05.15.13 |
∞
I’d argue it’s hard to find someone better equipped to deliver a “State of Cinema” talk than director Steven Soderbergh. Film Comment transcribed his entire talk for reading, There’s also a full SoundCloud embed file if you’d rather listen to Soderbergh’s audio. One of his quick asides on the major studios’ financial dominance was pretty scary:
In 2003, 455 films were released. 275 of those were independent, 180 were studio films. Last year 677 films were released. So you’re not imagining things, there are a lot of movies that open every weekend. 549 of those were independent, 128 were studio films. So, a 100% increase in independent films, and a 28% drop in studio films, and yet, 10 years ago: Studio market share 69%, last year 76%. You’ve got fewer studio movies now taking up a bigger piece of the pie and you’ve got twice as many independent films scrambling for a smaller piece of the pie. That’s hard. That’s really hard.
05.15.13 |
∞
Pretty damming analysis by Gamasutra‘s Matt Matthews, from overall shipments…
During the past fiscal year, the year in which the Wii U launched, total console hardware shipments actually went down rather than up. In the previous two launches, total console hardware shipments went up during a launch year.
…to upcoming Wii U releases…
While I think it’s a step forward for Iwata to show that Nintendo has a messaging problem when it comes to the Wii U, I don’t think Wii U owners — or potential Wii U owners — will be encouraged by his proposed solutions.
Iwata appears to be saying that Nintendo will reinvigorate the Wii U starting with Pikmin 3 in July and August of this year. That alone is cause for some concern, because Pikmin might be a fine game, but it isn’t really a system-seller. And on top of that, what are consumers to do with their Wii U in the intervening three months?
…and overall:
And where will all of this put Nintendo in a year’s time? Nintendo probably needs all, or nearly all, of the pieces to fall into place to reach its ¥100 billion operating profit goal…just looking at what we know now, I really don’t think Nintendo is going to make it.
Ouch.
05.14.13 |
∞
That shot of Vader and a bunch of mattresses laying on the “chasm” below gets me every time.
05.13.13 |
∞
iOS developer Dave Addey:
Apple’s iOS hardware business model – currently its largest revenue stream – is based on making a large margin from a premium hardware product. Their trick is hiding this fact from customers, and selling the iPhone and iPad not on their hardware specification, but on what you can do with them. And that, in every Apple advert, is all about the apps…
…This business model means that it is in Apple’s interest for the hardware to be as expensive as possible, and for the apps to be as cheap as possible.
True, and Dave has a lot of smart suggestions. But I don’t expect Apple to offer much of anything in terms of change, especially when iOS is still the considered the premier platform for third party developers. The numbers of the tech savvy begging for paid upgrades and trial periods are dwarfed by those that rarely make big purchases on the App Store.
05.13.13 |
∞
Well researched analysis over at Ph. D student Yossi Oren’s blog which compares the physical battery drain of running HTML5 video versus Flash. The post recently ranked high on Hacker News and deservedly so; the graph shows a remarkable difference between the two video delivery methods.
05.03.13 |
∞
Legendary game designer Ron Gilbert (The Secret of Monkey Island) on modern adventure gaming:
The focus is more on making the games themselves enjoyable. I think that is a place adventure games are going. The Walking Dead is a great example of really great games that have no puzzles. The puzzles that are there might as well not be. You just want to get on with the story. I think we should stop thinking about them as adventure games and start thinking about them as just games, or ways of telling stories.
05.02.13 |
∞
I hadn’t heard of Twitter Design Director Martin Ringlein before this talk, but regardless of his exact background, he’s a natural speaker, and I loved his frankness when it came to worker capacity prior to burning out. It’s really a talk that can apply to almost any fast paced/startup profession, from producers to designers to web developers. Martin goes off on some tangents near the beginning which pad out the length of the talk, but I’d still recommend it to almost anyone.
05.01.13 |
∞
Very well edited “back to the camera shot” montage, covering everything from Sunshine to Gone With the Wind.