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Archive for July, 2011

Weekly News Roundup (31 July 2011)

Sunday, July 31st, 2011

Hope the past week has treated you well? Me, same as usual, and not getting that much work done despite feeling like I’ve done a lot of work (yeah, one of those weeks). I did re-organize the forum a bit (and yes, we do have a forum, it seems to be a fact that’s not commonly known going by the forum’s visitor stats), tried to reduce the number of forums, and re-focus some of the discussions. And so if you ever have a digital video authoring, conversion, editing or encoding problem, or want to post your opinions on some of the news articles mentioned in the WNR (there should be a thread for each news item linked to here in the “Latest News” forum), then feel free to pop over and I’ll be there to say hi.

A couple of interesting stories to go through this week, so let’s get started before it becomes August.

Let’s do something different and start with the copyright news. The world’s unluckiest file sharer, Jammie Thomas-Rasset. Not that being fined $54,000 for downloading 24 song can be considered luck, but when you’re that unlucky, you have to take what you get.

For what seems like the billionth time, Thomas-Rasset has received a new figure representing the damages she needs to pay the RIAA, for daring to do the incredibly nasty act of downloading 24 songs without paying. Once again, a judge had to intervene and overrule an earlier jury decision to award the RIAA $1.5 million, by reducing the damages to “only” $54,000. The judge cited the Constitution and justice as reasons for reducing the unjustifiable 7 figure damages reward. The RIAA has voiced their disapproval at the decision, and it does not surprise me one bit the RIAA seems to have no respect for either the US Constitution or justice. Hopefully, Thomas-Rasset will not make the earlier mistake of trying to appeal the decision, and simply pay the $54,000 (or make some kind of financial arrangement), as her previous attempts at reducing damages has not worked, other than to add to her mounting legal bills. But even if she accepts the terms, the RIAA could still appeal, all the way to the Supreme Court, because reports suggests they’ve already spent at least $3 million on the case, which they hoped would be a deterrent for music pirates (hasn’t really worked), and $54,000 is not much of a deterrent compared to $1.92 million.

UK court forces BT to block access to Newzbin2 at the request of the MPAA

A couple of weeks ago, I brought to your attention the MPA’s (the International arm of the MPAA) UK high court battle with UK ISP BT (holy trinity of acronyms, Batman). The high court has handed down its decision, and it’s one that will have long lasting repercussions. The judge has ruled that BT should help the MPA block Newzbin2 so BT’s subscribers cannot access the website. BT’s arguments that they’re simply an utility, like an electricity provider, did not wash with the judge who ruled that, unlike an electricity company, BT is fully aware of what its subscribers are using its services for, and thus, has the responsibility to turn off supply if the uses are judged to be unlawful. The major problem with this argument is that it assumes just because BT *can* find out what its services are being used for, that it *should* find out and help groups like the MPA monitor usage. It’s like saying the phone company can find out about all you by listening on your conversations, and so because *can*, they *should* (and then should report or tak action against unlawful activities). The second problem with this decision is that, the judge, MPA and even BT are satisfied that Newzbin2 does distribute unauthorized content, based on an earlier high court case, but that case was for the UK operated Newzbin. Nobody has actually bothered to establish the guilt or even the ownership of Newzbin2, and while it might be obvious in this case that both sites are trying to do the same thing, the question is does the MPA need to launch a new lawsuit against, say, The Pirate Bay, or can they use this decision to force all ISPs to block any website they allege is promoting piracy?

But in the world of Internet piracy, mere allegation is “good enough” it seems, and hardly any distinction is made between sites that host, link, embed, or link to links, because if the RIAA/MPAA says you’re bad, then you must be. Staying in the UK, and taking the “allegations equals guilt” model further, a new plan wants search engine results to be classified by a “traffic light” system, where “bad” sites that may be offering pirated content are marked with a red light to warn users not to use these sites. Without getting into the implementation issues of a system that’s supposed to judge and classify billions of web pages, this whole idea assumes that people, the so called “moral majority”, aren’t aware that they’re visiting certain websites and the content there is not legal, and so would be warned away by a simple graphic. I think if people aren’t aware of what they’re downloading, listening to, or watching is legal or not is mainly because they don’t care. You go to YouTube and watch a music video, do you really care that much if it’s an official, authorized upload, or one of the billion mirrors for the same thing. And when people watch on MegaVideo, or download from RapidShare, are they really so clueless that they haven’t worked out that it isn’t legal, and do they really care, especially knowing that these download methods are not being monitored for anti-piracy activities? I guess the only positive of this plan is that it will make finding pirated content a lot easier – simply follow the “red lights”, to get all your piracy fix.

HBO has been used as a example in a new study that tries to show improving quality best helps to fight piracy

I’ve always said the best way to combat piracy is to increase quality (or at least decrease price so that it fairly reflects the product’s lack of quality). Now, people way smarter than me have written a new study that tries to quantify, what seems to me, is common sense. The new study specifically cites HBO and Valve as examples of where quality improvements have led to reduction in piracy and, most importantly, an increase in revenue. To me, both of these companies are innovative in their approach (HBO Go is very useful, if you’re in the US, and we all know Valve has single-handedly saved the PC gaming industry via the Steam model), and neither has focused their energy on copyright enforcement (take Steam’s DRM approach, for example). The study also reinforces this point, that the companies focused less on copyright enforcement tended to focus more on quality, and as a direct result, has more successfully raised their revenue. The study doesn’t mention Ubisoft’s draconian DRM approach, but I think it would make an interesting study in itself, to map out the full effect of Ubi DRM in regards to piracy rate and revenue, compared to say the success of Valve with their games, and also the Steam model.

But as far Ubisoft is concerned, Ubi DRM is a huge success. I know this because they’ve come out and said it, that Ubi DRM is a huge success. They say it’s a huge success because they have stats that show piracy rates have decreased dramatically for games that uses the “always-on Internet connection required” DRM. And you know what, I don’t doubt that at all. But you can often tell the truth not by what someone says, but by what they don’t say, and Ubisoft didn’t really mention revenue at all, which is strange. Considering that Ubisoft used the phrase “clear reduction in piracy”, you would think there would be a “clear increase in revenue” to follow that statement. But this statement was not made, and so I can only assume that revenue has not risen (and it’s hard to calculate anyway, as how can you compared say the revenue made from one game release to that of another?). The problem is that decreasing piracy does not mean increasing revenue, because pirates have a huge choice of pirated games to play, and if they don’t find one available (because the DRM hasn’t been cracked yet), they’ll just play another (even the most avid pirate gamer can’t possibly play all the pirated games out there). And this assumes Ubi DRM is hard to crack, which is not true any more. And there are also negative forces in play, with excessive DRM causing a drop in revenue as paying gamers, who also have far too many games to choose from, choose games that don’t use Ubi DRM. During the recent Steam Summer sales, I saw countless comments on countless forums where people posted their hesitation in buying Ubisoft games due to Ubi DRM, despite games like Assassin’s Creed 2 being on sales for less than $7 (and only committed in the end because others replied saying Ubisoft have toned down Ubi DRM in older releases). So how much money is Ubisoft losing because of Ubi DRM?

Of course, for truly great must-have games, gamers will put up with ridiculous DRM, but for these types of games, even some of the biggest pirates may come out of the woodworks and make this the one game they do buy. Quality is still very much king.

High Definition

In Blu-ray/3D news, apparently the Windows 7 (and Vista) native Blu-ray burning tool has a huge bug that prevents successful burns, if the compilation size is over a certain size.

Why bother with the buggy Windows 7 Blu-ray burner when you can simply use the freeware ImgBurn

This comes as a huge surprise to people because, one, they didn’t even know that Windows 7 could burn Blu-ray discs, and two, they didn’t know why anyone would use the native Blu-ray burner, when you’ve got cool free tools like ImgBurn (whose official website is proudly hosted by us).

From analysing the very small amount of information Microsoft released about the bug, it appears the bug could be related to how Microsoft loves using Binary prefix, while storage manufacturers prefer to use SI prefix. With SI prefix, 1 KB is 1000 or 10^3 bytes, while with binary prefix, it takes 1024 bytes, or 2^10. So 25GB with SI prefix is only equal to about5 23.3GB with a binary prefix (to avoid confusion, a new standard was set up to use KiB, MiB and GiB to indicate binary prefix, but hardly anyone uses it, and certainly not Microsoft). So maybe Microsoft’s native Blu-ray burner thought that discs could hold 25GB in Windows notation (or 25GiB), even though Blu-ray only holds 23.3GiB, and so of course the burns would fail is the tool doesn’t warn users that they’re trying to burn over the allowed limit. This seems like a simple fix, so it’s strange that there’s no hotfix, or even a hint of one from Microsoft, for this bug that seems to have been present since Vista SP2 introduced Blu-ray burning support.

And in gaming, not much again, except two more stories about Sony. The first one has Sony being sued again over the PSN hack, but this time by their own insurer, as Zurich American tries to get out of having to pay Sony to cover the costs of expected class action lawsuits and settlements related to the hack and outage.

It’s probably just standard procedure for insurance companies, or it could mean that Zurich American really thinks that the class action lawsuits could end up costing Sony a lot, and they want to protect themselves as early as possible. I don’t think even Sony feels they can placate everyone angered by the PSN hack just by giving them a couple of outdated games, despite inFAMOUS being pretty good fun.

The other news relates to Sony’s profit results for fiscal Q1 (April 1st to June 30, covering the entire PSN hack saga), and it’s not great news. PS3 console unit sales dropped by 25% compared to the same quarter last year, although Sony still expects the fiscal year to end in growth of the console. Surprisingly, the PSP was the only Sony console to see a unit sale increase, but that’s probably due to the super discounting that has been going on ($99 for a PSP with God Of War Ghost Of Sparta, is pretty good value here in Australia). And more surprisingly, PS2 sales are still holding up well, almost selling as many units as the PS3 (1.4m compared to the PS3’s 1.8m). It just shows how successful the PS2 was, and how Sony have totally failed to replicate the same success with the PS3. Globally, the PS3 still managed to outsell both the Wii and Xbox 360 (individually, not combined), thanks to strong performances in Japan, but the Xbox 360 was the only console to record growth out of these three.

And that brings us to the end of this WNR. Have a good one.

Posted in Copyright, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4 | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (31 July 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (24 July 2011)

Sunday, July 24th, 2011

A solemn start to this week’s WNR. Our thoughts go out to those affected by the events in Norway. Tragedies such as this makes the issues that the WNR covers pale in significance to the many other problems in the world today, and while this is true, just because something is less significant, it doesn’t mean it’s not significant in its own limited way, it shouldn’t become an ignored topic. And life, as cliche as it sounds, must go on.

But, and I’m going a little bit off topic here, what really struck me was the media coverage immediately following the bombing, and, when looking back at it now, how slanted it was. I think many people, if not most, immediately came to certain conclusions about the terrorist attack. Conclusions that ultimately painted the suspect(s) as Middle Eastern. This, I can understand, because we are human beings, and we are emotion creatures and ones that that need a sense of understanding, when an event that makes little sense happens. We we jump to conclusions, join the dots even if it meant drawing some of our own dots to complete the picture. It’s understandable.

Once upon a time, the news meant facts. And in the absence of facts, the media kept us safe from our own human nature, or at least attempted to, to prevent us from jumping to conclusions, to remind us to hold our judgement until the facts, and the full facts, have emerged. But that today’s news media, and even the so called respected sources, all became cheerleaders for the view that only terrorists of the Islamic fundamentalist persuasion could have been responsible for the tragedy in Norway, shows us how news has become entertainment, how facts (and fact checking) has become optional, how accuracy has given way to expediency and the need to set a clearly defined narrative, and why all of this hurts our democratic society in more ways than even the most insidious terrorist masterminds can hope for.

Anyway, this was just something I wanted to get off my chest before we start this week’s, very much opinionated, narrative drive, and fact-check-lacking WNR (and you should consider yourself lucky that a hack like myself is not allowed to cover the more important issues), so sorry for the interruption.

Starting with copyright news, we start with the FBI’s arrest of members of the hactivism group, Anonymous.

Anonymous members are arrested by the FBI, but the attacks continue

I’ve expressed the opinion before that I was surprised the FBI or other law enforcement hadn’t taken action against Anonymous. I thought that, sooner or later, one of the targets Anonymous chose, and they did choose quite deliberately, would come screaming to law enforcement for assistance (as some of them were targeted *because* of their “too close for comfort” relationship with governments and law enforcement via lobbying). I don’t really want to get into a debate about the right and wrongs of hacking, leaks (wiki or otherwise), and hacktivism in general, but groups like Anonymous don’t exist in a vacuum – they exist and they are supported because of real (and sometimes perceived) bias, and until these biases are addressed, and the disenfranchaised feel they and their opinions are represented, there will only be more groups like Anonymous and LulzSec, not less, no matter how many arrests the FBI makes.

And you know something is not right when a private company, really out there to protects its own interests, end up being more representative of the general public than the government that the people have elected. This time, it’s Google arguing against the recently passed, and soon to be adopted, copyright law amendments in New Zealand. The NZ government, under pressure from the entertainment industry (and not even the industry in their own country), passed three-strike type laws, which allowed rights holders to force ISPs to issue warnings to suspected copyright infringers. But these kind of laws always assumed that an allegation equals guilt, that an IP address is enough to “convict”, and Google is arguing that, this shouldn’t be the case. The NZ laws actually specifically state that all allegations should be treated as fact, when the tribunal set up to deal with cases hand down rulings, even if the tribunal felt that the evidence was not enough. The whole rationale behind graduated response is to short circuit the legal system, to turn allegations into facts, because the problem is otherwise “too big” to deal with via the courts. An IP address is circumstantial evidence, at best, and the quantity of such evidence should not improve their quality.

A different kind of pirated porn

As otherwise, we might end up doing something silly like suing 70 year old grandmothers for illegally downloading porn. Oh. As far as I’m concerned, there’s not a huge bit of difference between the “sue for settlement” gang, and the graduated response proponents – both are taking flimsy evidence and trying to make a buck (or to prevent a possibly non-existent buck from being lost). So we have a grandmother who doesn’t even know what a torrent is, using a wireless router set up by a family member probably, one that was subsequently unsecured, and hacked into for “nefarious” usage. And we have the law firm involved allegedly telling her that the “unsecured router” defence was not a sound one, and that she should just charge the thousands of dollars in settlement fees to her credit card or possibly face a six figure amount in court. Other than the fact that it is a defence, and one that has been used even recently, there’s also the fact that had she gone to court (and it seems she’s determined to do so, good on her), there’s no way that any judge or jury, in their right minds, would ever reward $150,000 against her, that’s assuming the law firm involved even turns up to court. Expect the case to be dropped double quick, now that the media is involved (so I guess the news media is not entirely useless these days, not when it comes to potential “sensationalist” stories such as this one). But the 30 year old single males, using the same defence, probably won’t get very far, unfortunately, nor would he get the same kind of media coverage, despite probably being just as innocent.

The madness that is copyright enforcement these days all center around the idea that, stopping piracy is important because piracy is bad, M’kay. But is stopping or even just caring about piracy really that important? Not according to Super Meat Boy (no, this is not the porno the 70 year old grandma downloaded) developers, Team Meat. Super Meat Boy, again not a porno, is an indie game for Xbox Live Arcade and PC, and a pretty popular one at that, with 600,000 buyers as of April. The popularity of the game also means that it’s pirated a lot, but Team Meat’s Edmund McMillen says he just doesn’t care about piracy, his exact words were “we don’t f**king care”. It’s all about word of mouth, McMillen says, and piracy helps to spread it. I would add that people also tend to buy good games, or anything they feel has value, regardless of whether it’s available for free (illegally) or not. Nobody likes “stealing”, or at least committing morally ambiguous actions, and if they can afford it and it it’s good “value”, they will buy. So if game developers cared less about piracy and stopping it, and cared more about making good games like Team Meat has done, then maybe, maybe, piracy will solve itself (it also helps for Super Meat Boy to be part of a lot of Steam sales – I got my copy for $3.75).

High Definition

In HD/3D news, a milestone of sorts for Blu-ray this week as Disney announce their release plans for ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides’.

Instead of having a Blu-ray+DVD combo, a Blu-ray only and one or two DVD editions, for the first time ever on a new A-list release, Disney will delay the DVD-only edition of the film for a month, and forgo the Blu-ray only edition entirely. So when the movie comes out on disc in October, it will only be available in two different combos (three, if you count the “DVD packaging” edition), including a 5-disc combo that also includes the Blu-ray 3D and Digital Copy versions, for $4 more (on Amazon). And since Blu-ray combos, even the ones with DVD packaging, are counted as Blu-ray sales, it effectively means ‘On Stranger Tides’ will be a Blu-ray exclusive, until the DVD only version is released a month later.

Disney is not new to this kind of release schedule, previously employing this for their classic animated releases like Snow White. And it has worked wonders to boost, artificially in some respect, Blu-ray sales numbers, making these Disney releases some of the most popular on the HD format. And it looks like ‘On Stranger Tides’ will be the next record breaker (although ‘Deathly Hallows Part 2’ might have something to say about this).

Is this really a big deal? I think it is. It’s the first step towards making DVDs obsolete, although it might mean they’re still around in combo form for some time yet. The truth is that, it doesn’t really cost studios all that much to include a DVD copy with the Blu-ray version (or vice versa), so it’s all about demand, perception of value and all that.

Digital Copy - insert, enter code, transfer, copy ... and then only in the "allowed" formats, is not worth the trouble

There was also the news that Fox is bringing Digital Copy to Android phones, which I didn’t think was big enough of a news item, since I already have a Fox Blu-ray that has a digital copy for Android (Unstoppable), and when UltraViolet rolls out, cross format compatibility of digital copies may not be such a huge issue any more. But it is kind of annoying, that if studios don’t include the right digital copy, your only choice to enjoy the movie on the platform of your choice is to buy it again, or illegally rip it (but the kind of “illegal” that nobody would get into trouble for, if you don’t share the copy with others). When we “buy” a Blu-ray, we’re not really buying the movie, or even licensing the movie itself – we’re only licensing the copy of the movie that appears on the platforms/media we are paying for.

And in gaming, not much, expect that I did manage to get the NPD analysis written, using the “guestimated” (ie. made up) numbers of the PS3 that I threatened to use in the last WNR.

The Xbox 360 was once again the king of consoles, although I predict the year on year growth the console has been experiencing may experience a slight pause, thanks largely to the larger than expected bump the console got last year this time for the then new “Slim” version of the console.

Story that I didn’t really cover this week included one about the PS3 3D headset. I’m sorry, but VR headsets, to me, are so 90’s, and you can never really make them light enough for them not to be a literal pain in the neck. The idea is sound though, that instead of having headache inducing 3D glasses based on flickering between images for your left and right eye, have goggles that actually give each of your eye a different picture, and then add head tracking to boot.

There’s also a story about the next-gen Xbox 360 having “Avatar-like” graphics. Maybe it’s just me, but I might be the small minority that thought Avatar’s CGI still looked quite fake, and some of the plants definitely had a “game console” look to them.

That’s all I have for the week. See you in seven day’s time.

Posted in 3D, Copyright, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | 2 Comments »

Game Consoles – June 2011 NPD Sales Figure Analysis

Thursday, July 21st, 2011

Welcome to another monthly edition of the NPD Game Console Sales Analysis, this time analyzing the home based game console hardware and software sales for the month of June 2011. We’re once again one console short of having all the hardware sales statistics, and once again, it’s Sony that’s the lone holdout. But thanks to information released by the other manufacturers, mainly Microsoft, we can still estimate fairly accurately what Sony’s PS3 hardware sales numbers look like, and so the NPD analysis feature can continue for one more month. For those that are new to this, this analysis looks at US video games sales figures compiled by NPD, unreleased by NPD due to pressure from the gaming companies, but then leaked by various sources, including gaming companies, if/when it suits them.

The figures for US sales in June 2011 are below, ranked in order of number of sales (June 2010 figures also shown, including percentage change):

Xbox 360: 507,000 (Total: 27.8 million; June 2010: 451,700 – up 12%)
PS3: 276,000 (estimated) (Total: 17.1 million; June 2010: 304,800 – down 9%)
Wii: 273,000 (Total: 35.9 million; June 2010: 422,500 – down 35%)

NPD June 2011 Game Console US Sales Figures

NPD Game Console Total US Sales Figures (as of June 2011)

My prediction from last month was:

No big changes, so the same hardware ordering as this month. The new top selling games will be Infamous 2 and Duke Nukem Forever (on a side note, ‘Forever’ really is such an apt name for the game considering the development time), but the overall top sellers will be some of the same titles as in May.

If my estimation of PS3 hardware sales is correct, then I was wrong about the ordering of hardware sales, although it was a close run affair between the PS3 and the Wii. Software wise, both Duke Nukem Forever and Infamous 3 made their marks on the top 10, but more on that later.

Starting with the PS3 hardware estimation, I think it’s best I go over the estimation process, which ironically, were mostly based on statements made by Microsoft, since Sony made no mention of their hardware results this month. It all comes from the slightly vague Microsoft statement about having a “48% share of the overall current-generation console market share”. It’s vague because when Microsoft talks about “current-generation”, it’s unclear if they’re referring to all consoles, or just the home based consoles, but it should be the latter, since the former won’t make sense. And Microsoft should also be talking about June only, since for life-time wise, and even 2011-wise, the “48%” market share just doesn’t add up. And armed with the “knowledge”, and knowing both the Xbox 360 and Wii’s hardware stats, it’s then quite easy to estimate the PS3’s hardware sales number for June, which comes to around 276,000. And Microsoft’s other statement about nearly selling twice as many units as their nearest competitor seems to support this number, since any higher, and Microsoft wouldn’t have been able to make the claim without stretching the meaning of the term “nearly”.

At first glance, this seems to be a good result for Sony. PS3 hardware sales are up more than 100,000 units compared to the previous month, and it did beat the Wii, if the numbers are correct. So why didn’t Sony (loudly) pronounce these set of good results, and instead, went all quiet in their press release in regards to the hardware numbers? I can only guess is that there was no year-on-year growth for the PS3 in June, as June 2010 recorded higher sales for the console. If my estimation is correct, this breaks a 4 month trend in which the PS3 has seen year-on-year growth, and perhaps this is what Sony didn’t want to focus on (especially, given the PSN hack, media “hacks” will jump to the conclusion that the breaking of the trend is a direct result of the hacking outage). But more careful analysis shows that June 2010 was a better than usual month for the PS3, which I attributed back then to the clearing up of the PS3 stock shortage problem that hurt sales for the console throughout the first half of 2010 (June 2010 was 85% higher than June 2009). So for the PS3 to not perform as well in June 2011 as in June 2010, is really no big deal, and the decline was mild anyway, nothing like that of say, the Wii.

Which brings us to the Wii. 35% down compared to the same month last year, and nothing really positive can be said of the Wii, other than the fact that, for such a technologically inferior console, it’s done remarkably well and surely has already made Nintendo enough money. And with the Wii U already announced, the Wii’s results will become less and less important for Nintendo as they concentrate on the development of the Wii U.

And last, but certainly not the least, we have the tremendous Xbox 360 numbers. Nearly double that of last month’s results, and the only console yet again to show year-on-year growth. This is made more remarkable by the fact that, this time last year, the new “Slim” model came out, and the sales bump associated with it meant that it was always unlikely that the Xbox 360 would have any sort of year-on-year growth, but here we are. Now, some of this can be attributed to various bundling deals Microsoft had, including the deal where selected PC purchases get a free Xbox 360, and the fact that the “Slim” didn’t go on sale until midway through June 2010. So next month, we could see the first ever year-on-year sales decline for the Xbox 360 in quite a while (versus last year’s sales bump), although it’s still a shoe-in to win the best selling console of the month award. Regardless, it’s been an impressive year for the Xbox 360, and the “Slim” has been a huge success, since it now makes the Xbox 360 the most balanced console in terms of price, performance (no more RRoD!), and audience (both hardcore and casual/family gamers are well catered for).

Onto software sales, or games. L.A. Noire retains top spot, as the new releases, Duke Nukem Forever and the PS3 exclusive Infamous 2 could not unseat the crime solving game. While Sony was remaining tight lipped about the PS3 hardware numbers, they rightly made a big deal about the performance of Infamous 2, which although third, is still the highest single-platform performer for June. It certainly did better than its predecessor, released in May 2009, and ranked only 5th, even though the chart back then was split based on platform specific releases, not like this month’s chart, which combines all platform sales for the same title as one listing. And releasing an exclusive earlier in the month, as opposed to in the last few days, does help it to climb the ranks. The other notable new entries for this month include the 3DS version of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Disney’s Cars 2. Here’s the full software sales chart for June:

L.A Noire (Take 2, Xbox 360, PS3)
Duke Nukem Forever (Take 2, Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
Infamous 2 (Sony, PS3)
Lego Pirates of the Caribbean (Disney, Wii, Xbox 360, NDS, PS3, 3DS, PSP, PC)
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D (Nintendo, 3DS)
Call of Duty: Black Ops (Activision Blizzard, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, NDS,PC)
NBA 2K11 (Take 2, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PS2, PSP, PC)
Mortal Kombat 2011 (Warner Bros. Interactive, PS3, Xbox 360)
Cars 2 (Disney, NDS, Wii, Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
Just Dance 2 (Ubisoft, Wii)

Time to make the usual prediction. As mentioned earlier, I think the Xbox 360 will experience its first year-on-year decline in ages, but still comfortably stay at the top of the home based console hardware sales charts, leaving the Wii and PS3 to fight it out for second and third place, and I think the Wii might be better positioned to win for some reason. It’s NCAA Football season again, so it will be the top seller, but otherwise, not a huge month for games again.

See you next month.

Posted in Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, NPD Analysis, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | 2 Comments »

Weekly News Roundup (17 July 2011)

Sunday, July 17th, 2011

A news-tastic week, and I guess we were due one. It’s a shame, because I was quite busy messing up my Paper (Star) Wars Android game update, in which I released not one, not two, but three versions of the app. It always happens like this though, you get ready to release an update, do all the testing you can, confident that it works, and then you release it only to find that it’s introduced even more bugs than before. But sometimes it’s hard to properly test an app that, according to Android Market, can be deployed on 430+ different Android devices. I added a crash report feature to the app, so that I can get a report every time it crashes, and so far, no new crash reports in the last 72 hours, so that’s something I guess. I also took the opportunity to add an official website for the app, which includes some getting started tips, and also Facebook and Twitter pages.

With plenty of news to go through, let’s get started.

In Copyright news, opposition to the controversial PROTECT IP act is gaining momentum, as this week, more than 100 law professors from around the United States have signed an open letter urging Congress to reconsider the new copyright legislation.

So we’ve had Internet pioneer, leaders in the field of technology, and now also law experts, all coming out attacking PROTECT IP. The law professors repeated the same warnings about messing with the Internet’s naming system, but more importantly, they argued that, from a freedom of speech point of view. But it won’t be the first time Congress has ignored expert advice in favour of lobbyist suggestions, and so, I’m not too hopeful that PROTECT IP will be defeated.

Fair use creates jobs, while tougher copyright may destroy them

And the politicians will not find it a difficult to support the RIAA and MPAA, because, as you know, it’s all about the jobs. The RIAA and MPAA have been arguing that tougher copyright protection means more jobs, and a politician in the current climate can’t afford to be seen as being anti-jobs, even if it is at the expense of being anti-free speech. But a new report by the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) shows that tougher copyright laws may actually have a negative effect on job creation, as it turns out, the US economy these days are very much driven by fair use related activities. Even I didn’t realise that fair use related industries accounted for 17% of the entire United States’ GDP, some $4.5 trillion in value added contributions. That’s much greater than the film and music business combined, and it makes sense when you see companies like Google, Facebook, Mozilla all embracing open source and taking advantage of fair use in some way.

PROTECT IP, in many ways, is just a protectionist measure in favour of the film and music business, and such measures always hurt other industries, and in this case, it’s the huge tech/Internet industry. But because one industry is more active in lobbying than the others, common sense does not always prevail in Washington. And just because the film and music business receives more protection, it doesn’t mean that they actually benefit financially as well, because tougher copyright laws does not equal more sales (and could even equal less).

If the US wants to see a real world example of tougher copyright laws, and the effect it has on revenue, they can simple look towards France, and see how their “Hadopi” three-strikes law (named after the agency, Hadopi, that is in charge of administering the program) is working out. A new report shows the extraordinary level of monitoring that occurs, some 18 million incidents of piracy were recorded in just nine months. But out of the 18 million, only 470,000 users were sent “first-strike” emails, warning them of alleged copyright infringement being conducted via their Internet accounts. And then, in what seems to be strongest indication of the effectiveness of three-strikes, only 20,000 “second-strike” emails were sent out, suggesting that 450,000 people took the first warning the right way and “stopped” pirating. And at the end of it all, only 10 people were being considered for further action after reaching their third strike – so that’s millions spent to catch 10 people.

But despite what appears to be a 95% reduction in piracy (going from 470,000 first time offenders to only 20,000 second time offenders), there’s almost no information on the actual economic benefits of the reduction in piracy, if the reduction even exists. I can only assume that there has been no positive effect on music and movie sales in France as a result of three-strikes, because otherwise, the RIAA/MPAA would be using it as evidence that every country in the world should adopt graduated response. And just because people stopped being detected, it doesn’t mean they’ve stopped pirating – direct downloads have never been monitored by Hadopi, and it’s impossible for them to monitor BitTorrent usage if it’s done via a VPN either.

It makes perfect sense to me though, that if someone who couldn’t afford to buy a movie or a piece of music still remains in the same situation after tougher copyright laws are introduced, and as long as this is true, there can be no increase in revenue. People will stop enjoying content illegally, and if they can’t afford the legal version, they will simply stop enjoying the content entirely. And this reduces the word of mouth effect, and also prevents “upgraders”, those that download illegally and then purchase later because they really liked the content. And so, tougher copyright laws may actually lead to revenue loss. The truth of the matter is that movie home entertainment revenue is much higher than what it was before the Internet become popular, and so is gaming. And that while the music industry isn’t doing as well, increased competition from other sectors (such as movies and gaming), and the increasing popularity of purchasing music singles over albums, are all more accountable for the decline in revenue than just piracy. The music industry needs to stop blaming piracy on all of its problems, and the movie industry needs to stop pretending there is a problem (what with box office receipts at an all time high, and home entertainment revenue up significantly compared to 15 years ago).

This graph shows that music industry revenue has been dominated by album sales ...	... and as you can see, albums were popular on CD but has been declining ...
... and this graph shows digital music is all about singles, which may explain the industry's revenue loss

The truth is that the way people consume content has changed drastically, and yes, a lot of that is due to the Internet. But with change, comes opportunity, and if the film and music industry aren’t interested in exploring the new opportunities, others will, and in this case, it has been the technology companies, like Apple and Netflix, that has benefited the most. And the latest to join their ranks may be Spotify, which has just been launched in the United States, albeit in a limited invitation only phase. Spotify attempts to address one of the fundamental shifts in media consumption, the lessening need to “own” music (well, people never owned music anyway, there merely licensed a recording of it), and the increasing need to consume (which makes owning far too expensive and time consuming to manage). So instead, people stream all the music they want in an on-demand fashion, for free if they’re willing to put up with ads. It’s completely legal, so no moral guilty as compared to piracy, plus the music industry can receive financial compensation. And those that do want to “own”, or at least rent, can buy one of Spotify’s paid for plans, with more money going towards the music industry. With Spotify, there’s almost no reason at all for pirating music.

Spotify is launching in the US, and there are now even fewer reasons for people to pirate music

And in a similar vein, UltraViolet for movies also attempt to change the way content is sold to more closely follow the consumer’s needs, an ambitious project that has the backing of more than 70 companies from a range of industries, with support, albeit reluctantly at certain aspects of it, from the movie industry. This week, UltraViolet licensing beings officially, and beta testing is also under way for an official launch later this year. If it works, it will finally allow movie lovers to buy the movie (or license it), as opposed to just buying the media that the movies comes on. It’s Digital Copy, but done right, with industry wide support, and done via the Internet.

And so, there is hope, that the music and film industry can embrace change and come out the other side stronger than before. Let’s just hope they don’t erode all of our civil rights, in a vain attempt to use legislation to stop copyright infringement, before then.

And finally, before we move on to other topics, the MPAA’s lawsuit against Hotfile has some new developments this week, as the judge in case threw out the MPAA’s claim of direct copyright infringement, simply on the grounds that Hotfile themselves did not upload any of the content that is considered to be infringing on the MPAA’s copyrights. However, the judge did feel Hotfile can be found guilty of secondary copyright infringement, of inducement to infringement by paying affiliates money for uploading popular content. I don’t think it will end well for Hotfile unfortunately, as the MPAA has chosen their target wisely, by choosing a file sharing host that actively promotes popular uploads with payment, and thus, encourage users to upload pirated content.

High Definition

In HD/3D news, a new report suggests that Blu-ray will beat DVD by 2014 to become the most popular disc format around.

But even by then, Blu-ray’s gain in revenue would not have offset DVD’s loss, and so it will be digital media that saves the day. The report, from London-based Futuresource, says that at that time, physical media will still account for more than half of the industry’s revenue, but digital media won’t be too far behind, accounting for 46% of the market.

While Blu-ray only accounts for 13% of the sell-through market last year, it’s not too hard to believe Blu-ray will get close to 50% by 2014, especially if you look at recent data as listed in our weekly Blu-ray/DVD sales analysis. Blu-ray revenue, in the US at least, appears to be already above the 20% mark on average, and for some recent releases like ‘Sucker Punch’ have managed to has a first week Blu-ray market share way above this average (61.42% to be precise).

Over 3.5 million Blu-ray 3D discs have been sold so far, but half of them were given away

There was also the news that 3D Blu-ray, despite the predictions of doom, has already sold some 3.5 million discs. Of course, half of these discs were given away with hardware, but with Avatar still not available for general sale on Blu-ray 3D, the number is still impressive. The main reason for the good result, and the good result of Blu-ray in general, is pricing. Blu-ray combos are now the best value packaging around usually, and with Blu-ray 3D “mega” combos becoming more popular (that is, the Blu-ray 3D version plus the Blu-ray 2D version, plus the DVD and Digital Copy versions), 3D is benefiting as a result.

What has decrease in value this week though is Netflix subscriptions, with price rises of up to 60% being announced. Netflix says the reason for the increase is due to their renewed focus on DVDs, by separating DVD and streaming into two separate, and cheaper plans (but at the same time, increasing the price of the combined plan). I suspect this price rise has to do with Netflix’s need to renegotiate digital rights for movies, with them having just agreed a new deal with Universal, and the need for a new deal with Sony. The rise in popularity of Netflix is obviously making studios feel they’ve not got the best deal they can, and they will want to squeeze as much out of Netflix as possible.

And before we move onto gaming, the news this week that new PS3s won’t be able to output Blu-ray in HD over component shouldn’t come as a surprise for those that read my news article on the Blu-ray analog sunset. Blu-ray’s copy protections system, AACS, mandated the removal of HD component support for all new players manufactured after January 1st 2011, and so the new PS3 model is just following the licensing agreement. The misinformation over HD being disabled even for games and streaming, is just that, misinformation.

And in gaming, there’s actually not much, but I wanted to address the NPD issue again. The NPD report for June has just been released, and as been the case recently, it’s light on actual details, especially for hardware sales figures. But Microsoft and Nintendo have decided to released hardware sales figures for their consoles, once again leaving Sony as the holdout.

I’m hoping a leak will reveal the Sony PS3 numbers in the next few days, but even without the leak we can deduce that the PS3 probably didn’t do very well in June, despite Infamous 2 selling extremely well. First of all, the Xbox 360 was the most popular console with 507,000 units sold, while Nintendo revealed the sale of 273,000 Wiis. Microsoft’s statement mentioned their 507,000 was nearly twice as much as other home consoles, confirming the Wii number at least and pointing to the fact that the Wii was probably the second best selling console. And with Sony’s statement only pointing to the success of Infamous 2, with no acknowledgement of year-on-year growth for the PS3 (something they’ve been vocal about recently). In fact, Microsoft’s statement actually says the Xbox 360 is the only console to have year-on-year growth in June.

So the PS3 sold less than in June 2010 (304,800 units), and so the only issue is whether the PS3 outsold the Wii or not. Microsoft’s statement mentioned that the Xbox 360 held a “48% share of the overall current-generation console market share”, although it was unclear whether this referred to June or the whole of 2011 (it’s not lifetime sales, that’s for sure). Assuming it is for June, and for home based consoles only, then a little bit of maths puts the PS3 at 276,250 units (if 507,000 was 48%, extrapolate to 100%, then minus the known 360 and Wii numbers, to get the PS3 number).

But I hate guessing, so I’ll wait a few more days to see if there are any leaks to confirm my theory, but if not, then I’ll give Sony the benefit of the doubt for not mentioned they outsold the Wii, and use the estimated 276,000 figure.

That’s all for this news filled week. I suspect the next week will be very barren indeed news wise. See you next week.

Posted in 3D, Copyright, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, NPD Analysis, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (17 July 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (10 July 2011)

Sunday, July 10th, 2011

Another pretty quiet week, probably due to the 4th of July weekend, so this WNR should be fairly short. I know I’ve promised this in the past, and failed to deliver almost every single time, but I swear, this time it will be different (or you can read my apology 2000 words later).

Let’s start with copyright news. The MPAA is at it again, this time trying to say that movie piracy will mean the end of the Internet.

Downloading pirated movies is the cause of all of today's problems, including recession, war, disease and Seth Rogen movies - the MPAA will try to claim at some point in the future

Ripping from the headlines, Law & Order style, the MPAA now says that movie piracy will threaten the entire nature of the Internet, because movie pirates are unwittingly spreading malware and getting their computers zombified. A recently discovered botnet by security firm Kaspersky is now being used by the MPAA in their scare campaign against movie downloading. While it’s true that botnets, such as the recently discovered TDL, which Kaspersky has dubbed “indestructible”, are spread through malware, and that by placing malware near where popular downloads are located, such as pirated movie downloads, there is actually no link whatsoever in between movie piracy and TDL, or any specific botnet. Certainly, Kaspersky made no mention of movie downloads or piracy at all, so just how the MPAA drew the conclusion, only they know. But these are the same people that have linked movie piracy with child pornography in the past, so I’m not surprised. The fact is that any popular download could be the target of a malware attack, with fake files being distributed, whether on BitTorrent, or just plain downloads. In fact, it’s more likely that a public, popular and legally available file be made the host for botnet spreading malware, because people are more comfortable downloading legal files, and are less alert when it comes to security issues. So by warning people about TDL, the MPAA actually wants to stop people downloading, period. Who’s destroying the Internet now?

In my opinion, if people are familiar enough with the Internet to know how to locate a reliable source for pirated movies and install and operate the tools needed to download them, then I think most would be better than average at protecting their computers from malware. Most expert pirates can spot a fake Torrent a mile away, and if more people pirated from reliable sites like The Pirate Bay, then there’s even less chance of malware sneaking in before someone spots it and comments. So, if the MPAA is so concerned about the Internet, they should help to promote The Pirate Bay and other respectable Torrent sites, so that people are downloading the right stuff. If the MPAA succeeds in shutting down the major Torrent indexers, then the chaos that ensues will probably make the malware problem even worse, and they would be to blame for the destruction of the Internet, if that’s even possible.

But the MPAA does have one good point, is that malware is a much bigger problem than piracy.

Otherwise, it was a good week for the MPAA and the RIAA, as ISPs formally announced their plan to help the music and movie industry clamp down on piracy, by introducing, not three, not four, but five or six strikes (with action being taken on the 6th strike, after 5 previous warnings). And disconnection is now a certain action after however many strikes, with the ISP free to choose the form of execution, whether it’s speed limiting, or re-education. There’s even an appeals process, where users can pay $35 to have an “independent copyright expert” decide whether action needs to be taken, although users can only use the “my router was unsecured” excuse once. Critics worry that the so called independent copyright expert may actually be someone chosen by the RIAA/MPAA, which may be a conflict of interest. Speaking of conflicts of interests, the monitoring will be done by a third party, who will watch BitTorrent networks and other sources for IP address of pirates, except, it will be in the interest of this third party to catch as many pirates as possible, and with no oversight, this is probably the biggest conflict of interest of all. So you have a situation where the cops are paid by the number of “crooks” they catch, the judge and jury have been replaced by a sign that simply says “guilty”, the appeals court is selected by the same people that painted the guilty sign, and the executioner is actually your paid for service provider. Nice.

VPN services, such as The Pirate Bay's IPREDator, will bypass monitoring as part of any three/five/six strike system

Other than causing a lot of problems for Internet users, I can’t see how this plan will even help to slow down piracy. Starting off, only a very limited range of piracy methods are even covered by the monitoring, and even within these methods, it’s not too hard to escape detection altogether by investing in a VPN account and encryption. Instead of killing piracy, this will probably kill free Wi-Fi that businesses offer, since they would then be responsible for their user’s activities. Unless the MPAA/RIAA can make an exception for businesses, and I suspect only for the big businesses like McDonald’s or Starbucks, then nobody would dare to offer free Wi-Fi unless they can sign up to an ISP that doesn’t use the strikes system. It’s a multi-million dollar “solution”, that causes more millions in loss of business, all for making relatively little difference to the piracy problem.

Good news for CNET, or at least that’s what it looked like at first. A couple of months ago, the founder of FilmOn, Alki David, sued CNET because CNET owned download.com had been distributing the now outlawed LimeWire software. Last week, David and company withdrew their lawsuit voluntarily. But it all depends on the reason for the withdrawl, with the plaintiffs suggesting that the popularity of the lawsuit was the main reason behind this latest move. Apparently, many other copyright holders expressed interest in joining the lawsuit, and due to time constraints, it was just easier to withdraw and file a new lawsuit in the future. Or this could just be the face saving excuse needed for David and Co. to get out of a lawsuit that, may not go very far anyway. I think most can see that revenge is one of the motivations behind the lawsuit (David’s FilmOn was sued by CNET’s owner, CBS, for copyright infringement), and I’m sure the CNET/CBS lawyers will make want the judge and jury, if it gets that far, to see this lawsuit as a revenge motivated stunt. I personally don’t think there’s much merit in the lawsuit, since there’s got to be some limit as to where the responsibility for LimeWire ends, because otherwise, even browser makers can get sued for allowing the downloading of LimeWire, and what about OS and PC manufacturers for allowing LimeWire to be run? And all of them made money off LimeWire in one way or another, if you want to make that argument. It never ends.

High Definition

In HD/3D news, not a lot happening again really. There was the news that Hulu’s launch of their Facebook Connect feature causing a privacy breach, as bad programming meant that some were able to access other’s accounts. But that’s hardly HD, 3D, or even video related, even though it did happen to a video website.

There’s also the rumour floating around that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are all interested in buying Hulu, probably for a very inflated price in what many people are now calling a new Internet bubble (although I personally believe it’s more of a consolidation, as tech companies battle the threat of a new mega-player, Facebook).

I don’t really care who buys Hulu, as long as they make sure it comes to Australia.

The rumour of the week goes to the one that says the PS4 will be launched early next year, with production to begin this year. And not only that, it will also copy Kinect and have built-in full body motion sensing.

This reminds me of the constant rumours about the Xbox 360 getting a Blu-ray drive, except this is going in the other direction. You take Sony’s “copying” of the Wii’s motion gaming system, down to the “nunchuck” device, add the fact that the Wii U will replace the PS3 as the most powerful console when released, add in a sprinkle of bulls**t, and viola, PS4 released before Wii U and will have Kinect like controls.

The PS4 and Xbox 720 are as likely to appear in 2012 as they are to be named the PS4 and Xbox 720

I’m not saying the rumour is completely false, but when was the last time a completely new console (not just a re-design) was launched with absolutely no announcement in the E3’s just before, nor any promotions, nor any sneak peak at games, graphics, even a logo? There’s a reason why game companies, or just tech companies in general, don’t “ninja” release products, because you need to hype, the promotion, the time for developers to actually come up with games, before a console can be launched. And if developers are already doing PS4 stuff, as you would expect for a 2012 launch, then they’re not *that* good as keeping secrets, and so somebody would already leaked out in-game artwork or even video, and that has just not happened.

And of course, there’s the statements actually made by Sony saying the PS3 if barely half-way through its product life cycle, and the fact that they still haven’t even officially retired the PS2 yet.

And of course, the Internet Chinese whispers game concluded with the “announcement” that the Xbox 720 was also going to be released in 2012. Yeah, right.

And true to my word, this WNR will conclude with barely 1500 words written, which must be a new record (both the shortened WNR, and me keeping my word). See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (10 July 2011)

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Archive for July, 2011

Weekly News Roundup (31 July 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (24 July 2011)

Game Consoles – June 2011 NPD Sales Figure Analysis

Weekly News Roundup (17 July 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (10 July 2011)

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