Weekend News Spin — February 10-11, 2001

Top Stories: Snowball loses money, New patches, Lt. Grossman speaks, Game sales dip

Game sales dip, PS2 blamed

Sony's PS2 is scapegoated yet again. According to Gamasutra, the IDSA is reporting that overall game sales fell to $6.02 billion from $6.1 billion the year before. This is the first drop since the numbers have been tracked beginning in 1994, and the blame is being placed at the feet of Sony for not shipping enough PS2s.

Gross, man!

Joystick101.org has an interview with Lt. Grossman, the leading advocate of the theory that violent games nudge kids towards violence. If you ever have wondered what Grossman likes to play himself, he answers that question:

I try to play every arcade, "shooter game" all the way thru. Most recently I played "Silent Scope." (Which is recomended by "SniperCraft," the nation's leading law enforcement sniper training magazine, as an excellent trainer for police snipers.) Prior to that I played CarnEvil, Area 51, and every other arcade game I could get my hands on, all the way thru, including everything from the old Lethal Enforcer, to Police Trainer to.... On my computer I like Civilization, WarCraft, Heroes 3 (I know it is old but it permits some nice strategy work that I enjoy) and a military tactical simulator called TacOps that I think is the very best thing available to represent current military tactics.

Civ, War2, Heroes 3 — why, he's a classical scholar!

You can read the rest of Joystick's interview here.

Patches galore and a map pack

Too bad no one can patch the Internet economy, but in the meantime, here are some of the recently released patches:

No One Lives Forever v. Update #2 BETA 2 (13.6 megs) at Blues News
Combat Mission v1.12 (1.8 megs) from Battlefront
Battle Isle: The Andosia War v206 (7.2 megs) from Blue Byte
SiN v1.11 (a variety of patches based on what version you're running) at 3DFiles
Hardwar is patched with new features at The Software Refinery

And it's not a patch, but Westwood has released a new map pack for Red Alert 2. The three multiplayer maps are Bay of Pigs, Russian Roulette, and Tanya's Training Ground.

Hardwar is an interesting game, a planetside flying game that's a little like Privateer. It was released as a budget title by Interplay for about $15 quite some time ago. Reviewers like to predict that quirky games will achieve cult status. This one seems to have actually done that.

Snowball (IGN) reports financials

It's that wonderful time of the year when publicly held companies have to fess up and tell us how they're doing. In the case of Snowball, insert your own melting joke here ____.

We care about Snowball because they own PC.IGN, one of the better gaming sites on the net, and they also are one of the few networks left standing who are still paying affliates. Gone Gold is one of their notable affliate sites.

So how are they doing? The good news is that they increased their revenues for the fourth quarter 52 percent to $5.3 million, compared to revenue of $3.5 million in the fourth quarter of 1999. The bad news is that they're still leaking red ink, reporting a pro forma net loss of $9.4 million.

According to their statement, their operating expenses were a little over $14 million for the quarter, including nearly $6 million for sales and marketing and just under $3 million for content and production, proving once again that Tom and Mark are in the wrong end of the business. (Thresh seems to agree with this, describing the editorial positions that were eliminated at gamers.com as "luxuries.")

They have $31 million in the bank still, so they're not in imminent danger of a collapse. They project that by the fourth quarter of 2001 and they will see revenue growth that will offset their expenses and be at a break-even point. This assumes that revenues will continue to grow by 20-25% and that Snowball continues to cut operating expenses. More layoffs?

In other words, it's a race. Can they make enough and cut enough to turn the business around before the money runs out? Investors are a cynical lot. Snowball's stock nosedived with the announcements of the results, losing 20% of its value and closing at $0.50 a share.

3am

With the events of late, we know a bit more how this fellow feels.

Akira Hareruya lives a double life. By day he is an electrician and by night he moonlights as a human punching bag. It's not by choice, though. Finding himself in debt for Y15 million, the 37 year old Hareruya could have filed for bankruptcy to get some of his debts waived. But he didn't want to do that, he writes in his book "Nagurareya" (Life as a human punching bag) published this December.

Yes, Akira makes some extra cash by letting people pay for a chance to feed him a knuckle sandwich. He never fights back, but just attempts to block and dodge. Even the Yakuza tried to put some muscle on him and take a cut of his business, but backed down in admiration. You can read more about him here.

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