Daily News Spin — July 5, 2001 (Thursday)

More PS2 military nonsense

Yahoo has posted a story about the U.S. and Japan asking Sony to not have the PS2 manufactured in China for fears of the PS2 technology somehow being subverted to create military weapons.

The two governments are pointing to the PlayStation 2's DVD ability as being possibly helpful to China's military. Sony in July was to begin receiving up to 400,000 game units each month from two Taiwanese outsourcers, says a report from that country.

We can't help but wonder if Sony's PR department isn't behind this story at some point? For one thing, the story mentions that Sony can't keep up with demand for the PS2, yet they can be easily bought here in the U.S. Units are sitting on the shelves and are not selling out.

Second, it's a console, not a phaser. We're more worried that unsold Daikatana CDs could be filed down to a razor sharp edge and used as frisbees of death than we are about the Chinese reverse-engineering a PS2 and coming up with a weapon that will make the sun implode or smart-target Nabisco factories and deprive us of Oreos or make American males impotent or something.

Violent Video Games in the U.S. and Germany

Frictionless Insight has a look at the legislative and judicial responses that violent videogames have received in the U.S. and Germany.

The different ways that the cities of Goettingen and Indianapolis attempted to regulate violent video games reflect the contours of their respective countries� principles of free speech. To my knowledge, no U.S. governmental agency has attempted to impose a Goettingen-style violence tax on video games of any sort. It is highly likely that any such attempt to do so would flatly fail. Not only would such regulation have to survive the same sort of compelling justification test described above, but it would have to account for the fact that it also infringed on the rights of adults under the First Amendment, since they, too, would suffer from the financial disincentive of arcade owners to stock violent games.

Be warned -- though interesting, it has a lawyer's slant to it all.

Biting the Hand

Jessica Mulligan's got a new column up at Skotos. It's an odds and ends look at the massively multiplayer gaming scene.

The plain fact of the matter is, if you expect to get 50,000 or more subscribers, it will (or should) cost several hundred thousand dollars to be properly prepared for launch of an MMOG, and it can easily cost $2 or $3 million if you expect your game to be a popular one, such as if you're expecting several hundred thousand subscribers during the first year. This is money the smaller shops just don't have; they have to lean on publishers to provide the resources. Most of these developers just won't be able to attract publisher interest. Of those who do get tossed a lifeline, some will lose it later on when the publisher realizes the true extent of the launch cost and ongoing maintenance. I suspect this is what happened between developer Wolfpack and publisher Take Two, regarding the MMRPG Shadowbane.

Ready for your wallet but not for review

Seems Funcom is happy to sell Anarchy Online, but they'd prefer that reviewers not review it yet. From their website:

As for reviewing the game: We will send out review copies soon, but we would like to ask that you hold back on a full review until we have solved these problems.

We would like to ask that Funcom not release games until they're ready for play, and review. The message also claims 35,000 subscribers, though no word yet on whether that number is dropping or rising.

3am

Fatbabies is running a rumor that CNET has laid off everyone at German Gamespot.

The New York Times has a look at online gaming. Nothing much new here, but you may want to check it out.

Infogrames has grabbed a hot license, the Terminator movies, and will make games based on them.

Click here to read yesterday's news