Continuing my quest to never get laid, I spent a Saturday cross-checking GameRankings review scores against VGChartz sales numbers.  As of January 15th, 213 games have sold one-million copies on the three seventh-generation consoles, reception ranging from dreadful to legendary.  Armed with this data, I ask: What can we learn about the seventh generation of video games with this data?

Bad games can be purchased for any console.  Many sell.  But never have so many sold irrespectively of “quality”.  And the majority of this business is taking place on the Nintendo Wii.

Yeah, reviewers have biases.  They enjoy Microsoft’s wallet.  They would have married Grand Theft Auto IV if they were allowed to.  But on a “compiling thousands of reviews for hundreds of games” basis, I’m willing to hear the opinion of those who enjoy the medium for a living.

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Hooray, more useless data!

A thesis will be on the way.  Data mining is serious business.

Update: The Gears of War category is not “PS3 and PC”.  Fixed to reflect that.

Just doing some data mining.  I’ll leave you to make something of the console-exclusive results until I finish making sense of the extended data.

Oh, and fuck the Nintendo Wii.

Sixty million reasons Wii Sports got a square.

Update: Added the names of all titles that sold more than four million copies.

Update 2: Replaced Forza Motorsport 2 with Gears of War, which was featured in a half-assed PC port.  Mah badz.

Update 3: JPEG compression wrecked the picture quality, replaced with PNG format.

Yup.  IWNet, that direct port of X-Box Live to the PC, sure stopped software piracy.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 broke records this year as the biggest ever entertainment launch in history. With 4.7 million units sold in the US and UK during the first 24 hours, it pulled in revenues totaling $310 million.

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With 4.1 million unauthorized downloads of the PC version alone, the game more than doubles the achievement of last year’s ‘winner‘ Spore. Modern Warfare 2 leads both the PC and Xbox 360 lists, by a landslide.

IGN’s response to the news?

Provided these numbers are indeed accurate, Activision has potentially lost more than $245 million in sales on the PC version alone.

We all know this is a line of bullshit.  “Every download is a lost sale, costing the industry 874 kajillion dollars”, blah blah.  Game publishers would love for societies to agree with this logic.  So I have a question I’d like to put forward.  Let’s tout some erroneous methodology and treat every download as though it was a lost sale.

On November 11th, VGChartz dropped jaws by estimating seven million copies of Modern Warfare 2 were sold in the twenty-four hours after its release.  The site also estimated twelve percent of these sales were on the personal computer.  (Despite the NPD’s recent tally, 840,000 units on day one sounds plausible.  “[N]early 170,000 units at retail for Windows PC [in the United States for November]” is consistent with both the popularity of digital distribution and regional sales breakdowns.

So let’s look at the six-week sales total:  To date, the Playstation 3 and X-Box 360 versions of Modern Warfare 2 have combined for 13.11 million units sold.  If PC sales still represent twelve percent of the total, then Modern Warfare 2 has sold 1.79 million units on the personal computer.

Now, assume TorrentFreak’s piracy numbers are accurate.  The Playstation 3 lived another year without a marriage to illicit downloads.  Meanwhile, Modern Warfare 2 was downloaded 4.1 million times for the PC and 910,000 times for the X-Box 360 version.  So I dare ask: Treating these downloads as “people who would have bought the game if it wasn’t for those meddling pirate Swedes”, how does the size of our user bases pan out?

So by the definition and economic ramifications of piracy as propagated by anti-piracy groups, please explain to me how the personal computer is a niche genre with a small userbase.

Happy New Year.

Remember that episode of The Simpsons where a doctor explains to Mr. Burns that every disease on the planet is trying to get into his body, thus cancelling them out and granting Burns pseudo immortality?  Thae X-Box 360 is the exact opposite.  A spiritual successor to planned obsolescence, this is a device where hardware issues are happy to take turns destroying your love for video games.

Ever watched a video card turn your monitor into a dyslexic flood of shiny?  The X-Box 360 knows when this is happening.  The Red Ring of Death is legendary small-talk, but the one-light E74 error is just as brutal.  The result of a (surprise!) bad solder joint on the H(ANA) video output chip, the success rate on fixing this error is rather dire.  The run of solutions includes replacing the heatsink X-Clamps, the previously-employed penny fix, and solder work.  These are akin to installing a pacemaker, all methods to delay the inevitable.

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Time for a riddle: What happens when Infinity Ward and Activision don’t beta test the highest-profile multiplayer title of 2009?

The issue in question is called the Javelin Exploit, and it allows players to detonate a grenade instantly upon death.

Gaming’s gotten complex, so game-breaking exploits aren’t surprising.  But if you’ve been playing online games for as long as I have, Microsoft’s actions were.

“While IW works on getting the MW2 glitch fixed, people we catch using it will recieve suspensions from LIVE. Play fair everyone,” Toulouse said via Twitter. He also noted that this policy isn’t anything new, and that it’s in place for more games than just Modern Warfare 2. If you get caught taking advantage of the exploit, you’ll be banned for 24 hours. If you’re a particularly bad case, the banning could last up to two weeks.

Forget the obvious issue, that people pay premium for X-Box Live and are on day six of waiting for a game-breaking bug to get a fix; a bug that would have never gotten by a beta test or demo.  Years back, Seth Killian of Insomnia wrote an excellent article surmising the issue with crying “cheap”:

When you claim something is “cheap”, what you’re really saying is that the game would be better without it. In effect, you’re staking your judgment against the combined efforts of the best design team in history. Sometimes people can be right about such judgments, as in the case of obvious bugs/glitches…they weren’t things that were intended or assessed by the designers, so they don’t already have their tacit stamp of approval. And, unsurprisingly, they tend to detract from the game…The best way to tell whether something helps or ultimately hurts a game is to play the hell out of it. If it really turns out to detract from the mechanics, then avoid it — fine. But you’ll never be able to decide that if you don’t play it to the fullest to begin with — something people fond of denouncing things as “cheap” never seem to do.

So Microsoft is banning people for using an exploit that detracts from the experience.  However, sucks-like-shit casuals consider “cheap” to be any tactic that allows others to outplay them.  And if you’ve been following gaming this generation, you’d know the hardcore gamer hasn’t had much of a voice.  So the question is: When casuals complain about the next unintended gameplay tactic and the tactic enhances the experience, whose side is Microsoft going to take?

British company Datel has been using the X-Box 360’s lifespan to concoct memory units for the console. They supply more memory at a lower cost than Microsoft’s product.  You know where this is going.

Datel, who expressed disappointment over a recent Xbox 360 firmware upgrade that eliminated the ability to use its third-party memory cards with Microsoft’s console, has responded with a lawsuit.

The complaint, filed in the Northern District of California U.S. District Court, alleges that the October 2009 Xbox 360 update, and subsequent lock out of Datel products, was designed to “to exclude competition from the Xbox 360 aftermarket for controllers, and to force consumers to buy Microsoft’s own controllers.”

Datel claims that Microsoft informed them that the lockout of Datel products was an “unintentional effect” of the software update, but notes that Microsoft told G4TV that, “Unauthorized MUs are not tested for compatibility or certified for safety and compliance standards and thus could damage -customer’s Xbox 360 consoles.”

I don’t claim to be a lawyer, but believe me: I know my tech history.

From 1978 to 1980, Atari tried to litigate the upstart Activision into oblivion.  Hey, they didn’t create the Atari 2600, so what right to they have to develop games for it?  The courts called “bullshit”.  Atari’s inability to win the battle justified the third party development and subsequent market saturation that caused the Video Game Crash of 1983.

Nintendo learned from Atari’s shortcomings and rigged lockout technology into the Nintendo Entertainment System.  That didn’t stop a number of developers from cracking the tech and making horrible games for the console.  Sega went a step further, building memory allocation into the Genesis that required all games (licensed or elsewise) to display a “Licensed by SEGA” screen.  The company believed this would grant them room to kick the crap out of unlicensed Genesis developers.  When Accolade became one of them, the courts ruled in their favor, stating their engineering and subsequent game development was within the confines of fair use law.

Legal precedent has established that you are allowed to build the key as long as you don’t reverse engineer the keyhole.  Datel created a key.  It provided more bang for the buck than Microsoft’s.  So the company used a firmware upgrade to change how the keyhole works.  In that case, we’re no longer talking about Atari and Activision.  It harkens to United States v. Microsoft, the court case that declared the company’s tendency to “buy out” competitors (make a similar version of competing software and then program Windows to lock out the original) constituted a monopoly.

So uh, yeah.  Good luck with that “stall the legal process until Datel runs out of money to fight the issue in court” thing, Microsoft.

You probably heard that as many as one million X-Box 360 consoles were permanently banned from X-Box Live.  As PC gamers (a.k.a. “software pirates”) say something about turnabout and fair play, I’d like to congratulate Microsoft.  Not for baiting a wave of idiots into the inevitable purchase of a second (or third (or fourth)) console.  Not for a hardware ban on the eve of the biggest software release of the year, hyped foremost as an X-Box 360 title.  Nope.  Microsoft destroyed the used market for X-Box 360 consoles and convinced everyone it was about Call of Duty.

Everybody knows that Microsoft sold the X-Box 360 at a loss, expecting to bank on the software.  Years later, Microsoft likely turns a profit on their consoles.  Not to mention that with every console sold at retail, the press releases touting the “millions of consoles sold to-date” look that much better.

Your Used X-Box 360: It Only Doesn’t EVERYTHING

If you purchased a used X-Box 360, you had obvious concerns for subsequent hardware failure.  You’re now telling the average consumer they may walk into GameSpot, throw down money on a used console, and may not be able to play Halo on it.

How long have we been hearing that used video games are ruining the market for game developers?  It was only a matter of time before a manufacturer applied the logic to their glorified toaster.

Yes, I played the Bayonetta demo.  Yes, the game is a jaw-dropper.  This despite a Playstation 3 version where framerates took a noticable hit during cutscenes.  According to the internet, issues also include screen-tearing, muddy graphics, washed-out colors, and a lack of tissues.

In other words, Sega ported Platinum Games’ X-Box iteration and ruined the hell out of it.  The reception is so vicious that it borders on hilarity.  Amidst “can’t tell if serious” calls to boycott the game (not the Playstation 3 version, the game), Jim Sterling of Destructoid footed kinder criticism:

Now for the messy stuff. I’m going to get this out of the way right now: Bayonetta is clearly inferior on the PS3. Right from the outset, somebody who has played both demos will notice the difference. The colors are more faded and the contrast less defined on the PS3, with graphics that lack the vivid sheen that the 360 version has. It’s certainly no dealbreaker, but the color is quite noticeably drained and it’s hard to go from the 360 to the PS3 without it poking you in the eyes.

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The issues with the PS3 version are obviously far more noticeable to somebody who has played through both demos multiple times, but even a first-time PS3 player should be able to spot the framerate problems and muddy graphics. Of course, those in the dark will simply believe that this what Bayonetta is supposed to be like, when playing the superior version clearly demonstrates otherwise.

Don’t believe him?  Side-by-side it (click to enlarge).

I really wonder how people survived previous console wars.  You know, when competing game consoles were fundamentally different.  Sonic the Hedgehog wasn’t merely a contrast to Mario in name and gameplay, he served to highlight the sensation of speed that Nintendo technology wasn’t capable of.  Final Fantasy VII proved the giant graphic novel the Nintendo 64 couldn’t cover, but to this day loading times are for pussies. If this is the sort of cross-console pissing match that merits a phrase like “clearly inferior”, then it’s safe to say the video game industry has come a long way.

In the previous installment, my X-Box 360 was suffering from a hardware error that Microsoft classifies as overheating.  For reasons beyond my understanding, the console erratically suffers from the error.  Before and after playing Arkham Asylum for three straight hours, my X-Box instantly two-lighted.  As a result, I’d prefer a gaping hole where one furnace wall used to be.  My X-Box just had knee surgery, so I don’t want to waste two hours trying to reopen it.

The problem with this?  As mentioned in the previous update, the penny fix relies on having sufficient force applied to the ram.  This pressure is normally created when the underbelly of the chassis screws into the top.  With one half of the chassis missing, we have a problem.  And obviously, stacking weight on top of an open 360 would be as suicidal as it is impractical.

The solution?  Similar-sized screws, the right nuts, a couple washers, and blam!

Remember that robot from Futurama with the clamps whose name eludes me?  I would like to thank him for his knowledge of clamping.