As a interactive media lawyer, it goes without saying that I am bullish on the future of the games industry. Every year video games get more compelling, more detailed, more fun to play. Meanwhile television and movie producers keep pumping out more of the same.
The rumors going around the web are that Activision and MTV Games have both been in talks with the Beatles‘ representatives regarding a license to create playable tracks based on the Beatles’ catalog. It would say a lot about the market power of the video game industry if Activision or MTV Games were able to score a licensing deal with the Beatles. Every six months or so there are whispers that Apple will finally be adding the Beatles to iTunes, but it hasn’t happened yet.
One aspect of a video game deal involving Beatles content that makes it more likely than a traditional music distribution license is that a Rock Band or Guitar Hero game may only require publishing rights tied to the underlying Beatles compositions and not the recordings themselves. Use of the recordings would require a license to both the composition and the recording. A composition only license would require the game developer to re-record the songs, however, which would make the game less compelling than if they used the original recordings. Somehow I doubt Paul and Ringo want to get back in the recording studio to re-record Twist and Shout for Rock Band. Then again, they might just use covers.
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Excerpt from Joystiq.com’s coverage below:
FT.com revisits the pursuit and reports that, perhaps unsurprisingly, Beatles ‘representatives have held discussions with both Activision and MTV Games’ in pursuit of a ‘final deal [that] would be worth several million dollars’ and ‘could be reached in a matter of weeks.’ Well, we’ll be here in a matter of weeks … say, E3 would be a really nice time to announce something. We’re just sayin’
It’s been about two years since we first started hearing about Will Wright’s next game, Spore. The game blew me away when I saw the demo from GDC, but it has been so long that my interest has waned. That may change with the release of Spore Creature Creator next week. EA seems to have cooked up a brilliant strategy for its release of the game. Spore Creature Creator only costs about $10, but only give you the ability to make creatures for use with the full version of the game. $10 is an easy buying decision for most people to make, but once they invest in the initial purchase, and start investing their time in building their creatures, it becomes unlikely that they won’t drop the $50-$60 on the full game. Not to say that the game won’t sell huge volumes on its own, but launching the creator first allows EA to build more buzz around the games full launch and initialize its game universe with a wealth of user generated content in advance of the full launch. Nice move EA.
If you haven’t watched the demos of Spore yet, watch the embedded presentation below. It is an ambitious and amazing game.
Who would have thought that manipulating amyloid-beta precursor proteins could be fun? Foldit, a game developed by University of Washington students along side professional game developers, is designed to harness the collective brain power of gamers for the purpose of making advances in protein science:
Can humans really help computers fold proteins?
We’re collecting data to find out if humans’ pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving abilities make them more efficient than existing computer programs at pattern-folding tasks. If this turns out to be true, we can then teach human strategies to computers and fold proteins faster than ever!
It will be interesting to see if this will have any effect on the market for video game related virtual items (e.g., swords, armor, gold and land in MMOs).
eBay Bans Auctions Of Digital Goods: “We’ve pointed out more than a few times how digital goods muck up traditional markets that are based on the concept of scarcity, and it appears that eBay has come to the same conclusion. It’s now banned the direct sale of purely digital goods from either its auctions or its direct sales offerings. Instead, those who want to sell digital goods need to put up a classified ad on the site, rather than a transactional platform. The basic reason has to do with the (wouldn’t you know it?) infinitely reproduceable nature of digital goods. That allows eBay sellers to list the same product many, many, many times over, since they have an infinite supply. This practice is screwing up listings and (more importantly) is being used to manipulate feedback ratings, and so eBay has done away with it.
As a follow up to our story about Wii Remote head tracking, here is a link to a story at Engadget describing a camera only based system that is being developed for the Sony PS3. Check out the video at Engadget:
We were already blown away by Johnny Lee’s headtracking demo using a Wiimote, but it looks like Sony’s trying to take it mainstream in a much slicker way. The company was demoing a PS3-based headtracking system at GDC that doesn’t require any special IR glasses to function — it just uses a bone-stock Playstation Eye camera to track your ugly mug around the room. Sony says it’s not announcing the system for any games yet, but we can’t imagine devs aren’t clamoring for this to get official — this would be amazing for all sorts of genres.
Are you a hardcore gamer? No, seriously — a hardcore gamer. If so, you should have no qualms throwing down $169 for TN Games’ FPS Vest now that it’s available for order. The entire bundle includes an ‘impact-generating’ wearable, an air compressor, USB cable, power supply and copies of 3rd Space Incursion and Call of Duty 2 for PC. Just don’t wander too far outside of your house with this thing on, alright?
Practically anyone who’s played Guitar Hero and/or Rock Band has probably come across that one jerk who just can’t help denigrating the simple fun of the rhythm game experience. ‘That’s not even close to playing a real guitar,’ he’ll say in a snide, nasally voice. ‘The guitar doesn’t even have strings!’ Well, if you want to show up that pompous prick, may we suggest you queue up the below video of a modded, stringed Rock Band guitar on a laptop and then RUB IT IN HIS FACE AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Ahem. Anyway, while this single-stringed beast still has a ways to go to match a real six-string guitar, it looks like it captures the axe-grinding experience a little more authentically. Here’s hoping that some sort of officially licensed, purchasable version of this type of guitar will be available soon.
Ender’s Game Now A Reality: “Chair Entertainment has announced a partnership with Orson Scott Card to start working on a game. They have purchased the rights to use the Ender’s Game series of books to create a gaming series based on the writings of Orson Scott Card.”
Johnny Chung Lee is a Ph.D. Grad Student at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. From the projects listed on his website, it is apparent that he has a real knack for taking existing off-the-shelf technology and pushing it to the limit. In the embedded video below, Johnny takes Nintendo’s already innovative Wiimote and creates a head-mounted tracker for virtual environments. This is really incredible and exciting stuff. Inspiring!
Using the infrared camera in the Wii remote and a head mounted sensor bar (two IR LEDs), you can accurately track the location of your head and render view dependent images on the screen. This effectively transforms your display into a portal to a virtual environment. The display properly reacts to head and body movement as if it were a real window creating a realistic illusion of depth and space. “
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Monday, June 23, 2008
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