Daily News Spin — May 28, 2001 (Monday)

The fourth E3 quartet

We have a look at another four games we saw at E3, Microsoft's Zoo Tycoon, Nexagon and Disciples II from Strategy First, and Neverwinter Nights from Interplay.

Eidos looking for funding

The BBC News has a story about Eidos asking shareholders for �50m for additional funding.

Some �50m raised by the exercise would fund Eidos' campaign to develop games for two next generation consoles, Microsoft's X-box console and Nintendo's Gamecube.

Nintendo's Yamauchi on Internet gaming

Computer and Videogame News has a short interview with Nintendo President Hiroshi Yamauchi. He discusses why the Gamecube won't be Internet-ready, among other things.

The Internet games available today are for hard-core gamers. I don't believe the general public is going to be very interested in them. And I doubt that Net games will turn out to be profitable. There is only interest in these games because NTT DoCoMo Inc has profited from i-mode. I am not sure if content providers have made any money. Unless the business proves profitable, Nintendo will not be involved in Internet games.

He's got a good point, though perhaps he's not looking very far into the future.

EA.com is confident of success

The San Francisco Business Times has an article about EA.com's business plans.

President John Riccitiello is driving EA to become the first video game company to build a profitable subscription service on the Internet. He has a ways to go. The company had a net loss of nearly $100 million for its EA.com Internet division for fiscal 2001 after a $34 million loss the previous year.

That's a lot of greenbacks turned into red ink, not that it's dampened Riccitiello's hubris any.

"It may not be on the radar screen of the press, but our industry is now bigger than the Hollywood box office. We can stare down Hollywood. I've been asked if we want to pass Disney. Of course not, they are 15 laps behind. I have no interest in going back to where they are. They are in a business that is lower margin speaking to a less interesting (older) audience."

What fools these mortal game company execs be!

3am

Freelancer has some new screenshots of Etherlords, the game we were so intrigued by at E3.

Saddam the sappy novelist? Maybe, according to this story. Thanks Blue's.

There's a new Sacrifice patch, number 3, with some pretty extensive tweaks and changes. You can download the 6.6 meg patch from Fileplanet.

While Microsoft may claim that the Xbox is for games only, Sony's not making similar claims for the PS2. They've now announced that they're adding security capability to the console to get it network-ready.

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