PC Download Stores Arguing Over Who Comes After Steam
Stardock’s claim that it holds 10% of the PC digital download market have been shrugged off by two of the company’s main competitors, Direct2Drive and GamersGate.
GamersGate CEO Theodore Bergquist tells Kotaku that “We have daily direct contact with all major publishers out there, we can benchmark most of our numbers with both Steam and Direct2Drive, and we know for sure that Impulse is never up for discussion as being one of the biggest”.
“Unfortunately I can’t give you any specific numbers on titles”, he adds, “though in many, many cases we know that GamersGate sell as many units as Steam for the mid-size segment of titles. For AAA’s we sell anything between half to a quarter. With a few exceptions they sell more than that. This is information we get from publishers direct from the source – their digital distribution teams.”
Meanwhile, Direct2Drive’s Sutton Trout told Gamasutra “Stardock’s recent assessment of its service [that Impulse holds a clear number two position in the digital distribution space] is misinformation at best. An NPD report from earlier this year refutes Stardock’s claim outright and clearly identifies Direct2Drive as a top-performer.”
So, now that three of Steam’s main competitors have sounded off, what do we now know about the PC download market that we didn’t before?
Well, aside from the fact Impulse won’t be getting many Christmas cards from Direct2Drive and GamersGate this year, we know that for at least one of these companies (GamersGate), the reason they don’t release sales figures is down to NDAs signed with their publishers. So if you want hard numbers, you know who to blame.
Oh, and we also know that none of this bickering involves serious competing with Steam, leading us to believe that the PC scene’s pecking order is Steam first, daylight second, and these guys jostling over the last spot on the podium.
Microsoft: Black Friday Gives Xbox "Biggest Sales Week" Of Year
Get ready to for some corporate gloating, Microsoft-style, in the coming days. According to the company’s Director of Product Management for Xbox 360 and Xbox Live, the Xbox 360 just had its “biggest sales week of the year.”
Greenberg didn’t put a specific figure to the console’s sales from the Thanksgiving/Black Friday week as Nintendo did earlier today. But the increasingly svelte Xbox 360 spokesman did write that last week’s numbers were “more than [two times the] previous week sales.”
We’ll see if Microsoft can top 2008, when the Xbox 360 maker claimed it outsold its PlayStation 3 competition three-to-one.
No More Heroes Xbox 360, PS3 Has No More Motion Control
The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 port of No More Heroes won’t take advantage of new motion control schemes for those respective platforms, according to Marvelous Entertainment head honcho Yasuhiro Wada, condemning Travis Touchdown to an analog stick controlled fate.
Wada tells Edge Online that No More Heroes: Heroes Paradise is getting the high-definition once over to “bring the game to a wider audience.” To wit, Marvelous isn’t “currently considering to use uncommon new technology” like Project Natal and Sony’s still-unnamed(?) motion controller.
No More Heroes: Heroes Paradise is being reworked for a prettier, motion control-free release by Lost Odyssey and Ninety Nine Nights II developers Feelplus. Wada says that the new analog control scheme should “improve the sense of being in the game.”
Should No More Heroes: Heroes Paradise find a new publisher and make it to these shores, rest assured, dear reader, that we’ll spend ample time sensing the amount of improved being in the remake, holding Wada to his word.
Interview: Yasuhiro Wada [Edge Online]
Lost Planet 2: Introducing Akrid X
Episode 2 of Lost Planet 2 pits you against the massive Akrid X, who may or may not secretly be the brother of Speed Akrid.
Okay, he’s probably not related to Speed Akrid, if such an akrid even exists, but he does throw fireballs, breathes fire, and hurls train cars at you, all of which sound particularly painful. Luckily for you and your akrid-hunting friends, the town you take on Akrid X in is filled with weapons and giant robot walkers, so you should be okay as long as you don’t die horribly.
Check out the full boss profile for Akrid X by following the magical link below.
Lost Planet 2 Boss Profile: Akrid X [Capcom Unity]
Nintendo Sold Over 1.5 Million Wiis, DSs Last Week
November will be a big month for Nintendo when all is said and done, based on the more than 1.5 million consoles and handhelds it sold in the United States last week.
That 1.5 million breaks down to more than 550,000 Wii consoles and more than 1 million Nintendo DS and Nintendo DSi portables, according to Nintendo’s internal estimates. In terms of frequency, that’s over 150 Nintendo hardware units sold every minute, more than 2.5 smiles put on faces every second.
Yes, those are impressive numbers. But one of those numbers was more impressive last year, when Nintendo says it sold more than 800,000 Wiis during the same time period.
In 2007, Nintendo sold a comparitively meager 350,000 Wiis during the Thanksgiving spending spree. That year, Nintendo boasted that Nintendo DS sales topped 600,000 during the same week long period, a number that jumped 20% the following year, nothing that compares to the new 1 million unit sold record held by combined DS and DSi sales.
Since Nintendo sold 506,900 Wii consoles and 457,600 Nintendo DSs during the full month of October, we’ll bet the company will have something to brag about when November’s tally rolls around. While we suspect it won’t shatter November 2008’s amazing, “historic” records,, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Nintendo branded things topping the charts.
Modern Warfare 2 Cheaters Banned On PC
According to Infinity Ward’s Robert Bowling, a large number of Modern Warfare 2 players on PC were banned over the weekend for using cheats in multiplayer matches.
He says around 2500 Steam accounts were targeted. That’s a lot of cheaters for a game being played on controlled servers over Steam.
Then again, it’s a proportionate number; 2500 may sound like a lot, but for a game as big as Modern Warfare 2, it’s probably a small percentage of the overall market.
You May Not Like Where Command & Conquer Is Headed
Jon Van Caneghem, EA’s new head of all things Command & Conquer, has grand plans for the future direction of the series. Plans die-hard fans of C&C may be interested/horrified to hear.
See, Van Caneghem is a big supporter of things like “games as service”, and online delivery. Which makes him a good fit for EA, since that’s exactly what EA are moving towards, with games like Battlefield Heroes and their acquisition of online gaming company Playfish.
So what does this mean for the future of Command & Conquer? Well, we knew he was going to “transform” the series, but didn’t think it’d be this drastic. Chew over these quotes from an interview with Van Caneghem over on Gamasutra. The first regarding strategy games taking a leaf out of Battlefield Heroes’ book.
“Look what online has done for RPGs over the last 10 years. All the other categories are following suit… we’re looking forward to building something to be a leader in that space.”
On where he sees C&C fitting in with this shift, he says “”It allows you to do everything you would have expected from a boxed game, but it adds a lot more to it… being connected and connected with players, and persistence, the social elements of playing against each other with other friends.”
And, perhaps most distressingly, this:
“What you’re seeing with all the social gamers on Facebook… they are actually already playing strategy games whether they know it or not. Taking a franchise like Command and Conquer and expanding it to a wider audience is part of the strategy.”
Tiberiumville, coming to Facebook, 2010.
Interview: Van Caneghem Talks EALA’s Vision, Command & Conquer [Gamasutra]
Alderaan Makes Its Explosive Debut In The Old Republic
BioWare has announced the latest playable planet for Star Wars: The Old Republic, Alderaan – an lovely place to hide your bastard children from their corrupted, guilt-crazed fathers.
The planet of Alderaan wasn’t always a smoldering cloud of debris. No, back in the day it was a lovely, peaceful planet – perhaps the closest thing in the galaxy to a Utopian society. Then the Great War occurred, and the Sith tried to invade, and while the Republic handed the Empire their asses, the face of Alderaan changed forever. The peaceful rulers began to support talk of war; the crown prince was assassinated for storming out of the signing of the Treaty of Coruscant; and now everything is up in the air.
It looks like Alderaan will be a contested planet in the massively multiplayer online game, with players on both sides fighting against each other for a planet that will one day be used as Death Star target practice.
Holonet – Alderaan [Star Wars: The Old Republic]
Nokia Gets Busted Showing Off N900 SNES Emulator
Alright, Nokia. We know you’ve ben hurting since N-Gage passed away, but apparently in your despair you forgot that Nintendo wouldn’t take kindly to a promo video featuring emulated SNES games. Oops!
The video has since been pulled from Youtube, but the screen grab above shows how Nokia went out of their way to demonstrate how well SNES emulators run on the N900. The rub here isn’t the emulator itself; as Nintendo Life points out, Android features a bunch of emulators in its app catalog. As long as those emulators don’t come with ROMs, everything is peachy.
The problem was that Nokia actually showed video of Super Mario World and Super Ghouls and Ghosts running within that emulator. They even acknowledged that “some emulators require separate ROM images to play games,” and claimed that “[m]ost publishers allow individual title usage provided that the user is in possession of the original title.” Yeah… pretty sure Nintendo doesn’t like that idea.
So now Nintendo’s got its claws out for Nokia. Pretty bold of you to push emulators now that N-Gage is no longer with us, Nokia, but really, you must have seen this coming. [Edge Online via Nintendo Life, Thanks Nintenboy01.]
This Is What "Toned-Down" Looks Like In Dead To Rights
When I first got a look at Dead to Rights: Retribution, I had to ditch a whole plate of food lest I upchuck in front of the producer at a Namco Bandai event.
If the level of violence I witnessed back then has been “toned down” in this developer diary hosted by Character Art Manager Dan Calvert, I might still abandon all foodstuffs to save my stomach. Sure, it looks like there’s less blood — and I can see what they mean when they say the “stylized” art sort of subtracts a layer of disconcerting realism — but people’s necks are still getting snapped.
See for yourself:
