In the past 24 hours, there’s been two new Q&As up on the Gamasutra site. The first is a talk with Brian O’Rourke from marketing analysts In-Stat, who has just released a report detailing the handheld war between the PSP and the DS. It’s pretty tame stuff, really; O’Rourke is pretty careful not to talk about anything contained in the US$2,500 report, so his comments mainly revolve around the fact that the DS is outselling the PSP. Interestingly, though, he does comment that the “DS’s shipment advantage has been overstated somewhat”, which I would take issue with - if we’re talking shipment numbers, then, yes, the PSP is a very close second to the DS, but the fact remains that Nintendo’s handheld has been outselling Sony’s by a quite considerable margin for most of this year. It seems strange for him to bring up something like that; almost like he’s trying to make it sound like the handhelds are on equal footing so people will pay money for the extended outlook contained in the report.
Which is probably true.
The second was a great interview with Yoav Tzruya, the COO of Exent, a digital distribution company who are preparing to make the move into in-game advertising. More specifically, they’re aiming to get advertising into games that didn’t have it before. This is a pretty touchy subject right now, so it was interesting to bring up a few things that I know are worrying gamers right now, and see what the reaction from Tzruya was. I’ll let you all draw your conclusions from what was said, but I personally still find it invasive, especially if the company is planning on “emulating additional operating system capabilities” to “to control output to the screen and audio systems”.
Scary - I wonder what my spyware checker would have to say about that.