| We start the last post of the news week with a quote I can't even fathom: "There is no casual gaming," says Nintendo senior marketing director Laurent Fischer, "For me, you are a gamer or non-gamer [...] I think most of you know that you can spend ten or twenty hours on an internet flash game and have not realised. The guy who plays these games regularly - he's a core gamer." This sounds great from Nintendo's perspective but, for the rest of us, Nintendo saying that there's no such thing as "casual gamers" is absurd. If I asked some of my friends and my family if they are "gamers" they would almost certainly indicate that they aren't. If I, like any good inquisitive friend/relation, pressed the issue and offered up varying definitions of "gamer," "casual gamer," and "hardcore gamers" they would absolutely describe themselves as being casual gamers. Nintendo can play with semantics as much as they want (and I'm, like usual, encouraging comment discussion for this post) but ignoring the categorization seems odd.
Valve released their eternally useful hardware survey yesterday and excellent PC gaming site Rock, Paper, Shotgun posted some great observations to go with the numbers. For my part, I'll point out that Intel has a healthy 17% lead on AMD, while nVidia (62%) is wiping their feet with ATI (31%). The average desktop monitor resolution is surprisingly low as well; the most common resolutions for a single monitor setup are 1280x960 (39%) and 1024x768 (32%). And Windows XP continues to absolutely dominate Vista with over 80% of users running it for their Windows flavor of choice compared to Vista's mere 15% of the pie. Anyway, for anyone currently developing a game -- which I assume to be a decent percentage of my readership -- a look at Valve's hardware survey is a great source of average specifications for people looking to release a PC game in the near future.
Then there are the April NPD numbers which, to no one's surprise, is dominated by Grand Theft Auto 4 and Mario Kart Wii. I've gone on about the numbers so much this last month that there's nothing much I can add... Luckily, the console manufacturers themselves handled commentary for me.
What? |
| This continues to be a slow news week, but the release of Sony's sales numbers for the Playstation 2, Playstation 3, and the Playstation Portable prompted some interesting console war news stories. This wouldn't be of note normally, but one such story spawned from a Microsoft press release. The Xbox 360 manufacturer said that its 19 million units sold is "more than any other current-generation console." At this point it's worth pointing out that the Nintendo Wii has an install base of 24.45 million. Microsoft later clarified that it meant that the 360 has the "largest global install base of any current gen, high definition gaming console" (emphasis mine and GameDaily's).
Sony can safely claim, then, that the Playstation 3 with its 12.85 million units sold has the largest global install base of a current gen, high definition, occasionally backwards compatible console with blu-ray support.
In-game advertising has been a staple of major sport games for as long as I remember, but recently the industry is seeing advertisements creeping into games which typically wouldn't sport them. There are also games which stream in their advertisements from a third-party such as Massive Incorporated (Crackdown, Rainbow Six: Vegas, etc.). Yesterday came news relating to the product placement in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots which features overt placement of things like iPods, Sony Ericsson phones, and other seemingly random items in a game that takes place well into the future. There is also a duck clock.
Personally, I can't believe they only gave Snake a 30GB iPod. |
![[logo]](http://www.gamedev.net/pics/gdnet-88x31.gif "GameDev.net")
![[logo]](http://acmqueue.com/images/qlogo.gif)