For laptops, Samsung and Apple were tied, according to the Brand Keys’ 2013 Consumer Loyalty Engagement Index, released today. But Samsung led in flat screen TVs, and, in perhaps the biggest shocker, beat out Apple for consumer loyalty in smartphones.

“This is the first year that Samsung beat out Apple in smartphones,” Brand Keys president Robert Passikoff told me this afternoon. “When Apple was number one, everyone said, ‘Well sure, it’s Apple.’ But the fact is that Samsung always had a larger share of the marketplace.”

Source: Brand Keys

Customer loyalty – smartphones

If you’re wondering whether this is just some dinky little no-name survey, think again. The Brand Keys customer loyalty index surveys 39,000 people, making it generalizable to the entire United States population with 95 percent confidence. And if you’re also wondering how big the delta between number one and number two actually is, Passikoff says there’s a “significant difference.”

“It’s not terrible to be number two,” Passikof said. “But in both cases I think consumers are looking for higher degrees of innovation. It was only after Samsung and other companies came out with smaller tablets that Apple brought out the iPad mini. It was only in reaction.”

Asus followed Samsung and Apple as the laptop vendor with the third-most-loyal customers, with Toshiba and Sony right on its heels. In smartphones, LG took third place after Samsung and Apple, followed by Nokia and Sony, who were tied for fourth. Motorola, HTC, and BlackBerry rounded out the top eight.

Amazon handed Apple some more bad news in the e-reader category, leading the field with its Kindle tablet. Barnes & Noble’s Nook took second, with Apple, Kobo, and Sony following. One big caveat here: it’s likely consumers don’t think of the iPad as an e-reader first and foremost, but rather as a general-purpose tablet, which may have affected these rankings.

I asked Passikoff about exactly that:

Source: Brand Keys

Customer loyalty – laptops

“That’s absolutely so. When we initially added the category, iPad never showed up. And then later it did … its primary product value is not as an e-reader. But we don’t define what products go in which categories: consumers do.”

But, adding injury to insult, Amazon beat out Apple in the dedicated tablets category as well. Apple and Samsung tied for second in that category, followed by Barnes & Noble in a tie for third, and Acer, Lenovo, and Toshiba in a tie for fourth. Google showed up in the tablets category, also in a tie, in fifth place with Sony.

Clearly, consumers are a little confused about what is a tablet and what is an e-reader — a rapidly disappearing difference — and that confusion played a role in Apple’s rankings. But just as clearly, Samsung’s products, innovation, and advertising are helping that company shape an extremely positive reputation.

Image credit: Dean Takahashi

We’ve seen the clash of titans in mobile as Apple, Google, and Microsoft have released new phones, tablets, and mobile operating systems. We’ve seen a single network connect over a billion people worldwide. We’ve seen the once-great mobile company of the far European north forced to hawk its headquarters to raise cash. And we’ve seen social media move from cutting-edge to mainstream as the Obama campaign celebrated four more years.

In every year, we see winners and losers: companies, devices, or operating systems. Here’s our look at some of the biggest successes and failures of 2012.

The winners

	Android What more can you say about Android? With 75 percent market share in the third quarter of 2012, the free mobile operating system from Google looks poised to take over the world.
	Samsung  Not many companies sell 55 million smartphones in a quarter. Samsung did, and it will probably do it again.
	Galaxy S III Samsung is hot in large part due to its top smartphone, the Galaxy S III. With over 18 million units shipped in the third quarter, and 30 million shipped in five months, it’s easy to see why.
	iPhone 5 Sure, it was Time’s gadget of the year. But more importantly, iPhone 5 catapulted Apple back into the smartphone leadership position, at least in the U.S.
	iPad Mini We called it immediately: light, portable, awesome, and expensive. And it even looked better up close and person in our review. But we had no clue it would become one of Apple’s best-selling iPads. And now that it’s probably going Retina in April/May, it’s just getting better.
	YouTube YouTube continues to be the online leader, by far, in online video with 800 million visitors and billion-view channels created by individuals and brands. Despite getting the boot from iOS6, YouTube just continues to grow, with 25 times the video streams of its nearest competitor.
	Twitter 2012 is the year that Twitter went mainstream, reaching 500 million users mid-summer and just recently announcing 200 million monthly active users. And despite major new API restrictions that soured its relationship with developers, a very public spat with Instagram, and an evolving shift from social utility to media company, the company continues to grow and solidify its space in fast-breaking news.
	Instagram With a sale initially priced at almost $1.3 billion and an exploding user count, not even a tone-deaf terms-of-service change that spurred a class action lawsuit and a possible exodus of some users can keep Instagram off our winner list.
	Google Android is hot — 75 percent market-share hot. Search is still a massive strength for the iconic company that runs an ad 30 billion times each and every day. And so Google makes over $100 million a day – and hits our list of hot companies in 2012.
	ARM With the vast majority of the chips in smartphones running ARM processors, ARM has people wondering whether the mobile juggernaut will challenge Intel for CPU dominance. That’s still a stretch, but not nearly what it was just a few years ago.
	Reddit With 3.8 billion page views and 46 million unique visitors in October — double the previous year’s numbers — Reddit is continuing its torrid growth. And it doesn’t hurt when the POTUS himself chooses your site to do an informal meet-the-people session — which required 60 dedicated servers.

Next page: The losers

Pages: 1 2 3

Sony announced today on the PlayStation blog that the PS3 is the number one home entertainment device people use to watch Netflix on their TVs. That’s impressive.

Almost any device, it seems, can stream Netflix these days. Netflix is available on the Wii (and the new Wii U), Apple TV, Tivo, Boxee, numerous Blu-ray players, Roku digital players, smart TV platforms from multiple vendors, and, of course, the Xbox 360.

To lead that pack is quite an accomplishment.

“PS3 is our largest TV-connected platform in terms of Netflix viewing, and this year, at times, even surpassed the PC in hours of Netflix enjoyment to become our number one platform overall,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said in a statement.

Part of that lead is because PS3 is a very successful mass-market console despite the fact that Xbox has outsold it for 23 consecutive months. Part of it is because PS3 had Netflix early, in 2009, was the first console with 1080p and 5.1 surround sound, and has consistently been on the cutting edge of what’s available, technologically, to control your Netflix viewing.

But part of it is probably also because the Xbox 360, while it offers Netflix, has a wider range of entertainment possibilities, with Microsoft working on original video content, major network TV, YouTube, live TV, and more.

Two newer innovations that Sony has brought to PS3 and Netflix include a new voice user interface system, dubbed “Max,” that is currently in testing, and the ability to pause a Netflix movie on your PS3-equipped TV, and restart it seamlessly on another device, such as your PlayStation Vita.

Innovations like that — and perhaps a breakthrough new console for the coming 2013 updates — might keep PS3 in the lead.

photo credit: CowGummy via photopin cc

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Panasonic, which had already trimmed its workforce by 36,000 jobs last year, will be looking to sell or close any business units that cannot achieve at least a 5 percent project margin, the company’s chief financial officer told Reuters.

Japanese electronics companies are fighting surging Korean electronics companies such as LG and Samsung — and losing. Sony’s stock is down almost 80 percent in the past five years. Sharp is down 90 percent, and Panasonic itself is down about 75 percent and currently at a 10-year low. LG stock, on the other hand, is up about 30 percent since mid-year, and Samsung’s stock has almost tripled since early 2011.

Source: Google Finance

Sony, Panasonic, and Sharp stock prices: down, down, down.

The Korean manufacturers have taken the majority of Panasonic and other Japanese companies’ TV business and have been quicker to jump on profitable new segments such as smartphones, where Samsung has a global lead.

Panasonic’s last profitable year was 2010, but it is aiming to return to profitability in its March 2013 to March 2014 fiscal year, aided by the sale of $1.4 billion-worth of land and buildings in Japan.

But it has a tough job ahead, with 88 business units to review and fix, close, or sell.

photo credit: joimson via photopin cc

The newly released fourth-generation iPad from Apple has just surpassed Sony’s eight-month-old PlayStation Vita game handheld in graphical performance, based on an analysis of the iPad’s performance from Anand Shimpi of AnandTech and available knowledge of the Vita.

The new iPad uses the new A6X processor, which includes a new graphics processing unit (GPU) that is twice as powerful as the third-generation iPad. As we noted in our review of the PlayStation Vita, the Vita has a nearly identical GPU to the third-generation iPad. The only differences are the clock speed and design architecture (to fit the Vita’s processor). This latest iPad — which is a tablet, not a dedicated game console — has a more powerful GPU than the PlayStation Vita.

Despite the nearly identical GPUs, we previously wrote that the Vita is more powerful than the third-generation iPad for two major reasons:

1. The Vita only has to populate graphics onto a 960 pixel by 540 pixel resolution display, compared to the iPad’s much larger 2048 pixel by 1536 pixel resolution display.
2. The Vita’s central processing unit (CPU), as explained by developers, is a quad-core processor with a clock speed that starts at 800 megahertz but can reach up to 2 gigahertz, compared to the iPad’s 1 gigahertz dual-core processor.

Even with a more efficient CPU architecture, more RAM, and arguably better software, the third-generation iPad couldn’t offer better performance than the Vita with the same GPU.

But with the latest version of the PowerVR GPU (the SGX 554MP4), the new fourth-generation iPad has significantly more graphical throughput than the Vita and 3rd generation iPad. This enables the newer GPU to (theoretically) process twice as much data as the older model, which is why Apple claims twice the performance over the previous iPad released in March. That speed boost, combined with the faster 1.4-gigahertz dual-core processor and a higher-clocked GPU (200 megahertz for the Vita vs. a maximum of 300 megahertz for the iPad), is enough to firmly set the fourth-generation iPad ahead of the Vita in gaming performance.

In graphics-based benchmarks, Shimpi recorded that the fourth-generation iPad performs up to twice as fast as the third-generation iPad. The most important test, scored below, shows a 99 percent increase in frames per second on the new iPad. With twice the RAM, twice the graphics processing speed, and a faster dual-core processor, these numbers suggest that the iPad’s increase in performance surpasses the Vita’s graphical capabilities.

But there’s a catch: The iPad may provide gaming performance that is definitively better than the Vita’s thanks to all of these factors, but it still has to render six times the number of pixels as the Vita. In effect, the new iPad may still lag behind the Vita in some circumstances. Most new iPad games are, however, designed for the iPad 2′s lower resolution 1024 pixel by 768 pixel display, which is only 30% larger than the Vita display. At these lower resolutions, the new iPad should be the clear winner.

However, when it comes to raw computing power, the Vita is no longer the most powerful portable graphics device. The fourth-generation iPad now takes that role thanks to the newer-generation PowerVR GPU.

Should Sony be worried? Not because of performance. As a dedicated game console, the Vita is still has built-in physical controls — an extremely important feature for gamers — while the iPad does not. Sony’s biggest concerns right now for the Vita are poor sales and a limited game selection.

Photo credit: Chipworks

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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So in Skyfall, 007 is using a 13-megapixel-equipped Sony Xperia T, running Google’s Android mobile operating system.

Sony has launched phones with Bond before, showcasing the K800i in Casino Royale and the c902 in Quantum of Solace. Perhaps Skyfall will bring a big dollop of solace to Sony this year, as its latest earnings have shown widening losses.

After selling just 30 million phones in 2012 so far – Apple sold 27 million and Samsung sold 57 million in just the last quarter – Sony is aiming for 50 million for 2013.

Source: Sony

Sony Xperia T

Bond, James Bond, does not use the phone’s built-in NFC, but he does flash the camera in a not terribly subtle product placement. The Xperia’s impressive 13-megapixel camera is fully accessible just 1.5 seconds from standby, records in 1080P high-definition, and includes Sony’s face and smile detection technology. And Sony included a relatively recent version of Android in the 4.55″ smartphone: Ice Cream Sandwich.

One neat feature for Bond fans: Sony is apparently including some exclusive Skyfall behind-the-scenes footage, wallpaper, ring tones, and more.

After all, who wouldn’t want the Bond theme as their ringtone?

Image credit: Skyfall

GamesBeat is giving away a signed copy of The Art of Journey, a book highlighting the visual wonders of PlayStation Network title Journey. Interested in winning our unsealed edition signed by Art Director Matt Nava and Game Director Jenova Chen from thatgamecompany? Then enter the giveaway by doing one of the following:

1. Leave a comment below stating your favorite thing about Journey.
2. Tweet the following message: Follow @GamesBeat and RT this for a chance to win The Art of Journey. Rules: http://wp.me/p1re2-2enn #GamesBeatGiveaways

You can enter twice: once in the comments and once via Twitter. Read these quick rules before entering:

• To enter via Twitter, you must follow @GamesBeat.
• This contest is limited to the continental U.S.
• Feel free to share on Twitter as often you like, but please only comment once. Duplicate entries on Twitter will only count as one vote.
• Our winner must supply his or her full name and mailing address (duh).
• The contest starts right now and ends in exactly one week (September 24, 9:59am PST).
• Void where prohibited.

You can read more about The Art of Journey here. The winner will receive The Art of Journey book signed by Matt Nava and Jenova Chen and a download code for the Journey original soundtrack.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Journey, the best-selling Playstation Network title, is considered one of the most artistic games released this year. It’s the tale of a wandering vagabond traversing a magnificent desert and, through a unique multiplayer system, meeting with one other player at a time to harrow through the massive levels hand-in-hand. Sony is commemorating exactly that with an art book of Journey, and the company held an event in Los Angeles to show off the visuals from the game as well as the artists behind it. I had a chance to attend and see the art that helped create the game, its unique character and landscape, and the public reaction to it.

Oh, and we’ll also be giving away a signed copy of The Art of Journey, which you can read more about below.

The event, which highlighted the visual design of Journey from the artwork of Matt Nava, Art Director at thatgamecompany, featured dozens of different pieces, including screenshots, pre-game renders, drawings, and even live paintings courtesy of BlueCanvas, which co-hosted the event. You can see pictures from the event in the gallery below, which includes much of the artwork that is in the The Art of Journey book. The spectacle was completely open to the public in the heart of downtown, and anyone over 21 could come in and see the gallery or even play the game on one of three stations. Many patrons clearly demonstrated that they had no idea what the game was — some likely didn’t know what a Playstation 3 was — but even then, viewers exhibited a certain fascination with the sparkling desert, the strange armless character that always seemed to stare into the distance, and the odd portraits of creatures unknown.

The gallery was a success. Nava and Jenova were busy signing copies of The Art of Journey most of the night, and a constant stream of newcomers shuffled in to see what was happening or to purchase the first copies of the art book. You can learn more about the creation of the book in the video below.

The Art of Journey will release later this month for $60 through BlueCanvas and other retailers, but the publisher has not set a hard release date yet. The book includes over 150 pages of art from the game, most of which aren’t screenshots, as well as a number of 3D augmented-reality simulations through a free smartphone app. Some pictures of those in action are in the gallery below. Finally, every copy of The Art of Journey includes a free download of the Journey soundtrack through the Playstation Network.

Interested in winning a copy of The Art of Journey, signed by Art Director Matt Nava and Game Director Jenova Chen? Click here to learn more!

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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This is part 2 of our interview with Wikipad’s James Bower and Fraser Townley, the company’s CEO and president of sales. Click here to read part 1.

GamesBeat: Getting back to partnerships, are you working with OnLive as well as Gaikai/Sony?

James Bower: We’re in discussions with OnLive as well. One of the key things of Wikipad is that we’re approaching this as a very open platform. We’re willing to work with a lot of various players. The most important thing for us is that our customers have content and that there are various ways for them to get content. There’s the traditional way through Google Market. And then there’s the streaming games, like Gaikai, which was just bought by Sony, and OnLive. We’re in discussions with what our relationship is moving forward.

We also have other forms of content that are interesting, forming on the horizon, that I can’t share yet. We’re not concerned that there won’t be enough content on the Wikipad to get started, and it’ll only get better over time.

GamesBeat: What is Wikipad’s funding? Is the company self-funded?

Bower: The core founders have funded all of the capital to date–

GamesBeat: And the core founders are yourself….

Bower: Myself, Matthew Joynes, and one other founder that we’ll be announcing shortly. We haven’t discussed him as a founder because of who he is, but that will be coming out shortly. It’s a higher-profile person. A lot of the financing of the business is through banking relationships for the purchase orders we have, and things like that.

GameBeat: You previously worked at Master Image. What was your position there?

Bower: President/COO.

GamesBeat: And when was the company acquired?

Bower: Master Image was acquired from Korea and moved to California in November 2009.

GamesBeat: Do you think you’ll have to look for outside funding, perhaps getting closer to the product release?

Bower: I think it’s a question of how fast we want to grow. As of today, they’re fine. So to answer your question, yes, we’re open to look at that and how it can accelerate the business, but it’s not something we’re overly concerned about doing in the short term because of where we’ve come with doing it ourselves.

GamesBeat: Why go with Tegra T30 instead of the more powerful T33, like in the ASUS Transformer Prime Infinity TF700T?

Bower: One of our goals was to ensure that the Wikipad was both lightweight and thin as possible. The T30s is Nvidia’s smallest, high-powered, component CPU. The T33 is a larger component requiring a larger PCB and would have added addition thickness and, in turn, additional weight to the Wikipad. An additional benefit to the T30s is that it draws less power from the battery. This results in the benefit of longer battery life for gamers using the Wikipad compared to the T33, which draws more power from the battery.

GamesBeat: From my own research, it seems like Wikipad is a secretive company. The company has put out so little information. Is this intentional?

Bower: We really had the intent to come out with the stereoscopic version of the Wikipad. And we made the announcements at CES. With some of the decisions we’ve made to make a better tablet, faster platform, that gamers will take very seriously, some of that strategy had to shift a little bit. We’re being very cognizant and careful about what we announce and when we announce it. We don’t want to mismanage the expectations of our future customers. As you’ve seen, there are a lot of people who are excited with what’s coming, with the potential of Wikipad, of what it means. And we want to be very careful and cautious on what we say, and we want to deliver on what we say.

But you’re going to see a shift in the chatter coming from us, and we’re going to amplify things considerably, going into the launch of the company. It’s just us being cautious.

GamesBeat: Are there any game partnerships, like with developers or publishers, that Wikipad has to release titles specific to the Wikipad?

Bower: We’re working with some of the [graphics] engine guys, like Unity and a couple of other guys that build the engines for other guys. We’re in some discussions for unique game designs for the Wikipad, but there’s nothing to the point where we can make an announcement. We’re going to see a lot of content coming from a lot of directions.

GamesBeat: What can you say about the manufacturing of the Wikipad?

Bower: We’re working with the top two manufacturing plants in the world, that have embraced us as a newer company and have taken us on.

GamesBeat: Can you announce who they are?

Bower: Not yet. But we can sleep at night knowing that the guys who sleep at night are the guys who are manufacturing it for us are manufacturing some of the best brand names in the market.

GamesBeat: Several products similar to the Wikipad have been showed over the last year. The Wii U uses a tablet controller but targets a home audience. Razer’s Project Fiona concept device is a laptop-in-a-tablet with a built-in controller running Windows 8. How would you differentiate Wikipad from these?

Bower: It’s challenging to come back with a very poignant answer to that, because one’s a concept and the other people have only just started to see and play with. The unique factor that we have is that we’re really a bridge between a historically mobile console and the invention of the tablet. We do everything as good or better than other tablets on the market, and very easily you can transform the Wikipad into a very efficient, easy-to-use video game device that’s very comfortable.

How we’re different is that we’re not just about gaming. The focus of the company is gaming; that’s who we are, and that’s our pedigree. But when this comes to market, people are going to realize that, wow, I might as well just buy the Wikipad to do all of this plus have fun with games and have a control mechanism that I have on my console.

GamesBeat: Apple holds 68 percent of tablet marketshare with the iPad. Amazon’s Kindle is the next best, and it’s not even close. Android isn’t even close, even though it’s riding smooth at 50 percent of smartphone marketshare. Is that a concern?

Bower: Not really. Apple’s done such a fantastic job with their products, and we all love them. What we’re coming to the market with is a different concept; it’s not just a tablet — it’s a mobile gaming platform that can do all of the functions that you can with a tablet with all of the advantages you have for gaming. So we’re competing right down the middle with what a tablet is, with what people expect out of a tablet, and with what people expect out of a mini console device.

And it’s a space that isn’t populated by very many, or anybody, because we’re really the first ones to market on this. And the other aspect of this is if we’re as successful with this as we believe we’re going to be, from the indications from retailers, from the orders we already have, we don’t have to dominate a market to do really well, because we’re new, we’re relatively small, and we’re innovative, we’re agile. We have a roadmap for the next 24 months. We don’t have to make 2, 3, 10, 20 percent of the market to do really well. One percent of the market is tremendous success. But I think we’re going to do better than that.

GamesBeat: Do you also see the Wikipad competing with portable game consoles, or does it hit the middle ground so users can have a tablet, a game console, all in one device?

Bower: That’s what I would say. What we’re proposing to the market is a bridge between the two. We’re saying if you get this, you can still do all of the things you love to do with a tablet, and you’re also going to have access to all of the great content that’s historically only been able to get through a console-only device.

GamesBeat: What do you think about newer game technologies like Microsoft’s Smartglass? Or the large number of upcoming Android game controllers? And the recently announced Kickstarter success home Android-based game console Ouya?

Bower: What’s coming from Microsoft is great. We’ve seen some of the prototypes of Windows 8 and RT, and it’s great. The interesting thing about the future of that platform is going to be the access of some PC content. There’s not much I’m going to talk about in relation to our company at this point, as it relates to Microsoft’s platform, but it is something that we’re looking into. It’s something that we’re open to, not to replacing the current platform we have now, but maybe as an additional product. But it’s exciting. I think Microsoft has finally got a hit with this new OS. And behind the scenes, retailers and manufacturers behind the scenes, are really excited.

GamesBeat: And that’s notwithstanding Valve chief Gabe Newell’s recent remarks about how Windows 8 is just awful?

Bower: Everyone’s going to have their own opinion. I think Android has done a fantastic job on getting out there. If you look at the global numbers, Android has outpaced everything. You then talked a little bit about…?

GamesBeat: Android game controllers?

Bower: You know, for me…I can only speak for myself because our product isn’t on the market yet. If you’re dealing with a mobile product, if there’s separation between the screen and the your person, then it’s an unengaged experience. I think in order to have the experience, on a device that is personal, that you’re willing to put your credit card into, the game experience on controllers has to be directly connected because you’re expecting it to be totally personal. I would rather use this [holding an Xbox controller] than this on a tablet that I have to prop up and play. That’s all I can say. The market will determine who’s the winner at the end.

And since I mentioned Ouya, we’re really excited about Ouya. Them talking about and launching on Kickstarter, and the results that they have, is a really interesting and solid sign for us. The games that are going to play on that are going to work on the Wikipad, and the games that will work on Wikipad will work on the Ouya. The more content that is prepared for them is going to help us, and the more content prepared for us is going to help them. It’s a very interesting concept that they have.

What I think it’s really going to come down to is how can these devices, and how can our partners like google and others, begin to fix the piracy issues? Because the big game developers, the Epic’s of the world, the Crytek’s, they won’t invest the tremendous amount of money they spend to create these great games for consoles until the piracy issues are fixed. Because it’s a lot more difficult to pirate something for a Playstation or an Xbox. It’s just a lot more work. And the discussions that we’ve had with them is yes, the concept is great, but fix the piracy so that our investment of $30 million, $40 million, $50 million, $80 million in marketing and development cost isn’t going to go to a waste and everyone is going to steal it. Fix that problem and we’ll develop everything for this platform.

GamesBeat: But you’re not concerned at this point about piracy….

Bower: Not for us. But I think as far as the experience on these devices, the game publishers need to know that their investment in these high-quality products is protected, and then we’ll see more of that content come about. We’re very involved with the dynamics behind the scenes with our partners like Nvidia and Google and others about how we can help…we’re people’s art that they create is protected, and respected, and paid for. So that there’s enough money so they can develop their next games.

GamesBeat: Have you been in contact with Ouya, maybe for a partnership?

Bower: We love what they’re doing, I’m sure we’re going to have a conversation at some point, but there’s nothing in the works right now. There isn’t anything worth talking about, or even speculating about.

GamesBeat: What about, since we already spoke about potentially going outside of the company for funding, using Kickstarter since Ouya was so successful. Is that something that you’re considering?

Bower: Frankly speaking, we’ve considered that from the beginning. We decided not to because of the significant adoption that has been relayed to us from retailers around the world. Would Kickstarter have helped us or hurt us? We want to see the retailers make money with us. Right now we’re really focusing on the retailer relationships that we already have in place.

GamesBeat: When will the Wikipad ship?

Bower: We’re looking to release later this year.

GamesBeat: And that’s just in the U.S.?

Bower: For now, yes. We’re also actively looking at the European and Asian markets.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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There are tablets, and then there’s a gaming tablet. The Wikipad, an Android handheld that promised to be the first mobile device with a gamepad built specifically for the device, is set to launch later this year. Venturebeat recently sat down to talk with CEO James Bower and President of Sales Fraser Townley in a local design office in Thousand Oaks, Calif.

Here’s an edited version of our interview. For details on the Wikipad’s specifications, see our report from late last month.

Venturebeat: What is Wikipad, and what is the history of the company?

James Bower: Last year we (Bower, Matt Joynes, and one more founder) started thinking about what type of consumer device could make a difference. What’s something that we could do that would really get good market acceptance as well as being a game changer?

We all started getting smartphones and tablets and we’re playing games and whatnot, and it just doesn’t quite have that experience as when you’re playing with a controller. The touch experience is okay, but it doesn’t quite get you there. So we thought what can we do to take the concepts of tablets and create a much better gaming experience.

VB: When did the company get started?

JB: We officially formed the company in September. But as a team, we’ve been thinking through concepts, I would say, since back in the spring of 2011.

VB: What was the team doing back then if it wasn’t a company?

JB: Matt [Joynes], who is the chairman of the company, previously bought and sold companies. He and I partnered up on this, and he was twiddling with some of the business planning of creating a consumer device. I was involved with the restructuring of a company called Master Image, which was acquired and restructured and moved to California. That company created stereoscopic 3D for cinema and screens for tablets and smartphones.

The market dabbled in [3D in mobile devices] for a little bit. We saw LG come out with its 3D version (the LG Optimus 3D) of a phone, and the Nintendo 3DS, but there hasn’t been a tremendous market push to adopt this from a tablet and smartphone perspective. In some cases, from my standpoint frustratingly so, anyone who loves stereo sees this as a huge potential market that hasn’t really been opened yet. We see this in the television market; most TVs support stereoscopic in some form, and we see a lot of the market shifting to that.

The fact is, there’s a lot of 3D content that is still coming out. What’s different when it comes to a personal device, when you don’t have the challenges of putting glasses on that becomes a socially inhibiting event — you know, you’re not going to sit with friends and put glasses on in your house. It’s a little bit awkward. When you remove that barrier and enable stereoscopic 3D, it starts to change.

VB: So the original idea was to have the Wikipad be a stereoscopic tablet, and as time went on the 3D got pushed out?

JB: Yes, but it’s more than that. It’s the nature of how fast we can get to market with the price points that we need to get with the market research we’ve done, you know, for the first version [of the Wikipad]. [3D] is in our DNA, if you will, and in our future plans.

VB: Why the name “Wikipad? What exactly does that mean?

JB: ‘Wiki’ actually means fast [in Hawaiian], and so we were thinking about what are we going to create here? We’re going to create a tablet that’s really fast, that’s really edgy for the gaming community, and ‘wiki’ is such a representative name of what we want to be, which is a fast pad. And it’s catchy. Sometimes there’s an educational tone associated with it, and if we come out with a tablet that people may think has educational benefits as well, we start to hit a brand that’s accepted across a lot of mediums.

VB: If I’m not mistaken, you’re currently partnered with NVIDIA, as well as Gaikai. Does that mean Sony as well now, since they purchased Gaikai?

JB: Gaikai has been a great relationship for us, but we’re under NDA with Gaikai and Sony. That’s about all I can say right now, but we know what’s going on and we’re still close to the situation, and the transaction is just in the completion stage as we speak. Stay tuned.

VB: What about Sony Mobile Certification, where Playstation titles can play on some Android devices, mostly from Sony and now some select HTC smartphones?

JB: Sorry, I can’t comment.

VB: Fair enough. So you’re working with NVIDIA as well. Why go with Tegra?

JB: For a number of reasons — a few secret ones that I can’t talk about, and a few that I can. When it comes to a brand of processor that is close to the hearts of gamers, NVIDIA has been there a long time. They have a very good, integral brand; they have a very good relationship to content, and content is key for us, as it relates to our product. So there are a lot of advantages to Tegra as it relates to gameplay. They’ve been working on a lot of things behind the scenes that they haven’t talked about regarding gameplay. They also were one of the front-runners in the development of stereoscopic 3D support, integrating their 3D vision capabilities into the Tegra processor as well. So it became much more of a turnkey easy solution for our future as we look at stereoscopic 3D.

VB: So you’ll be working with them for 3D support?

JB: Yes.

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Sony’s answer to Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. pits some of the most popular PlayStation heroes and villains against each other. Recognizable characters like God of War’s Kratos, Uncharted’s Nathan Drake, and Twisted Metal’s Sweet Tooth have been confirmed as playable fighters, but the final roster is yet to be determined by the game’s developers.

Sadly, it’s unlikely that All-Stars Battle Royale will feature every Sony first-party series — the publisher just has too many franchises for this to be a reasonable expectation. Let’s take a look at some Sony properties that probably won’t make it into the game due to poor sales, overall weirdness, or horrible design.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Over the course of four hours across three Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) press conferences, hardcore gamers submitted over 16,000 real-time impressions — a valuable set of data for anyone curious as to how fans felt about the most important announcements during the gaming industry’s biggest event of the year. Now that E3 is over, we can take the time to really dig into what they liked and didn’t like, learning some interesting lessons in the process.

For this study, we counted the positive and negative comments in the hugely popular NeoGAF gaming forums, charting the reactions minute-by-minute in the graph below. The basic rule of thumb: the more positive responses, the higher the reaction score and vice versa. In short, Sony received the most positive responses, well ahead of Microsoft and Nintendo…but the publisher didn’t exactly impress everyone.

Click for a full-size version. For a more detailed explanation of how we analyzed this data, please see the explanation at the end of this article.

What NeoGAF liked about the Sony press conference

NeoGAF reacted strongly to the following games: Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, Assassin’s Creed III, and The Last of Us (for more on these or any products mentioned here, click the tags below). While they responded positively at first to Beyond: Two Souls, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, Far Cry 3, and God of War: Ascension, opinion soured soon after their first mentions.

The community also reacted positively to Jack Tretton, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, and Kaz Hirai, president and CEO of Sony Corporation. Both have become heroes to the video game community. David Cage, founder of Quantic Dream (Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls), also received good feedback, if not as strong as the two Sony personalities.

The most positive reaction of the show came at the end of the The Last of Us demonstration. The presentation concluded with the game’s protagonist killing his enemy with a brutal shotgun blast to the face, at which point the community exploded with shock and amazement. In fact, this single moment would prove to be the most popular across all three press conferences. One could say that The Last of Us “won” E3 — an expression gamers are very fond of using.

What they didn’t like

As noted, NeoGAF responded poorly to long demonstrations, and goodwill for games quickly evaporated as they continued. The group gave mixed responses when Sony discussed PlayStation Plus and PlayStation 1 games coming to the handheld Vita.

The most negative reaction of Sony’s press conference occurred during the Book of Spells demonstration. The community complained throughout this Wonderbook presentation, and comments hit a low point during the eighth minute of the Book of Spells segment. They cited a variety of factors for their displeasure: that the game is for kids, it was motion controlled, it was augmented reality, it was boring, and the demo was too long. In fact, the segment was so unpopular that members posted 943 negative comments during the 11 minutes Sony featured Book of Spells, compared to 103 positive comments. It didn’t help that the live demo had technical hiccups, and the game didn’t work for a brief moment.

For more on how NeoGAF reacted to the E3 press conferences, check out the Microsoft and Nintendo studies.

How the scoring works

NeoGAF hosts a single message board thread for each press conference, where dozens of members comment throughout each show. I graded each comment as positive or negative, giving them scores of 1 or -1 respectively. Then I totaled the sum of these reactions for each discrete minute and plotted in the above chart. A high score means that the NeoGAF community liked what they saw; a score close to zero represents mixed reactions; and a low score means that they were not enjoying the show at that moment.

Some notes on how I scored each response:

• I made no distinction between really positive or somewhat positive comments — likewise for negative comments. Each was given either a score of 1 or -1.
• While I made every effort to understand the various memes and inside jokes that make up a large part of the responses, if I could not understand a response, I would not score it.
• In the event that a comment employed obvious sarcasm, I scored it to reflect the original intent of the commentator. If the sarcasm was not clear, I relied on the literal meaning of the comment. Fortunately, the very expressive NeoGAF community rarely employed subtle sarcasm.
• When comments included positive and negative observations, I accounted for the more immediate reaction to preserve a more real-time response. An example: “I liked the game that was shown at the beginning of the show, but this game now is bad” would have a negative score.
• Many comments weren’t scored as they offered no opinion. These included clarifications, questions, discussions between members unrelated to the press conference, and inquiries into whether one game or another would be shown at a later time.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The lights have been turned down, the speakers silenced, and the journalists are still complaining. E3 has come and gone. What better way to celebrate the end of the “Superbowl of Video Games” than with bad poetry? And seriously, let’s never use that expression again.

The Sony E3 press conference went a little something like this:

Jack Tretton was first to the stand,
With visionary David Cage in hand.
A game called Beyond,
Ellen Page, her hair gone.
“Play Beyond?” Now, I understand!

PlayStation All Stars Battle Royale
Makes characters enemies and pals.
Everyone knows,
It’s Super Smash Bros.
A good game to copy, I allow.

Assassin’s Creed 3 is on a boat,
Brand new ways to kill some red coats.
Avast me matey,
Wait, there’s a lady?
Extra Vita game to promote.

Another Far Cry is being made,
A debt to its roots has been paid.
4-player co-op
Was overwrought,
Will it get lots of store credit on a trade?

PlayStation Plus unveiled more perks,
Making other pay services look like jerks.
With PlayStation Move
They have something to prove
Like maybe the games should work?

There is no IP that is hotter,
So how can we douse it with water?
We’ll take a look,
With Wonderbook.
A buzz kill for Harry Potter.

Kratos is back from fire and soot,
Starting off at the base of the foot.
Larger than life,
Mythical strife.
Just wait until you see its boot.

The Last of Us got cheers from the place,
Showing the end of the human race.
Trouble for two.
What do we do?
Of course! Shoot ‘em all in the face!

Why not check out the limericks that round up the Microsoft and Nintendo press conferences?

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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 Sony filed for an interesting patent in 2010 that shows it has technology that resembles Nintendo’s upcoming Wii U game console. Titled Position-Dependent Gaming 3-D controller, and Handheld as a Remote, the patent shows that the game company is at the very least interested in a controller or mobile device with a built-in display to be used as an input device for a console game.

The concept is similar to the Wii U, which was unveiled at E3 last year. The device shows objects onscreen and interacts with the objects on  the television while acting as a controller. It suggest that the next-generation game consoles will embrace touchscreen tablets in a big way.

Below is a description of how the device is supposed to function:

Methods and systems for using a position of a mobile device with an integrated display as an input to a video game or other presentation are presented. Embodiments include rendering an avatar on a mobile device such that it appears to overlay a competing user in the real world. Using the mobile device’s position, view direction, and the other user’s mobile device position, an avatar (or vehicle, etc.) is depicted at an apparently inertially stabilized location of the other user’s mobile device or body. Some embodiments may estimate the other user’s head and body positions and angles and reflect them in the avatar’s gestures.

The device is position-dependent, and the application only describes it as a “mobile device,” so it’s difficult to know whether it’s a handheld such as the PlayStation Vita or a separate game controller designed for a future console. Still, it’s only a patent application, and Sony may only be covering their bases for future control possibilities.

It has been said in the past that the PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 3 combination can do what Nintendo’s Wii U can do. Perhaps Sony was way ahead of us on that one.

Check out the additional images below:

[Via US Patent Office]

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Sony has announced on its European PlayStation forums that PlayStation Network (PSN) will be down for maintenance through most of Thursday, Feb. 2. Based on the announcement, it seems the outage will only affect European PSN users, but we’ve reached out to Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) to ask whether North American users will experience any downtime.

Maintenance time always makes Sony’s gamers a little nervous these days, particularly after last year’s six-week outage after hackers breached the network’s security. The official announcement from the European forums is as follows:

PSN Maintenance has been scheduled to take place this Thursday 2nd of February from 14.00PM until 08.00AM on Friday 3rd of February.

During the maintenance period, the following services will be affected:

• PS Store (PC and Console)
• Customer Account Management
• Registration  

HOME will be unavailable for the duration of the maintenance.

Users who attempt to sign in after maintenance begins may receive the site notification page. If you are signed in before maintenance begins you should remain signed into your online session (although the above services will still be unavailable).

It’s worth noting that the post says nothing about other territories. At the time of this writing, there is no mention of it on the North American PlayStation Blog, so keep your heads up, North America. We may have our full PSN service through the week after all. The last time North America experienced downtime was in November.

Expect an update if we hear back from Sony.

[Via Official PlayStation Forum Europe via VG24/7]

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Sony has officially denied a report by respected Japanese newspaper The Nikkei claiming Kazuo Hirai was set to take over as company president.

“Certain media reports were published on January 7, 2012 (JST) regarding Sony Corporation’s executive officers’ appointments. Sony Corporation has made no announcement in this regard and nothing has been determined at this time.”

It’s important to note that the official statement doesn’t necessarily mean Hirai won’t replace current president Howard Stringer (eventually).

Hirai, best known to gamers for his embarrassing Ridge Racer PSP demo during E3 2006 (see video below), would be taking over the company during its darkest hour. In fiscal 2011, just months after predicting a sizable profit, the company posted losses of roughly $3.2 billion dollars, and again in November with $1.2 billion. This is largely attributed to the company’s poor electronics sales, particularly TVs, as well as slumping PlayStation product sales.

The PlayStation Vita, Sony’s latest handheld gaming device, saw a disappointing launch in Japan over the Christmas period. The Japanese earthquake/tsunami disaster in March of 2011, along with the five-week PlayStation Network outage and security breach (estimated to have cost Sony $172 million), have certainly not helped the company.

Hirai, currently executive deputy president of Sony, said in November that “management is feeling a serious sense of crisis about the seven years of losses.” Hirai promised to “lead the turnaround to get Sony out of the red” himself.

Image via Gawker

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Sony today revealed an initial list of retail PSP titles that will be transferable to Japanese Vita systems for a fee via a download program. However, the list covers less than half of the former Sony portable’s library of games, and leaves out many releases from some major Japanese publishers.

The Vita, which launches in Japan Dec. 17 and worldwide in early 2012, does not include a drive for the Universal Media Discs used to play PSP games. As a solution to that backward compatibility problem, Sony revealed the Japanese UMD Passport program, which lets PSP owners register their UMD game purchases so they can download Vita-compatible versions. Although, it costs game owners about $5 to $19 per game to do this.

Today, Sony Japan revealed a list of 262 UMD titles (out of the over 600 total titles) from PSP’s library that will be available on Vita through the Passport program. While the list includes many popular titles from Sony as well as major publishers like Atlus, Tecmo Koei and SNK Playmore, Siliconera points out that key publishers like Square Enix, Namco Bandai, Konami and Capcom are not represented.

That means several PSP titles from major franchises  — like Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, Tekken and Monster Hunter  — won’t be transferable to the Vita when the system launches. Though it’s largely unknown in the west, Capcom’s Monster Hunter series consistently top sales charts in Japan and has been known to cause significant hardware sales spikes when games are released. Not having it available might end up being a big deal for some Vita owners.

Of course, that’s not to say that some of those major publishers won’t eventually open up their entire PSP libraries for Vita download. As we’ve previously seen, many publishers have slowly started offering more of their classic games for sale on digital marketplaces, like the Wii’s Virtual Console and Sony’s PlayStation Network. And while it’s typical for a vocal (loud) group of hardcore players to demands backward compatibility of old games on new systems, the majority of game consumers largely ignore the issue.

Still, with limited (and somewhat costly) support for the passport transfer program in Japan (as well as no official plans for similar programs in North America and Europe), the launch of the Vita may represent a larger break with Sony’s portable past than some gamers had hoped.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Like the rest of the Sony PlayStation Network, Sony’s Home virtual world is still recovering from the shock of being down for almost a month as a result of a hacker attack. But Jack Buser (pictured), head of the U.S. PlayStation Home business, said that the virtual world had a record week when it turned the service back on. Home has more than 20 million registered users worldwide.

The traffic in late May was higher than in the holidays. Jack Tretton, president of Sony Computer Entertainment America, said at E3 that sales of the PlayStation 3 rose 27 percent since the revival of the PSN.

“That speaks to the loyalty of the PlayStation user,” Buser said.

After Home returned, Sony offered more than 100 free virtual items in Home to give users an incentive to come back. And PlayStation Home hit new records during E3, largely because of the traffic to the simulated E3 booth. In that booth, Sony had live streaming video of game demonstrations as they were in progress. Sony also created a 3D rendering of the PS Vita, its new upcoming handheld device. Players could view the handheld in 3D and check it out.

Last year, Sony had five times as many people watch the virtual E3 booth than attended. This year, it was ten times the in-person number.

In another piece of news, Sony is launching its Sodium 2: Project Velocity game inside the Home virtual world on Thursday. Built by Lockwood Publishing, the game lets you race sci-fi jet racers and customize them with items you can purchase in the Home virtual item showcase.

Home has 230 games available for players to play inside the world.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The PlayStation 3, which debuted in 2006, still has a lot of life left in it. But Sony has begun incurring increases in research and development costs. That means that we’re getting closer to the introduction of new game systems for the Big Three of video games — a transition time when billions of dollars are at stake and big market share shifts can happen.

Sony chief financial officer Masaru Kato said on the company’s earnings call, “For the home equipment the PS3 still has a product life, but this is a platform business, so for the future platform — when we’ll be introducing what product I cannot discuss that — but our development work is already underway, so the costs are incurred there.”

Sony has said it foresess a 10-year life span for the PS 3, and the company is not expected to say much about the PS 4 at its press conference at E3 on June 6. Nintendo, on the other hand, has said it plans to introduce a next-generation game console in 2012. Microsoft, whose Xbox 360 was introduced in 2005, hasn’t said if it will launch a new console or is working on one. All of the console makers want to postpone the introduction of a new console as long as possible so they can amortize the huge development costs over a longer period and reap more sales from games in each generation, but they generally introduce a new console when the older models start to see declining sales.

In some respects, a new console is always in development. But the important difference here is that Sony is incurring rising R&D costs. That means it may be in development on some chips, which are difficult to design and prototype and often carry big price tags during the R&D and early manufacturing stage.

For the fiscal year, the overall Sony Corp. reported sales at 7.18 trillion yen, or $86.5 billion, down slightly from $88.7 billion a year earlier. Operating income was $2.4 billion, up five-fold from $390 million a year ago. But net losses were $3.1 billion, compared to a loss of $501.3 million a year ago, mainly because of Japan quake-related impacts and accounting changes.

Sony’s Networked Products & Services division, which includes the PlayStation game business, saw an improvement. Sales were $19 billion, up 0.4 percent from a year ago. But profit was $429 million, compared with a loss of $1.02 billion a year earlier. Sony credited the game business for the turnaround.

During the fiscal year ended March 31, Sony sold 14.3 million PS 3s, up from 13 million a year earlier. Software sales were 147.9 million units, up from 115.6 million a year ago. The PlayStation Portable sold 8 million, down 1.9 million units from a year ago. Software sales were 46.6 million, up 2.2 million units. The PS 2 sold 6.4 million units, and software sales were 16.4 million units, down from 35.7 million units a year earlier.

Sony expects to sell 15 million units of the PS 3 in the new fiscal year. It plans on selling 6 million PSPs and 4 million PS 2s. Sony made no forecast for sales of its upcoming portable NGP gaming system. The PSN hacker attack is expected to take a toll on earnings in some way. Total sales are expected to be $92.1 billion for the coming year.

[picture credit: edesigninspiration]

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The company is sharing 70 percent of revenues after taxes and service charges, mirroring Apple. However, it’s setting a minimum price for paid apps of about 3 euros across euro-zone countries and 3 pounds in the U.K. Following in Research in Motion’s footsteps, the price floor is conceivably a protection against shoddy apps and is meant to raise overall quality in the store at the expense of volume.

Developers can distribute content for free, but they need a separate distribution agreement if they want an advertising-based model. Sony Ericsson also asks for special agreements if developers want freemium or subscription models. Buyers can pay for low-priced apps with SMS and can use a credit card for apps at higher price tiers.

It doesn’t cost anything to submit an app, and developers can send them to both of Sony Ericsson’s stores: the newer PlayNow Arena, which is available in 17 countries, and the traditional Fun & Downloads carrier deck, which launched in 2003 and reaches more than 200 million phones.

The Final Fantasy series (except for 11) was a Sony exclusive for many years. Now Microsoft has knocked that out, to some degree, by winning over Square Enix to make Final Fantasy XIII for the Xbox 360, at least in Europe and the U.S. That’s just as important as eliminating Sony’s exclusive lock on Grand Theft Auto IV. Microsoft also got an exclusive for Rock Band 2 for the Xbox 360.

And it cooked up a deal to hurt Apple, as fellow VentureBeat writer MG Siegler has noted, by getting Netflix to make its movies and user queues available on Xbox Live as downloadable movies. But the Microsoft games that are focused on Nintendo’s broader market audience — for casual gamers — aren’t going to hurt Nintendo all that much. One title, Lips, has a motion-sensitive microphone. But there is no motion-sensitive controller for the Xbox 360, as was rumored. And there were no Halo games announced (a disappointment).

Here’s the live version of the post:

We’re live inside the LA Convention Center where Microsoft has bathed a big ballroom in acid green Xbox lighting. The press is piling in. They’re running a “street talk” video on gamers and how they talk and what they like. Do we all know what “pwned” means? (owned, getting beat or beating someone).

Don Mattrick, head of the Xbox business at Microsoft (and pictured above), took the stage briefly to mention Microsoft’s big titles and introduce a video clip of them. Well, Microsoft knows its audience, as it has now gone into a demo of the hardcore and bloody “Fallout 3” action-role-playing-game/shooter from Bethesda Softworks. We’re just a couple of minutes into it and the body parts are flying, thanks to weapons like the “fat man gun,” which lobs a big bomb at enemies in slow motion. The first live demo of the game will have exclusive downloadable content for the Xbox 360. The flying body parts are non-exclusive.

Next up: online quad gamer play in “Resident Evil 5″ from Capcom. This game is set in Africa and for the first time you can team up with others in online play as you slay hundreds of zombie-like monsters. But too bad. This game slipped until March 13, 2009.

And then comes the eloquent Peter Molyneux of Microsoft’s Lionhead Studios, who says that “Fable 2″ is now finished. Fable 2 will be out in October. It’s a role-playing game and a sequel to an Xbox hit that sold millions. A new feature that Molyneux described is the ability to meet others in online play and invite them into your game party easily, inside the game, with no Xbox Live matchmaking screens.

Cliff “CliffyB” Blezinski of Epic Games is showing off “Gears of War 2,” where you can pick up a dead Locust body and use it as a human shield. But watch out for the flamethrowers. There is a new “five-player” cooperative mode. It will be available Nov. 7. They got some “whoops” out of the audience on that one.

Mattrick says that Xbox Live now has 12 million members, up from 6 million a year ago. And since 2005, it has generated more than $1 billion in revenues. There are 10,000 movies and TV shows on Xbox Live now. NBC is joining today, adding its TV shows such as “Heroes” to the Xbox Live marketplace for downloading. Universal is also adding its movies, as are Constantin Film and MGM.

John Schappert, corporate vice president at Microsoft and head of Xbox Live, software, and services, has taken the stage to talk about “innovation in social services.” Um, the gamer kind, that is. Schappert has confirmed the rumor that Microsoft will now have avatar characters for Xbox Live gamers. These “Mii-like” avatars are customizable with hairdos, clothes, etc.

There have been more than one million downloads of free game development tools. Microsoft is preparing to launch Xbox Live user-generated community games in the fall. And Schappert says that Netflix movies and queue lists will now be available on Xbox Live, doubling the number of movies available. You can now share your movie queue with your friends.

Shane Kim, the business development chief at Xbox, says that 1,000 new titles will launch by the end of 2008 for the Xbox 360. One new offering is the downloadable content for “Grand Theft Auto IV.” But Kim says there are titles for broader audiences too, like “You’re in the Movies.” In that title, you can get yourself into your own campy movies, using an Xbox Live webcam to record live video.

On average, 3.5 million songs are downloaded every month. One of the reasons is Guitar Hero. There’s a new version of that game coming from Red Octane, “Guitar Hero World Tour.” The Lips karaoke/sing-along title rumor turned out to be true, as a singer is ably demonstrating on stage now.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Warner Music Group did the same in July (our coverage). The deal is significant because it represents one more fissure in the once united stance among music labels to stick with a paid model and digital rights management. Increasingly, music is being streamed for free, supported by ads.

Of the four market leaders in the music space, imeem now has sharing arrangements with two. EMI and Universal Music Group have yet to cut deals with imeem. “We’ll have to demonstrate that we can provide a serious revenue stream,” CEO Dalton Caldwell told us.

Unlike Napster, which has a subscription model, imeem is supported entirely by advertising. Other advertising-based models like last.fm and Pandora are more similar to radio than imeem, playing random songs based on user’s preferences; imeem allows you to build your own playlist.

Sony will get a piece of imeem’s ad revenue, just as Warner does, and the deal will further be supported by collaborations on social networking and marketing projects.

This is a remarkable turnaround for San Francisco’s imeem, who just a few months ago was getting sued by the labels for streaming their music.

In the ‘90s, when the Internet took hold in a big way, publishers half-heartedly looked to ebooks — electronic versions books as a way to boost sales.

The efforts generally failed, due to poor reading devices, customer reluctance to pay full retail prices for digital versions, and overly cumbersome DRM and competing document standards that restricted ebook portability from one reading device to another.

Even today, while annual ebook revenues are growing, at $54 million they account for only a miniscule two-tenths of one percent of overall publisher revenues according to estimates from the American Association of Publishers.

Some of the barriers to ebook adoption are slowly falling by the wayside, but improvements are still necessary for ebooks to go primetime. New ebook reading devices such as the Sony Reader or the ILiad (at left) from iRex Technologies are beginning to visually approximate the paper based reading experience, though they still fail to match the readability of paper.

Onerous copyright issues continues to hamper ebook growth. While there are signs that the music industry is beginning to relax their stance on strict digital rights management (DRM), the publishing industry has been slower.

Such questions were at the heart of the three-day O’Reilly Tools of Change conference in San Jose earlier this week — where 450 book publishing industry executives and technologists showed up.

The first news out of the conference came from O’Reilly Media itself, which announced it allows customers of over 700 titles of their computer reference books to buy individual chapters online for $3.99 each — reflecting a new strategy of atomization that is taking hold in the industry. O’Reilly is one of the first major publishers to offer book content free of DRM.

Whether or not digital books become the savior or the bane of the traditional publishing industry, one thing is for certain: The traditional book publishing industry has suffered from moribund sales over the last few years as it was forced to compete for consumers’ shortening attention spans amid a proliferation of new, alternative information and entertainment sources such as 500+ cable channels, user-generated Internet content (photos, videos, blogs) and video games.

The American Association of Publishers says the $24 billion book publishing industry said sales dropped last year.

As the overall market for computer books has stagnated, O’Reilly has seen sales of its own computer titles moderate as well. The changing market conditions prompted O’Reilly to begin experimenting with digital publishing in 2001.

Mark Coker is a contributing writer for VentureBeat. He’s founder of Dovetail Public Relations, a Silicon Valley technology marketing firm. He has no clients among the companies mentioned in the story, nor among their competitors. More on Mark at http://www.linkedin.com/in/markcoker