Vista

Alright, let's talk about Micro Soft Windows Vista. Vista offers a lot in the way of a new and improved OS. It has enhanced GUI, improved security, improved performance, and is the central pillar for the future of gaming. It uses hardware to power it's new GUI, running a lot of the new graphics through your graphics card itself instead of the CPU. This feature allows more use of the CPU for other more critical functions. Vista is the catalyst for the new directx 10 wave of GFX cards. DX10 compared to DX9 is like comparing Win32 to Win95. It's a vast leap froward from a stagnant period. The time between vista's release and XP's release is the single longest period between two windows operating systems, and this has not gone unnoticed by the majority of people in the online community i know. The lengthy time was mostly speculated to be from the massive incapability and lack of backwards compatibility with other windows software. A lot of information on Vista can be found on Wiki, which is where i learned most of the technical and nuisance things from. One thing on the wiki that i found which is my main complaint about what windows did with vista is with the windows classic mode. I'm a conservative person who fears the oncoming inevitable change the world presents. Every time i install XP, which is often, I immediately switch it to the classic mode. Apparently what windows has done is made the classic mode for business environments so as to make it less visually taxing, rather than the set up of the GUI itself. this quote off the wiki relays my concerns "Thurrott offers the opinion that Windows Vista's classic visual style is 'horrible' and a 'misbegotten excuse for a UI.'" I like the way XP looks and is set up. Microsoft has a sound defense against the "they made it look like OSx" claim stating they had certain OSx type features and looks planned and displayed well before vista beta 1. The problem is, it still looks like OSx, and i hate it. I plan on buying Vista, but rest assured, i'm going to despise it for being so different for a long time.

Blue Ray and Sony. Reading up on the blue ray player, the blue ray, and the blue ray disc, this piece of technology offers much in the way of potential. Typical DVDs can hold 4.7GB's of information on them, while blue ray discs can hold up to 25GB (single layer). The player uses an ultraviolet light which operates at a much lower wavelength than the typical red lasers we currently use. This feature allows for enhanced photonic storage of data and thus the increase in overall size. There are even some multi-layer single and double sided BD's in production and use that can support anywhere between 250GB - 300GB on a single side. I've heard one possible use for the Blue Ray over the HD is in PC gaming. Piracy is the bane of any game maker's day. What the Blue ray offers over the HD DVD is simply larger size. A tactic the gaming industry is trying to implement is the use of game bloating. They will try as hard as they can to increase the size of the game program in an effort to make it so you can't pirate it. The only real problem i can see with this is the amount of time they are going to invest in bloating the game's code and the cost it will take to simply waste all of the space on a disc. The only thing about the Blue Ray i don't really like is the fact that Sony is the master of creating and developing new technologies, and yet they simply seem to fade out of existence because Sony fail to market them correctly. While they did not create the Blue Ray, they are backing it with their obviously failing release of the PS3.

Newsgroups

Newsgroups were a marvelous innovation of their day. Connecting several people via the Internet to share all various types of data. Today they have taken on a forum for piracy and other various sorts of things, unless you're Canadian, then it's not illegal. Usenet is the most recent form within the past years. If you've ever used a forum before, think of it like that, only you transfer files. The interesting thing about it, however, is you have to pay for newsgroups. Which means that for an account you have a registered name to everything you download or upload, and yet somehow they have never been shut down. Not only that, but with a lot of ISP's it's free with your internet access. The thing i find noteworthy about this, is that all form of piracy are interesting. This one is by far the weirdest. People sacrifice the never paying for anything, with paying for a subscription to gain insane amount of speed to download with. Personally i find piracy aids in the purchase of some things. The type of people who pirate simply never want to spend their money on things that are a waste of time, and today unfortunately most forms of media are standard and unoriginal. The cool thing about it however, is if you truly enjoy a product, you will go out and buy it. I've seen and heard this happen thousands of times from people who pirate everything. And a lot of them have Usenet accounts. I think the main points about all this is that simple little things that formed at the start of the Internet, newsgroups, are helpind to aid in what the legal system thinks is theft. It's an interesting paradox, but people who pirate, dopay for things that are worth it. So it's really an incentive for a gaming company, a movie studio, a record label, ect. to truly be original and break the mold. Enhancing every one's entertainment experience, and not just some one's wallet.

Digital Communications

The real interesting aspect of gaming is that technology drives it to do one step better every time. There are two programs that are currently in use which are free and wildly popular among PC gamers for Massive Multi-Player Online (Role Playing) Games. Teamspeak and Ventrillo both use a person's personal server set up by them for people to connect to. The quality of audio is solely dependant upon the quality of the server, however, Ventrillo is known to have slightly better quality. The reason this is so important, is because the way you communicate through it can vary wildly. You can set it so you push a button to talk, or set it to send audio at a certain decibel level. If you can't tell already that has serious business potential and applications. You can make it so you can talk and discuss while the other person is talking, and not have them hear you. The only thing that generates lag for these types of programs is the server and internet connection, which a company almost always has superior forms of as compared to consumers. It allows nearly limitless connections and is 100% free. The only thing you need for your company to make a conference call to every single board room in their corporation is 1) an Internet connected laptop or PC 2) a microphone 3) the program 4) a board room. Now because it's a laptop you can plug it into the room's built in audio via the headphone port so everyone can hear it. Not only that, but you can set it to personal preferences for volume input and output. Meaning you can put it in the middle of a 100 person board room and everyone who wants to speak could be heard, and if it's too quiet, you can make it so you pick up more volume, and vise verse. These programs are a lot like skype, only you don't even need a phone number to talk to each computer. You can set up 1 globally used server and every branch can use it and be in separate password protected rooms to speak teach other in, or one common room to speak to everyone in. It has many benifits over skype but the only single disadvantage it has compared to skype, is it can not call phone numbers and its quality is slightly inferior. But if the gains outweigh the cost to use skype, then a company would welcome this easily.

The Marketing King

Burger King recently came out with a new marketing plan involving Xbox and Xbox 360. With the purchase of any value meal at participating Burger King’s you can buy an Xbox/Xbox 360 game made by Burger King for $3.99. There are three games to choose from, Sneak King, Big Bumpin’, and Burger King: Pocketbike Racer. This marketing technique is obviously aimed at a younger generation that will want to play Xbox games. We feel that these games will bring business to Burger Kings because kids will employ the “I want it, I want it” tantrum until the parents give into buying the games. In order to get the game, however, you have to buy a value meal. Thus, increasing sales for the King.

Gaming Product Placements

while visiting gamespot we came across an article depicting the ever popular product placement and company alliances within using video games. www.gamespot.com/pc/action/darkenedskye/news_6091835.html
In reading the article it unvailed several key issues involving internet marketing using games. One of the more specific things i focused in on was the ubisoft fiasco that took place in Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3. The company linked a url in the game but never registered the domain. And some one found it unregistered and made a porn site with it. This was clearly a disaster in the eyes of the marketers who meant to use the website for promotional purposes. The whole point is you almost never see TV advertising for most games that aren't dynesty games, such as madden or halo. And you almost never see a commercial for a PC game that doesn't have a company history of excellence. Almost all games for PC's, from my experience, are marketed through the internet using website gamers frequent, i.e. gamespot or ign. And almost all games are judged and weighted by gamers themselves, much like Amazon's system of comments by consumers is also conducted. So what this article is telling me is that large companies are going to unite with large games to form both subtle and overt product alliances within them. What strikes me as brilliant about this is the fact that most people in my age group have the ability to ignore advertisements and banners on websites, from the book, and the one thing i've never been able not to notice is a big billboard in a game with a company's logo on it. Two examples of games like that are VTM: Bloodlines, where the company's who made the game had huge billboards in the game with logos on them, and C&C red alert 2, where westwood studios advertised an upcoming game on billboards within the game.

Introductions

Hello Cyberspace! My name is Jake and my partner is Robert. We are setting up this blog for our E-marketing class at the University of Missouri-Columbia. We will discuss the different ways companies use the internet to market games. We will mostly discuss computer games and companies but everyone now and then there may be a post about a non-computer game company that has used the internet in their marketing strategy.