f13.net

Am I reading http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060406-6544.html right to understand that the cheapest standalone Blu-Ray player announced so far will retail at $999? 


Blu-Ray will fail. People have known and loved the terms “HD” and “DVD” now for years, and with a format combining the two terms, it’s clear who will win the battle.


Not to mention the loss they will be taking on each unit even if they retail the PS3 at $600.  Can I get an Amen?

The price keeps going up. It's total bullshit aimed at first-adopters.

HD-DVD might not have enough...uh third party movie support. We'll see though. The backwards compatibility native to HDDVD is what I think will really help it. Much like it helps the Playstation brand. I'll never quite understand Sony's hatred of HD-DVD other than it isn't THEIR format.

Sony needs another reason?

There's a signficant difference in material costs between a top-of-the-line early adopter "I MUST BE FIRST ON THE BLOCK TO GET ONE" standalone Blu-ray player with all the bells and whistles and a bare Blu-ray drive. Samsung announced a while back that they are aiming at around $500 for their Blu-ray *burner*, which is a better indication what the material costs of the bare drive is going to be.

As for Blu-ray vs HD-DVD that may not really matter since both formats use a blue ray laser and there will be players coming out that will play both formats.

Even in your best case scenario, a $500 dollar Blu-Ray player exceeds the cost of an entire Xbox 360 system with just one component.

Sorry I guess I wasn't clear: That's $500 RETAIL PRICE for a BURNER. The manufacturering cost for a bare non-recording Blu-ray is going to be way under that price especially since Sony is making their own drives. Even the idiots over at Merrill Lynch weren't stupid enough to think a Blu-ray drive was going to cost Sony $500 (they were guessing $350). The guys over at The Register were guessing $100 for the drive price. Personally I think it'll be closer to $150 or so.

Touche.

DVD burners (and CD burners for that matter) when brand spanking new were more than those prices listed above.  This is typical early adopter pricing, nothing to see here, move along.

The larger point is that Blu-Ray is more expensive, harder to produce, requires more licensing fees, and is not backwards compatible.  Sony will bleed money selling PS3's at $500, and HD-DVD will prevail.  But then, you knew that.

I've been mostly ignoring this technological slap fight but do you mean that I can't play my old DVDs on Blu-ray?  I had assumed both would have support for the older format, even if they had slap in an extra laser head.

I don't like either of these new formats, I don't see the need for them, it's just a bunch of slimeball executives that want us to buy our stuff all over again.  I really hope both fail.

Yeah, and betamax should have won because it had higher quality in a smaller form factor.  Facts don't mean anything in this, the only thing that matters is which consortium is the bigger bully.

Blu-Ray has the backing of the porn industry.

What I actually expect is that within three years you will be able to buy a Blu-Ray/HD-DVD/DVD/CD combo drive from Best Buy for 60 bucks and the Next Big Thing will be on the horizon (probably NOT disk based).

Listen to Murgos.  Don't stir you panties into a froth over the price of bleeding-edge tech.  Only a few years ago, DVD players were ridiculously expensive, now you can get one for $30 that is easy to de-region.

You will be able to play your DVDs (and CDs) in Blu-ray players. HD-DVD does offer simpler backwards compatibility to DVD both in the logical disc structure and in the physical materials used to make the disc. Blu-ray's deviation from the DVD physical spec is what allows it to fit more data on each disc. This will make HD-DVD disc manufacturering cheaper than Blu-ray disc manufacturing in the short term. On the other hand, Blu-ray discs come standard with TDK's "Scratch Proof" coating (aka Durabis) which means they will be much harder to scratch compared to HD-DVDs which use the same plastic coating as DVDs.

Next big thing is Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD). They already exist and burn 1.7tb to a cd sized disc.

Well, hell... that's what I'm getting.

Sure, better disc tech does and will continue to exist I will give you.  It's been a half assed consumer solution since it was introduced in 83 (?) though, delicate and requiring complex and delicate machinery to use (Discman anyone?).

I am actually anticipating cheap flash memory to take off.  Maybe I am hallucinating though, still in 5 years or so I expect you to pick up a little thumb drive looking thing with your favorite movie on it for 15 bucks.

I expect everything digital to come packaged this way the advantages over disc based media are numerous, smaller cheaper packaging, solid state devices with all the inherent advantages (DRM, non existant load and seek times, high speed transfer, superior data retention, much cheaper hardware to use it with, much less power use, blah blah blah).  Write once read many will be very easy to make and DRM and will allow kiosks in 7/11 where you can load a disposable drive with the new releases of games/movies/music/whatever.  Retard level easy error correction and checking (you will never ever burn a bad drive, if it passes QA at the plant it will work, period).

Affordable 40 gig flash drives will be out in the next 18 months.

18 months after that multiple hundred gig flashdrives will cost 1/2 as much.

18 months after that TB flash drives will cost 1/2 that again.

5 years.

edit: case in point: I have a 1 gig thumb drive in my pocket.  I have carried that drive around with me for 2+ years now IN MY POCKET.  I can use it on almost any computer in the world at any time that has nothing more than a $5 USB port.  It has never corrupted any data that has been on it.  No disc will ever be able to do that.

Amen

I believe the VHS users said the same thing about the kids these days and their expensive, new-fangled DVDs.

Blu-Ray has my support. Unlike HD-DVD, it's an actual improvement over current tech. Which is not to say I'm going to rush out and buy one. I also didn't rush out and buy a flat widescreen plasma TV when Circuit City was selling them for $10K, or a DVD player when they were $500.

Point is, the price will go down, and HD is - in comparison to Blu-Ray - so incremental an improvement as to be pitiable.

The real question, IMO, is whether we *need* a "next generation" DVD at all. What we have seems to cover most uses adequately.

We don't. We really, really don't.

RUDY! RUDY! RUDY!

You're eating paint chips right now, aren't you?

But the bottom line does!

Somewhere, a long time ago, I read an article about revolving formats, and how it was planned to have everyone re-buy their media every 10-15 years.  This was to ensure some sort of self-fueling profit cycle or some nonesene.  I laughed at the time, but I begin to wonder.

My 8-Track of Peter Frampton Alive agrees with you.

I have an 8-track of Queen's News of the World sitting in a box somewhere.

There are some practical limitations that will however start coming into play.

For example, a 1GB flash drive is most likely using a single 8Gb NAND flash die, which is currently selling on the spot market in China for roughly $25.  In order to get 40GB you would need forty of these chips, costing (today) over $1000!

In order to approach cost parity to hard disk drives, you need to be talking sub $1 per GB.  Most HDD's are at the sub 50 cent per GB level today, so $1 per GB is still twice as much.  Even given the average decline in NAND spot market pricing extrapolated over 18 months, we will be lucky to be operating at around the $5 per GB level in 18 months.  This is still over $200 for a 40GB NAND flash based drive!

The biggest limiting factor is the density of the NAND chips themselves.  The big guys like Samsung and Toshiba are starting to run into technological limitations at the 32Gb level (or 4GB per chip) even on their cutting edge process technologies, which is sub 65nm.  Even assuming they can run at 32Gb in a cutting edge fab they are not going to be able to charge sub $5 per GB and still be able to recover their costs.  You cannot sell a product in a brand new fab running a high density product for below cost.

Lastly there is the power limitation and form factor limitation.  The USB standard defines 500mA for bus powered devices the absolute maximum, with 100mA being preferred.  The 100mA level would allow 5 USB devices to run bus powered at the same time which is the standard set forth by Microsoft.

A 32Gb NAND flash device would give 4GB of storage, which means for 40GB you would need 10 flash devices.  Assuming you wanted a good write bandwidth, you would need to program 4 devices in parallel, each requiring around 50mA is active read/write current which puts the power requirements for flash alone at 200mA.  This doesn't count the USB controller or the voltage regulators either.

For form factor, this isn't as big an issue IMHO.  10 flash devices could theoretically be fanagled to fit into a thumb drive format given die stacking technology that we have today.

About the only thing I can see happening in the next few years is for the polymer storage or magnetic array storage technologies taking off.  These promise much higher densities in comparable die sizes to what we have in the market today.

My prediction is that we will see a leveling off in USB thumb drive density around the 8GB to 16GB level, which is where the 32Gb NAND flash chips start to hit their technological barriers.
In 18 months I would guess that a 32Gb chip is going to cost roughly $15 (or right about $4 per GB), putting an 8GB thumb drive at roughly $35 and a 16GB drive roughly around the $80 level.

As far as straight audio or video, human senses really don't need anything more precise than the current cd/dvd technology provides. Despite what faggy audio/videophiles say, human senses barely take advantage of what's provided by those. No human can detect the .0000005 difference in the treble levels you'd get from a new, bigger technology.  Until we get holoprojectors or whatever, DVD's are fine. Where new technology is handy is storage. Right now I have about 3tb of external hard drives on my desk. I'd much prefer that all on 2 hdv disks. Or even better, a 40tb internal drive. Or whatever the hell.

Are you actually betting against Moore's law?  I've actually seen an image of a 1nm (10 Angstrom!) quantum dot device.

I don't know if you carried out your thought's all the way to conclusion but you will notice that your prediction for the next 18 months and mine are identical.

40 GB for $200 in 18 months (we are at 8GB for $212 now BTW).

Hundred(s) of GB for $100 in 36 months (less than 1$ per GB).

A TeraByte for $50 in 54 months -or- disposable low double digit GB devices for a quarter.

The technology probably won't actually be Flash (certainly not as we know it today), that was me keeping the conversation simple, but to the layman on the street?   They wont know the difference, except for maybe a different looking connector.

Not so much as that I think I have a different definition of the term 'affordable'. ;)

$200 for 40 GB does not an affordable drive make in this industry, where a vast majority of sales volumes for thumb type drives are done on an 'impulse' level.

In fact not two weeks ago I attended a presentation from a large manufacturer of photography equipment, where they want over 80% of their solid state media to fall under the $20 level, where it's most attractive for purchase at your local Walmart or Costco.  Anything that small costing more than $20 needs to be locked up and requested from an employee, which puts it out of the 'impulse purchase' category.

I bet you would be surprised to know that over 75% of the total flash capacity goes into very low density (like less than 256MB) applications like small thumb drives and SD/MMC cards since all of those fall within the impulse purchse category.

As for the new technologies, I agree there is some exciting stuff on the horizon however for the vast majority of it we haven't figured out how to manufacture it with good yields leveraging existing semiconductor infrastructures.  At my previous company, I was involved in some research with organic polymer storage technologies, which yielded some promising results.  However we were at a loss to figure out how to make them in large quantities. ;)

I can tell you that the hand wringing is already in full swing at just about every semiconductor company (mine included) since 'traditional' floating gate and nitride storage designs just literally stop working at less than 45nm.

Blasphemer!

You should notice a difference between HD and standard-def video (or at least you should, if your cable company doesn't compress the everliving fuck out of all its digital channels like our local crapheads do.)

Some people don't "see" it immediately; it takes a while to click.  Case in point with the upgrade from VHS to DVD:  I bought one of those $500 (well, $450) DVD players.  I'm a video producer, the difference in image quality was blatantly obvious to me, but the wife got pissed that I would throw money away on something like that when VHS was perfectly fine and she "couldn't tell the difference."  Bitched about it for days. 

A few weeks later the optical head malfunctioned, and I got home and she surprised me by demanding I take the DVD player back and get it repaired IMMEDIATELY because after becoming accustomed to it, she'd discovered she could not stand to watch the VHS any more. 

I don't know about tech upgrades, but somebody needs a wife upgrade for sure.

ZING!

Those are a lot more expensive than Blu-Ray.

Late to the party, but I've spouted this line before:

Does the PS3 ship with Blu-Ray?

If yes, Blu-Ray wins.

That is all.

All I know is that for once I can tell the difference in a tech upgrade.  Things encoded in h264 (or whatever its called) look slightly better (I NEVER NOTICE) then things encoded in .xvid I have noticed an increase in processor use but not a noticeable increase in file-size.

Oh I totally noticed the difference between HD TV + HD channel but only with sports watching regular sitcom/drama on HD is a fucking waste anything but sports or a movie in widescreen is pointless.  Hockey and Soccer esp get much better on TV w/ HD.

I'm bored... sorry.

Where are you getting that idea from? HD-DVD supports, well, HD, which DVDs don't. It doesn't support 1080p which Blu-ray does so it is going to be obsolete quicker than Blu-ray unless they manage to shoehorn that into the spec at a later date without making all the existing players obsolete. Both formats support the same video codecs and similar audio codecs. Blu-ray, on the other hand, has copy protection up the yin-yang. Both are using AACS (the finalization of which caused the delay of the PS3) but Blu-ray has two additional copy protection schemes on top of that. Another technical difference is that HD-DVD supports iHD which supposedly allows for more interactive content compared to Blu-ray's Java-based approach (Java is needed also to support Blu-ray's RomMark copy protection scheme).

I'm not sure that's true.

UMD is hardly setting the world alight.



I'd say it depends, if a PS3 sells at $400 within a year of launch with a crappy blu-ray player in it, then maybe, because if a PS3 does that, then the home electronics market is forced to sell decent blu-rays at no more than $500 at the same time (and so way earlier than anyone is forced to sell HDDVD at a sensible price point). If all this nonsense about $1k blu rays is true, and it means a PS3 costs anything more than half that, I don't know who the hell is going to buy one outside of Japan.

I have no plans to buy a PS3 anyway, but I'm sure as hell not spending PC money on one.

No, Blu-Ray has backing from a couple of players in the porn industry. Digital Playground does not = "the porn industry" anymore than Codemasters = the gaming industry. Most of them are next-to-clueless on this sort of thing and will wait for a clear winner before comitting themselves to anything. These days we're a far cry from the VHS/Beta wars when porn at home was a new thing, which was why porn backing at the time meant something. Nowadays, porn on VHSDVDVOD is commonplace, so being able to buy "Andy's All-Anal Adventures #22" on blu-ray doesn't mean much when you can also get it on DVD or VOD.

Can you really compare Digital Playground to Codemasters?

Aren't they one of the big players? Not the EA of pron, but maybe... ummmm... the Ubi of pron?

Uh, I'm counting on the fact that 90% of the porn industry is clueless fucktards.  They see a couple of big fish start to swim a little to the left and all the rest will follow.

Except that the Porn industry is very good at using the latest technologies to sell more porn to people. On the other hand I don't expect them to gravitate to just one blue laser standard, at least initially.

For what it's worth, Dell is pushing for Blu-Ray. That could tilt things or it could be like backing BetaMax.

Not really, they're definately second-tier at best.

At the top tier you have your companies like Vivid, Wicked, Hustler, Private, Evil Angel, Red Light District/Platinum X. VCA in the past but I think they got swallowed by Hustler, who is kind of like the EA. There's literally hundreds of little, little fish in that industry, and while many of them may be pretty clueless to the blu-ray/HD-DVD thang, they'll mostly adopt a wait-and-see attitude, since they have their money supply in DVDs and next to none of them want to risk throwing money at new standards when there's such a goodly risk of being on the losing side. So I disagree with Murgos as well.

Yeah, I think codemasters is actually a pretty fair comparison.

You know a truly unhealthy amount about porn.

it could be worse. I could know that amount about obscure japanese dating, hentai and roleplaying games. Or bread-baking anime.  :wink:

Somebody here does, or at least did, work at Vivid. Anyone remember who that is?

Digital Playground made one of the most expensive and elaborate porn pieces ever last year, Pirates. There's no doubt that DP is A-list. I'd compare it to UBISoft before I'd say Codemasters. They release hi-def versions of nearly all of their "movies" (and by movies I mean straight spoofs of actual legit REAL movies). They're too big budget and have a stable of hugely famous actors and actresses. God, it hurt to use those words to describe dicks and vaginas.

And as much as it hurts to say this: Digital Playground has probably the highest production value on all of their DVDs and such. Vivid, Evil Angel, Wicked and such don't even compare in terms of technical quality.

In other words, Wolf was right.


No, you could know that amount of information about all media, not just porn, wiseguy. I'm a purveyor of the electronic arts. Not a japanophile.

Edit: I'd like to add that I can actually watch Digital Playground movies and skip the sex and still be entertained. The actors are all pretty fucking funny guys and Beat the Devil may very well be one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. Contract Star and Pirates aren't bad either. In fact, Pirates is pretty fucking hilarious and they've got a scene in it that (given the release date) almost make it seem like Pirates of the Caribbean 2 cribbed it.

Should that say, "Not merely a japanophine"?  :-D

I'm still going to have to disagree with you there sunshine, DP might well have overall better technical stuff than Vivid, et al, but Vivis is still king of the hill because of the amount of product they churn out and it's overall profitability. Vivid is much more the EA of porn, though even saying that is a misnomer since no porn company has the power and studio-swallowingness that our gaming friends do.

NSFW LINK!
http://www.digitalplayground.com/girls.php

Their contract stars aren't anything special. Sure they're very attractive but none of them are the hottest thing since baked bread and every other studio with contract stars can boast similarly attractive women. Teagan is probably the "hottest" name of them all right now, and she's just not that "on fire".

Or to put it another way, we just might be comparing apples to oranges. DP is a reasonably-sized, successful outfit producing decent quality feature porn. Codemasters is the same, though they're producing games. HotP is great for example, but it doesn't make them the top of the litter.

If you're looking for an UBi or an EA, you might want to look at Private, who have multiple successful lines (franchises) and directors (studios would be the parallel) working for them. Who pretty much spearheaded the "big shot-on-film release that means something" in recent times. Pyramid/Tatiana etc, though their latest attempts at the same haven't been as successful. Pirates is an attempt by DP to do the same thing as Private has been doing for years with a "BIG" title that might have nice production values and a bunch of stars, but the real thing about pirates is that they put a shitton of money into it's promotion. Wicked's "Conquest" from a bunch of years ago is essentially the same thing, but shot for the VHS market, and without the huge budget and marketing hype behind it, that you seem to have bought into.




If you're a fan of the talking parts and porn humour, you might want to check out a lot of the Johnathan Morgan-directed stuff for Wicked.

You could also pull your head out of your arse when claiming that you know a lot of stuff about "all media" because like all of us here you have several things you know a lot about, and a bunch of stuff you have little to no knowledge about rather than trying to pass yourself off as king dickcheese "of all media".

You did seem to get quite bent out of shape all of a sudden when I made a jokey reference to your otaku-fanboi-ism in a post that wasn't about you, though. Show me on the Genma doll where the bad man touched you.

Oh, and as for Blu-Ray. I don't know enough to comment. Though the "UMD isn't exactly settingt he world on fire" comment isn't really fair, as UMD is a one-hardware-item-tied pointless wank of Sony's, as opposed to an attempt at any real market.

 

I just had a bigass long post here when I realized what you just said. You completely missed the point. I never, even for a moment, thought that DP was bigger or even as big as some of those other studios. No one is as big as Vivid. And Private, whom you mention, is sitting on Sylvia Saint like a golden fucking rooster. They've yet to acquire anyone near her level of popularity though Miko Lee and Rita are no slouches either. Vivid on the other hand has been a little slack. They didn't pick up Cytherea, who was The Big Splash (god that's a horrible choice of words if you know who she is) last year, and they missed a host of girls since around 2000-2001. Jesse Jane doing straight porn was a big win for the DP folks, as was Teagan - though I hear they stuffed her chest (which is a shame). When they lost Tera, I'll admit, that was not good for business. But they managed to keep Janine - who could have been Jenna-huge at one point int he 90s. Also, at nearly every award show every year (as a studio) they do as well, if not better, than nearly all the competition. But moneywise is DP pulling in business like Vivid or Private? Fuck no.

The real problem as I'm seeing it though, is that you don't understand how SMALL UBISoft is compared to EA. EA could write a check for fun and buy UBISoft. Yea, Vivid is that big. And yea, DP is that small. Though, Vivid purchasing DP is probably a better purchase than EA buying UBISoft. Remember how the french government had to intervene to keep UBISoft from being bought? Right, so what makes you think DP isn't an apt comparison despite being completely different industries? They've both got a reasonable sized stable of stars, they constantly do very well in the market place and at award shows and are both leaders in the industry in the various fields they choose to pursue.

On the bright side, I have found out that you know less about games than you know about porn. Which sorta makes this little argument a whole lot more interesting. I'm going to break down the gaming industry real fast, ready? In America, there's EA. Then there's a tiny subsection of the big 3 and their stables (Microsoft -> Silicon Knights, Rare, Bungie, Ensemble for example). Then there's everybody else. In Japan there's Square-Enix and Nintendo (who, with that Brain Age shit and the DS has come out back on top). And then everybody else.

On that note, I could see the porn industry adopting the Blu-Ray standard. They could really fucking use a healthy dose of DRM at this point lest the creation of bittorrent eventually destroy the studio system. As in, completely annihilate it. Digital Distribution and heavy DRM for the win.

Edit: So, what do you do in the porn industry?

QFT

This thread has suddenly turned from "meh" to "Heh."

Azazel has the best avatar, he wins the game.  After all we are arguing about which porn company is more comparable to which gaming company.

Erhm? Sophia Santi and Jana Cova are as hot as one can get.


I didn't know anything about the movie. My girlfriend wanted to rent porn, so we went and got this. We ended up skipping through most of the pron to see the story. That's a pron movie that wins by my account.

Actually, Hustler is the monolith in the porn industry these days. Remember VCA? Hustler bought them awhile back. Kind of like when WOTC bought TSR. Private is comparably huge. Vivid is essentially the mainstream face of porn in the US though, because of their cable deals. Wicked comes behind them somewhat.

The thing is that Private doesn't actually have any contract stars and haven't since the early 90's when they had Beata for a year and didn't do anything of note, and a couple of years later when they had Monique Covet for a year (you might have known her as Helen Duvall II), which admittedly made Monique huge. Point being that Private don't have contract girls, they have contract directors. if you look, you'll find that every Rita Faltoyano and Michelle Wild and Sophie Evens and so on has a whole bunch of movies made during the same period they were shooting for Private. Some might not seem that way, but you'll find them shooting for Dorcel or the other European studios & directors. (It's more a director's game over there).

I can do without Cytherea myself, for just the reason you point out and yes Teagan now sports bolt-ons. Janine is still cool, but wasted her chance, and with all those tattoos now will be coasting on her established name for the rest of her career. Lucky for Jenna she got her popularity and mainstream (semi) acceptance before she got all that ink done as well. What you mention about DP there as far as awards you can just as easily say about EA (the porn one) though EA also has the highest wholesale price of all the studios, and people pay it for a reason. It'll be interesting to see if Jules tries to keep the EA wholesale prices now, too.


Fair enough though. I knew EA was a monolith, but I underestimated just how big they are. I was also unaware that Square-Enix was that big compared to rhe Capcoms and Konamis. Didn't they, (or the Squaresoft part) merge with EA years ago? I always wondered about what happened with that. Hear that sound? That's me admitting that I didn't know something. You might try it sometime instead of being bullheaded in the face of wrong.  :-P (I refer to other threads.) On that point, I'll consider myself edumacated.

However, I don't see how thinking that Ubi is bigger than it actually is means I don't know much about games. It means I've learned something new about the Business side of the business. Since you're dispensing knowledge from on high, I'll ask you where does VUG fit into this picture? Actually, a more apt description would be that I didn't realise that EA was THAT big.

And back to the Blu-ray point - they're a more fractured industry than games by far. Like I said before, there's no monolithic "leader" that all the little guys will follow. DP's noises about Blu-Ray is more to get people talking aboiut them than any hardline support. (and it worked, of course). They're scared about bittorrent, like every other media industry but they're essentially letting the MPAA and RIAA do the work on those fronts. As far as short term distribution/media changes they're looking to VoD, with a close eye on any changes to the defining media format. This is because most of the studios either don't have the money to put their hats into the ring, are owned by people who are illiterate to the tech, or aren't willing to take the risk (or some combination of the above). Hence the "wait and see" approach.

And no, I don't directly work in the porn industry, but I know a bunch of directors and performers across the industry in varying degrees. Not hard snce they're often the same people these days.  :-P  No heavy hitters from my friends who work at Vivendi though, unfortunately. And I don't know HHH personally, either.  :cry:



added for Wolf:

DP's stars:
I didn't say that DP stars aren't "hot" in a "hot babes" sense. I mean "hot" as in "hot property in the porn industry" sense. I readily admit that they are all hot babes. Below average-looking chicks don't get contracts.

Pirates is overhyped:
Different strokes for differnt folks. Personal taste and all that. My point is that the film is big because of the huge marketing push it got, regardless of it's goodness or otherwiseness.

I can chip in about VUG, or at least their European business.

They were in a whole lot of trouble pre-wow, as in they didn't really have any big hitter titles and their parent company VU was in all sorts of trouble in France. The thing is after WoW they got some money to spend and they secured some AAA titles, most noteably FEAR. With FEAR and WoW still going strong they cruised through last year. Their line up for this year is pretty good tbh. They got Burning Crusade, that Scarface game, the Ice Age II game, FEAR's expansion and there is a harry potter like book about a boy and a dragon the name escapes me. Anyway, it's being made into a movie and VUG have the game licence secured. I'd say in Europe's PC market they're the second biggest thing to EA (second by a long shot of course). And that's most likely true for the US, but I might be missing someone.

The curious thing about VUG is that they're probably the strongest publisher in Russia. Which is big. They're basically busting the market open over there and it is truly a huge market. EA's trying to that too, but they made one big mistake - they're trying to distribute themselves, while VUG got a local distributor and they're really rolling. Their estimate for Russia's market this year is putting it at #2 in Europe (and yes, that IS including Germany, France, Spain and the UK). Schild will probably correct me 'cause I'm sure stuff is different across the pond. And I don't really know how well VUG is doing console wise.

Here are some numbers (all US$) for 2005 revenue:

EA - $3.1 billion
Activision - $1.41 billion
Ubisoft - $795 million (2004/2005)
VU Games - $775 million
THQ - $757 million (2004/2005)
Square Enix - $686 million (2004/2005)

Microsoft doesn't break out Microsoft Game Studios revenue but they did make $300 million just on Halo 2 alone in 2005.

Oh, there we go. I forgot about about Activision and the dreaded Star Wars licence of doom. So whatever I said in my previous post, just put activision infront of VUG.

What does (2004/2005) mean in that list? Isn't it 2005 revenue only, why is there a 2004 thrown in there?

Yeah I'd heard that they were almost in the shitter pre-WoW. When did VUG buy Blizzard, anyway?
As for FEAR, I read somewhere that the sequel was going through a different publisher. Something along the lines of the publisher foisted the retarded name of the game on them, but they get to keep all the IP associated with the game except for the name (which they didn't really want in the first place, anyway) so the sequel's characters locales and so forth will be following on from FEAR but it'll be called something else and distributed by someone else.
Scarface could be interesting, but looks a fair bit like Vice City with a Pacino skin on it. And how was it that EA could afford Brando and all the others but didn't want to pay Pacino for his likeness for Godfather? Because Michael isn't an especially important character, right?

The stuff about Russia is a pretty big surprise to me though. I'd thought the Russian market was essentially only pirated everything to a degree similar to Hong Kong or Malaysia.

Ah, Activision + Star Wars licence. There's that IP that should have WoW numbers again, if the game hadn't been an absolute abortion.

For many companies their fiscal year spans two calendar years. E.g. Square Enix's fiscal year 2005 ended March 2005. So those companies have not yet reported their fiscal 2006 results which would include the majority of their sales in calendar year 2005.

Here's a summary of their history (their ownership has changed hands many times):

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/ref/blizzard_entertainment

Edit: fixed quoting

The rumor on digg.com was that TimeGate Studios is going to do the sequel using Unreal Engine 3.

I just read I said VUG is the biggest publisher in Russia. I blame cofe and my english. What I ment is EA still sells more, but VUG is not that much behind. And comperative to other markets EA is not doing that much damage there.

The thing about mostly pirated markets (which I know more about than I'd like, living in such a territory), Russia in particular, is that it's not that there aren't any people willing to buy games, it's that they can't afford it. A triple AAA title at full price is equal to about a third of the median sellary here. So the thing gamers do in those territories is buy only online/mmorpg games so they can play on the official servers (and that's mostly 1-2 a year) and pirate anything singleplayer. The thing that was big in Russia was the release of FEAR, which sold ~50,000 copies at full price. As a normal, mostly single player game, would sell no more than 5000-10000. The other thing VUG does in Russia is they've began localising basicly everything. That allows them to go with a much lower RRP, that in part means bigger sales and getting people used to buying original games. Localised games get pirated too, though... :P

Yeah, I always remembered R&RR and TLV as Interplay games, not Blizzard ones. 1994, fuck that's so recent. I thought they were around a lot longer than that for some reason...

I also recall sequels to both, on the PS1.. North by Northwest was TLV's sequel, and.. R&RR2 became a 3-d racing game with a different name, which escapes me for the moment. Neither of which appear on the Blizzard listing from that link, though I remember a dev interview on R&RR2 in what may have been Edge magazine way back when..



Is that the original Dev of FEAR making their sequel? Or a sequel to the name by a different dev? I forget who Timegate are, and I'm to lazy to google them up.


So the localisation involves translation to Russian text and language ingame? As well as localised pricing (and the Russian-ness making it pointless to ship out copies to, say, the US/UK?) Everything gets pirated. The more relevent thing to my mind is whether it would have been bought or not by a given consumer.

Where do you live, out of curiosity?

TimeGate did Kohan. Monolith did F.E.A.R.

Yes full localisation is translating everything into a different language. They do it for a lot of games in Germany and France. The thing is it's really expensive (huge text to translate, actors for voice overs, lots of QA involved) and you're supposed to guarantee some ammount of sells depending on game, territory and if you want to have the localised version at launch (meaning localisation is going on parallel with development) or you can wait a couple of months and start localising after the game is released. There's semi-localisation, where only the box and manual are in a different language, which could lower the price too, but not by much.

Bulgaria, Ex-soviet block. Our market is mostly the same to Russians, with several huge differences :)

"The more relevent thing to my mind is whether it would have been bought or not by a given consumer." I don't understand that. What do you mean?

Yeah, as I thought. When I worked at Beam doing casual QA for a short time they used to send the games out for localisation into German and French and so forth. I just wasn't sure if it was the same thing for the Russian market, as in the potential sales considering the piracy rate and cost to localise there.

What I meant is that the more important thing to think about (to me, anyway) is whether someone who pirates a game would have bought it if they did not get the pirated version. Compared to people who just pirate things and would never have bought it.

Squaresoft and Enix merged a few years back and made an unstoppable RPG juggernaut. But now that you've seen the numbers, you can see why I said DP is UBISoft. They're planted cleanly in that part of the ballpark in the porn industry. Any of the huge companies could outright eat them. But people still love them. As for Squeenix on that list, the number is over 1B when you include Japan. Considering they release about twice as many games over there, they're holding themselves back over here. There was a day when they'd release shit like Erhgeiz, Einhander and whatever other wonky shit was in development.

As for the porn stuff, I had no clue Hustler bought VCA. Yeesh. I've no real contact with any Hustler product nor any care for it. I don't particularly care for Wicked or Vivid product either. There just happened to be a time when I followed the industry pretty closely because of how much money went through it. As for mentioning Marc Dorcel (are we getting too obscure here now?), I never thought those American contracts mattered over in Europe so I would have written it off, however, if they do - it's a completely different ball game.

We should start a porn+games blog. We compare the commercial success of game companies and porn companies, and recommend career changes to the usual suspects. Seems reasonable to me.

I wish all my posts turned into detailed analysis of the porn industry juxtaposed with the game industry.  SWEET TITTIES.

FUN! Ok, here's some fun differences. Activision makes a lot of money off duping children into buying stupid shit based on TV and movie properties. EA doesn't. EA makes their money by duping people into buying the same properties every year. As for UBISoft, last year was actually pretty fucking strong for them - the Devil May Cry stuff, Onimusha, a bunch of localizations beyond them, a raft of 360 launch stuff. It was just a solid year. I still don't know what the 2004 is for though. VU Games is about to rocket into second place. Also, I have a feeling Take Two should be on that list. In one quarter last year I remember them pulling 400M+. That was before the released Civ4 and some other stuff as far as I can remember. THQ does the same thing Activision does, makes some games for adults but most of their shit is just stealing money from mothers. I said my piece about squeenix in the above post.

Edit: Ok, Take Two - $1.127 Billion. Also, this year, we'll see that company owned Bono floating around 7th or 8th place. (FEH FEH FEH FEH FEH FEH).

I've always liked Timegate. Kohan series for the underrated win.

Hustler is overall not that interesting, but they have recently (in the last few years) gotten a few good directors. Woodman left Private to go to them, although he's never had the same quality output since. I guess Private were willing to put more budget behind him, who people like Alessandro Del Mar now get. They also had Herve Bodilis (credited with stupid names like Patrick Handsome so they could rep the director on the sly, which they did) and Denis Marti.

And nope, the contracts are contracts. Given the number of European and American director/performers who shoot their stuff in Europe (especially Budapest, Hungary, Czech in general) it just wouldn't work. One reason I brought Dorcel up is because a goodly amount of his stuff is released in the US by Wicked (and vice versa in Europe). Herve Bodilis also shoots a bit of stuff for Dorcel, so there's a reason for you to check some Wicked titles out right there. Not to mention that you seem to like humorous, plotted porn, so I'd have imagined you'd enjoy at least Johnathan Morgan's stuff as I mentioned before, since he's been getting good raves as a porn-comedy director for years now.

Both industries certainly have the churn of useless product down pat, that's for sure.

I had a look through the pile of games that's next to the TV atm, and found only a few were Activision, and they were things like the Incredible Hulk, X-Men Legends and Tony Hawk, and on the PC, Jedi Knight games. And fuck, my KOTOR is missing.

Anyway, gotta go do Easter shit with family.

Wolf asked the same question above. The companies listed above without the "2004/2005" have fiscal years that match the calendar year. The ones that do have the 2004/2005 are typically April 2004 through March 2005 or thereabouts. So EA's fiscal year 2005 included Christmas 2005 but Square Enix's fiscal year 2005 had Christmas 2004. That can make comparing fiscal years among different publishers difficult since the Christmas's shopping seasons aren't always the same. Hence the reason why I made the notation, but obviously I should've just left it off since I just confused everybody.

Just for reference, EA already bought 20% of Ubi.

Silly personages.  The entire pleasure of the eight track are the shiny parade trailers a cassette creates when tossed from the car at highway speed.  They also are for picking up late middle-aged bar hags for a quick drive around the block in the El Camino.

Something else that more recent reading has turned up is that Codemasters are no longer the hardworking little studio that turns out good product. I was too distracted by enjoying Heroes of the Pacific to realise that they're also hosting many subpar MMOs in the UK and blowing smoke out of their arseholes about LotR-Online and so forth.

I believe broadcast/standard cable is 4x3, 240 lines, and DVD has 16x9 in 480 (and is widescreen). Additionally, most HDTVs convert the image up to their native resolution. HD discs will display 720 lines.

I've compared DVD to HD video on my HDTV. The HD image is a little crisper, but it's not nearly as huge a difference as VHS to DVD. I think this is going to be a device that does not offer a sufficiently compelling improvement to justify an upgrade for the vast majority of consumers. Like Laserdisc.

Yeah, that's the common opinion among people who have thought about it.  Which is a big reason why Blu-Ray is the predicted winner of this battle even though only the first shots have been fired.

PS-3.

There is no reason to upgrade except that it will be included into several million homes by the end of the year anyway.

That's what I'm sayin'.

NTSC is 702 x 480 interlaced (4:3 aspect ratio with non-square pixels, 640 x 480 is the square pixel resolution). NTSC DVD is 720 x 480 for either 4:3 or 16:9 and is either interlaced or progressive. HD DVDs (HD-DVD and Blu-Ray) support at least 1080i (1920 x 1080 interlaced) with Blu-Ray also supporting 1080p (p for progressive) which is why people consider Blu-ray more "future proof".

Native resolution on widescreen dvds is actually 852x480. This includes everything from 16:9 to 2.35:1. The black space counts.

Edit: On second thought, technically speaking, I may be wrong. I've "authored" DVDs in the past and remember every single one being a variant of 852x480, but I also remember it actually recording at 720x480 despite my wishes.

NTSC:  4:3, interlaced, 486 viewable vertical lines of resolution.  There's actually 525 lines in the signal, but the remainder of the vertical interval is used for other purposes such as carrying caption information.  Unless you're using a widescreen monitor and/or a progressive-scan DVD player, that's what a DVD delivers to you; the entire difference in picture quality is use of digital media vs. an analog tape signal (and not a very good one, in the case of VHS) and the use of better connectors on most DVD players (component vs. composite).

DVDs *are* capable of delivering a higher-quality anamorphic widescreen signal, if you have a TV/monitor capable of handling it.  The short description is, it's encoded to use the full 525 lines of vertical resolution for actual video image (extra lines are discarded when the signal's shown on a standard-def monitor).  So, it's already kind a middle-ground between NTSC and HDTV; if you're used to watching images in that mode, then upgrading to HDTV does show less of a difference than you would have between regular old broadcast NTSC and HDTV.  It's still there, but without having a side-by-side comparison it may not be immediately noticeable.  Get used to it, though, and you'll notice it if you switch back.

That assumes, of course, that your cable doesn't do what ours does; they look to be applying some heavy, heavy MPEG compression at too low a bitrate, it's chock-full of artifacts.  Comes from trying to squeeze in hundreds of channels that nobody wants to watch anyways.  Drives me nuts, but a lot of people don't seem to notice.  Then again, these are a lot of the same people who can't figure out how to set their HDTVs so it doesn't horribly distort the non-HD channels.

Is Blu-Ray 1080 compatible?  I'm too lazy to check, but if so, I'm all for it.

No, there are not. There are only 480 lines of vertical resolution on a standard NTSC DVD (MPEG-2) encoded frame:

http://www.mpeg.org/MPEG/DVD/Book_B/Video.html

I think you are getting confused between progressive scan DVD players and encoded material and interlaced material. 480p is often referred to as "EDTV" or Enhanced Definition TV but that's not a true HD standard.

Like I said above Blu-ray supports 1080i and 1080p while HD-DVD only supports up to 1080i.

Y'know, yer actually right, shame on me...bad broadcaster, bad!  I'm mis-remembering the way various widescreen formats are encoded on DVDs. 

Although, I'm actually still right, just not about the >480 lines on anamorphic video. 

"Anamorphic" widescreen is encoded without the usual letterboxing at the top and bottom you see on a "widescreen" DVD.  If you look at the raw video, it's squashed horizontally.  Ordinarily a "widescreen" image would be both horizontally and vertically expanded to fill a widescreen TV, but the loss of vertical resolution in the encode doesn't look as sharp when it's blown up vertically.  An anamorphic encode allows the widescreen TVs to only need to horizontally expand the image without the vertical stretch, reducing the amount of artifacting from lost lines of resolution and giving a clearer image. 

Of course, to further fuck with things, depending on how "wide" the widescreen was on the original film print (Ben Hur, I'm looking at you...) you may still end up with letterboxing at the top and bottom and/or some amount of pan-and scan, but you still don't suffer the loss of vertical lines the way normal widescreen does. 

If it's shown on a 4:3 set, it downconverts each 4 lines into 3 lines to correct the image (I think that's where my brain got sidetracked)

It makes my brain hurt...This illustration might help some folks (http://www.dvdweb.co.uk/information/anamorphic.htm)

And no, I'm not confusing widescreen or EDTV with HDTV.  They're both still mid-points, in their own separate ways.  With anamorphic, you don't have over 480 lines, but you have a wider, more complete segment of the image than an NTSC pan-and-scan and a sharper image than a non-anamorphic widescreen DVD.  With 480p, you don't technically have higher vertical resolution, but you get it without the interlacing.  It's not HDTV, it's not NTSC , it's somewhere in the middle.

So, I have to replace my early-80s RCA unit soon?

No you still have a couple more years.

Don't forget the fact that 720p is actually better than 1080i for viewing a lot of fast moving stuff like sports games; 1080i may look better, but only if it's still framed pictures; there's actually more video bandwidth in a 720p signal than a 1080i, becuase 1080i is interlaced (the I, get it?) and each frame only updates half the image.

Some newer TVs will stick the frames in a buffer and update them all at the same time so you can't see the jerkiness as much, in effect generate the off frames, but it still doesn't look as good.

As someone who's sensitive to movement (must be all those FPS games) until we get to true 1080p, in my eyes 1080i is essentially a bigger number for a worse picture.

No 1080i still uses more bandwidth:

1920 x 1080 * 30 = 62,208,000 (or 1920 x 540 x 60 if you prefer)
1280 x 720 * 60 = 55,296,000

I agree though that 720p is better than 1080i for sports and other fast moving images.

Ironically, even though there's twice as much raw video data in a progressive image, there's typically a very high correlation between lines of video so it actually encodes quite well for little extra overhead than interlaced video.  So 1080p should take about the same amount of resources as 1080i.

Edit:  i should point out I'm talking progressive vs. interlaced within the same 720 or 1080 framework, not comparing 720p to 1080i here

Oops. I was thinking with current TV compression, how it looks (http://alvyray.com/DigitalTV/DTV_Bandwidths.htm), and got my numbers mixed up. Of course, this is all theoretics, since there isn't any broadcast media that can do 1080p/60.

There's where the PS3 factor comes in. It would be the first viable 1080p product. My pc would choke on 1080p, but it is admittedly a couple years old now. 720p is the sweet spot right now, great place to be.

Some of that PS3 footage at CES was suhweet.

You mean the magical PS3 that doesn't even have any demo models out to developers yet? The one that gets repeatedly pushed back for a variety of reasons? I'll be SHOCKED if it's out by christmas.

Very few monitors even display 1080p.

Sure. Maybe we should stick to 640x480. Many display 1080p today, and in two years, everything outside the walmart special will be 1080p.

Errrrr. the majority of the material on the PS3 will be 1080i, not 1080p. It's pretty much gunning for the same resolution as the 360. Sure, eventually we'll see 1080p material when people figure out how to hack the Gibson, but it'll be a while.

I better not be the only person who gets that one. Heh.

This is all rather obvious.

VHS was an analog medium that would duplicate imperfectly and degrade with multiple viewings or copies. DVD is a digital format that does not suffer those problems. *That* is the main differentiator. Not resolution or anything like that.

HD-DVD is just DVD with higher specs, but it's not a fundamentally different animal. DVD was fundamentally different from VHS. Of course you can always do better the jump from HD-DVD is nothing like the jump from VHS to DVD.

Console lifetime is going to see 1080p more mainstream, though. The PS3 will be the only 1080p console. My supervisor just bought a 1080p set, my next set would be 1080p. And I'm not so sure material on the PS3 will be any set res, you might see a move to a more pc-like selection of resolution depending on your display, as the walmart crowd uses 1080i and the early adopters use 1080p, with the mainstream (heh) using 720p. It's got the capacity to display it is all I'm saying, unlike the others.

From the That's What I Was Saying Dep't (http://next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2866&Itemid=2&www.dailytech.com).

At risk of sounding like a noob, but can I have some more info on this.  My regular channels look fine but I have not adjusted anything specifically for this on my TV.

Today at work someone made reference to Blu-Ray, and I thought of this thread.  I couldn't remember whether the title was really "Blue-Gay" or if I was just making that up in my mind.  It was quite vexing.

Here's a basic primer:

http://www.cnet.com/4520-7874_1-5140690-3.html?tag=arw

Also you need to be careful if you go the black bar route since that can cause burn in with various display technologies (flip back two pages in the above link to get more info).

This thread has legs.

Maybe, but it will never be a truly legendary thread.  Needs more Star Wars.

True, but it served its purpose well in lampooning the "maybe if I camp this penny stock night and day I can figure out a pattern and become rich!" guy.

Lawl.

Be carefull what you wish for. (http://www.episdioeo.org/photogallery/star%20wars.JPG)
(http://babybratz.com/media/1/20050918-instylekids_1862_58748800.gif)

(http://sithvixen.com/starwars/femtrooper/femtrooper_ajc001.jpg)

(http://www.katiehorn.com/StarWars/Denver/ext07.jpg)

(http://web.ukonline.co.uk/bingo275/doom/geordietrooper2.jpg)

Is that a maternity stormtrooper suit?

(http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/05.13.99/gifs/slices-9919.jpg)

It's a fruity stormtrooper by the look of him. Or her.

Speaking of her....

(http://web.ukonline.co.uk/bingo275/septoct05/droopymccoolkinkyvad.jpg)

If you've avoided having your eyes burned out or your brains scrambled by the star wars freaks,


I should point out that in my original statement, I'm fundamentally disagreeing with the solutions posted on the page Trippy linked to because the "problem" IMO lies in tying to stretch 4:3 into widescreen in the first place. 

Maybe I'm just hyper-sensitive to it since I get headaches all day from dealing with things like correcting for varying pixel aspect ratios; I do know a lot of folks I run into don't even recognize the distortion until I point it out.

Pillarboxing is the way to go for regular NTSC.  No distortion or cropping of the picture, so what if you don't use all the horizontal space--the programming wasn't shot with it in mind and you should be used to seeing old "Star Trek" episodes or whatever it is in 4:3 anyway.  BTW, avoiding a display that's prone to burn-in is always a good idea, even if you're not doing this; things like videogames or DVD menus or anything that has elements in exactly the same spot all the time can cause it.  Note that some displays that are prone to this do have a feature that will slightly shift the image periodically to help avoid this sort of thing, but it's not going to move it enough to deal with a larger feature like the black bars.

Stretching, well, depends on personal taste I guess.  This is the option I generally see set on widescreen TVs.  If you prefer it that way, fine, just don't expect to see it at my house :)

The third option can give a really weird fisheye look.  It's most noticeable when it distorts an object you expect to be a particular shape, like a circular logo suddently becoming an oval.

(http://static.flickr.com/56/134918570_5bf3c42457_o.jpg)


I like this game.

(http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/Original_Photo/2005/04/28/1114705935_6254.jpg)

Don't really have anything against Star Trek, but I ran across this today and I have to post it somewhere.

(http://www.neat-solutions.de/blog/bblog/pbimages/11.jpg)

I'm not American, so I don't really know who Barry Bonds is, or why the joke is funny. Baseball player?

Also, it's time for the Heavy Hitters:

(http://web.ukonline.co.uk/bingo275/mayjune05/deathstarman.jpg)


One of the mods should split this shit off into it's own thread (no, not the Den), so we may continue to post amusing images of retards and let the others continue talking about video)...

Barry Bonds is the most famous baseball player in the world who is poised to eclipse Aaron's homerun record.  His hobbies include being a dick and rubbing steroids all over his body in unholy ecstasy like White Goodman with the pizza in Dodgeball.

I've heard of Babe Ruth, that guy who was on Seinfeld, and the ones who were on The Simpsons. Darryl Strawberry was one, who I understand later got in trouble for something or other. Oh, and then there's Pete Rose, who I've only heard of because the WWF used him a few times. Gambling while playing. No idea who Aaron is.

Don't bother explaining them though. It'd like me telling you about Merv Hughes, Dennis Lillee and Peter Daicos.

Point taken.  Let's never speak of this again.

By the way, I think you have the best avatar since WUA changed his.

Just for refernce, Bonds still has a lot of work to do to get to Hank Aaron's record.

48 homeruns, that's two seasons tops.

(http://media.koreus.com/200507/2-sports8.jpg) 

(http://www.creaturecantina.com/news_images/2005/1005/baseball-wookiee.JPG)

I wish it was a smart bet to put down money on Bonds getting thrown in jail or something before that happens.

Unfortunately, he'll probably come back Just to break the record, then retire.

From a game yesterday, not a photoshop. (http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=1756&e=4&u=/060506/483/3263483980e645dba80b187610d5a0b1)

(http://us.news3.yimg.com/us.i2.yimg.com/p/ap/20060506/capt.3263483980e645dba80b187610d5a0b1.giants_phillies_baseball_pxs114.jpg)

That is freaking awesome.

See, Philadelphia fans are good for Something.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/lincolnshire/content/images/2005/11/18/pudsey_louth_starwars_470x352.jpg)
That pic of bonds looking at the fan banner is teh awesome.

And then he wouldn't sign #713.

He is such a winner.

Apologies for the on-topic question:  are there any price estimates out for the 360's HD DVD drive coming out at the end of the year?  I can't help but think that my own purchasing decision between the 360 and the PS3 will be heavily influenced by the answer to that question.  In fact, I even suspect that the console war will have an influence on the format war.  Maybe I'm being short-sighted.

Nothing but speculation at this point. If they wanted to compete head-to-head with Sony it would be priced somewhere between $100 - $150 ($150 assumes a 360 price drop come holiday season). However Microsoft has said that the HD-DVD will only be for playing movies (though of course they reserve the right to change their minds at a future date) so they may price it as standard computer peripheral in which case you are probably looking at around $200 - $250.