Sony Enhances PlayStation to Take On Nintendo's Wii

The Wall Street Journal

 

If you're still just pressing buttons to play video games, now you have another reason to get up off the couch and really get into the action of a video game.

This week, Sony's PlayStation 3 continues the motion sensor video-gaming trend with its PlayStation Move (us.playstation.com). Move comes in a $100 bundle for people who already own the PlayStation 3, or $400 for the system and the bundle.

Nintendo helped spark this trend in 2006 with its Wii, a video-game console, which is played using remotes with built-in motion sensors. The Wii inspired all sorts of people to play video games—including some who never played one before—because its remotes weren't intimidating and worked with gestures familiar to people, like swinging a tennis racket or rolling a bowling ball.

Sony's PlayStation move takes this concept a step further. Its Move motion controller remote has three built-in sensors and a sphere on one end, making it look a bit like a microphone. The sphere's position can be tracked in 3-D space by a camera called the PlayStation Eye, which plugs into the PlayStation 3 and sits atop your TV. This camera lets the PlayStation know how you're moving the controller and where you're holding it. Instead of a camera, the Wii uses a sensor bar that emits infrared signals detected by the Wii remote.

Sony claims these enhancements give PlayStation Move precision and accuracy, and for the most part, I found this to be true. I especially liked when virtual images of the equipment I was "using" appeared on the TV screen, which made it seem like I was actually holding a bat, sword or tennis racket. I was so engaged with the on-screen images, I almost forgot I had a controller in my hand.

My experiences with the Nintendo Wii, which costs $200 less than the PlayStation Move and PlayStation 3 combined, have always been enjoyable. I've found many of the Wii's games to be approachable for almost anyone. Nintendo helped its cause a year ago when it brought out the Wii MotionPlus—a small accessory that plugs into the Wii remote to give its gestures added sensitivity; in my tests, it worked well. The Wii's action will be enough for some not-so-serious video-game players not willing to pay more for another console.

The PlayStation Move will get some competition in November when Microsoft releases Kinect for the Xbox 360. This video-game console tracks body movements but doesn't require a remote control. Instead, gestures like hand waves work to control games, making one's entire body a sort of remote control.

I'm not a serious gamer. As always, this column is written for mainstream consumers and I tested PlayStation Move with those people in mind. I played games like table tennis and disc golf from the Sports Champions game that comes with the PlayStation Move bundle, as well as downloadable titles like a precision block-building game called Tumble.

I also played EyePet, a game that involves taking care of a creature by washing it, dressing it in stylish costumes and playing with it.

In games like Tumble, I found that the PlayStation Move motion-control remote generated precise movements such as the ability to tilt a cube exactly the way I wanted to get it to stand on a stack of five blocks—or in one case, accidentally cause the stack to crash to the ground. Likewise, while I played table tennis, I quickly figured out how a slight flick of my wrist could generate more spin on the ball in a way that felt more realistic than with the Nintendo Wii.

I was impressed by the detailed animation and scenes in the PlayStation Move games that I played. In disc golf, for example, I played against three opponents who each had their own set of unique celebration flips or dances. And the golf courses in the game showed trees and water hazards that looked pretty realistic. A special bird's eye view followed my disc's trajectory from the second I flicked the wrist holding my motion controller until it landed.

EyePet is especially fun—and not just for kids. I named my EyePet "Domino" and taught it to jump through a hoop that virtually appeared on-screen at the end of my remote. I gave Domino a "checkup" by turning the motion controller into an X-ray-like device. This told me his brain needed a boost of creativity but his heart was happy.

There are currently 15 games that will work with PlayStation Move and a spokesman for Sony says 15 additional games will be available by the holiday season. The average price for these games is $40, though downloadable games cost less, including the $10 Tumble.

The $100 PlayStation Move bundle has the motion controller, PlayStation Eye camera and a game called Sports Champions, which includes disc golf, gladiator dual, archery, beach volleyball, bocce and table tennis.

The PlayStation Eye camera can track four controllers at once, though some games—like Start the Party—are designed to let people pass their controllers from one person to the next. Other webcams can't be substituted for the PlayStation Eye to use with the PlayStation 3.

A $20 shooting attachment fits over the controller and makes it look and act like a handgun. This can be used in first-person shooter games like Killzone 3, due out in February, as well as in arcade shooter types of games like The Shoot, available in October. (I didn't get these games in time to test them.)

If you already own a PlayStation 3, you'll enjoy the added precision and fun that the $100 PlayStation Move bundle offers. But for casual gamers who don't want to spend so much, the less expensive Nintendo's Wii will probably suffice.

Microsoft's Online Xbox Games to Pass $1 Billion Sales Mark for First Time

Bloomberg

 

Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox Live online video-game service probably broke the $1 billion revenue mark for the first time in the year that just ended, helped by sales of movies, avatar accessories and extra game levels.

Microsoft says about half the service’s 25 million users paid an annual fee to play games online like “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” in the year ended June 30. That would be about $600 million. Sales of products like movie and TV show downloads topped subscription revenue for the first time, Dennis Durkin, Xbox’s chief operating officer, said in an e-mail.

The remarks suggest the business generated more than $1.2 billion in sales last year, exceeding analysts’ estimates. Success in online gaming is crucial for Microsoft because the other products in this unit include the barely profitable Xbox game console and mobile-phone software that’s losing ground to Apple Inc. and Google Inc.

“Xbox Live has helped sell a lot of consoles and created a lot of loyalty,” said Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft in Kirkland, Washington. “Everyone has been talking about Microsoft’s inability to innovate, but this is a pretty good example where they have innovated. They timed it just right with this one.”

Durkin declined to give more detailed results for the service, and Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft doesn’t break them out when it reports earnings. Sarah Friar, an analyst at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in San Francisco, estimates Xbox Live had sales of $1.1 billion in the past fiscal year, up from $800 million a year earlier. Subscriptions for the premium service are $50 a year.

Rival PlayStation Network

Microsoft may have difficulty extending the popularity of Xbox Live to other consumer businesses like television software and portable music and video players, Rosoff said.

Sony Corp.’s rival PlayStation Network is starting a subscription offering, and Xbox Live also competes against Apple’s iTunes for music and TV show downloads. Microsoft said in May that Entertainment and Devices Division President Robbie Bach, who has overseen Xbox for a decade, will retire. J Allard, one of the earliest executives on the Xbox project, also left.

Friar estimates Xbox Live has gross margins, the percentage of sales remaining after deducting production costs, of about 65 percent. That’s buoyed results in the entertainment division, which has reported an annual profit only since 2008.

Microsoft will post operating income of $1.04 billion for the division in the year that ended June 30, projected Friar, who is based in San Francisco and recommends buying the shares. That’s more than six times the income in fiscal 2009. The company is due to report 2010 results July 22.

‘Launch, Sustain, Retain’

Xbox Live is helping Microsoft draw in additional revenue after gamers leave stores with games in hand, Durkin said.

“The old playbook of ‘launch and leave’ is a relic of the past,” Durkin said in an e-mail. “Today with Xbox live, it’s now about ‘launch, sustain, retain’ by continually adding new content that enhances the original experience.”

To boost future revenue, Xbox Live struck content deals with Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN and Activision Blizzard Inc. and introduced a family subscription that gives four memberships for the price of two. Its Kinect device, which lets users play games by movement rather than with a controller, will also fuel sales, Friar said. Microsoft probably can increase Xbox Live sales by a rate of “mid-teens to 20 percent” a year, she said.

Activision says Xbox Live is the only online gaming business -- except for Activision’s own personal-computer based “World of Warcraft” franchise -- that generates substantial money.

Revenue Sharing

“When it comes to online gaming, they’re the only significant alternative to us,” says Activision Chief Executive Officer Bobby Kotick, whose “Call of Duty” titles have 50 million registered online players.

Success may breed increased demands from content providers to share more revenue. Already Activision says it wants a cut of the take from subscriptions, not just the percentage it currently gets from its content sold through the service.

“We’re driving a lot of the subscription interest and certainly hours of game play,” Kotick said.

Microsoft rose 48 cents, or 2 percent, to $24.30 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The stock has dropped 20 percent this year.

Microsoft’s decision to invest early on in a subscription service for online gaming is paying off, said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities Inc. in Los Angeles, who covers the video-game industry. Xbox Live began in 2002.

Sony Plays Catch Up

Pachter estimates Microsoft sank about a billion dollars into the effort and didn’t break even until it released its second console in 2005. Still, the early start, combined with exclusive games, means Sony won’t catch up with its PlayStation Network, he said.

“I was skeptical in ‘02 -- I thought it was stupid,” Pachter said of Xbox Live. Now, the service is driving gamers to Microsoft. “If your friends are all playing on Xbox, you get an Xbox. If they’re all on Xbox Live, you get Xbox Live.”

Pachter estimates that Sony is losing money on PlayStation Network, which sells games and other content. Last month, Sony said it will add a premium service and charge $50 a year, matching the Xbox Live fee.

Some of Xbox’s success is due to the popularity of the alien-shooting “Halo” games, which are Xbox exclusives and top-sellers.

The “Halo” franchise “essentially invented” the market for multiplayer online games on consoles, Pachter said. There are 6 million people a month who play the game on Xbox Live, and Sony probably doesn’t have half as many people playing all of its exclusive online games combined, he said.

Microsoft is working to extend Xbox Live’s success to mobile phones. Its overhauled phone software, available later this year, will let customers play Xbox Live games and see users’ avatars, profiles and achievements.

The company needs to expand its success with Xbox Live to its other consumer businesses, Rosoff said.

“They need to take it more broadly,” he said. “It’s taken longer than I expected to do that.”

The PS3 Problem: How Sony Got Scooped by its own Customers

PC World

When a problem was discovered in Sony's PS3 consoles, the company's official response was lacking.  

You know things are bad when Sony tells Playstation 3 owners not to turn on their consoles for fear of data loss, but they're even worse when the warning comes 16 hours, and an entire night, after the company first acknowledged problems with the Playstation Network.

Yesterday, Sony announced that PS3 consoles, with the exception of the new PS3 Slim, were unable to connect with the Playstation Network because of a bug in the system's clock. What's worse is that simply turning on the consoles can cause "errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not being able to restore certain data." As such, Sony advised staying away from the PS3 -- unless you've got a Slim -- until they can fix the problem, hopefully within 24 hours.

As with any tech service outage, it's appropriate to look at whether the official response was adequate. In this case, Sony's clearly was not.

Information moves astoundingly fast in the gaming world. I first got wind of the problem at around 4 p.m. PST, reading a Twitter update from Game Informer's Philip Kollar. His PS3 Trophy information was gone, and he couldn't play any games. That was two hours before Sony itself acknowledged the problem and said it was looking into it.

Before long, Sony's customers blew the story open. Reports of internal clock issues were everywhere, mainly stemming from the popular gaming forum NeoGAF. By midnight, one user had posted a detailed FAQ on who was affected, what to do and what's at risk by turning on your console.

That's exactly what Sony should've done. Instead, the company sat on the issue until Monday morning, when spokesman Patrick Seybold posted a sterile message explaining the errors. The warning to PS3 Fat owners was buried in his blog post. That was the last we heard from Sony. Among the perfectly valid questions that were unanswered: How will a fix will be delivered to people who can't go online? What other data is at risk of being lost? Will people get their trophies back?

Kotaku's reporting that consoles are now coming back to life (but no word from Sony, mind you). Sony still has some explaining to do, and gamers deserve an apology not just for the outage itself, but for being kept in the dark.

Update: Sony's made it official that service is back, that a non-existent leap year was to blame, and that the problem resolved itself once system clocks hit March 1.