Sure. FarmVille’s All Fun And Games. Until Somebody Makes A Billion Dollars.
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on June 8, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Tuesday, June 8th, 2010Game sales have been outstripping music and movie sales for some time, but the real money may be in imaginary money.
If the entertainment industry is still wondering where that billion dollars in lost sales went last year, I think I have an answer for them. FarmVille. Yes, laugh at your Facebook friends as their lonely cows meander through the pasture of your Facebook feed, but Zynga, the developers of the game, banked a cool $270 million last year, and are looking forward to topping ONE BILLION DOLLARS this year. All because your do-nothing crackhead friends couldn’t find anything better to do than plant imaginary corn. But there’s the rub. It wasn’t slacker crackheads that were playing. It was Midwestern housewives. At least that’s how David Laux, global executive for games and interactive entertainment at IBM was quoted in that article. While the real demographic for the boom in this kind of game isn’t literally “Midwestern housewives”, it certainly is a new kind of user, and a new kind of development process. Not surprisingly, the same “traditional” game developers who enjoyed the kind of growth that has led to game sales outstripping movie sales in many countries are a little upset that a company like Zynga is creating the kind of revenue streams that it is, especially with the kinds of games (Farmville, Mafia Wars, etc) and user engagement strategies they utilize. Some developers resort to a bit of hyperbole to express their concern for the “purity” of the industry by saying things like “metrics-driven design and extrinsic rewards for in-game actions could lead to a future of designing shitty games that you have to pay people to play“, when what they may really mean is “dang, I wish I’d thought of that“. There’s no question that this new game market is going to be a big thing for a while, but what I find almost more interesting (and which I touched on earlier this year) is that there’s a second billion dollar industry spinning off of this all, one involving transferring your imaginary money between these booming games and social networks. I personally have never understood the “hook” with games like FarmVille; frankly Facebook itself is like a game to me. But what will catch my attention is an opportunity to get in early on a growing economy, even a virtual one. See you in ProfitsVille!
What Will Replace The “Dead Tree Edition”?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on June 2, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010While the continuing demise of major print news sources is inevitable, what will replace them?
The fact that the term “dead-tree edition” even exists is a clear expression of the state of newspapers today. It’s clear that big changes are afoot, and it’s even clearer that no-one knows where those changes will take us. While Steve Jobs is talking about his fear of America turning into a nation of bloggers, Yahoo News is banking on exactly that as a big moneymaker. And while Rupert Murdoch loves the iPad – which is being touted as “being to news what the iPod was to music” – he has also lost billions on his takeover of the Wall Street Journal, while not ruining it in the ways everyone expected. And though people have been arguing for a while that Google has somehow contributed to the demise of print news, this piece in The Atlantic not only points out that Google CEO Eric Schmidt wants to help print news (and ironically said so in a December 2009 Op-Ed piece in the WSJ), it also points to some of the real causes of the newspapers’ demise – mostly loss of ad revenue. And mostly in forms you wouldn’t imagine, like classified ads, which with many papers generated as much as 30% of their income. I’m personally excited to see where it all goes, as long as the Huffington Post doesn’t become the leading on line news source as some expect, and as long as Google doesn’t become the world’s news filter, with their search portal dominance dictating which news Web sites we can find. Oops! We forgot that the new AP Style guide says it’s “website”, not “Web site”. Not that the AP has quite the nearly-biblical influence it used to; even their net income is down 65%, and their very identity is being parodied daily by crappily edited sites that wantonly violate half their guidelines with almost every sentence.
Fetal Distraction: Splice The Movie
[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 27, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Thursday, May 27th, 2010In theaters June 4th, Vincenzo Natali’s “Splice”, starring Oscar winner Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley, promises to be the best bad movie of the summer.
It is with a moderate amount of shame that I admit that the next film release that intrigues me is Splice, which will be in theaters June 4. The film looks like it falls comfortably into a genre that I for reasons beyond my comprehension am fascinated with, the slickly-produced film that may be really bad but knows that it is, and is therefore exceptional in a twisted sort of way. I have a long list of these that I’ll share someday (it would be very different from Rotten Tomatoes’ list based on the same idea), but recent examples would be Teeth or Hissss. The recent Repo Men should have made it into this realm, but failed, for reasons that I can’t quite put my finger on. In any case, Splice’s premise is from the familiar territory of Frankenstein-meets-egotistical-gene-splicing-scientist stuff, but apparently director Vincenzo Natali (The Cube
Lawyers Gonna Put You In The Hurt Locker
[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 16, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Sunday, May 16th, 2010Makers of The Hurt Locker are causing more casualties in the War On Piracy. Didn’t they hear about the cease fire?
While the Iraq War has claimed at least 100,000 casualties, it looks like the makers of the Oscar-winning film about it are getting ready to claim another 20,000 or more. Only in this case, the lawyers will be doing all the shooting, and the casualties will be internet users like you and me who are nerdy enough to use Bittorents. It appears no-one at Voltage Pictures (the backers of Hurt Locker ) got the memo about how stupid it is to sue your customers, and so they’ve contracted US Copyright Group (who apparently didn’t get the memo about updating their vintage web site) to go after every one of the filthy pirates that swiped their movie . Don’t they know that even the MPAA has decided that Anti-piracy is passé and that it’s now to be called “content protection”? You may remember the relatively short-lived You Can Click But You Can’t Hide campaign (our parody below) by the MPAA a few years ago, which was a little different, and not nearly as insane as the practice of suing consumers en masse, which even the music industry has come to realize is absurd . Who knows when these industries will ever figure out that they’re fighting an assymetrical war (ironically, much like the one that the film is about) and that their “enemy” is the future and their inability to understand it, not the consumer. Just ask British entertainer Peter Serafinowicz, who expains in this Gawker piece why he’s going to have to sue himself for piracy. Do the Hurt Locker folks ( and me) a favor and buy their dang film through this link
No Lion – M.I.A.’s New Video “Born Free” Is Manely Just Violent
[ Comments Off ]Posted on April 26, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Monday, April 26th, 2010In much the same way that her political posturing brings more attention to herself than the plight of Sri Lanka, M.I.A.’s new video “Born Free” brings more attention to itself than its message.
Not to be outdone by Erykah Badu, Lady Gaga & Beyoncé, M.I.A.’s new video (below) is much more provocative short film than music video. And while it’s stylishly and cleverly shot it is – in my opinion – a little short on real finesse. When I first heard about M.I.A.