Data Filter: The News You Need in Easy-to-Swallow Gel Cap Form

Electronic Gaming Business, Jan 14, 2004

News-O-Matic
Whassup?: Infinium Labs, maker of the long-promised subscription-based game
console that plays PC titles, The Phantom, posted and then promptly removed
a list of launch titles and publisher partners at its site. The list included
500 titles from 60 publishers, but most were long forgotten games from
nearly forgotten publishers (i.e. 3DO) as well as some older titles from
Take Two and Strategy First. The site now tells users to return later for
a list of games for the system "that are pending developer/publisher
approval." At CES, Infinium was demo-ing the Phantom to select press
and publishers, and had a non-working version included in MS's kiosk
for Windows XP Embedded products.
So What!: After months of some wild press speculation that The Phantom
was truer to its name than the makers intended - in fact a hoax or
an investor scam, Infinium seems determined to trip over itself in
demonstrating that they are legit. At one CES panel, a company
executive brought the Phantom in for show, but for some reason
neither he nor MS could hook the thing up to a TV to show us
that it worked. Infinium told us that they hoped to release the console
before E3. Well, if that is the plan and they don't have a unit that
can be demoed publicly or even a list of publisher partners who will
agree to have their titles listed, how close can they be to shipping this
thing?

Whassup?: At Digital Games Summit and CES, both Apex Digital, a DVD
player maker, and Alienware, a high-end gamer PC maker, announced
upcoming versions of the DISCover game console, which plays PC games
through the home theater. Specs and pricing are not final, but the
expectation is that Apex will come in with a consumer-level lower-end model
while Alienware will serve the game geeks with a higher end model. The
consoles are designed to handle all installation and configuration chores
of a PC game automatically, so that virtually any title for which the
console has an install routine (provided by DISCover and updated via
the Web) can plug and play like a console game. The consoles will be
released sometime this year probably at around $299 and up.
So What!: The plug and play technology we saw demoed at CES was ingenious,
and DISCover says publishers have been very willing to submit their
PC titles so that install routines are available to buyers. We're still
having trouble seeing the market potential here. There are too few major
PC titles that are not also available on consoles, and the ones that
play best on a PC (RTS, FPS, etc.) do not tend to translate well to a
living room anyway. Also, the hardware needs to be beefier. We
were not impressed by the performance of the Apex system, which
demonstrated visible slowdown in some of the sports titles we saw
running.

Whassup?: NY Post financial columnist Chris Byron, who penned a bio of
Martha Stewart, savaged Take Two Interactive in a heated piece on Jan. 4.
After describing the free flow game play involving playing a criminal in
GTA: Vice City, Byron says, "People, this is insane. This is 10,000
times worse than the worst thing anybody thinks Michael Jackson ever did
to a little boy - or than any lie the feds think Martha Stewart ever told
them, or any line in any song that Bruce Springsteen ever sang that
rankled a cop in the Meadowlands. Out of that company is spewing the
glorification of mass murder and the celebration of death."
So What!: It's always interesting to watch a noted commentator lose
a wing nut in public. Byron's is the kind of misinformed rant that
should be left unanswered because it only dramatizes the irrational
response to video gaming that passes for social concern in some circles.
In a kind of bizarre McCarthyite fashion, Byron goes on to trash the father
of the company's founder ("a polo playing fop") who
apparently went to prison for tax fraud. All of this is a set up for
Byron's news that the SEC recently sent Take Two notice that it is
about to be charged with fraud, probably over an ongoing investigation
over revenue statements.

Whassup?: At a CES panel on next generation consoles, executives from
Tapwave, Activision, G4, and Infinium seemed to agree that the presence
of DVD playback on the Xbox and PS2 helped drive penetration of the
current generation of consoles. Yankee Group analyst Michael Goodman
shared research showing that about two-thirds of owners had played DVDs
on their systems and 40% had played CDs. All of this points to the next
generation of hardware taking on more home theater duties like PVR
and media archiving.
So What!: We're not at all convinced that piling multimedia into the
next-gen consoles is a wise move. It risks alienating the core market for
these units in a vain attempt to attract a new audience. As Goodman
also points out, core gamers get suspicious that these added features
require compromises on the game function side. The only add-ons
that make financial sense are natural and cheap extensions of the game
technology that are already included in a system. We would also like to
see more extensive research on how extensively console owners
use their units for DVD playback. We have yet to see a number suggesting
that users have done much more than try the feature. That multimedia is
a system seller is a bit of a stretch.

Whassup?: Sony reports it has shipped 70 million PS2s, with more than 29
million of those in the North American market. Sony says it sold through 3
million units in November and December, bringing the NA installed base
to 24.5 million.
So What!: While Sony's NA targets may have been too optimistic, the
sales figures are strong enough for the company to keep price points as
is for a while. The strategy seems to be to extend the life span of the PS2
as long as possible. On the online side, Sony is claiming 2.4 million
connected players, although how many are actively using online consistently
is an unanswered question about Sony's free network.