Daily News Spin — July 26, 2001 (Thursday)

Games instead of banner ads

ZDNet has an article about how many companies are using custom games to market their products.

Companies are struggling to find online marketing tools that are more effective than banner ads. Ford Motor's Ford Motor Canada unit, for example, developed an online game to promote its Escape small sport-utility vehicle. Torrey Galida, vice president of marketing at Ford, says the car maker invested in the game because banner ads are no longer "a great investment of our advertising resources."

The five-minute Ford game, created by Los Angeles game developer, YaYa, allows players to steer an Escape through a race course on the moon. Users then can e-mail the game to friends and issue a challenge to beat their score. The landscape is branded with the Ford logo, and shots of the SUV's interior are prominently featured as players choose the color of the truck they will use to play the game.

We played this YaYa game and were sold. As soon as we need a car for driving around on the moon, we'll definitely buy a Ford. Definitely!

Diablo II: Lord of Sales

The expansion has already sold over one million copies and two million copies have been shipped to retail, according to this Yahoo story.

Following in the tradition of other Blizzard titles, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction becomes not only the sixth Blizzard product to sell 1 million copies, but also to reach No. 1 in U.S. sales. The expansion, which shipped on June 29, is topping most PC sales charts in North America, Europe and Asia.

In its first week alone, the game captured a record 17.7% of total U.S. PC game market share, also according to NPD INTELECT(a).

Pretty impressive.

Video game sales boosted...

MSNBC has a look at how game sales have risen by 30% over the first half of the year, fueled mostly by PS2 and Game Boy Advance sales.

CONSIDERING THAT HOLIDAY SALES during the fourth quarter account for half of annual sales, and that Microsoft Corp. and Nintendo are readying the release of their new game systems in November, the industry is on track to beat last year�s sales of $6.5 billion, predicts Richard Ow, senior account executive at NPD Group Inc. As to exceeding the record high of $6.9 billion in 1999, �it is highly likely that we will break it, if not blow it away,� he said.

Indeed. With the sales of the Xbox and Gamecube still on the horizon, we should see a banner year as far as money spent by consumers. How this translates into sales of individual titles may be a bit more problematic as there may be more titles vying for our attention than ever before.

...But Sony's revenues still down

Sony's reporting a 90% decline in profits for the most recent quarter, according to Eurogamer.

Analysts suggested that slow sales of the PlayStation 2 were contributing to the poor figures, with the company's gaming division losing around Analysts suggested that slow sales of the PlayStation 2 were contributing to the poor figures, with the company's gaming division losing around �18m, an improvement on the previous year but still not reaching break-even. Meanwhile there are questions over whether Sony can reach its target of selling 20 million PlayStation 2 consoles by the end of March 2002, although the growing number of quality games for the machine after a poor start last year should help, with titles like Metal Gear Solid 2 and Gran Turismo 3 likely to drive sales and help Sony withstand the onslaught from Microsoft and Nintendo later in the year.

Sirtech on their problems

Daily Telefragged has an interview with Ian Currie in which he discusses the dire straits that Sirtech finds itself in.

DTF: So, the first question is: what happened with Wizardry 8? Why doesn't Wizardry 8 have a worldwide publisher for now?

Ian Currie: We had attempted to combine a deal for Wizardry 8 with Wizardry 9 (so that we'd have funding to develop the next game). We have been unable to do that with today's industry shift to console games. Now we're no longer actively pursuing funding for Wizardry 9 and simply concentrating on publishing Wizardry 8, which will be a lot more straightforward.

The interview does mention that Wiz8 will be published in Russian as scheduled, but other regions are apparently up in the air right now.

3am

Funcom is implementing a feature that allows you to toggle on or off the number of players you can see to help with framerate issues. Kind of goes against the reason for being behind MMOGs, doesn't it?

Bronze Age mummy fragged, according to this LA Times story about the iceman mummy that was found a decade ago. Scientists are now convinced that he was killed with an arrow, probably a BFA.

HomeLAN has interviewed the Rails Across America's Russel Williams.

Read about the new wearable PC here at ZDNet. Why don't they just drill holes in our skulls and wire us up? IT'S GETTING CRAZY!

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