Xbox 360 Returns to Amazon Top 100

Yesterday I was surprised to see that the Top 100 items on Amazon’s video-game store did not include any model of the Xbox 360 console. Today, Microsoft’s gaming machine makes not one, but two appearances. The top game is still New Super Mario Bros. Wii, with the Wii console holding it’s sales position at No. 2. The lower-end model of the PlayStation 3 moved up a few slots to No. 14, though the higher-end version with a 250GB hard-drive fell a few to No. 85. At No. 90 is the Xbox 360 Elite bundle, and the Modern Warfare 2 “Super Elite” bundle registers at No. 95. Wii games dominated the list with 30, followed by PS3 titles with 11 and then Xbox 360 with nine.

Is Motion Control a Failure?

Stephen Totilo over at Kotaku makes the case that, yes, it has failed. At least if you judge by the number of blockbuster titles that rely primarily on motion control.

As right as Nintendo was about so many things, maybe it was wrong about this. Or, as is so often the case with Nintendo’s Wii project, the failure here may be one of critical imagination. That happens. Forty years ago on Monday, a human being first stepped on the moon, and what people assumed would happen in the next four decades — trips to Mars, cities in space — have not been built. The guessers often guess wrong.

Great stuff. Of course, motion control was wildly successful when measured by one, easily quantiable metric: Nintendo’s profits. Maybe motion control didn’t transform every single game experience. But it changed the rules for the industry. Wii Sports was so compelling that millions of people, people who would never in a million years call themselves gamers — rushed out and bought a Wii.

And while maybe there haven’t been dozens of epic motion-control games on the market selling millions of copies, that didn’t really matter to Nintendo’s bottom line. They made money on every Wii. And most of those new Wii owners also went out and bought Wii Play. OK, probably many of them did it just to get the extra controller, but they liked Wii Sports enough that a Wii Play pack-in was attractive. And then what did they do after that? They bought Wii Fit in droves.

So even if motion control hasn’t been as broadly successful as Nintendo envisioned, it succeeded wildly in bringing more people into the industry. And now that that trail has been blazed, there’s no going back. The motion-control genie will not go quietly back into his bottle. Microsoft is going big with Natal and “controller-free games and entertainment”. Sony is bringing out its wand.

Only time will tell if these new technologies will have the far-reaching impact that, in Totilo’s analysis, Wii games have fallen short in achieving. But it’s a pretty safe bet that all forms of motion control will be a part of the gaming landscape for a long time to come.

Live Mesh

As I said in the last post, the Microsoft employee meeting acts as a showcase for new technologies brewing at the company, and what I saw yesterday was pretty cool.

Windows 7 looks awesome and there were some peeks into Office 14 and Live services that looked cool, too.

One sweet thing you can get your hands on right now is something called Live Mesh. You know those online storage services that give you a certain amount of gigabytes of Web storage so you can backup your files and access them from any computer? Well, Live Mesh takes that concept to the next level through an applet that lets you seamlessly swap files between Mesh-enabled computers.

Here’s how it works: first, you sign up for the Mesh service, on mesh.com. A free account gives you 5 gigabytes of online storage, with the option to pay for more, and if you already have a Hotmail or Windows Messenger account, then it’s as simple as plugging in your existing username and password.

Mesh.com then gives you a minimalist page with a few large icons, one of which is “add device”. Click that, then you’re prompted to download a small (I think it was under 2 megabytes) app. That pops a Mesh icon in your system tray and lets you create Mesh folders on that computer.

Sign in to mesh.com and repeat that “add device” procedure on each PC you want Mesh-enabled.

In my case, the end result is that I have “work” and “pictures” folders on my work and home PCs. At home, I dragged some photos into the pictures folder, and when I checked my work computer, boom, there they were. Likewise, I can drop a few documents into my work folder and have them be automagically synced to my home PC. Pretty slick.

As the guy demo’ing the product said, to much applause: “No longer do I have to e-mail myself the files I need.” Amen to that.

It’s simple and cool. What more do you need than that?

One final note, on presentation. It was clear that 1) the people demo’ing the various products cared deeply about what they were showing, and thought it was cool and 2) the problems they addressed may not have been of global import, but they were things that mattered to people’s everyday lives. Things like ignoring e-mail threads that digress into irrelevance, things like eliminating tenacious but impenetrable able error messages, things like enabling side-by-side browser windows for easy comparison.

This is the same tactic Steve Jobs has used to such amazing effect at Apple events. Many of their hardware and software upgrades are incremental, yet he talks about them with such conviction, and they solve problems that his target audience is so passionate about, that every presentation seems like the most amazing ever.

Say what?

Yesterday was Microsoft’s annual employee meeting. These things have the reputation of being equal part religious revival and product showcase, and this year’s didn’t disappoint on either front.

 

“The Office” star and Seattle nataive Rainn Wilson did a commendable job as MC, punctuating droll observations about Microsoft with explosions, breakdancers and a world-record-setting paper airplane toss.

 

But the funniest moment arguably came when Microsoft’s chief guru Ray Ozzie addressed everyone. At one point he talked about the negative forces arrayed against Microsoft and said something like, “There will always be the cynics, the skeptics, the cookie lickers.”

 

Cookie lickers?

 

Everyone in my vicinity processed that for a second, then we all turned to one another and asked, “Cookie lickers? Did he just say ‘cookie lickers’? What does that mean?!” We were abuzz with cookie-licking speculation, and as far as I know, nobody has figured out what exactly he meant.

 

The only thing I can figure is that it’s a reference to “Oreo lickers”, those who just lick the cream out of an Oreo without consuming the whole cookie. I should go watch the video of the event and see if there was some context I missed the first go around.

Hey, where did everyone go?

Just over two months ago, I wrote that I was taking a job with Microsoft’s Xbox division. The ensuing 5 weeks ended up being one of the busiest periods of my life. In fact, I think we must have set some sort of record for doing a complete interstate move.

My last day with Reuters was June 20. By June 26, me, my wife and 6-year-old son had packed up and hit the road on the 900-mile drive to Seattle.

I received my Microsoft badge on June 30, just two weeks before the E3 expo in Los Angeles that is the video game industry’s most important show of the year (and which, incidentally, we won hands-down).

We closed on a new house on July 31 and were fully moved in by the evening of August 2.

It really was one of those moves in which everything comes together, A-Team-like. It was about time, since we’d had enough practice. Here is a brief history of our wanderings since the mid-90s:

• April, 1996: Take full-time job with Reuters in Beijing.
• January, 1999: Take job with Reuters in Los Angeles
• February, 2000: Take job with Reuters in Seattle
• May, 2002: Take job with Reuters in Beijing
• October, 2005: Take job with Reuters in San Francisco
• June, 2008: Take job with Microsoft in Seattle

That’s five major moves in less than 10 years. I guess all that practice paid off since pretty much everything went off without a hitch this time.

In a corporate move like this, there are so many moving parts: moving company (and a separate company to move one of our cars), corporate HR for both Reuters and Microsoft, the temp housing company, the real estate agent, the mortgage lender, the home seller, etc. In every case, each party totally went to bat for us to make sure everything went as smoothly as possible. It was amazing.

I don’t have much to report right now. Scratch that, I have tons to report, but I’m not going to do it right at this moment. This is sort of the re-launching of Command-K, and I just needed to log in and get the ball rolling again.

In the coming weeks I’ll be writing about the new job, my evolving perspective on the games industry from the inside and other random thoughts.

Well, that went pretty well

On Friday, my 12-year career with Reuters came to an end. In a little more than one week, I’ll be starting a new job with Microsoft as executive speechwriter for the Xbox division. I can’t wait to finally crack open the Big Book of Xbox Secrets and find out what’s coming down the pipe.

The past year that I’ve been covering the gaming industry has been about the most fun I’ve had as a reporter since I started in 1996. It was sometimes hard to focus on other aspects of my job.

My other main responsibility was covering Apple. Apple’s a great story in every sense. The stock has doubled in the past year, giving it a great financial angle. The products are used and salivated over by tens of millions of people, giving it a great consumer and general news angle. The passion and quirks of Steve Jobs are the stuff of Silicon Valley legend, giving it a fantastic human angle.

The problem is that Apple is notoriously tight-lipped. They don’t talk about anything they are not ready to announce themselves. They don’t make executives or managers available for interviews. They don’t host events or give presentations for the benefit of reporters or analysts to get to know the company better. And because the company is so high profile these days, most analysts who cover it closely are stingy with their time and often don’t respond to press inquiries. That leaves a small handful of Wall Street analysts and consultant types that are contacted for many stories.

In the gaming industry, on the other hand, everyone wants to talk. PR plans on games are drawn up many months in advance, and companies are only too happy to have an outlet like Reuters highlight one of their titles. The industry analysts, too, are probably the friendliest and most open I’ve ever encountered. That means it’s never hard to find a fresh angle or a quick comment, and you don’t have to pester the same few guys day in and day out.

I’d be a bit more wistful about leaving Reuters and the great colleagues I left behind, but I don’t have time. After originally telling us that they couldn’t get to us until June 30 at the earliest, the movers called today and said they’ll come pack up our stuff on Monday and load it up on Tuesday. We’ll roll out of Albany for good on Wednesday morning.

Lots to do.