Black Friday sales for the video game industry were excellent. Nintendo sold 1.8m systems for the week ending November 29 while machines from rivals Microsoft and Sony combined to sell about 1.1m units.
Software sales were quite strong as well, but the vast majority of the spike this week is simply from the fact that Americans spent $10 billion ($30/per American if every American shopped) on Black Friday according to various reports, and a lot of that went to video games.
Last year, Black Friday week sales were strong as well, but Wii, DS, and Xbox 360 saw significantly better sales this year. PS3 had the weakest Black Friday to Black Friday growth, at 13%, and PS2 declined.
Sony's machines accounted for about 1 out of 3 video game machines sold (31%) during Black Friday week in 2007, this year that ratio is down to about 2 out of 9 (22%) as the shares for Microsoft and Nintendo increase.
Although Wii had a smaller percentage incr... More »
Sr. Producer Rusty Buchert of Sony Santa Monica Studios shared the following today via PS Blog:
Hi all, it’s Rusty again from the Santa Monica Studio. We are getting ready to launch Everyday Shooter PSP on the PSN store today, and we are really thrilled about how it has turned out. Between Jon Mak, Backbone Entertainment and us, we have Jon’s thoughts about how everything went on getting this made. Hope you all like what we’ve done.
First things first: the seaweed is gone, but the hashbrowns are still in the freezer.
So Rusty wanted me to write a little blog post about Everyday Shooter for PSP. I don’t really know what to talk about so I guess I’ll start chronological and see where that goes.
I actually tried porting Everyday Shooter to PSP way back around December 20th, 2007, and stopped around December 27th, 2007. Here’s an old video I found from back then:
Atari president Phil Harrison has revealed that there is a generation of kids being born today that will most likely never buy a physical media product. Therefore, they will not buy a DVD, CD, and never buy a game in a box.
To quote: Phil Harrison is convinced that the game industry’s future audience will not be reliant on physical forms of media.
Speaking to Edge, the Atari company president said that “there’s a generation of kids being born today and probably already alive who I’m pretty confident will never buy a physical media product. They will never buy a DVD, they will never buy a CD, and they will never buy a game in a box.”
Harrison and Atari CEO David Gardner are already gearing the company towards this perceived trend. Back in September Gardner explained that the future of Atari lies in online play and distribution, with the former EA executive declaring that “within five years 90 per cent of our products will be onl... More »
Update: The LBP 1.05 patch adds star ratings to levels - you can now see the current star rating of a level (providing it has enough feedback).
The LittleBigPlanet v1.05 patch for PlayStation 3 is now available. It went live last night and is just 15MB in size. There isn't any word on what is new, but we're sure it brings with it some fixes and minor improvements.
To quote: The Planetoid observatory has just seen that the Little Big Planet 1.05 patch is now live. It went live at around 11pm GMT / UTC and is a teeny tiny 15MB in size.
Like previous patches, there has been no official word on it so right now there is no news on just exactly what this patch contains. We’d put our money on it being some minor stability fixes, much like patches 1.01, 1.02, 1.03 and 1.04 did and they were all around the same size.
Media Molecule did, only a few hours ago, announce their commitment to improving key areas of the game: Searching, Mo... More »
Per Grace Chen (Senior Manager, PlayStation Store) today:
Hey, everyone. It’s time again for the weekly PlayStation Store update.
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Capcom USA has unveiled their delivery of a real Bionic Arm from Japan. Check it out below, modeled by Capcom's resident babe Marisol.
To quote: Today, we got the Bionic Arm. It came in a crate with some mysterious Japanese writing (probably a warning of the pure awesome inside), and a dead give-a-way in english as it says "Bionic Arm" in big letters.
Marisol was kind enough to strap on this prop for some pics to show off how cool this thing is. It would have been cooler if I could have found the button for the lights. But there's no obvious switch on there that says "lights."
Instead I spent a good five minutes pressing things that looked like they could be buttons while it was sitting on my desk(I was guarding it from the droolers). As I was looking, I realized just how much detail went into this piece of equipment.
Every rivet, bolt, screw, the hosing... It's all hand painted down to the most minute detail. The arm is an e... More »
IGN has gone through Famitsu's 11-page feature on Final Fantasy: Dissidia and translated several new details recently.
Square Enix apparently considered putting a FFXII character in the game, but were concerned it would solidify "the character's image and skills in players' minds and thus affecting the main FFXIII".
Famitsu also revealed that gamers will be able to choose a Memory Stick installation of 245, 373, or 528 megabytes. Finally, Ikeda, the main programmer for the game, says that the 245MB install will allow "smooth battles."
To quote: If all that isn't enough to make you wonder how Square Enix is fitting Dissidia on one UMD, here's something that should do the trick. Famitsu also reveals that Dissidia has a "Command Battle" mode of play.
Here, the normal action-based battle system is replaced with a menu system, allowing players who aren't so hot on action games to still engage in combat.
In the gaming world exclusivities have become all but obsolete. So it should come as little surprise that analysts are stating the future of Epic’s gaming giant, Gears of War, will be bright on all fronts of the console war.
Analyst Michael Pachter, who is well known throughout the gaming industry for his insight to the future of gaming, has stated “we pretty much know that Gears of War 3 is probably gonna come out on PS3.”
Pachter is going off the idea that things today aren’t exactly exclusive, they’re only set aside for a set amount of time. If this holds true, PS3 gamers will get a chance to see just how much they’ve been missing.
As gamers of all three major systems, we welcome multiplatform any day. The console war is getting down to the point of ‘who’s system has the better technology’, and steering clear of ‘who has the better games’.
Either way this one ends up, Gears of War has cemented it’s p... More »
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