The PC gamers are making themselves heard by buying the game in large numbers. ”Online activity has been notable, with Steam reporting that in the first 24 hours of its release, Skyrim set a record with over 280,000 concurrent players, far outdistancing all other titles,” the company said in a statement.
Skyrim, as well as Deus Ex: Human Revolution, makes a strong case that there is indeed an audience for single-player campaigns. The story is said to be a lot stronger than the previous Elder Scrolls titles.
Google has made the decision to begin selling music online, similar to the way the iTunes Store works. The announcement came during their Google Music event last Wednesday. Instead of referring customers to content partners, they will begin allowing musicians to upload and sell their music to customers.
Google Music went into beta earlier this year, and started as a streaming-only service. Users could upload music directly from libraries, and others could stream the music.
Google has partnered with music labels in order to sell music downloads to customers via the Android Market. They have stated that the companies they have signed deals with include EMI, Sony, and Universal. ”You don’t need to search the web anymore for music,” Google said during its presentation, “just search the market!”
This will be amazing for independent artists. They will no longer have to work through a label and third-party to get their music on iTunes. Google Music will also have the top hits from professional music artists if they so desire to upload it. Google will even have their staff monitor and keep track of the Front Page so that the more professional music is even easier to find.
Songs will also be able to be shared on Google+, where they can listen to each song you share once, as well as shared playlists. The new store is online at market.android.com and will be on Android devices running Android 2.2 or higher in the “next few days.”
Paul Amsellem, head of Nokia France, has stated that they will have a tablet running Windows 8 by June 2012. Nokia PR’s official line is “we have not announced any specific plans as it relates to tablets.” However, Nokia will be making Windows 8 tablets. After all, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said that Windows 8 will “change the dynamics” of the tablet market, and that there was a “new tablet opportunity coming.”
Nokia already has the Linux-on-ARM 770, N800, and N810 tablets. These were tablets that tried to mimic the possibilities of the iPad. Nokia is now closely partnered with Microsoft, and the “new opportunity” by Windows 8 will make it perfect to try again in the tablet market.
EA claimed that Battlefield 3 sold 5 million copies in the first week of it being released. Sure, that’s impressive. However, Activision has stated that they estimate 6.5 million units for Modern Warfare 3‘s first day release. That’s in one day compared to EA’s one week! Sure, Battlefield 3 sold a lot of copies, but nowhere close to how many Modern Warfare 3 did.
“We believe the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is the biggest entertainment launch of all time in any medium, and we achieved this record with sales from only two territories,” said Bobby Kotick, CEO, Activision Blizzard, Inc. “Other than Call of Duty, there has never been another entertainment franchise that has set opening day records three years in a row. Life-to-date sales for the Call of Duty franchise exceed worldwide theatrical box office for Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, two of the most successful entertainment franchises of all time.”
The $400 million estimated for the first day is impressive, but there’s more to be said than the cash profit. The Call of Duty: Elite has received so much more traffic than Beachhead Studios thought that the servers are still not operating smoothly. The for-pay Elite service will bring a lot of revenue to the developers as well, not to mention the other DLC for people that don’t have the Premium Call of Duty Elite membership.
“Call of Duty: Black Ops has sold more than 20 million Map Packs,” Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg said during a November earnings call. “The revenues generated from Map Packs alone would make it the third largest console title of the year.” At $15 for each Black Ops map pack, that’s a lot of revenue. If Modern Warfare 3 continues anywhere near or above these numbers, Activision could break $300 million in additional profits without too much of a problem.
Adobe has announced plans for layoffs yesterday ahead of major restructuring coming up in their schedules. They plan to cut 750 employees and has stated they plan to refocus its digital media business. Which employees will be affected? Well, Adobe is planning to “gut” its mobile Flash player strategies.
Adobe is going to stop developing mobile ports of its Flash player browser plugin. Adobe will now be focusing on AIR and tools for deploying Flash content as native applications. This move marks a huge change in direction for Adobe, which previously was all about uniform support for Flash across desktop and mobile browsers. They will not be introducing new Flash player plugins, but will continue to support its existing implementations, including updates.
“Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations,” the company said, according to a ZDNet report.
Adobe was halted at their previous goal to have all handheld devices running Flash when Apple refused to put Flash into its mobile Web browser. It’s known already that Steve Jobs has opposed Flash for a very long time and supported HTML5 for quite some time. Jobs issued an open letter to personally address the issue when Adobe retaliated at his refusal. Concerns about battery life, security, and stability have been cited as key reasons why Flash isn’t allowed on iOS.
With sites following this move and allowing HTML5 into their development and disallowing Flash or supporting both, this decision went pretty much unnoticed. Other platforms have followed in Apple’s footsteps, including Microsoft when they released the Windows Phone 7. Google has supported Flash and allowed Flash to its Android mobile platform. The major reasons that Apple and Microsoft went away from it is a bad security track record and quite a few minor problems.
The security track record isn’t the only that was negative. The Flash plugin wasn’t ready for the Motorola Xoom at launch and didn’t perform well on the Galaxy Tab 10.1. When the BlackBerry Playbook was released, the Flash plugin was very buggy even though Adobe worked close with RIM on the entire product.
Artist representation of Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been trying to tighten copyright enforcement for quite a few years. In 2008, they pushed the PRO-IP Act, which allowed the federal government to seize domain names used for copyright infringement and created a new federal copyright czar. This year, 2011, the MPAA is a leading force in the campaign for “rogue sites” legislation, which would give the federal government powers to target sites with minimal judicial oversight.
Viacom, whose Paramouth subsidiary is an MPAA member, told the Wall Street Journal that “a new wave of digital piracy could threaten the US media business” if they lost their copyright infringement case against YouTube. The MPAA has argued that “when profits are reduced, the studios have fewer dollars to invest in movies, and when there is less money to invest they make fewer movies and the diversity and variety of films we love become more limited.”
CNN recently released a story on the top 20 biggest CEO pay raises. Want to know who was at the very top of the list? You either read the title of the article, the last paragraph, their story, of you have psychic ability. Viacom’s CEO Philippe Dauman. He received a pay raise of $50.5 million in 2010 from 2009. This increase is a 149 percent pay increase from his 2009 compensation of $34 million.
Dauman isn’t the only CEO that is rolling around in money made from the record-breaking box office results. Disney CEO Robert Iger made $29.6 million in 2010. While the US economy has been in a pretty nasty recession, these CEO’s have been sitting around without any trouble in the world.
While you must understand that this raise isn’t really primarily in the form of cash, but stocks and stock options, it is still a huge increase in compensation. Viacom’s shareholders are pretty much the ones that made this possible, so perhaps he earned it. Since stocks fluctuate, for all we know, that $50 million could tank in future years.
The underlying problem is this. They and other companies are trying to get taxpayers to spend more taxpayer dollars to better protect copyrights, especially in the case of Viacom copyrights. Making movies seems to already bring in millions of dollars. It seems strange that a company that is complaining about losing money to pirating and needing money to protect against it would up compensation of the CEO, one person, by $50 million.
The release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has begun. The game has been officially released starting in Australia and continues its spread as midnight, November 8th, reaches globally.
With new game modes, Kill Confirmed and Team Defender, and point streaks instead of kill streaks, the ideas and improvements in this game are nearly endless. Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer Games, and Raven Software have really thought this through and worked to develop a “flawless” game. Let’s hope the anticipation and patience has paid off when everyone gets on and gets to playing.
Here is the live action Modern Warfare 3 trailer.
Now here is an actual gameplay video, with the credit going to vGTrickShotz1. This is a domination match showcasing a pretty decent player showcasing his skills on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.
I will be standing out waiting for the release here in Minnesota, which will come pretty late as a standard globally. I’m absolutely thrilled and have been anticipating Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 since Modern Warfare 2 was released. Hats off to Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer Games, and Raven Software for what I have seen thus far. I’m quite impressed.
The servers that Apple receives and processes Siri commands was down for many iPhone 4S users across the US on Thursday afternoon. Users began talking about this outage around 2PM Eastern Time on Twitter. Not everyone has been receiving problems.
The problems seem to lie within the carrier. When users ask Siri a question or use it to perform a task, Siri replies with, “Sorry, I am having trouble connecting to the network.” Apple has not publicly confirmed whether the problem is server-side or carrier-side. However, VentureBeat spoke to an AppleCare technician who acknowledged that it’s possible that Siri is experiencing an outage.
Angry Birds, perhaps the most addicting game of all time, has surpassed 500 million downloads. Rovio states that this makes Angry Birds the most downloaded game in “the history of gaming.” While the idea is fairly simple, the graphics are stunning, attractive, and very addicting.
Players are not just downloading and moving on, as any game could have a lot of downloads but not a lot of players. Hell, NightMist Online has had thousands of downloads, but is now down to 20 active players. Rovio has stated that its users average about 300 million minutes of playing time each day. They have played about 200,000 years of Angry Birds in total. More than 266 billion levels have been played where 400 billion birds have been “launched.” How many stars have these people managed to get? 44 billion, Rovio says.
“This is a fantastic landmark achievement for us, and we’re extremely delighted to see such an incredible amount of people enjoying our games,” said Mikael Hed, CEO of Rovio. “We remain committed to creating more fun experiences and bringing exceptional quality to Angry Birds Fans everywhere.”
Rovio has extended its popular Angry Birds to other platforms as well. We’ve known about the plush toys and odds and ends for quite some time, as there are more than 10 million toys worldwide. However, they are soon opening a retail store in Helsinki and even launched its first Angry Birds print book. Rovio is even moving forward with a cartoon series with a Helsinki-based animation studio.
The trailer that Rockstar Games promised has officially been released for Grand Theft Auto V. The game still has no release date, but the storyline is in place.
Grand Theft Auto V‘s trailer has buildings and signs that suggest it takes place in San Andreas, where the location is similar to California. Los Santos can be compared to Los Angeles and San Fierro can be compared to San Francisco. Actually, there is even Las Venturas, which is very similar to Las Vegas. And finally, Vinewood is shown, where the sign is strikingly familiar; the Hollywood sign.
With the trailer’s voiceover, the narrator explains how he wanted to retire from “that line of work” and even wishes to raise a family and be a father. However, the life of crime follows him and starts anew in this latest installment.
I leave you with the Grand Theft Auto V trailer, where the graphics seem the exact same as every other Grand Theft Auto.
The PC gamers are making themselves heard by buying the game in large numbers. ”Online activity has been notable, with Steam reporting that in the first 24 hours of its release, Skyrim set a record with over 280,000 concurrent players, far outdistancing all other titles,” the company said in a statement.
Google has made the decision to begin selling music online, similar to the way the iTunes Store works. The announcement came during their Google Music event last Wednesday. Instead of referring customers to content partners, they will begin allowing musicians to upload and sell their music to customers.
Paul Amsellem, head of Nokia France, has stated that they will have a tablet running Windows 8 by June 2012. Nokia PR’s official line is “we have not announced any specific plans as it relates to tablets.” However, Nokia will be making Windows 8 tablets. After all, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said that Windows 8 will “change the dynamics” of the tablet market, and that there was a “new tablet opportunity coming.”
Angry Birds, perhaps the most addicting game of all time, has surpassed 500 million downloads. Rovio states that this makes Angry Birds the most downloaded game in “the history of gaming.” While the idea is fairly simple, the graphics are stunning, attractive, and very addicting.
