A great write-up of GameSpot's Gerstmanngate

Sam Kennedy's 1UP Blog: GameSpot's Sad State of Affairs has a great summary of Gerstmanngate with some new information about what Jeff and some of the other GameSpot editor's that have left the site are going to be doing. Also, there is more on a lot of other changes that happened at GameSpot that should have made it obvious Jeff's firing was coming.

How long are studios going to offer a rent only option on iTunes?

I was looking around at the various movies that have been added to iTunes for rental, and the thing I see over and over again in customer reviews is enthusiasm for seeing a movie people have wanted in iTunes, but only with a rental option, not a buy. For example, look at Transformers (opens in iTunes). I have taken a screenshot for posterity:


How long until studios realize they are missing out on a revenue opportunity? How quickly until Apple users a fleet of comments from all the new movies that are rent only to go back to the studios and negotiate for a purchase option too? For a lot of iTunes customers, going to a store and buying a DVD, even if it includes an iTunes copy with the movie, is just not going to be good enough. They don't want the disc, they just want the digital copy.


For the movies that are rent and buy, when is there going to be an option to upgrade for a rental to a buy? In the old world, this was always possible at some place like Blockbuster, and when I went to mom and pop video rental, they would offer that kind of option, but now with iTunes its a no-brainer. I am not saying necessary a straight rental price deduction from the buy price, but some discount means more revenue for studios. Are they ever going to get it?

Testing

Blogging from the iPhone

NetNewsWire 3.1 Released as Freeware

One of my favorite applications, NetNewsWire, has just been upgraded to 3.1 and is now free, as in beer. Daring Fireball broke the story for me. One of the first badges I ever put on the blog was the NetNewsWire button because I loved the application so much.

Interview with Tim Burton

I have always been a big fan of Tim Burton, director of Batman (1989) and Beetle Juice among a long list of directing projects. David Poland at The Hot Blog did an interview with Burton about Sweeney Todd, Burton's latest directing project, and I found it pretty interesting, mostly because Burton rarely interviews, so I thought I would pass it along:

Bought my first MP3 album from Amazon

I was looking for some new rock to listen to, and ironically I ended up buying Led Zeppelin's Mothership, the remastered greatest hits package released back in November. The buying process from Amazon is very good. About the only negative I could possibly point to was that it wasn't immediately obvious that once the download completed, the songs were going to be automatically added to iTunes.

Why I didn't buy from iTunes
If you look at Mothership on iTunes, which is how I learned about the release in the first place, you can see the album listed for $13.99. Which given the 24 tracks for that price, is $0.58 a track and seems like a good deal. Amazon undercuts by a dollar, $12.99, for $0.54 a track. That might be enough by itself, but I of course knew Amazon is selling a 256 kbps MP3, and unfortunately Apple is only seeing a 128 kbps AAC (really wish this was named MP4) DRMed file. Seems like nearly a no brainer to buy from Amazon, so why am I still questioning my purchase?

I just did exactly what the music labels want
Led Zeppelin's label is Atlantic Recoding Corp, owned by Warner Bros. The labels all want consumers, who in general hate DRM and I am no exception, to get used to buying legal digital downloads from anyplace except iTunes. iTunes, the brand, is synonymous with legal digital downloads, and the labels hate it. They are giving something to iTunes competitors, MP3 DRM-free high quality tracks, they won't give Apple (with the notable exception of EMI, who with Apple got the whole DRM free thing rolling). Apple wants to hold the line on pricing per track, with the only bundling concept, the album, also held low on pricing, all DRM free. If Apple's share of digital downloads (all media types) falls, the labels negotiating position is greatly improved to mandate price increases. This is why I feel bad about following the label's carrot. I know if I take solely my interest into account, I would always choose Amazon over iTunes when tracks are DRMed on iTunes, but DRM free on Amazon. If iTunes and Amazon had the exact same DRM free tracks, I take iTunes every time because iTunes uses AAC/MP4, the files are smaller for the same bit rate, and require less device battery power to decode. But I feel like I must continue to buy DRMed tracks on iTunes and hope for a continued migration path to iTunes Plus tracks when this eventually gets sorted out. I am no lawyer, but a lay interpretation might be that Amazon is in collusion with the labels and studios to unseat Apple as the dominant digital download distributor, then return as much power to the labels/studios as possible through whatever price increases, content bundling, "flexible pricing" they want. What the music labels want most of all is to not have to listen to, in their minds, Apple's crazy, pro-consumer unbundling of all content (songs, episodes) and relatively fixed pricing. They want a return to $16 a CD for one song you want, or even that price point on albums. I don't know how else to reinforce, other than completely not buying, that Apple's model is the one I find acceptable (and even there I think prices are too high by 20%) by sacrificing my short-term self-interest for the greater long term good of a reasonable digital download pricing structure. Since Apple is the only company that has demonstrated a willingness to stand-up to the labels/studios regarding content pricing, I will continue buying from iTunes, even if that means DRMed tracks. Velvet Revoler's Libertad, here I come.

I guess I am not buying HD-DVDs anymore

Happy New Year!

One of the things I was looking forward to that I wasn't surprised with for Christmas was the Blade Runner HD-DVD. I was really looking forward to seeing the film in all its HD glory, but instead received one key HD-DVD from my Christmas list. Hey I am not complaining, but now Warner goes Blu-ray exclusive (via Engadget)

I am really torn on what to do. My first reaction, just stop buying HD-DVDs, which I was admittedly moving slowly into, but now just full stop. Second, sell the HD-DVDs and the HD-DVD add-on for the Xbox 360. I did think about getting Blade Runner on HD-DVD now before supply runs out, but why? If Blu-ray is the winner, then I can always get it there. There is the problem of me not owning a Blu-ray player, but maybe the rumors of Blu-ray for Apple TV will fill the need.

I am overall really disappointed, my favorite HD-DVD is by far Batman Begins, and now I won't be able to get the sequel, The Dark Knight on HD-DVD late in 2008.

This is what happens when your wife doesn't listen to you on technology purchases :-)

Halo 3 Class Action Lawsuit for not really being HD

Joystiq posted that a class action lawsuit is being filed against Bungie for false advertising of Halo 3 because Halo 3 is not really HD, it's just scaled to display in HD. Bungie admitted so in a weekly update post to their site just a few days after Halo 3 was released on September 25, 2007. Halo 3's engine renders to a 1152x640 framebuffer, actually 2 of them due to their lighting schem, making Halo 3 run internally at 640p. That image is then scaled to whatever your Xbox 360 is set to output to, 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, or 1080p. What is the minimum HD resolution? I think it is minimally 720p. Is a lot of fuss being made about 80 pixels? Actually no, we are missing 183,040 pixels, that sounds like quite a number of pixels. When you read Bungie's post, it is clear they thought they made the right decision, and I in no way would dispute their decision, what I am interested in as is the lawsuit is whether people buying Halo 3 have an expectation that the game is in actual HD, not scaled to to HD resolution. Put another way, if I bought an HD-DVD, and it says on the back of the box the movie is in 1080p, should I expect to see a 480p movie scaled to 1080p? The answer is clear cut, no. It would seem to not matter how little the Halo 3 engine "cheats", or how good the 360 can scale to HDTV resolutions, what matters is if I expected Halo 3 to be in HD and I got what I expected. Let's look at some images.

When you go to the Halo 3 game detail page on xbox.com you see the image on the left. You could interpret that a number of ways, but without any preceding text, I would expect that the same runs in 1080p, which is 1920x1080, not scaled to it. That makes Halo 3 1,335,040 pixels shy of a true 1080p HDTV image. That is a huge number. Scaling can only get you so far before it's noticeable, you can't just invent millions of pixels without anyone noticing. Scaling down, no problem there, my equipment isn't up to snuff, but scaling up without consumer knowing about it, I have a huge problem with that. What about when you buy an Xbox 360, is anything said on the marketing that would lead someone to believe High Definition was a feature?

On the Xbox 360 Pro info page, you see the text in the images to the left in different spots on the page, but that's it. Microsoft's language here never explicitly says something like Experience gaming in True HD, but I do think the expectation is created between what you see on the Halo 3 site, and the retail box, and what you see on the Xbox 360 site that you are going to be gaming in true high-definition, the image you see will be native HD, not scaled to that output resolution.

I don't think it's a stretch all, I know that is what I expected with the 360 and absolutely for Halo 3. Apparently it's not just Halo 3 that has this problem, but a decent number of other games also render at less than HD resolutions.

Tip: Signup with Catalog Choice and stop unwanted paper catalogs

I just wanted to pass along a tip I got from Chris Pirillo. Get a lot of catalogs in the snail mail that you don't want? Register with Catalog Choice and opt-out of all that junk. Save some trees and save yourself some time.

Thoughts on Gerstmanngate, or Heightened Consumer Product Expectations

N'Gai Croal at Newsweek's Level Up has written an excellent article on what the Jeff Gertsmann firing from Gamespot (a CNet company) means for game publishers and the video game press. He covers the controversy from a larger publication perspective that he writes from and the shielding editorial receives because of it. He also talks about enthusiast sites like Gamespot where they earn their living primarily from game publisher advertising deals. GameSpot has posted their most definitive commentary to date on Gertsmann's firing earlier today, where they clearly deny that game publisher pressure (Eidos) had anything to do with it. The whole situation stinks. I was a frequent GameSpot reader before this episode, and Gertsmann was my favorite reviewer, the only game reviewer I knew by name and trusted. I have stopped going to the site since the story broke weeks ago now.

While GameSpot continues to deny Eidos was the direct cause of Gertsmann's firing, his review of their game, as N'Gai and numerous commenters on today's GameSpot explanation speculate, Gertsmann's Kane and Lynch review (since publishing heavily edited) may just have been the last straw for GameSpot parent CNet. MTV's Stephen Totilo has a pretty good interview with Gertsmann which to me seems to hint that Jeff nor any previous review bowed to pressure from advertising, but makes clear Gertsmann's strong opinion of how to keep the integrity of a game reviewing operation intact. 

From my perspective, the pressure on game publishers, and in fact producers of all content, has gone up dramatically with the Internet as consumers have become more choosey about what content they will even think about. Rotten Tomatoes (an IGN company), Game Rankings (a CNet company), and MetaCritic (another CNet property) are the tools that consumers user to decide if content in question is worth their precise time. All these rating aggregators are a shorthand for the quality of content. In my experience over the last few years, the bar keeps going higher for consumers to even notice your content. This may be most prevalent for video games because of the time and money involved.

Games are the most expensive up front consumer entertainment you can buy. $60 for a new Xbox 360 or PS3 game, $50 for a Wii game, with PC games sold at a large variety of price points. With the amount of ways to entertain yourself, this is a pretty big cost to first justify and then absorb for a consumer if a video game isn't good. Then there is the time commitment. You waste 2 hours on a movie if its bad, an hour on a music album, 5 minutes on a song, but anywhere from 10-50 hours on a game, and you may not know whether that game is good all the way through into the final hours of gameplay, whether it was worth your time, is a satisfying ride. That is a tremendous amount of time to invest in a piece of entertainment. The risk is too high that you aren't going to be entertained according to the initial investment in the game. This is my theory on why a lot of games don't sell and aren't talked about unless their MetaCritic/GameRankings score is over 90%. Particularly for core gamers, the Xbox 360 owners (primarily now driving the software market) that rush out to buy the hot new title every week. If developers aren't bringing their "A" game, don't even talk to me. We have all played enough mediocre games, why should I bother with them anymore? Sounds snobby as I write it, but I see it happening, and I know I am doing it. Assassin's Creed for 360 has a Game Ranking score of 84%, you couldn't pay me to play it.

With this trend, it's plausible, even probable, that GameSpot is trying to insure continued strong advertising buys for promising softball, powder puff reviews of advertised product. Does this serve consumers, of course not, but it will keep the checks coming at GameSpot as long as their readers don't catch on. And maybe Jeff wasn't fired for these reasons, but these issues aren't going away, unless that is review sites break free of known advertiser revenue and make it all anonymous. Google AdSense?