Cost, Time Not Factors in Lack of 1080 PS3 Game Support—Harrison

With 1080p, one reason is that developers need to get up to speed on creating games for the complex new console -- as industry sources we polled in recent weeks had guessed (CED Feb 7 p8). Once developers use 1080p in a few games, the process will become much easier and the number of PS3 games supporting that resolution will grow, Harrison predicted. Another reason for the lack of 1080p in many PS3 games is that the highest resolution available isn’t needed in every game, he said. As we discovered by testing, it’s hard to tell the difference between PS3 games in 720p, 1080i and 1080p.

Getting PS3 games to support 1080i, meanwhile, isn’t a major concern of game makers, because 720p and 1080p are superior, Harrison said. But many old HDTVs only have 1080i inputs and no compatibility with 720p. A game that supports only 720p or 1080p now gets downgraded to 480p on those TVs because PS3s have no built-in scaler chip like the rival Xbox 360. Sony is studying the problem but has offered no specifics on whether it plans to fix it, perhaps through a future firmware update. Harrison argued that the number of HDTVs supporting only 1080i is small and the vast majority of HDTVs are moving toward 1080p. CEA and DisplaySearch had no data on how many HDTVs support only 1080i input, but it’s believed that thousands of such sets were sold in the early days of HDTV. But the crossover between consumers now buying PS3s and owning those older HDTVs is likely minuscule. The problem would be minimized if game makers included 1080i support in their PS3 games. It takes just “one line of code” for a developer to add 1080i to a PS3 game, Harrison said. But if a developer adds 1080p to a PS3 game, 1080i and 720p can be simply added along with it, he said.

Separately, Wii sales continue strong in N. America, Nintendo of America (NOA) Pres.-COO Reggie Fils-Aime told us during the Summit. He offered no sales update and declined to say how many units NOA is shipping into the N. American retail channel. NPD’s upcoming Jan. retail sellthrough data will likely offer a good sign of how many units Nintendo is shipping: Supplies remain tight at retail and most -- maybe all -- units shipped are quickly selling through. NPD’s data cover only the U.S. but that accounts for most of Nintendo’s shipments.

Despite the perception that Toys “R” Us had more Wiis to sell during the holiday season than other retailers, Fils- Aime said GameStop and Wal-Mart actually had larger quantities because those are larger Nintendo accounts. Toys “R” Us is about its 5th-largest retail customer in the market, he said, adding that Wal-Mart remains its #1 customer. But GameStop, which merged with Electronics Boutique, also is a big customer for Nintendo and may have had more Wii supplies even than Wal-Mart during the holiday season, he said.

“The next 12 months are going to be interesting” in the game console and HD optical disc format battles, Fils-Aime said. Nintendo is watching the optical disc fight from the sidelines: Wii is the only next-generation console that can’t play HD movies. PS3 offers Blu-ray movie playback out of the box. Microsoft offers movie playback for 360 through an external HD DVDs player. Wii is also the only console that can’t play DVDs.

Asked whether an external Blu-ray or HD DVD player could be made to allow Wii to play HD movies, Fils-Aime said “I don’t know.” But he said the installed base of HDTVs is now so small that it’s “not worth it” now to make it possible for Wiis to play HD movies. The company is studying introduction of an external DVD player allowing Wii to play DVD movies. But Fils-Aime said he didn’t see a great need for that either, because most consumers already have about 3 DVD players in their homes. When we pointed out that many consumers might prefer to have one device that can play DVDs and games to free up space, Fils-Aime said Wii -- unlike rivals PS3 and Xbox 360 -- doesn’t take up much room.

Wii sales have eclipsed PS3’s in the U.S. and far eclipsed PS3’s in Japan, where Sony recently admitted sales had become weak. The latter situation was one issue not cited by SCE’s Harrison during a D.I.C.E. presentation Thurs. in which he questioned how PS3’s launch could be viewed as a failure (CED Feb 9 p6).

Nintendo was one of the big winners at the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences (AIAS) Interactive Achievements Awards here Thurs. night, nabbing 5 awards: Three for Wii Sports, including Outstanding Innovation in Gaming, Game-Play Engineering and Game Design, and one each for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Outstanding Achievement in Story and Character Development) and the Nintendo DS game Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day (Handheld Game of the Year). Nintendo received 19 nominations in 11 categories. The AIAS honored ex-NOA Pres. Minoru Arakawa and Chmn. Emeritus Howard Lincoln with Lifetime Achievement Awards.

The Wii version of Twilight Princess “just crossed the one million sales mark” in the U.S., NOA boasted Fri., claiming that represented “the fastest-selling launch title for a new videogame system since Super Mario 64 for Nintendo 64 about 10 years ago.

But the biggest winner at the Interactive Achievement Awards was the 360 game Gears of War, which won 8 honors. The game, published by Microsoft Game Studios and developed by Epic Games, won awards for Game of the Year, Console Game of the Year, Outstanding Achievement in Animation, Art Direction, Online Game Play and Visual Engineering, Outstanding Character Performance (Male) and Action/Adventure Game of the Year.

Alex Rigopulos, CEO and co-founder of Guitar Hero developer Harmonix, used his speech at D.I.C.E. Fri. to tell the story of his company’s bumpy ride to success with Guitar Hero and later Guitar Hero 2 -- the latter another big winner at the Interactive Achievement Awards, taking home honors for its soundtrack and as Family Game of the Year. The company started in 1995 but didn’t become a true independent developer success story until Guitar Hero was released in late 2005. Before that, Harmonix made Frequency and Amplitude -- offbeat rhythm games that received glowing reviews but sold few units -- for SCE. Both titles sold only “mouse nuts,” he said, admitting the main problem was it was hard to market the games because they couldn’t be described easily. The game Karaoke Revolution it developed for Konami sold better but still not significantly. Peripheral maker RedOctane -- a company even smaller than Harmonix -- then asked Harmonix to develop Guitar Hero, which RedOctane made a guitar peripheral for. Harmonix reluctantly agreed to make the game, Rigopulos revealed, noting that his company’s many concerns included RedOctane’s lack of a track record and significant cash. The game was made in 8 months and RedOctane provided Harmonix with creative control over the game, he said. Guitar Hero shipped in time for the holiday season but -- for the first time in Harmonix’s history -- sales started expanding significantly in the new year. Obstacles included the inability to manufacture enough guitars to meet consumer demand, he said, adding that Best Buy was one of the first major retailers to find success with the game, which was included in store demo kiosks. Best Buy ordered only a few units initially but they “blew out of the store in a couple of days” and the retailer significantly boosted the number of units for its next order, he said. Since then, RedOctane was bought by Activision and Harmonix was recently bought by Viacom’s MTV Networks, which had initially teamed up with the game makers to help market the first Guitar Hero. MTV’s resources will help Harmonix significantly, he said, but development of future Guitar Hero games will now be done by Neversoft. Guitar Hero was “our baby and it was hard for us to let it go,” Rigopulos conceded. Harmonix has “really big ideas” on where it wants to take the music game genre in future titles but he offered no specifics.