In 2008, game designer Jonathan Blow released Braid for the Xbox 360, which was quickly celebrated as a landmark achievement for independent game developers. A mix of Mario Bros.-inspired platforming and inventive time-shifting puzzles, Braid has gone on to be one of the best-reviewed and highest-selling Xbox Live Arcade titles to date. Since then, fans have been anxiously awaiting Blow’s next game, The Witness, which has only been vaguely described as an “exploration-puzzle game on an uninhabited island.”
Little was known about the “philosophical and quiet” game until Blow debuted it last week at Penny Arcade Expo in the most fitting way possible – he didn’t say a word about it. Located next to other like-minded indie titles by Chris Hecker (Spy Party) and Andy Schatz (Monaco), The Witness was shown off for the first time ever to the public, albeit with unfinished puzzles and rough graphics that Blow dubbed “programmer art.” Kotaku‘s Stephen Totilo was one of the few game journalists to notice The Witness, and he just posted his first thoughts on the game.
Marketing-wise, this was an absolutely perfect debut for a product like The Witness for a few reasons:
Connect with the Core Audience – By showing the game off without any pretense, the only people who knew what they were playing were either such diehard fans they recognized it from the concept art or recognized Jonathan Blow himself standing in the background.
Get Honest Opinions – Blow was more likely to get realistic reactions to his project by making this hugely anticipated game completely anonymous. Signs next to such an early version of the game saying “From the developer of Braid” would only hurt the title in the long run.
Create a Story – Video game conventions like PAX revolve around massive spectacle to attract eyeballs. By bucking the norm and going low-key, The Witness already has a built-in attraction for writers looking for a unique story from the convention.
Yesterday, the world was introduced to Ping, a social network revolving around iTunes. Ping has been touted as the final MySpace killer, a social network for music and a way to discover new music based on what your friends are listening to, downloading and following. The most obvious gripe have been covered everywhere so I won’t get into more than just a summary here. Initially, Ping launched without Facebook integration. Though a problem, this is something that’ll be fixed so I don’t count it as a really big deal.
I have two real big issues with Ping, though. The first is that Ping allows to see what your friends bought on iTunes, not what they’re listening to. This is a problem. How much of the music on your iTunes player was purchased from the iTunes store? They took what could have been a pretty cool idea and castrated it. Who cares what your friends bought? Chances are, they didn’t buy anything. If everybody was buying lots of music, the music industry wouldn’t be in such dire straits.
This reeks of a concession to content providers. iTunes will always benefit from the shared experience people have around music. The more robust the experience and the more Apple is part of that, the more impulsive buys and buys based on recommendations they’ll receive. At the end of the day, word of mouth is still the largest purchase driver and the most trusted form of advertising. Apple is therefore incentivized to make this experience as inclusive as possible. Leaving out something as easy and basic as what your friends are listening to is something I don’t think Apple would overlook.
If I were a betting man, I would guess that major record labels would like to keep the community around sales. The thinking goes that if sharing is based on sales, then individual artist sales will rise as a result. Regardless, the major record labels certainly don’t want to encourage a music community in which the engagement is based on music that might have been obtained by nefarious means – or at least not direct sales.
My second issue with Ping isn’t so much an issue with the product as it is with Apple’s idea of extending the value of the long tail. This is of various limited appeal to consumers. The long tail is a natural occurrence. To oversimplify, as people share content they like, more people are exposed who can then share it with their friends. Content not liked is content not shared. This results in a very uneven distribution model – a large majority of impressions, sales, plays, etc focused on choice pieces of content. This system only works because the majority of consumers are passive. They don’t want to actively search for new music. They’d rather their friends just tell them about good music. Ping does nothing to address this underlying passivity therefore, Ping will do nothing to change the nature of the long tail.
The person most likely to see value out of the discovery aspects of Ping is your active consumer who won’t like Ping because the information they get is limited to purchases! This is such a small element of a normal user’s interaction with music that it’s almost statistically irrelevant in determining what people are actually listening to.
Apple has the ability to make Ping an amazing tool. All they really need to do is open up what people are listening to. Until then, Ping is second rate.
This week was all about Apple, who announced the newest updates to their products at a music-themed event on Wednesday. Updates to iPods (touchscreens! buttons (again)! they’re still tiny!) abounded, as well as the announcement of their own social network, Ping. Apple’s trademark “One More Thing” turned out to be the newly-refreshed refreshed AppleTV. A $99 cloud-based media streaming center, the AppleTV will let you rent TV shows and Movies via iTunes, as well as pull off nifty party tricks by zipping video content from your iPhone/iPad to your TV at the push of a button. Pretty great stuff, but we’re still more interested in the upcoming Boxee Box, as well as SageTV’s newly-revealed HD Theater 300, which does (pretty much) all of the above and some even cooler stuff, too. Now if we could just find the free time to actually watch all of this content on our awesome AV setups, we’d be golden.
Apex staffer Gabo’s band Kordan were just added to Filter’s Culture Collide festival in LA, and while we can’t make it out there, we’re bugging our LA friends to check out the show. Deli Mag said their “fuzz-drenched guitars and the droney melodies are reminiscent of late 80s/early 90s shoegazer” and we’ve gotta agree. RIYL My Bloody Valentine, A Place to Bury Strangers, Jesus and Mary Chain, and other bands you already should be into.
Sorry to cut this week’s post so short, but in case you weren’t aware, there’s a hurricane coming, and we’re trying to make it out of here while it’s still mostly dry outside. We’ve prepared, have you? We’ll leave you with our favorite video that’s made the rounds this week so you can at least have some entertainment in your storm shelter. (Quasi-NSFW for those of you offended by hilariousness.)
If you haven’t seen the video yet, it’s a user experience dream! They pretty much created an interactive, multi-window, data-driven video that uses the user’s information (particularly your address) to personalize the video. Part of the Chrome Experiment, they utilized HTML5 technologies to make this work. This pretty much means you should definitely watch it on Google Chrome (as they point out in their disclaimer). I don’t want to give it away, I’ll just say you should check it out!
This week saw so many cool things! Manly in the internet. For one, Facebook decided that it’s cool for ALL your friends to know where you are ALL THE TIME (?!?!?!?!). That’s right!! With Facebook Places, you can now tag your location and even your friends can tag you. So if you lied to your friends and told them you can’t go out, just because you secretly wanted to go to the Ice Capades, well now your little 14 year-old cousin can be all like “I was sooo happy to see my cousin at the Ice Capades!! He looked especially cute when he cryed ” on her wall.
And yes, she can tag you all through that! Awesome!! So now, not only people can tag our pictures and our profiles and pages, they can also let everyone know where you are. I won’t weight-in into the subject (although, it does seem like I have) but there have been many articles for and against this feature. I’ll let all of you be the judge.
Also, you can now (finally) see the entire version of the Star Wars Uncut Movie! It’s particularly exciting to us, as one of our own participates in the feature!
It’s also really exciting to now that it’s now been nominated to an Emmy! Nice going, Davis! You’ll be a super “Star” (Wars?)!
Well, that’s our week! Now, go out and get some sun or something. You’re getting to pale from all the staying inside and watching a computer screen all day.
Lastly, I’ll leave you with the FunnyorDie.com exclusive: “Pranah 3D: For Your Consideration”.
Wired‘sSeptember issue cover story has been making waves online this week, and for good reason: Wired editor Chris Anderson’s lengthy feature story entitled “The Web is Dead” makes the argument that although we’re using online services more and more, the idea of the standard “internet” (y’know: that thing you’re using right now. Yes. Right now.) is over, while online services such as apps are thriving.
Several outlets have taken umbrage with the article, specifically regarding the graph used as the backbone of the article’s argument: that web usage accounts for less than a quarter of data moved online, and we’re using online service that use the internet as a means of transporting data outside of the web. Obviously online-based services such as iTunes, Xbox Live, YouTube, Netflix, Skype, etc. are accounting for bigger percentages of data. For the most part, they weren’t around 10 years ago, and if they were it was in greatly reduced forms. Boing Boing succinctly points out that while the amount those services are used is increasing, the web as a whole is far from dead.
Dubious graphs aside, the thing about Anderson’s article is it feels like he’s simply splitting hairs. In essence, his argument comes down to the definition of “the web” vs. “the internet,” two words that are synonymous to the everyday user, and he seems to focus almost entirely on the way users interact with content, rather than the content itself:
We want TweetDeck to organize our Twitter feeds because it’s more convenient than the Twitter Web page. The Google Maps mobile app on our phone works better in the car than the Google Maps Web site on our laptop.
But does this really matter? If we’re using Google products, Facebook, Twitter, RSS, etc. through various tools other than a web browser, we’re still using the same content. Essentially, it just tells us that we’re interacting with the web on a greater scale and across new mediums, which is exciting news for what we do here at Apex, as it broadens the tools we can use to reach users in a way that makes sense to how they’re using the internet. If anything, we should be hopeful looking forward to the future of the web (and the online community as a whole), not discouraged.
Hey, remember when your only options for purchasing music online were overpriced monthly subscriptions or DRM-laden files? Y’know, way back in the dark ages of 2003? Apparently Brilliant Digital Entertainment does, because that’s exactly the model they’re following with the newly re-launched Kazaa. $15 gets you a month’s worth of browser-only streaming and DRM’ed MP3s for purchase, a move that feels about half a decade too late to gain any kind of a following.
Ironically, the original founders of Kazaa, Janus Friis with Niklas Zennström, are also the founders of new service Rdio.com, which opened to the public earlier this week. They offer unlimited streaming (mobile and browser – even when you’re offline via some kind of witchery) and a solid set of social features, such as musical suggestions, friend-created and sharable playlists. I was able to play with Rdio while it was still in beta, and after just a few hours of use I’m considering ponying up the $5 per month subscription fee.
NYC commuters should be happy to learn that Wi-Fi will soon be accessible both in the subway and in 1,000 livery cars. So no matter what your commuting plans are, you will likely have access to this new city perk. The Wi-Fi enabled cars will provide access to anyone in a 400 foot radius of the vehicle, meaning that anyone in the other cars or on the street nearby can tap in.
Thanks to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), iPhone (and other cell phone) users can now unlock, jailbreak, and pretty much do whatever they want with their phones via new exemptions to the Digital millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). According to the EFF’s statement released today, users can now activate their phones on any mobile carrier or install any applications they wish without the worry of getting their pants sued off by companies such as Apple or Microsoft. Such actions were previously verboten by the DMCA, though that hasn’t stopped the massive jailbreaking/modding community from making the process fairly easy.
There are several new exemptions listed, though one interesting tidbit is that students and professors can now break copy-protection on DVDs for “educational purposes, criticism, or in noncommercial videos,” opening the legal door for mashups and similar videos. That means you can rest easy and more fully concentrate on your series of Back to the Future/Jurassic Park 2/Independence Day videos. Marty’s not gonna go back in time to fight off T-Rexes and aliens by himself, now is he?
Between Twitter and Facebook, you’ve probably got several hundred of your close personal friends and/or enemies slinging hundreds of links your way. Keeping that amount of information straight and wading your way through that many cat videos (because honestly, what is the internet for other than sending cat videos?) can be a daunting task in itself, but wouldn’t it be nicer to have all of that content presented clearly in one concise spot?
Enter Flipboard, an iPad app that creates “your own personal magazine” with a ridiculously stylish layout system that lets you interact with constantly updated content from your friends to check out. Watch their demo video above (which curiously stars the same guy from the Birdhouse iPhone app, making me wonder if this is the same development team?) and you might find yourself checking your couch cushions for a spare $500 to drop on an iPad by the end of it.
When the iPad was first announced, I was intrigued not just because of the solid hardware Apple had developed, but because of the potential for software. The iPhone and iPod touch are nice enough on their own, but those devices really started to shine when programmers were able to take it in such new directions. No one expected the App Store to become a huge new market for gaming, and who knew that we’d be seeing apps as varied as remote controls, marketing devices, and dedicated social networks on such a massive scale? Flipboard is just another example of a developer taking a great piece of hardware and turning it into a unique and useful way to keep in touch with those around us.
Update: It might be a really cool app, but Gizmodo brings up a good point: is it legal?
” on her wall.
