Posted by: Tiffany_Smith at March 11, 2009 10:54:38 PM
Analyst Michael Pachter is weighing in, as usual on what he thinks is going on in the games market. He states that the Wii consumer is willing to buy games based on the brand name alone. "The Wii audience isn't sophisticated enough to know whether the game they're buying compares favorably to, say, Gears of War or LittleBigPlanet, because they probably don't own an Xbox 360 or a PS3," Said Pachter. (is he calling Wii consumers less than smart?) "They buy the Wii games that they buy for the same reason that people go to McDonald's. McDonald's doesn't win a lot of restaurant critic awards but they are approachable, they're consistent, and you know what they're going to serve you.""Nintendo has become the fast food machine. Sony is very much the high-end restaurant. And Microsoft is somewhere in between," he added. Very interesting analogy, to say the least.
Not that they will have any trouble paying up, but it looks like Microsoft is being sued for 90 million dollars over a copyright infringement case brought by PalTalk Holdings. According to the news by Gamesindustry.biz, the Halo franchise as well as both the original Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles infringed on patents concerning interactive applications over multiple computers, developed by MPath Interactive which was later bought by PalTalk. Lawyer Max Tribble told the jury that MPath was "a pioneer in the online video industry in the area of real-time, multiplayer online games." "Microsoft had many meetings with MPath regarding their technology, and Microsoft found the technology to be very valuable," Microsoft is refuting the claims as both incorrect and wildly inordinate considering the value of the patents. Microsoft's lawyer David Pritikin, explained that Microsoft did review the technology but chose not to purse it any further, saying that the patents in question concerned outmoded dial-up connections, adding "the patents don't cover the way the Halo games work." "Microsoft decided to go in another direction and work with another company," he said. "Obviously, this was upsetting to PalTalk and its employees." Pritikin concluded: "The patents aren't worth much, certainly not 90 million." The trial in Marshall, Texas, is being held before US District Judge David Folsom and expected to last around two weeks.
Goober KingMember since: 9/4/2001 From: Kansas City, MO
Posted - 3/11/2009 8:17:03 AM
Why do people like to wait years and years before crying about patents? Over Halo...really? It's been a major hit for years. Do people just sit around and try to wait for the infringement pig to get nice and fat before going after it? For whatever reason that always makes it seem less credible to me. It's Halo and any company that could have contributed something to it has to have a few gamers that at least know about the game they supposedly deserve $90 million for. Seems like, at some point you missed your chance to say something(or should have).
Sony like a high end restaurant??? wtf?? oh yeah, they're so far up themselves the crap they serve is only eaten by those rich enough to be able to afford it and stubborn enough not to admit that got served crap and snobbishly up themselves far enough to pretend its not crap that mcdonalds makes better and sells cheaper.
How many times can I say crap in the same sentence before I get edited? Did that rant even make sense? Maybe I've eaten too much crap from Sony.
There's a lot of problems with having analysts like this so far outside of the game industry; they feed bad information to MBAs, and American corporations seem convinced that MBAs can run a corporation in an industry they literally know nothing about by just sticking to the basic rules of business and picking the specifics up as they go.
The other problem is that we're paying a guy to predict what is still a hit-based industry; even EA doesn't have a formula for success (NFS: Undercover) and the gap between best-sellers and even 3rd or 4th place on the charts is staggering. Why the hell would you pay good money for a guy to apply historical logic to an industry that is both in constant upheaval and whose actual profit centre consists mostly of the opaque movement of a core group of maybe 1000-2000 very talented people? Even when it's an industry that can be predicted, look where securities analysts have gotten the world economy and your savings now.
They drive investor confidence, venture capital, project greenlights and corporate sentiment towards safe bets like EA and away from risks that potentially provide new hits, because people like Pachter are too lazy to actually do research that goes beyond "Square-Enix makes a lot of money right now, they will probably still make money in the future so Eidos should try to get bought by them." You better believe the current kingmaker publishers don't use Pachter's ramblings to figure out who to buy next.
At best, it's a crap shoot, and perhaps the industry should be more vocal about shouting down these guys when they pop up to make a fast buck off speculation about Space Invaders, a Big Book of Metaphors and an RSS feed from Joystiq.
[Edited by - Ravuya on March 11, 2009 12:19:05 PM]
A surefire way to spot a patent troll, if the story isn't evidence enough, is to note where the suit was filed. 100% of them will be filed in the Eastern District Court of Texas, which includes, you guessed it, Marshall, Texas. It is notorious for ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, so it often results in the defendant settling out of court, effectively admitting guilt where there may not be any.
So no, Microsoft will not get out of this without paying, but it won't be anywhere near $90 million. Microsoft is well aware of this place, of course, as they (and their patent troll affiliates like IP Innovation) have filed many of their own patent infringement lawsuits in this exact arena to take advantage of it.
Original post by yanxiaowen
does it only happen to me? this post has very weired post time...
it displays "March 11, 2009 10:54:38 PM"...
Yea I mentioned it in an earlier Daily. It's most likely to due with Tiff being two hours behind the server time - seems local time shows up here and server time on the home page.
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Codeka
Member since: 10/19/2008 From: Sydney, New South Wales
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