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Digital Daily

Friday, November 13, 2009

Videogame Industry Suffers Massively Multiplayer Sales Decline

knockoutIf the latest sales data are any indication, the videogame industry may be headed for a rough holiday season. NPD Group reports that revenue from consoles and software plummeted during October, falling 16.4 percent from September and 19 percent year-over-year. It was the industry’s seventh consecutive monthly decline.

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Monday, October 26, 2009

Netflix Coming to the PS3

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Exclusive Xbox 360-Netflix Partnership Not So Exclusive Anymore

netflix-ps3-rm-engSo much for Xbox 360’s game console exclusivity on Netflix streaming. This morning, the DVD-by-mail pioneer said that beginning sometime next month, owners of Sony’s PlayStation 3 game consoles will be able to stream movies and TV shows from Netflix.

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Thursday, October 22, 2009

Microsoft Store Overhauled to Encourage More Windows Shopping

flanders_microsoft_store_thumbMicrosoft’s first brick-and-mortar retail store isn’t scheduled to open for another few hours, but the software giant is already selling PC hardware and third-party software titles–on the Web. This morning it unveiled an expanded online store that will better reflect its new real-world counterpart.

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Thursday, September 24, 2009

New Twitter Valuation Clearly in Need of Character Limit

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Price Cut for PS3; Xbox 360 Ported to Wii

wii_grandparentsNintendo President Satoru Iwata likes to say that game console price cuts aren’t the cure-alls many believe them to be. “People often talk about the price cut as if it’s an almighty weapon,” he said this past summer. “The fact of the matter is what a price cut can do is rather limited.” But Nintendo is cutting the price of its Wii videogame system just the same.

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Friday, September 11, 2009

Videogame Industry in Massively Multiplayer Sales Decline

gameoverThe videogame industry may be recession-resistant, but it is clearly not recession-proof, as some once claimed.

If it was, surely we wouldn’t be seeing the sixth consecutive month of declining sales reported by NPD. According to the market research firm, overall sales in the United States in August of hardware, software and game accessories were $909 million–a 16 percent drop from the same period a year ago.

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Thursday, August 27, 2009

Price Cut to Give Xbox Sales an Early Christmas Goose

xbox-360-logoWho will win the gaming console price war of 2009? Consumers. Two weeks after Sony lowered the price of the PlayStation 3 to $299 from $399, Microsoft did the same for the Xbox 360 Elite, slashing $100 off the price of the console. In addition, the company cut the price of its now discontinued Xbox 360 Pro console by $50 to $249.99, while supplies last.

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Tuesday, August 18, 2009

$100 Off and PS3 Is Still the Most Expensive Console on the Market

6a00d8341c630a53ef0120a558dfdd970c-600wiThe PlayStation 3 price cut is a rumor no longer. Hoping to bolster sales in advance of the holiday shopping season, Sony Tuesday announced a new slimmer verison of the game console and slashed $100 off its price.

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Thursday, July 30, 2009

Perhaps if You Bundled the Zune With Windows?

zune-trashcan“For something we pulled together in six months, we are very pleased with the satisfaction we got. The satisfaction for the device was superhigh.” Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said that of the Zune in October 2007. Boy was he ever wrong. MarketWatch reports that revenue at Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices unit, which manages the Zune and Xbox 360, fell 42 percent to about $211 million in its most recent quarter.

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Tuesday, March 31, 2009

New for PS3–Price Cut: Countdown to Never

So those rumors of a PlayStation2 price cut? True. Rumors of a similar cut for the PlayStation 3? Not so much… Confirming recent speculation, Sony this morning said that it’s dropping the price of the PlayStation 2 from $129 to $99.99 as of April 1. But it aggressively dismissed reports of a PS3 price drop as false.

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Wednesday, March 25, 2009

TiVo and Blockbuster Join Farces

Repudiating claims that Blockbuster intended to file for bankruptcy earlier this month, spokesperson Karen Raskopf said the troubled video rental chain has “lots of plans to grow our business.” If inking a video-on-demand deal with a declining DVR pioneer is one of them… well, that’s not much of a plan, is it?

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Friday, January 16, 2009

Wii Are the Champions

Playing videogames in a recession doesn’t make them any less fun–even if that recession is the worst we’ve seen in 50 years. Though the economy shuddered and slowed in December, videogame industry sales rose nine percent in the states. And for the year, sales of games, consoles and accessories grew 19 percent to $21.3 billion, from $18 billion in 2007.

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Monday, August 11, 2008

Zune Ready for Closeup; Zune Market Share–Not So Much


Since John Paczkowski is still out of range, Beth Callaghan will post Digital Daily today.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter reports that Microsoft execs have been talking to talent agencies all over Hollywood with the intent of building an exclusive body of original content for the company’s Zune player. Not just standard sitcom fare, either–Zune’s recent update of firmware for the device provides better social functionality, and Microsoft sees this as a move toward the kind of communal functionality pioneered by the XBox multiplayer experience.

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Wednesday, July 16, 2008

If You Know the Name of the Movie You’d Like to See, Press ❑

Now that Sony has completed its transformation from disruptive innovator to struggling consumer electronics player, it’s embarking on its next big corporate makeover: reinvention as “a global provider of networked consumer electronics and entertainment.” And so it’s begun offering a video-downloading service for its PlayStation 3 videogame console.

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About John

John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »

Ethics Statement

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

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