Blu-Gay: Read or die in squallor!!!!!!

[eldaec]

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.

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.

[Azazel]

Blu-Ray has the backing of the porn industry.

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.

[Wolf]

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?

[Murgos]

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.

[Trippy]

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.

[Toast]

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

[Azazel]

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?

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.

[eldaec]

You know a truly unhealthy amount about porn.

[Azazel]

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. 

[angry.bob]

You know a truly unhealthy amount about porn.

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

[schild]

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Murgos]

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.

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

[Azazel]

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

[schild]

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?

[Strazos]

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.

QFT

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

[dusematic]

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.

[Wolf]

Azazel saying that DP's stars aren't hot

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

Azazel saying that pirates is overhyped

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.

[Azazel]

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.

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?

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.   (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.    No heavy hitters from my friends who work at Vivendi though, unfortunately. And I don't know HHH personally, either.  



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.

[Wolf]

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.

[Trippy]

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.

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.

[Wolf]

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?

[Azazel]

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.

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.

[Trippy]

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

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.

[Trippy]

Yeah I'd heard that they were almost in the shitter pre-WoW. When did VUG buy Blizzard, anyway?

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

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

Edit: fixed quoting

[Trippy]

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.

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

[Wolf]

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

[Azazel]

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..

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

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.

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

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?

[Trippy]

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

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.

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

[Wolf]

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?

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?

[Azazel]

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.

[schild]

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.

[dusematic]

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

[schild]

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.

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).

[Strazos]

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

[Azazel]

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.

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.