news to those who purchased the PS3 wanting it to be future proof (and to those, like me, that has been recommending it for the same reason). Of course, the one feature Blu-ray owners really want is DTS-HD MA decoding for the PS3, but I hear that it’s only a matter of time before it is available. I’ve also just published the Nero Vision 5 AVCHD authoring guide. AVCHD is basically like a mini Blu-ray, allowing you to encode 1080p content (with up to 7.1 Linear PCM audio) onto a DVD recordable (although you won’t be able to store too much content on a standard single layer DVD).

In gaming, the expected hoopla surrounding the release of GTA IV next month will no doubt intensify. I’ve just read some previews on IGN, and I can’t be anything but excited at the new version of my favourite gaming franchise. Microsoft Australia (and New Zealand) is giving people who pre-order GTA IV a special exclusive deal in which we get 500 Microsoft points to use on Xbox Live plus four exclusive GTA Gamerpics. I still haven’t decided whether I will get the 360 version or the PS3 version, but I’m leaning towards the 360 version due to the better controller and because Rockstar seems to suggest that the 360 version had been finished earlier (and hence, should be a bit better). I’ve seen Microsoft’s new Arcade bundle that includes both GTA IV and Halo 3 that will retail for $200 less than the cheapest PS3, and I think this bundle will sell extremely well (let’s just hope that MS finally has the 360 stock issue sorted out, because it was a pain trying to source a 360 during the holiday period). I put up the February US NDP game sales figure analysis a few days ago, so have a look if you’re interested in these kind of things.

And last but not least, the Roxio competition to win yourself an iPod Nano plus other cool Roxio prizes is still up and running, until the end of this month. I will have some reviews and guides up for some of the Roxio software on the site shortly as well.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, Gaming, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (23 March 2008)

The HD DVD Fire Sale – Part VI

Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

HD DVD Fire Sale - Part IOne more “HD DVD Fire Sale” post to update on what’s happened.

In the US, situation remains normal, with no new sales and prices going up and down on Amazon. While prices have definitely dropped since Toshiba withdrew support for HD DVD, they are nowhere near “fire sale” levels and I’m starting to wonder if it will ever happen. Of course, my definition of “fire sale” might be clouded by my local experience with the HD DVD fire sale (ie. “almost everything under $10”), and that what we are seeing now in the US is already a fire sale. I doubt it though.

In Australia, the sales are drying up, as are the HD DVD stock. EzyDVD.com.au, who secured most of the remaining HD DVD stock in Australia, started their third and last HD DVD sale on the 20th, this time 27 Paramount titles including Transformers, Shrek the Third, Into the Wild and The Heartbreak Kid (the last two being new releases, the latter also released on DVD on the same day, and the former not even available on DVD yet!). And a few days before, due to a stock mix up that caused some orders to be cancelled, EzyDVD did the right thing and gave a limited special offer to those who were affected – all five Harry Potter HD DVDs for only $5.92 each. Fortunately, those who weren’t affected were also able to get in on the act as somebody posted the offer in a public forum. I already own the first four Harry Potter movies on DVD (and owning the fifth movie on HD DVD already), but upgrading my HP collection from SD to HD for less than $24 was an offer I could not resist. So here’s my updated HD DVD shopping list:

EzyDVD Order #4:

  • Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone – $5.92 
  • Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets – $5.92
  • Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban – $5.92
  • Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire – $5.92
  • Shipping: Free
  • Order Total: $23.68($USD 21.38)

EzyDVD Order #5:

  • Black Snake Moan – $7.92
  • Black Rain – $9.92
  • Dreamgirls – $9.92
  • The Heartbreak Kid – $9.92
  • Into the Wild – $7.92
  • A Mighty Heart – $7.92
  • Sahara – $12.92
  • World Trade Center – $9.92
  • Shipping: Free
  • Order Total: $76.36($USD 68.87)

I think it’s safe to say that the bulk of my HD DVD fire sale buying has been done, at least here in Australia. So it’s probably a good time to tally up and count the damage:

Number of titles bought: 39 (3 box sets)
Cost (excluding shipping): $404.53 ($USD 364.87)
Shipping: $13.75 ($USD 12.40)
Average cost per title (not including box sets): $9.13 ($USD 8.23)
Average cost per title (including box sets): $10.73 ($USD 9.68)

Just over $10 per title for 36 movies and 3 box sets (season one of both Heroes and Battlestar Galactica, Planet Earth) that’s not bad. Considering the cheapest Blu-ray player here in Australia costs just about the same as my spending above, I think it’s money well spent!

Posted in High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K) | 1 Comment »

Game Consoles – February 2008 NPD Sales Figure Analysis

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

The February 2008 NPD game console sales figures for the US has been released. This month, all sides have claimed victory, and after reading this analysis, you might come to the same conclusion as well. You can read last month’s analysis here. The figures are from NPD, a marketing research firm that releases games console sale data every month.

The figures for US sales in February are below, ranked in order of number of sales:

  • DS: 587,600 (Total: 18.5 million)  
  • Wii: 432,000 (Total: 8.1 million)
  • PS2: 351,800 (Total: 41.7 million)
  • PS3: 280,800 (Total: 3.8 million)
  • Xbox 360: 254,600 (Total: 9.6 million)
  • PSP: 243,100 (Total: 11 million)

    • NPD February 2008 Game Console US Sales Figures

    NPD Game Console Total US Sales Figures (as of February 2008)

    Apparently, this month’s results showed that Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are all winners. It’s obvious why Nintendo would claim this. Both the DS and the Wii sold in large numbers again, claiming first and second place. The DS claimed 71% of the portable gaming market, while the Wii claimed an equally impressive 45% of the next-gen console market, outdoing the previous two months’ efforts.

    Sony has also claimed victory because for the second month running, the PS3 outsold the Xbox 360. Last month it was by 39,000 units, this month 26,000 units. Since I started doing this feature on the blog, the PS3’s monthly market share has jumped from just under 11% (in September 2007) to now a very healthy 29%. The Blu-ray victory appears to have had the intended effect, and Sony will be pleased with its efforts so far in 2008.

    However, it may sound strange, but Microsoft has also claimed victory this month, despite coming last in the next-gen console war. As with last month, Microsoft is claiming stock shortages are the cause and that April will be the soonest that they can ensure stock is no longer a problem. Cynics might suggest that it’s just an excuse, while there does seem to be some data which suggest the claim has some validity. Regardless, the trend in the last few months have been decline in monthly market share for the 360, starting from September 2007: 45%, 36%, 35%, 37%, 30% and now finally, 26%. But to be fair, the one month that bucked the trend, December with 37%, was the month with the highest volume of sales, so if Microsoft had been expecting something like 33% in December, and got 37% instead, it does explain why they might be caught short-handed in January and now in February as well (that extra 4% equals more than 136,000 units). But excuses, whether real or not, can only last for so long and if the 360 does not outsell the PS3 in March or in April, then we will know who is telling the truth and who is not. So why is Microsoft still claiming victory? Well, it’s the software sales that will give Microsoft some encouragement.

    Five of the top 10 selling games in February were Xbox 360 titles, including previously PlayStation exclusive, Devil May Cry (4), which perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, outsold the PS3 version. The PS3 version of DMC4 was the only PS3 title to make the top 10, with 2 Wii titles, 1 DS and even 1 PS2 title making the top 10. The top 10 games sold in February were:

    1. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Xbox 360, Activision) – 296,200
    2. Devil May Cry 4 (Xbox 360, Capcom) – 295,200
    3. Wii Play (Wii, Nintendo) – 289,700
    4. Devil May Cry 4 (PS3, Capcom) – 233,500
    5. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (Wii, Activision) – 222,900
    6. Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games (DS, Sega) – 205,600
    7. Lost Odyssey (Xbox 360, Microsoft) – 203,600
    8. Turok (Xbox 360, Touchstone) -197,700
    9. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (PS2, Activision) – 183,800
    10. Rock Band (Xbox 360, MTV Games, Electronic Arts) – 161,800

    So Microsoft do have something to smile about, and their earlier efforts to release the console before all others seems to have paid off. By having the most number of consoles, software sales will come naturally and Microsoft again was the most profitable company out of the 3. With almost exactly 50% of sales in the top 10, it’s hard not to be.

    Predictions tell us that the Xbox 360 will regain its lead over the PS3, although barely, with April being a better months for Microsoft. The release of GTA IV in late April will also be interesting, especially to gauge whether the PS3 version or the Xbox 360 version (with exclusive content) will sell better. A good GTA IV led sales campaign might just help one console to dominate the rest of 2008.

    See you next month.

    Posted in Gaming, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, NPD Analysis, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | 5 Comments »

    Weekly News Roundup (16 March 2008)

    Sunday, March 16th, 2008

    What a week it has been. The server problem was finally fixed, although not without a lot of fixing and tweaking as you would expect when you do a major server move. Also received a bunch of cheap HD DVDs that I had ordered in previous weeks, pretty much all the titles I’ve ordered have now been received (I just need to find some time to watch them, that’s all). And I also celebrated my birthday during the week as well. So it’s been a busy week, and if there seems to be less news stories than normal, that’s probably why.

    So let’s not waste any time and start with copyright news. The MPAA is at it again (I seem to use this phrase quite a lot. But blame the MPAA, not me). This time, they are against Net Neutrality, because it might hurt their plans to spy on everybody. Net Neutrality basically means leaving the Net alone and not placing restrictions on things like content types, connection modes and placing priority on certain types of content, while reducing priority on other “less desirable” content. Obviously, a restricted and regulated network will benefit the MPAA in their attempt to control how, when, where and what we download. Having big business tell us what we can and cannot do is, in my opinion, even worse than Big Brother type governments doing so … at least government are elected (in most countries).

    On to HD. Now that people have finally gotten around to the idea that Blu-ray is *the* HD format for the future, questions are starting to be raised. Even staunch Blu-ray advocates such as Bill Hunt from The Digital Bits are starting to ask the BDA to make changes, the very changes that made people choose HD DVD like prices, profiles. We’ve been flooded with news of Blu-ray prices rises, both for hardware and movies, but I think it’s too soon to tell what the general direction Blu-ray will be heading to next. If the BDA is serious about replacing SD DVDs with Blu-ray, then prices will drop. If they see Blu-ray as a money maker that is needed to replaced flagging DVD sales, then prices may not drop as quickly as one would like. There is a very interesting read on Gizmondo that highlights some of the problems that Blu-ray will be facing in the short and long term. It certainly is a pretty pessimistic look at things, but you would have to agree with their key points, which are: the cost of the format war means prices drops will hurt manufacturers and studios, profile confusion, and productivity problems. On that last point, the article raises something quite interesting in that they speculate Universal studios might be having trouble releasing their titles on Blu-ray due to the entire 2008 production stock already being allocated to other studios. In other words, Universal can’t release movies on Blu-ray because they can’t get production time in the already over capacity production lines. New lines are being built, but they cannot come online quick enough. Of course, this might all be speculation, but one thing is for certain: HD DVD would not have experienced this problem as all recent DVD production lines are capable of producing HD DVDs. And speaking of former HD DVD studios releasing titles on Blu-ray, Paramount is apparently set to re-release their previous Blu-ray titles (before they went HD DVD exclusive) again next week. Seems that they kept their Blu-ray stock, as opposed to pulping them as some rumours had suggested. Unfortunately, Universal never got into Blu-ray production, so it will be some time before you see The Bourne Trilogy on Blu-ray. Another problem for Blu-ray is that upscaled DVD performance continues to improve. Oppo this week officially announced their new DVD upscaler, the DV-983H, which early testing has showed to be possibly the best performing on the market today. From my experience, a fairly average/poor HD encode is often the same or worse than a decent DVD encode upscaled (case in point, T2 Extreme Edition DVD vs T2 HD DVD Australian version). Such decent DVD encodes look very “HD” when upscaled, but the general rule is that real HD, when given a proper encoding, will always look better. But just because it is better, doesn’t mean people are prepared to pay extra for it … think DVD-Audio and SACD, although better video quality is easier to sell than better audio quality.

    Meanwhile, HD DVD is selling quite well (the latest numbers showed a 10% market share jump for HD DVD in the US, even though the big sales haven’t really started, at least not at Australian “everything under $10” levels yet). For those that want to join in, keep an eye on this page and this page, as well as the blog. I wish somebody would release Australian sales numbers, because it must be at least 20:1 in HD DVD’s favour in the past few weeks. The Xbox 360 add-on drive is proving particularly popular due to its low price, but Microsoft this week denied again that they are working on a similar add-on for Blu-ray. 

    Before I move on properly to gaming, DivX support is coming to a lot more Blu-ray players than just the PS3. In fact, their support will be even better than the PS3’s (which is a bit strange). Anyone who has used the PS3’s DivX/XviD playback function will know that it is somewhat limited, with no DivX Ultra support, no support for GMC/Q-Pel and has a few other problems as well. But when a file does work, it plays beautifully. And while the PS3 has had a firmware update (adds nothing of significance, other than some gaming compatibility fixes), the next big update will be interesting if they add enhanced DivX support, as well as perhaps DTS-HD MA decoding (the one essential Blu-ray feature that the PS3 sorely lacks) and even Profile 2.0, although I believe the latter two will be more likely to come only after standalones with similar features are available.

    Now onto gaming proper, February’s US NPD figures are out and I will provide a full analysis in the next few days. Once again, all three gaming companies are claiming victory. Nintendo’s Wii sold the most, so they’re claiming they’re the best (with justification, IMO – but if I’m a bit sick and tired of seeing another story about how the Wii is helping the elderly, the injured and basically curing all disease and bringing world peace). Sony’s PS3 sold more than the Xbox 360, so they’re claiming victory too (mainly thanks to Blu-ray’s victory, I think). While Microsoft is still saying Xbox 360 stock shortages are affecting sales figures, and that they sold the most software and made the most profit, which they think is the most important. If Microsoft is really having stock problems, then what they say makes sense, since people are still choosing the 360 over the PS3 when it comes to multi-platform releases (Call of Duty 4, for example). It will be interesting to see which consoles gains most from the release of GTA IV, but I believe with the 360 install base much greater than the PS3 in the US, the 360 version of GTA IV, with the exclusive content, will probably sell more copies. I’ve yet to decide which version I would get (PS3 or 360), although I’m leaning towards 360 due to not having to buy another controller just to get rumble capabilities (and the fact that the 360 version was produced first, meaning it might play a little bit better). Once I assume 360 stock become plentiful again, Microsoft will fight the PS3 with further price cuts which will put pressure on Sony to follow. Expect to see a 360 GTA IV pack for less cost than the basic PS3, and it will sell like hotcakes.

    See you next week.

    Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, PS3, PS4, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (16 March 2008)

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