Accoriding to Reuters Sony plans on its game division losing 100 billion yen, or roughly 900 million dollars. Most of this has to do with the PS3 launching this year. Now, this begs the question: how much does Sony plan on losing per console? (more…)

Right now everyone is trying to figure out the HD-DVD and Blu-ray battle before any products even hit the market. Ironically, both Blu-ray and HD-DVD have seen endless delays. Sure, techies and journalists love to blog about the virtues of both formats, but do consumers care? (more…)

According to a report in Next Generation, Wal-Mart will soon stop selling UMD movies and most of Hollywood is also backing out of Sony’s portable movie format. Why? Sales of UMD movies have died completely. None of the UMD movies are making any money. Chalk this one up as another Sony format failure.

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CVG reported on a couple rumors yesterday. First, the Nintendo Revolution is going to get renamed this week at the Game Developer’s Confrence. That makes a lot of sense to me and it’s only a matter of time. Second, that the Revolution could launch in June. That’s right, June. (more…)

A lot of sites today are posting about the rumor that the next Bungie project is going to be a Halo game that isn’t Halo 3, but does exist in the Halo universe as more of a prequel. I know what you are thinking, sequels suck but prequels are worse and I agree. This project is being called Forerunner, a refrence to the race of beings that created the Halo rings in the first place. Most sites are calling this pure rumor or speculation. It’s possibly an April fool’s joke.

Now, being that I am the mole and I love to banter about such rumors I have to put my two cents in on what is likely to happen. As you may already have read, I was pretty much right about the PS3 annoucements earlier this week, so maybe I can go 2 for 2 on rumor prediction for the week. Ok here goes:

The next game will be online. MMOFPS if you want to call it that. Let’s just call it Halo Online. Ok, so Halo Online will be all about being a huge multiplayer battleground. The battle will probably be for Earth and the player can pick a side and battle in huge battles - 100+ people trying to take over a base and 100+ people trying to hold the base. Instead of getting tons of XP to level a character as you would in a MMORPG, players will need to carry out missions to get better equipment, tanks, and just more bases. The game will probably launch this fall, let’s say around November or at the very least will be announced at E3. Halo Online will be as big as World of Warcraft and will be Microsoft’s first “billion dollar game.” Don’t be surprised if this game gets 10 million subscribers paying $10-15 a month within the first three years. That would be over a billion dollars a year in revenue.

I know this all sounds a bit crazy, but here is the reasoning. Bungie originally promised huge multiplayer battles and epic battles for earth in Halo 2. That didn’t happen, but I’m sure Bungie tried to make it happen. At the same time World of Warcraft has been making huge waves in the gaming world with it’s 6 million subscribers worldwide paying $15 a month just to play. A couple years ago those kinds of numbers would have been seen as pure insanity, but Blizzard’s near-perfect execution of the MMORPG genre in World of Warcraft made 6 million subscribers a reality. Bungie is one of the few studios who could make the same thing happen to the MMOFPS on a console. After all, Sony and Nintendo pretty much wrote off online console gaming before Halo 2 came out and lauched online console gaming into a viable business. Now even Sony is raving about how the PS3 games are going to be “Live” and online(just like Xbox games have been for the last couple years).

In short, Halo Online is just too big of an opportunity for Microsoft to pass up. It’s a billion dollar idea that if they don’t do they would be completely foolish. The Halo fanbase would go crazy for it and it would be the biggest game of the next generation. If Bungie and Microsoft make Halo Online happen, the Xbox 360 will will the next-generation console war. Period. Not only that, but a version of Halo Online playable on Windows Vista would ensure that gamers who don’t have an Xbox 360 will still upgrade to Vista.

I’ll try and keep this short, but there will probably be some followup postings in the next week or so about the ramifications of today’s annoucements. Yes, the PS3 is delayed until November worldwide(I was pretty much on the money with that) due to Blu-ray DVD copyright protection issues. Yes, the PS3 is going to have a big online service that is more media-centric, but will probably have some cool gaming features. Yes, Sony still doesn’t want to pay for the infrastructure to have games hosted on their servers. No, there was no iTunes integration for the PS3 announced. There was also more media-centric stuff annouced for the PSP, but I honestly don’t care about the PSP anymore. It’s not a good enough gaming device or a good enough media device for me to use it as either, much less both. I think the real winner in this is Microsoft, but I’ll get to that later…

Gaming Age is reporting that the recent rumors of a PS3 announcement on March 15th are true. Joystiq and others have already reported this. So, is it really going to happen? What are they going to announce?

Here is a short recap of the various PS3 rumors and their probability of being confirmed:

Playstation 3 Delay - Will the PS3 hit it’s supposed spring launch date? I really doubt it. At this point everybody is expecting a delay. Nobody really knows when the PS3 will be shipping and thus no stores are taking pre-orders yet. It’s most likely that the PS3 won’t hit the US until November. Perhaps it will show up in Japan as early as this summer, but don’t count on it.

New PS3 Controller - Everybody seemed to hate the original boomerang design even more than the Spiderman PS3 font. If they are going to unveil a new controller now would be the time, so it could very possibly happen. However, don’t expect it to look like the dualshock. They already got into hot water with that controller design once.

PS3 Online Service - I expect this to happen at some point, but don’t expect it to be annouced until E3. If they are building anything, then it’s probably going to be more media-centric than game centric. It’s going to disappoint a lot of people. It won’t be an Xbox Live killer by any means.

iTunes PS3? - As unlikely as this probably is, it also makes a whole lot of sense. If Sony would ditch their whole Sony Connect and latch on to the iTunes user base of millions of people, they might have the next generation’s “killer app”. However, the one thing Sony wants more than money right now is control, and without the ability to control the iTunes format, they won’t ever go for it.

So there you have it. Any other PS3 predictions?

It’s the morning of the next great Apple announcement. What should we expect to see today? Video iPod? MacBook(iBook)? MacMini? iTablet? Well, all of those are great possibilities, but are they fun enough? A couple of them are, but as the mole I try to look deeper into the conspiracy theory to find the hard(ly) published rumors that slip through the cracks of most journalistic efforts.

So what could it be? Don’t be surprised if we see iTunes show up on the PS3 or the Xbox 360. Both systems are extremely media-centric and want to be the center of your digital life in the same way that the iPod and iTunes already are. Now, since Apple has partnerships with both Sony and Microsoft for various things, either company could have made a deal with Apple to get iTunes on their system. However, it’s more likely that we would see iTunes on the Xbox 360 for two reasons. One, it’s already on the market. Two, Apple owes Microsoft big. It wasn’t too many years ago that Microsoft gave Apple the cash infusion that it needed to stay alive, not to mention that Microsoft signed a 5 year deal to support OSX with Office. Apple wants iTunes and iPod to be everywhere. The iPod already works great with the Xbox 360. If iTunes shows up on the Xbox 360, it will sell 100 million consoles for that reason alone. That’s 100 million people buying movies from iTunes. That’s just too much business for Apple to turn down.

Any other great conspiracy theories out there? Think I’m crazy? MAKE A COMMENT!