Xbox One Data Kept Secure

While some people are excited about picking up the Xbox One console when it arrives in a few weeks, others are skeptical about the kind of security it will provide, making sure their data doesn’t leak into the wrong hands.

In a privacy statement issued before the weekend, Microsoft explained how its new Kinect device will use the data it gathers. In a nutshell, face and body details that the device manages to pick up will be kept private. Xbox Live conversations may not be completely secure, however.

Regarding the facial scanning the Kinect utilizes, the statement reads, “The camera can be used to sign you into the Services on the console using facial recognition technology if you choose. To do this it measures distances between key points on your face to create a numeric value that represents only you. This value is stored as a very long set of numbers.”

The information is not shared, it insists, stating, “No one could look at the numbers and know they represent you.” It continued, “The numeric values sent to Microsoft are destroyed after analysis is complete. The stick figure representation cannot be used to identify you.”

Microsoft also states that the option to share data is up to the user. “With user consent, samples of voice commands occurring while using Kinect will be collected and periodically sent to Microsoft for product improvement. We also collect voice samples to provide the voice search service and, with user consent, for product improvement.”

Source: Microsoft

Oculus Rift On Sale Next Year

Ever since its successful funding on Kickstarter, the Oculus Rift virtual headset has been building up steam in production, even though some were wondering when it would eventually release. Relax . . . it’s not too far off now.

The company has confirmed that the consumer-ready device will be launching sometime in 2014, and will be compatible with PC and Android, as well as Mac and Linux.

“We will be delivering a single Oculus Rift which is a tether to multiple different devices,” said Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe, speaking with Engadget.

As far as the Android unit goes, it won’t be any lesser in quality than the others, nor “bleed” out any significant details. “I don’t think it’s going to require that full Kepler capability. I think we’ll be able to deliver on an even earlier chipset than that,” said Iribe, regarding the technical details.

People will also be “surprised” at how well the mobile version works. “We’re testing the latest Android phones, tablets and gaming devices to see what delivers the best VR experience,” he concluded.

Source: Engadget

Nintendo Halts Swapnote

When people log in to a Nintendo 3DS system to chat with one another, they have only a few options to do so. One was SwapNote, a feature where they could pass along messages to one another, through their virtual Mii characters. However, they’ll need to find another option.

Before the weekend, Nintendo put a halt to the service, stating that it “has learned that some consumers, including minors, have been exchanging their friend codes on Internet bulletin boards and then using Swapnote to exchange offensive material.”

In the meantime, messages can still be sent via StreetPass, provided they’re in the same physical location. Otherwise, they’ll be out of luck.

“We are very sorry for any inconvenience to the many consumers who have been using this service responsibly; however, this decision was made considering the point that many minors also use this feature of Swapnote,” the company said in a statement. “Thank you for your understanding.”

No word yet what service Nintendo will introduce to replace Swapnote, or how the problems will be avoided in the future.

Source: Ars Technica

Netflix Testing 4K Video

Netflix, always interested in gaining new viewers to its streaming service, has begun rolling out a series of test videos that work in compliance with 4K televisions, such as the new Sony 4K Bravia line. These videos have been recorded at a number of speeds, ranging from 24 to 59.95 frames per second, and can be viewed on standard high-definition televisions as well.

The move is to help the company ease in to possible 4K streaming video programming for the service, though obviously it would keep regular standard and high-definition feeds for most audiences. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has indicated that he wants the company to become “one of the big suppliers of 4K” content during the next coming year.

In order for viewers to get the most out of the content, they’ll need a premium bandwidth package through their Internet provider to get the highest streaming speed possible, without any sort of buffering issues. Super HD 1080p content, for example, requires a minimum of 5 Mbps of bandwidth to stream properly. Netflix recommends even higher, running around 7 Mbps to 12 Mbps.

No word yet on what new programming will utilize the service yet. Currently, 4K TVs are just beginning to hit the market at relatively high prices (Sony’s line starts at $3500), though Seiki has introduced a 4K TV for less than $1200.

Source: Digital Trends

Sony PocketStation Returns

It may be obscure to most folks, but some game players are familiar with Sony’s PocketStation. It’s a 1999 memory card that worked with the company’s original PlayStation console, with a 32 X 32 pixel monochrome LCD display that played games and worked with certain game titles. It was built following a similar reveal by Sega for the VMU, or Virtual Memory Unit device, for the Dreamcast console.

So why mention it now, in 2013 Simple – Sony may be bringing it back. The company revealed a surprise new teaser video, viewable below, that hints it could be back in production very soon. This would mark the first time it would be in circulation since its discontinuing in 2002. The video is a fake news story: “There’s something going to be announced! I think it’s in that truck! Let’s follow it!” The reporter follows the truck to Tokyo, where a sign tells you that the PocketStation will be revealed on November 5. You do glimpse the PocketStation mascot, though there’s no explanation.

No word yet if it’s a device, or an app, or if it will work with any of Sony’s current systems, like the forthcoming PlayStation 4, but we should know more soon.

Source: Computer and Video Games

 

Nintendo 3DS Sales Decline

While the Nintendo 3DS will no doubt see huge sales during this holiday season, that’s coming after a decline in sales for the current year..

Nintendo’s latest financial report indicates that sales for the system for the current half of the year, running from April through September 2013, reached 3.89 million worldwide. While impressive, it’s a drop from the 5.06 million sales in the previous year.

Not all the news is bad, however. Out of those sales, the enlarged 3DS XL model has seen a boost in sales, going from last year’s 2.1 million to 2.9 this year. Software sales increased from 19 million units in the first six months of last fiscal year to 27 million units this fiscal year, and impressive increase.

In addition, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, the company’s latest release in the adventurous simulation series, has sold 2.5 million copies worldwide in the last six months. Throwing in pre-April sales on top of that, the game has sold an impressive 6 million copies to date.

To date, 34.98 million 3DS systems have been sold globally, while software sales sit at 122 million.

With such games as Mario Party: Island Tour and The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds still set to release before the holidays, the numbers should be on the rise again.

Source: Computer and Video Games

Be A Secret Agent Man with ‘Ingress’

Beginning today, Android users will receive an invite to join Google’s Niantic Labs game, Ingress. The game is a spy-warfare augmented reality game that makes use of virtual overlays. Players are referred to as “Agents” and defend and overtake portals by collaborating with other players in teams. The game strives to be playable on mobile and wearable devices with desktops being used as data centers of sorts for players to communicate location information to others on the playing field.

“It’s almost like an e-sport gamer event, where people strongly identify with their teams. After that part is over, it becomes very social at the live events,” said John Hanke, vice president of Niantic Labs in an interview with GamesBeat. “We see ourselves as a platform company. The idea behind Ingress is to understand the space of mobile social-location games and what it means for the future of Android, Google Glass, and game developers.”

Niantic Labs was initially started with individuals who worked on Google Maps, Google Earth and Street View. They have spent the past year smoothing out the game’s technical infrastructure to handle a large volume of players without a hitch.

Currently, Ingress is being played in a 39 city global event called Operation #13MAGNUS. Players who join today will have an opportunity to receive a Founder Medal if they reach Level 5 by December 14, when the game formally launches.

Ingress has already inspired two e-books and a comic series. Hanke has discussed the wide appeal of the game due to its augmented reality nature and as a good way to make friends.

“Gaming and real-life meetups are really coming together. I can’t say we predicted how popular the live meetups would be. We didn’t anticipate the degree to which people would go to live events to meet people they didn’t already know. The game is a social icebreaker.”

Source: VentureBeat

‘The Race’ For Prestige

When fans line up at midnight next Tuesday for Call of Duty: Ghosts, a group of hardcore players will already be about 12 hours into a marathon session to finish the game while raising money for charity. For the second year in a row, a team of online gamer personalities led by Twitch’s Ernest Le are putting on what they call “The Race.” It’s a campaign to be the first to play through the game nonstop on Max Level until they reach Max Prestige, the paramount achievement in Call of Duty games. This year, Le and his team have organized their race as a fundraiser for Activision’s Call of Duty Endowment, a nonprofit that helps those who served in the US military transition to civilian jobs. While Activision isn’t giving the effort its official backing, major brands like Monster Energy and PC maker Razer have stepped in to help.

Le is a self-described Call of Duty fanatic who first began streaming his gaming sessions after joining Twitch, where he’s worked on building gaming communities. His obsession with playing the game in marathon sessions started about two years ago.

“When Modern Warfare 3 came out, I just started playing the game . . .  I played it probably way too much, way more than I should have,” said Le. “I was playing, playing, playing for hours a day — 12, 16, some days it was 20 hours a day when the game first came out.”

Le was streaming his game play as he was playing towards getting Max Prestige in Modern Warfare 3, and he got noticed. He says a Kotaku article put his Twitch channel on gamers’ radars. When Activision released Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 last year, he decided to pull in three of his YouTuber friends and set up a nonstop live stream where they played 24 hours a day, switching off in shifts. It took them just over eight days to finish. When it was over, their channel had pulled in 1.2 million unique visitors and 4.4 million views.

Despite the impressive reach for their campaign last year and the expectation to grow it this year, not to mention the decision to turn it into a fundraiser for Call of Duty Endowment, Le and his team couldn’t convince Activision to get on board. They did however score by enlisting Julie Thomas Knap, a game industry consultant and brand integration specialist who brought in major sponsors to help fund the effort and raise charity money. In addition to Monster and Razer, Knap was able to get on board gamer-friendly brands GUNNAR Optiks, Elgato, Eat24.com and KontrolFreek.

“The history of what they did last year made a lot of people sit up and take notice,” said Knap. “The numbers from last year in terms of viewership was solid, especially with how everyone’s community has grown.”

Knap pointed out that while having “The Race” have a charity function helped, it was really about convincing these brands that their involvement would net them a positive ROI. They’d be reaching an impressive number of people from an audience they regularly strive for, and they had the opportunity to create custom campaigns.

“[The brands] all have an affinity with gaming. All of the integrations were a very natural fit. We didn’t want to force anything,” said Knap, adding, “Everyone in their own way is doing something unique. Eat24.com . . . they know each of the five personalities so well they’ve created codes that are kind of like inside jokes. They’ve also got overlays that are so funny, you look at them and you go, ‘oh my god this is perfect for the game community’.”

The brand partners lined up by Knap are really the force driving the fundraising part of “The Race.” The live stream is free on the official “The Race” Twitch channel. The way the effort will raise money is by giving out a virtual raffle ticket for each $5 donation, with backers eligible for prizes being given away by those participating companies throughout the event. All of the ad revenue raised for the event is also going towards the charity.

Thanks to that support, Le and his team have also been able to go bigger in how they’ve set up the format this year. For one, they’ve taken a giant leap towards establishing this as a reality TV-like event, renting a house in Los Angeles where most of the live game play will take place. They’ve dubbed it GamerShore, an homage to MTV’s famed reality show Jersey Shore. The team itself has grown too, with Le gathering a squad of four crack Call of Duty players, all of them YouTube personalities. They are Tucker “JERiiCHO” Boner, Robbie “MuzzaFuzza” Kenison, Trevor “TmarTn” Martin and Brennon “Goldglove” O’Neill. Collectively with Le, they have a social audience of 3.2 million, and that’s where most of their promotional efforts have been focused.

Le wouldn’t estimate what the charity is expected to raise, but he seemed confident they’ll grow their audience this year. That could get Activision and perhaps more major brands to take notice the next time they plan “The Race.”

“I think combined we have about 2.5 million YouTube subscribers. [We’re] all going to promote it on [our] YouTube channels. There’s a hashtag [#TheRace] that we’ll promote every day. Last year we got it worldwide trending, so I imagine this year it’ll be easy to do as well,” he said.

“The Race” kicks off at 11:30 a.m. on Monday, November 4, with a media event at the GamerShore house in Los Angeles. The live stream takes place on a dedicated channel on Twitch. To attend the media event or for more information on the campaign, contact Julie Thomas Knap.

New Consoles, New Market

As we await the release of the next-generation of consoles, we’re being bombarded by predictions about the success of this new hardware, and the console market in general. GameStop has worked hard to analyze its many years of data on sales, particularly for the period during the decline of an old console generation and the rise of a new generation, and based on that they predict a jump in the business by 20 to 30 percent for next year. Publishers in the console business will tell you how they expect great things from the new consoles, and of course console makers are bullish on the prospects for their new hardware.

Here’s the real truth: Nobody knows for sure what’s going to happen to the console game market in the next few years, and the data from past console transitions is of little value in predicting the future.

Sure, one thing that looks like a lock is that both Sony and Microsoft will sell all the new consoles they can make for at least a couple of months, based on the actual pre-orders received by retailers. Beyond that . . . well, we’ll probably see some kind of drop in sales in the early part of 2014, if for no other reason than that’s usually the slow time of the year for retail game sales. Will new consoles continue to sell strongly Will their sales grow over time, or will they drop like the Wii U sales did for most of 2013 No one really knows.

Why is it so hard to predict the future of the console business now, when it’s followed a regular pattern in the past through console transitions Let’s look at the major factors that are different in this console transition.

First, and perhaps most importantly, the fundamental business model that dominated the game industry for decades is no longer the only model, or even the most lucrative one. Yes, putting games on discs in boxes and selling them at retail stores is still a business model that generates billions of dollars every year. Just look at Grand Theft Auto V, for instance, selling 29 million copies (most of them in boxes) in just a couple of weeks. Yet the gaming industry has experienced tremendous growth at a time when the retail business has been shrinking every year since 2008. Why Because of a variety of business models like free-to-play, subscription, virtual items, ad-supported, and the many hybrids and variations of those business models.

This change in business models means that console games are far from the only way to play games these days. Yes, consoles are trying to adopt many of these business models, and they may be very successful at doing so. But the reality is that for the most popular games 20 or 30 years ago, you had to buy a console in order to play them. Now, the most popular games, and the most profitable games, can be found in many places other than consoles. The consequence is that getting a new console is no longer the only or the best way to have access to the many (perhaps most) of the best new games of the future.

We’ve also seen a loss of console game publishers, and the middle tier of games is vanishing as companies reduce their new product slate from dozens to just a handful. Yes, console makers are striving to get more indie development on the new generation of consoles. This is, however, a very new thing for the console business, and no one knows who well it will really work. Yes, there have been some successes in downloadable games on XBLA and PlayStation Network, but none really compare to the top boxed games in terms of revenue.

Gamers used to have very few choices when it came to finding a new game to play. There might be just a handful of new console games in the store in a given month. Now, thousands of new games are released every week on a wide variety of platforms, as well as new content for existing games. Even that console game you bought last year probably has some new DLC available — which may make it less likely you’ll risk money on an entirely new game.

Console games are still, for the most part, an expensive proposition with a $60 upfront charge. You can start playing top-quality games like League of Legends or World of Tanks for free. Most mobile games are free to play, and even if you can’t really progress too far or too fast without paying something, there are so many games to choose from it’s easy to find something else to try.

Even the nature of games is changing, with many becoming multiplayer, long-term, community-dependent activities rather than the solo beat-the-game experience that formed the basis of the console business. Games are now a global phenomenon, too, and publishers are very interested in getting revenue from around the world. Restrictions on console sales in many parts of the world make that difficult or impossible for console games. While China is making faint noises about finally allowing game consoles in, we don’t know how fast that might happen — or if Chinese gamers will even care. Brazil’s import duties and fews are driving the PS4 price to stratospheric heights, which means that’s not going to be much of a market for PS4 games unless that situation changes.

Publishers are taking note of the growth and horizontal expansion of the game industry by becoming brand-centric rather than platform centric. They don’t think of games as belonging to a given platform; they are trying to think of games as a branded experience that they will strive to make available to everyone, any where, at any time. Look at FIFA as an example of where publishers want to take their best titles — it’s available in different forms on console, PC, online and mobile, and it’s generating substantial revenues in all those places.

Even the tools are better than ever for cross-platform development, as Unity and Unreal Engine and others work to become useful for games on any platform. Games not as reliant on hardware performance any more, or on shiny graphics as the main selling point (hello, Minecraft), which makes the optimized graphics performance of consoles less necessary than it was.

This is not at all to say that next-gen consoles can’t succeed. They may do as well as the current generation of consoles, or even better. Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo are trying hard to work with the changes in the gameplaying marketplace. None of the trends discussed has escaped the notice of console makers, and they are implementing mobile device integration and second screen gaming, embracing indie developers, making sharing and community easier, and expanding the array of business models. All of these things are happening to various degrees.

The point is that the success of this new console cycle cannot be predicted from how the last console transition proceeded, given the massive array of changes in the marketplace. Smartphones, tablets, Facebook, messaging, new business models, global game markets — none of these things were factors the last time we had a new generation of consoles introduced. So when you see someone predict just how well new consoles will do in 2014, take that prediction with an appropriate amount of healthy skepticism. We’ll know when we get there.