melante

Report from Inside Electronic Arts' Shareholders Meeting

I don't understand why people keep saying that TTWO has ONLY one franchise... Their sport titles are on average better than EA's and have recently released very successful titles (Bioshock, for instance). True, none of these is as popular as GTA, but which other gaming IP is?

As I live in SE Asia I think I should do some clarification regarding Thailand. The local government has nothing to do with this story. It was simply a decision by the local distributor to withdraw the game. What happened was that an obviously insane teenager killed a taxi driver to see whether it was as easy as in the game. He will likely be sentenced to death. A very sad story but I guessed such a person would have killed someone anyway soon or later.

Video Game Industry: One of the Most Attractive Areas to Invest

Bruce, sometimes you say something worth reading, but this time you really had me roll on the floor laughing... how can you say it's not worth developing for the Wii, DS and PSP? True that piracy can be (and is) a problem but it's all to be seen in the perspective of development costs and hence ROI. Developing a title for DS and PSP is quite cheap and people still make a lot of money out of it (otherwise do you think anyone would still publish games for them?).
Cheers and remember that the Wii is, amongst the big consoles, the one with the biggest user base (by far) and the cheapest one to develop for, which means the system that can offer the biggest profit.

Four Reasons for the Gaming Industry's High Valuations and M&A Activity

Good analysis. Actually companies like ERTS, ATVI and TTWO look quite promising both in the short and long term while, unfortunately, it's not all gold what shines and others like MWY and ATAR would really be avoided despite their extremely cheap valuations since they don't seem to have solved they problems yet.