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.

(more…)

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.

…

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.

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.

…

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.

For the six-thousand years since the Creation, America has been the undisputed champion of the world.  But today, threats loom.  Democrats control the political process.  Brock Lesnar controls the Octagon.  But most terrifying?  A world where countries compete in a global market for goods and services.  Fortunately, we triumph again.

Best Buy’s on the ball.  How do you expect an untrained American to install a Japanese gaming device?  Hello?  Cultural divide?  Japanese goods simply don’t fly in America.  We’re sorry Sony, but your influence is in another country!

Remember kids: America invented capitalism.  It’s an economic system where one improves products by marketing them better than their inventor.  Best Buy, you have a fine service, but I summon my trap card: The Ghetto Playstation 3 Installation Team.

We’ll prevent your Playstation 3 from ever getting the dreaded Red Ring of Death!

You can’t take chances in this world.  One day, your game console is playing Wii Sports.  The next, it kills you and every person in your family.  Video game consoles are a device best left to professionals.  That’s why The Ghetto guarantees they can install your Playstation 3 or Sony will give you your money back!

Best Buy claims they can do it for 130 dollars?  What a ripoff!  As part of our week-long, fifty-percent-off promotion, The Ghetto will install your Playstation 3 for sixty dollars.  What’s more important?  Purchasing a copy of Heavenly Sword, or making sure your Playstation 3 can entertain you?

We’ll not only match the competition, but we’ll install two Playstation Online accounts.  That’s double what the competition offers.  And as a bonus, we’ll permit your Playstation 3 to download demos!  It’s like a legal version of ThePirateBay!  Choose from hundreds of video games, like Batman: Arkham Asylum, I don’t know if Metal Gear Solid 4 is there but I’ll check, and many others!

It’s your call: You can follow the instructions in the manual, or we can do it for you.  Call now, before your Playstation achieves sentience and murders the dog!

Commander Handsonface, status report!

A PlayStation 3 gamer has filed suit in U.S. District Court in California, alleging that SCEA suppressed his free speech rights and caused him pain and suffering by banning his account on the PlayStation Network.
In a complaint filed on July 6th, Erik Estavillo of San Jose writes that he his disabled by a variety of disorders; among these are agoraphobia, a fear of crowds[.]

…

In his request to the court, Estavillo, who appears to be unrepresented, asks that SCEA be enjoined from banning players. He also seeks $55,000 in punitive damages.

First-amendment rights don’t apply to services and property, and said first-amendment rights were likely used to be an obnoxious fuck, yada yada.  Consider the equivalent: I post on the Battle.net forums.  I have been banned from the message board over a hundred times.  During the creation of this entry, I made the following post:

Imagine Blizzard tires of this.  The company deletes my Warcraft III account, that of over three-thousand games played.  I proceed to sue Blizzard Entertainment for 55,000 dollars, claiming:

“Blizzard eliminated my ability to use the Battle.net forums as an advertising outlet for my web site.  I would like to be compensated for the revenue which I could have potentially earned as a result of this advertising. In addition, the company destroyed the significant time and effort that I put into my Warcraft III account.  They damaged my internet reputation, infringed upon my first amendment rights, and ruined my life in the process.  Thanks for ruining my life by making some of my favorite games, you tyrants!”

Yup.  Sony’s public relations team should be happy.  As of this moment, they’re no longer the biggest asshole(s) affiliated with Sony products.

You enjoy video games.  You own a game console.  Last week, Sony called you retarded.  Didn’t see the press release?  There was a slight problem with it:

Sony created this chart.  It epitomizes the entire press release.  You just called a play from the Atari Jaguar marketing machine and told us to “Do the Math”.  Nobody told you the Jaguar was a massive failure.  Sony is now the sixth-grader that didn’t get his way and called mommy a bitch.

People don’t slam Sony because the Playstation 3 is a bad product.  It’s good hardware with a passable game library.  People slam Sony because they took the most dominant market share in video game history and pissed it away.  And according to you, we don’t get that you reverse-engineered the Ark of the Covenant and gave it a BluRay player.  If the Playstation 2 is Bill Clinton and oversaw great economic success, then the Playstation 3 is George W. Bush.

You, Sony, can’t understand that you turned your back on everything that sold 140-million Playstation 2 consoles.

You got on top of the industry by producing an inexpensive media center that was easy to program games for.  Since Mattel and Coleco fought Atari in the first modern console war, only the Super Nintendo won out its generation with the best tech (and that’s if you don’t count the Jaguar and 3DO as competitors).  That’s why you, Sony, attached yourself to a proprietary format that’s only better on the 72-inch televisions nobody can afford and saddled it with a processor that game developers can’t code for.  You eliminated backwards compatability from the system and let the Sony of America CEO say it was to encourage people to buy more Playstation 3 games.  You removed your DualShock functionality and installed a half-assed Wii-Mote in the controller.  Unless your name is Maddox and you have made a living off of insulting the consumer, you do not insult the consumer, particularly when those consumers have a tendency to scream “Bloody Mary”.

You, Sony, thought you could work this because you felt the Playstation name was in IPod territory.  The Playstation 3 was going to be a status symbol.  Hey, your boy Ken Kutaragi said it:  “Our goal for PlayStation 3 is for consumers to think to themselves, ‘I will work more hours to buy one’. We want people to feel that they want it, irrespective of anything else.”  Want to know the problem with marketing an everyperson product as a status symbol?  Generally, status symbols are such because lots of people can’t afford them.  If everyone owned a Lexus, it would carry the same connotation as a Pinto.  But you, Sony, decided the sun shines out your ass and people would slide down rainbows to buy your supercomputer.  Every living organism in the world was going to bipedal, slither, or osmosis their ass into the store and buy half a dozen.

At least when Nintendo was exposed in the early 90’s, it required several home runs from Sega.  Sure, the Nintendo Wii choked out the “friends and family” market, but they couldn’t have done it without Sony’s help.  The Playstation 3 will become an historic example of how not to market a video game console.  When the 2600 caved in, the suits at the top believed the game industry had no boundaries.  People would buy whatever could be programmed onto cartridges.  When Sony’s games division caved in, it was because their people believed the Playstation name had no boundaries.

If I was part of any gamer stereotype, it would have been “Sony fanboy”.  I wasn’t the only one.  It only took you three years to throw it all away.  Enjoy third place.