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Games for Windows Gets On Demand Downloads, But Why?

Posted by Jared Newman on December 3, 2009 at 7:29 pm

Microsoft is being Microsoft and stepping into a market that the competition proved fertile a long time ago. This time, the company’s offering on demand downloads of PC games, going toe-to-toe with Steam, GamersGate, Direct2Drive and others.

The service, called Games on Demand, launches on December 15 as part of Games for Windows – LIVE. (I guess that awkward en dash prevents people from thinking of Windows Live, which is something entirely different. Chalk it up to bad naming habits, maybe?)

Anyway, I’m scratching my head, looking at Microsoft’s press release and trying to determine how Games On Demand will distinguish itself from the competition, particularly Steam, which rules the market. Looks like a pretty straightforward download service to me, but the company swears this one is different: “With Games on Demand, we didn’t just want to create a cut-and-paste version of existing digital distribution services,” Mike Ybarra, general manager of Live Engagement Services, boasts.

The one specific benefit Microsoft describes is the ability to “re-install your games whenever you want, wherever you want.” Steam does that too, because games are linked to your Steam account, rather than a specific computer. As for games, Steam already sells everything Microsoft lists as launch titles, including Resident Evil 5, Red Faction Guerrilla, Battlestations: Pacific, World of Goo and Osmos. Also, the features you get with Games for Windows look pretty much like Steam, with matchmaking, voice chat, text messaging and achievements.

I’m not questioning Microsoft’s move — they’re now selling game downloads on the Xbox 360, so they might as well get some PC action too — but I don’t see any clear reasons for gamers to abandon the download services they already use.

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Like Symbian, Only Good

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 3, 2009 at 10:23 am

When I pick up a phone based on Nokia’s Symbian operating system, I get a little teary. (I exaggerate, but only a smidge.) Symbian is the modern-day descendant of Psion’s wonderful EPOC PDA OS from the 1990s, but it doesn’t show a decade’s worth of improvement. Actually, it’s backslid in some ways: It’s not as usable as EPOC was, and current Nokia Symbian devices sure don’t feel as snappy as my trusty Psion Series 5 did.

But here’s reason for at least guarded optimism: Engadget has grabbed some images from a Nokia presentation that previews a 2010 version of Symbian. It has an all-new user interface. And it looks…pretty good. The presentation only shows still images, so there’s only so much you can tell about the future of Symbian from it. But consider my appetite whetted.

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Google/Bing: Minimalism vs. Maximalism

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 3, 2009 at 2:13 am

I kinda doubt that anyone involved planned it this way, but yesterday provided an interesting study in contrasts between the world’s biggest search engine and its most notable rising star. In the morning, I attended a Bing press event. It was highlighted by the debut of a feature-packed new version of Bing Maps, but also included demonstrations of how you can get weather reports from three different providers right within Bing. And watch movie trailers, and view slideshows. Bing may be a search engine, but that doesn’t mean its goal is to get you to leave–it’s at least as happy if it can help you without you having to click away to another site, and it won’t shy away from throwing a lot of stuff at you.

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Redbox May Do Gaming, But It’s a Tough Sell

Posted by Jared Newman on December 2, 2009 at 5:37 pm

Redbox wants to do for gaming what it did for movies by offering nightly game rentals from its popular kiosks.

According to Reuters, Redbox is talking with game developers (publishers, more likely) about renting games for $2 per night. The company won’t say which publishers are involved, but THQ, the company behind Saints Row, said it would consider the idea. Redbox is already testing the program in Wilmington, N.C., and Reno, Nev.

There are only two problems: Just as Blockbuster is following Redbox’s lead with movie rental kiosks, Redbox was beaten to the punch by Gamefly, which has been operating G-Box kiosks since March. More importantly, as I’ve experienced first-hand, renting video games through kiosks is unpleasant, at least with the business model that both companies are pursuing.

Game rentals are fundamentally different from movie rentals. You can watch a movie in one evening, but you can’t play an entire game in one night without a four-pack of Red Bull, and possibly the next day off from work. The real money from game rentals, I suspect, is made when you keep that game beyond the first day. That’s probably why Gamefly constantly sends me coupon codes for free rental nights. (Seriously, they’re like AOL demo discs in e-mail form.)

Unfortunately, the G-Box costs $2 per day, the same price Redbox chose for its pilot program. If either kiosk operator is serious about game rentals, it needs a weekly price scheme for considerably less than $14. As it stands, gaming by kiosk makes the most sense for people who want to try before they buy — and the G-Box does let you purchase games from it. Otherwise, you’re better off renting from a place that won’t put you under so much pressure. There’s enough of that going on in the games themselves.

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Intel’s New 48 Core Processor Won’t Change Your Life

Posted by David Worthington on December 2, 2009 at 4:41 pm

Intel began sharing a programmable 48 core processor with researchers, according to reports published today. That is progress towards a future generation of computing, but don’t expect the technology to significantly impact your life for many more years to come.

The processor, which Intel calls a “single-chip cloud computer,” is about 20 times more powerful than Intel’s most powerful six and eight core processors that are available on the market today. It also provides that capacity while remaining energy efficient.

It might sound revolutionary, but it is just the evolutionary progression of the many-cores trend that has occurred over the past several years. Intel showed off its ability to design an 80 core chip in 2007, and very little has changed from the end user’s perspective over the past two years.

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A New Reason to Look at Yahoo: Facebook Connect

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 2, 2009 at 3:55 pm

I consider this very good news: Yahoo and Facebook have announced plans to integrate Facebook Connect into Yahoo during the first half of next year.

Yahoo’s blog post about the news doesn’t provide a whole lot of detail, but it says that you’ll be able to (A) share Yahoo features such as photos, article comments, ratings, and more via your Facebook activity stream; (B) benefit from “richer experiences” on services such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Answers, and Yahoo Sports; and (C) update your status message on Facebook or on various Yahoo services. I’m assuming/hoping that you’ll also be able to log into any Yahoo service with your Facebook credentials, although the post doesn’t explicitly say so.

It’s a pleasant surprise to see a Web player as big as Yahoo turn on Facebook Connect. Even if the decision stems in part from Yahoo’s somewhat fragile condition and resulting willingness to behave in ways that a super-ambitious, Web-dominating monolith would not. (What do you think the chances are that Google will turn on Facebook Connect anytime soon?)

The more time I spend online, the more I realize that I don’t want multiple, fractured collections of friends, family, and acquaintances stored at various destinations around the Web. I want one well-organized, close-to-comprehensive database of people I care about. For a lot of us, that data lives on Facebook. The more places we can get to it, the better. And a Facebook-enabled Yahoo gives me a pretty tantalizing reason to consider using Yahoo services instead of comparable ones from Google, Microsoft, and other Yahoo rivals.

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Bing Maps’ New Beta: Interesting, Promising, Erratic

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 2, 2009 at 1:38 pm

At a press event in San Francisco this morning, Microsoft demonstrated recent, brand-new, and upcoming features it’s adding to its Bing search engine. The big news: The company is launching a beta of a major upgrade to Bing Maps. The beta is available here–and for the sake of comparison, here’s the existing version of Bing Maps, which remains the default.

From my experience so far, the new Bing Maps may be a true beta in the “we’re still working on making it work” sense: It sometimes performed very slowly, or conked out altogether. (Disclosure: I’m trying it on an EVDO connection, which probably doesn’t help.) The new version requires Microsoft’s SilverLight browser plug-in to work, which will be a source of controversy: There are folks who dislike plug-ins in general, and some who have a particular distaste for SilverLight. And since SilverLight is far from universal, there’s a good chance you’ll need to install it before you can test-drive the new Bing Maps.

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The First Flip That Isn’t a Camcorder

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 2, 2009 at 10:39 am

Our friend Dave Zatz’s discovery was the real deal: Cisco division Pure Digital has released FlipShare TV, a $150 box designed to let you watch videos shot with Flip videocams on your TV. It’s the Flip brand’s first foray into products beyond the wildly popular cameras, and therefore a hint of where the company may go in an era in which more and more people shoot their video with a phone or a still camera rather than a dedicated video device.

The Wall Street Journal’s Katherine Boehret has reviewed the FlipShare, and her take is lukewarm at best. The basic idea sounds tantalizing: It lets you watch not only videos on a computer in your house via a wireless connection, but also ones which friends have decided to share with you. But the FlipShare isn’t an autonomous resident of your home network: It connects via a computer in your home that has a USB key plugged in, and the computer must be turned on and running Flip’s software. It’s also meant only for viewing video captured with Flip cameras. And while you can get alerts of new video shared by friends via e-mail, text message, or Facebook, the FlipShare box itself has no way of notifying you of new videos to watch.

Flip’s made its name not by making the most powerful video products, but with ones that are exceptionally simple to set up, use, and enjoy. I wouldn’t expect it to come out with a Popcorn Hour-like box aimed at video nerds. It does seem, however, that we’re rapidly reaching the end of the era of TV boxes which do only one thing –and that a box for sharing Flip video might also provide access to non-Flip clips. (YouTube, anyone?)

I’d also love to think that we’ll see features similar to the FlipShare’s capabilities show up on boxes that some of us already have attached to our TVs, such as TiVos and Rokus.

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AT&T and Verizon End Map Spat

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 2, 2009 at 9:05 am

According to Dan Frommer at the Business Insider, AT&T and Verizon Wireless have agreed to end their legal tussle over the Verizon ads that slam AT&T’s 3G coverage. Good for Verizon. And good for AT&T, too–as far as I can see, the suit it filed against Verizon did absolutely nothing to improve anyone’s perceptions of AT&T. Actually, it mostly gave lots and lots of people a new excuse to grumble even more about AT&T–and gave more publicity to Verizon’s (accurate) map showing that it has far more 3G coverage than AT&T does than the Verizon ads could have gotten on their own.

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