Nintendo tops video game (2007)

Nintendo tops video game sales in 2007


Fueled by the success of Nintendo Co.'s Wii and Microsoft's "Halo 3," more video games were sold in the U.S. in 2007 than in any other year, with retail sales hitting $17.94 billion, according to the NPD Group.


The market researcher said total video game sales grew 43 percent, up from $12.53 billion in 2006. In December, historically the industry's strongest month, Americans spent $4.82 billion on video games, up 28 percent from a year earlier and up 83 percent from $2.63 billion in November.

Video games sold well during the holidays even as jittery consumers were cutting back spending on clothes and other items.

Hardware sales jumped 54 percent to $7.04 billion in 2007, while software sales climbed 34 percent to $8.64 billion. In December, hardware sales rose 17 percent to $1.83 billion, and software sales grew 36 percent to $2.37 billion.

"I think the industry has become much more generally accepted as a mainstream form of entertainment over the last couple of years, and that sets it up well for future expansion," NPD analyst Anita Frazier said in an e-mail.

Much of this growing acceptance has been attributed to the Wii, groundbreaking when it launched in 2006 for its motion-sensitive controller that lets players mimic movements for bowling, tennis or sword-fighting.

Even so, the portable Nintendo DS was by far the year's best-selling gaming system with 8.5 million units sold, 2.5 million of them in December. In short supply all year, the Wii still sold 6.3 million units, 1.4 million of them last month.

Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime said the company expects to sell more Wiis this year than it did in 2007. To deal with the high demand, Nintendo raised Wii production twice since last April, the last time to 1.8 million units a month. Though the consoles are still selling out soon after they hit store shelves, Nintendo has not said it plans to boost production again.

The year's best-selling game was Microsoft Corp.'s blockbuster first-person shooter "Halo 3," which helped sell 4.6 million Xbox 360s in 2007, about 1.3 million of them in December.

Microsoft spokesman David Dennis said there have been shortages of the Xbox 360 at retailers across the U.S. The company, he added, is working on getting the consoles back on store shelves "as soon as possible."

Sony's PlayStation 3 was the only gaming system that didn't sell more than a million units in December. Nonetheless, sales have jumped since Sony slashed the console's price by $100 and launched a low-end model last fall. There were 797,600 PS3s sold during the month, and 2.6 million in 2007.

Frazier said Activision Inc.'s "Guitar Hero" games remain the industry's best-selling franchise. People spent more than $820 million on "Guitar Hero" games for various consoles in 2007.

Dennis and Fils-Aime said the U.S. economic slowdown had not hurt video games, as the industry has generally been insulated from broader downturns.

"Gaming is about having fun, spending time with friends — you want to do it whether the economy is good or bad," Dennis said.

MORE,,,,

Top Gun (video game)
The popularity of the 1986 film Top Gun resulted in a number of licensed video games that have been released since the film's theatrical debut:

Top Gun was released in 1987 for the PC, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) (with an equivalent version for Nintendo Vs. Series arcade cabinets). The Commodore and Spectrum versions were developed by Ocean while Thunder Mountain handled the PC version of the game. Konami developed the Nintendo versions.

Gameplay
The NES game
Piloting an F-14 Tomcat fighter, the player, as Top Gun's main character Maverick, has to complete four missions:

Mission 1 - Training for the next mission.
Mission 2 - Destroy an enemy aircraft carrier.
Mission 3 - Destroy an enemy base.
Mission 4 - Destroy an enemy Space Shuttle.
All four missions require the player to land on an aircraft carrier upon completion. Missions 2, 3 and 4 require the player to refuel in the middle of the mission. Mission 4 is the most surreal, involving combat with land, sea, air, and space targets.There are three missile types available to the player:

Hound (quantity: 40);
Wolf (quantity: 20);
Tiger (quantity: 10).
The Hound is the best missile for training, since there are no targets on Mission 1 strong enough to withstand it, but it is a weak choice for the other missions.

A commonly overlooked fact is that during landing sequences and refueling, the A and B buttons are used to control speed. Keeping the speed in the 280-320 knots window while following the other instructions (Left! Left!, etc.) is sufficient to bring the plane to a successful landing; however, one must keep in mind that the direction the plane is pointed in while accelerating will affect altitude. For instance, if the player accelerates while pointing the nose down, it will cause the plane to descend, not the best thing to do when the computer is urging "Up! Up!".

The game is notorious for its difficulty, especially regarding the landing of the plane. This aspect has been made popular by the Angry Video Game Nerd, who found, as shown on one of his videos, that it is virtually impossible to land the plane without crashing. Interestingly, on another video in which he showcased the NES Power Glove peripheral's poor controls on various games, he easily made the landing.


The computer game
The version for computers is a one-on-one dogfighting simulator with wireframe 3D graphics (opposed to more traditional sprite-based graphics and straightforward gameplay of the NES version). The game features a two player mode, in single player mode the other aircraft is maneuvered by the computer.


Top Gun: Fire at Will
Top Gun: Fire at Will was released for PC by MicroProse in 1996. A version for the PlayStation was released later that year by Spectrum Holobyte.

Fire at Will is notable for including full motion video cut scenes featuring James Tolkan, who played Maverick's commanding officer Hondo in the original film. The live video scenes were directed by Eli Noyes and produced by Brian Sullivan. Bill Zarchy served as Director of Photography.

Top Gun: Hornet's Nest
Top Gun: Hornet's Nest was released for PC by Atari and Zipper Interactive in 1998. It was considered to be a complete washout and received bad reviews for its noticeably lackluster design and gameplay.


Top Gun: Combat Zones
Top Gun: Combat Zones was released for the PlayStation 2 in 2001. It was developed by the now-defunct English developer Digital Integration, and published by similarly defunct French publishers Titus Software.

It was later released for PC and Nintendo GameCube the following year.


Gameplay
The game is composed of 36 missions spread over 3 eras (distinct periods in history), intended to illustrate the history of the Top Gun combat school and its near future. In each era, missions are located both at the Top Gun academy at Miramar and in a live combat zone. Upon gaining access to each era the academy missions must be performed before moving to the combat zone itself, but whilst the former do introduce new game concepts, aircraft and weapons they are not simple training missions - players must face tough opponents and live fire to succeed.

Only the first era is accessible from the outset, and is set in South East Asia, towards the end of the Vietnam War (erroneously showing the F-14 engaging in combat with North Vietnamese forces, despite never having fired a shot in anger during that conflict). During the second era, the action is set in the Persian Gulf States circa 1990; although the game story does not make direct reference, parallels can be drawn to the real-world Gulf conflicts of that time (such as hunting for SCUD missiles and protecting oil refineries). The final era is set within the Arctic Circle and depicts a future conflict based around disputed borders and a global fuel crisis.

Top Gun DS
Top Gun for the Nintendo DS was released on February 23, 2006 in Japan and May 3rd, 2006 in North America. The game was developed by Interactive Vision, and published by Mastiff Inc in North America, and Taito on Japan.

The game lets players play through a story-driven campaign (featuring appearances by characters from the film) as well as a set of solo missions and a multiplayer mode that supports up to 4 players.[1] The bottom screen is used as a map and weapons readout. There are two control schemes offered, but there seems to be no difference between them. The game was not well received.[2]

Mobile phone gamesMobile game publisher Hands-On Mobile (formerly knows as Mforma) have published three mobile phone games based around Top Gun. The first two were top-down scrolling arcade shooters. The third game takes a different approach as a third-person perspective game, similar to Sega's After Burner games.

Sun's Billion-Dollar Baby

MySQL: Sun's Billion-Dollar Baby

Sun put its money where its mouth is Wednesday, with the announcement that it would buy open source database vendor MySQL for a whopping $1 billion.

The price tag set tongues wagging, however, it was no more tantalizing than the question that immediately sprung to the minds of IT managers everywhere: Now that Sun owns MySQL, what on earth does it plan to do with it?

Sun has toyed with the idea of a database offering of its own for at least two years. But in a market where basic relational database functionality is increasingly considered a commodity, competing successfully is no mean feat, even when playing the open source card.

Certainly, Sun isn't the first to try it. In 2001, leading Linux vendor Red Hat launched its own branded version of the open source PostgreSQL database, only to scrap the project a year later after deciding that servicing and supporting a database was not its core competency. Similarly, Computer Associates opened the source of the Ingres database in hopes of becoming a one-stop shop for customers in need of an enterprise application stack, but had little luck winning market share away from the likes of IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. CA spun Ingres off into its own company in 2005, where continues to nurture a small installed base.

In his blog announcing the MySQL acquisition Wednesday, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz remains characteristically effusive. "Until now, no platform vendor has assembled all the core elements of a completely open source operating system for the internet," he wrote. "No company has been able to deliver a comprehensive alternative to the leading proprietary OS."

Yet CA's and Red Hat's experiences seem to discredit the idea that a stem-to-stern platform offering from a single vendor is what customers really want. Not to mention the fact that Sun already offers enterprise support for PostgreSQL, a competing open source database that is widely perceived as being technologically superior to MySQL. Schwartz reaffirmed Sun's commitment to PostgreSQL in a conference call Wednesday, causing some analysts to speculate whether the MySQL acquisition was anything more than a billion-dollar PR stunt.

Good Will Worth the Money?
But there may be method to Sun's madness. The considerable goodwill that MySQL has cultivated among enterprise customers could have benefits for Sun that technology alone never could.

"I think the answer is simple: ubiquity," says Andy Astor, CEO of EnterpriseDB, which markets a high-performance, commercial database product based on PostgreSQL. "[Sun is] a big company; to move their needle, they need to see millions of potential users, which MySQL provides."

According to the company MySQL's own estimates, there are already some 11 million active installations of the MySQL database worldwide. What's more, MySQL is virtually the de facto standard relational database for rapid application development, particularly for the Web. In future, as these fledgling sites mature and their needs broaden, they will become natural customers for Sun's enterprise support offerings.

Sun's new role as steward of MySQL is sure to ruffle feathers in the software industry, as well -- particularly at Oracle, which, with its recent acquisitions, increasingly competes with Sun in the enterprise application platform arena. In 2005, Oracle bought Innobase, makers of a plug-in component that adds advanced features to MySQL, in what was widely perceived as a competitive swipe at the open source upstart.

For his part, MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos has repeatedly denied that his company's aim is to displace high-end databases such as Oracle's. And that's only appropriate; for those customers who demand Oracle's most advanced features, no other product will do. But Mickos's protestations verge on false modesty. On the low end, MySQL is an absolute pandemic, and it's already making headway into the mid-tier territory traditionally owned by the likes of Microsoft. That trend is only likely to accelerate with Sun's backing.


Licensing Issues
What is unclear, however, is whether Sun will take any steps to alter MySQL's license terms. Licensing and project governance have played key roles in MySQL's success, and as a result, MySQL's license policy is somewhat more restrictive than the one that Sun has used for the rest of its software portfolio.

Although all MySQL code is available under the Gnu GPL (General Public License), the product is developed primarily by full-time employees of MySQL. Furthermore, the MySQL company requests that community developers sign over copyright to their code contributions to the company before those changes become part of the main MySQL code base. This allows the MySQL company to offer a separate, commercial version of its database for enterprise customers who don't want to be bound by the terms of the GPL. Initially, this license structure was used mainly to allow companies to embed the MySQL database into their own products, but the MySQL company was criticized last year for making it more difficult for non-paying customers to download the enterprise version of the database.

By comparison, Sun has been freer with its own code, foregoing separate, commercial versions of its products in favor of a subscription-based enterprise support scheme. PostgreSQL is arguably even more free; it is governed in a much more distributed, community-based fashion than MySQL, and its permissive license even allows proprietary derivatives, such as EnterpriseDB.

Name Recognition Factor
Ironically, however, MySQL's stringent intellectual property policy may be precisely what makes it so appealing to Sun. Red Hat Database and Sun's own version of PostgreSQL were merely different retoolings of an existing open source software product, one that customers could just as easily download from elsewhere. To the enterprise IT community at large, however, there's really only one MySQL -- and from now on, that name will be indelibly associated with Sun. Remember, for all Sun's talk about open source, this is a company that banks so heavily on its trademarks that it had its stock ticker symbol changed to JAVA.

Ah, but there's the rub. Sun open-sourced the Java platform in 2006, and while the move has been widely hailed by developers, not everyone in the business community was as thrilled with the idea of Sun giving away its crown jewels. As former Sun vice president Larry Singer put it, "We [at Sun] were spending all of our time and attention ... on things that were important from an intellectual standpoint, important from an innovative standpoint, [but it was] hard to understand how they were going to drive revenue for the company."

So far, MySQL has built a solid business selling open source database software. Whether Sun has the strategic acumen to take that success to the next level, however, remains to be seen. But stay tuned; after all, $1 billion gives Sun a hell of an incentive.

more...

Users say Sun needs to fix what's broken at MySQL
Sun's acquisition will bring it an open-source database -- and some unhappy customers


Sun already distributes the PostgreSQL open-source database on its Solaris-based servers; on the company's Web site, it touts PostgreSQL for Solaris 10 as "the open-source enterprise database platform of choice." But Schwartz described the purchase of MySQL as "the most important acquisition" ever made by Sun -- indicating that MySQL's software likely will eclipse PostgreSQL on Sun's priority list.

In addition to introducing the internal issues of MySQL, the deal could complicate Sun's relationship with Oracle Corp., which is Sun's largest database partner. MySQL competes directly with Oracle and other database vendors. Also, Oracle owns InnoDB, after having bought the storage engine's developer, Innobase Oy, in late 2005.

"Now that [MySQL] is going to be supported by a major vendor, there's lots of companies that are going to give it a serious look," said Robert Lepanto, Oracle applications manager at AppCentric Solutions LLC in Stamford, Conn. "I would think that's a serious long-term threat to Oracle."

Lepanto, who also is president of the New York City Metro Oracle Applications Users Group, added that he's surprised that Oracle "didn't buy [MySQL] first to squash the competition."

Daniel Grim, executive director of networks and systems at the University of Delaware in Newark, has an enterprisewide license for Oracle databases but also sees value in the open-source alternatives.

"We've often found Oracle is more complex and more cumbersome than things like PostgreSQL and MySQL are," Grim said. "So we use those for small applications, although some of [the] applications are quite large, such as monitoring networking traffic."

In addition to Google, Yahoo and SmugMug, MySQL's wide-ranging customer list includes some of the darlings of the Web 2.0 era, such as Facebook Inc. and YouTube Inc., as well as more traditional businesses like Toyota Motor Corp. and Southwest Airlines Co.

The buyout deal ends widespread speculation about the future of MySQL. Before agreeing to sell to Sun, the company had been on track for an initial public offering, said Kevin Harvey, a partner at venture firm Benchmark Capital and chairman of MySQL's board of directors. Menlo Park, Calif.-based Benchmark has a 26% stake in MySQL, and it uses the open-source database to help power its Web site.

One of the questions that Sun continually faces is how it can improve its bottom line while offering key technologies such as Solaris and Java on an open-source basis. But Harvey said that from his perspective, open source "very clearly" can be "turned into a fantastic business model."