FE, FI, FO, FUM

Welcome to the Fi, Fi, Fo, Fum issue

They’re big enough, they’re scary enough…

update: No closed deal (yet) but there has been an announcement of terms: $562.2 million plus “performance liked earn out of up to $200 million. (source) So it looks like its full speed ahead for Disney version of Facebook games. Are we in for treats like “Down on Mickey’s Farm”, “Duck Wars”, and “Minnie’s happy little aquarium”? Get out your barf bags ladies and gentlemen it promises to be a bumpy ride.

No word as of yet if Disney has actually gone through with the purchase of Playdom and it’s ever growing portfolio of Facebook game developers for a reported $500 million plus. But that isn’t the only merger/acquisition in the news today. Senator Al Franken, the man who fought tooth and nail to get the job as senator in the first place, was addressing the Netroots Nation conference in Las Vegas this last Sunday, as reported by TheWrap.com. Calling Net Neutrality “The first Amendment issue of our time” Senator Franken had the following to say about the proposed Comcast/NBC merger:

“If Comcast merges with NBC, how long do you think it will take for Verizon and AT&T to start looking at CBS-Viacom and ABC-Disney”

“Imagine if what is happening with television, the senator went on to say, where an independent producer can’t get a show uon the air unless a network owns a piece of it, where to happen to the internet. There would be no next Youtube or Twitter. There would only be what the R&D departments at the few megaconglomerates could invent and profit from.”

If you don’t think the Senator is right, consider the following:

Vivendi SA (formerly Vivendi Universal) divisions are Vivendi Entertainment, that in turn owns the Canal+Group (a French film and television studio), Universal Music Group, ACTIVISION BLIZZARD, Global Village Telecom, Maroc Telecom, SFR (a French mobile telephone company), and a 20 percent interest in NBC universal (the remainder is owned by General Electric)

But wait, we’re just getting warmed up here.

NBC Universal in turn has the following divisions: NBC, Universal Studios, NBC Universal Television Group, NBC News, USA Network, SYFY (the Sci-Fi Channel), CNBC, MSNBC, NBC.com, MSNBC.com, IVillage, Bravo, qubo, Telemundo Television Studios, The Weather Channel, Hulu and the A&E Television Networks.

If you add Comcast into the mix that includes five more networks (source: Arstecnica as well as The Philadelphia Flyers, The Philadelphia 76ers, the Global Spectrum Management company, Front Row (a marketing firm), as well as non-controlling interests in In Demand, TV One, MGM, Sportsnet, New England Cable News, and the Pittsburgh Cable News Channel

When you are all done chewing on that you can go watch the following movies on Netflix (while Comcast still allows it to run) – The Running Man, Robocop, and one of our personal favorites, the John Cusack movie called War Inc. The common theme with all three is, of course, “egaconcongomoerate” corporations run amok vie to control the world (or destroy it).

Is the senator from Minnesota being alarmist? We tend to think not, and if he is, a large portion of the Federal Government is being alarmist right along with him. If nothing else you have to like an actor from Saturday Night Live who fought hard to be a senator; and as the Senator’s Stuart Smalley character used to say, he’s good enough, he’s smart enough, and doog done it, people like him. Just like California, Minnesota may have an actor for a senator, and had a professional wrestler for a governor (Jesse Ventura) but none of the governors are, to my knowledge, wearing prison uniforms – and that’s something that we here in Illinois won’t be able to say for some time to come.

Another one bites the dust?

You had to see Warhammer Online Free 2 play coming from a mile away. It certainly didn’t take a telescope to spot Dungeons and Dragons Online coming up the Free 2 play street either. Lotro was a bit of a shock – we will certainly hand you that. Now in a move that we will claim you could have seen with a blindfold on (never mind that hind sight is always 20-20) Everquest 2 is going free 2 play [http://everquest2.com/free_to_play/extended_faq] with what they are calling Everquest II Extended. Now there are many of our listeners who will, of course, remember Paul Barnett speaking of such matters on a previous show shouting “I TOLD YOU THE SUN WOULD FINALLY EXPLODE.” We will let you look up exactly how much is “free” in Free 2 Play, after all no matter what anyone said our grandmothers were right…there is no such thing as a free lunch. Does this mean that I will be able to get out my gnome and get back the key to my enormous mansion and 1 Antonia Bayle? I sort of doubt it. If the past is in any way precedent I sort of doubt it. John Smedley once said that he considered a game a success if the profits paid to keep the servers open and pay the bills; lets hope the new business model does at least that.

No reviews for you

Today is the day that Blizzard finally takes the chains off that giant of industry IP’s Starcraft 2. As we all know by now, Blizzard would not allow reviews ahead of time. Our first thought was to consider movie Studios like Paramount that refused “professional” reviewers into advance showings of some of their movies after they had been blasted one to many times by reviewers, who later ended up with a few dozen eggs on their face after the same movies where hits at the box office. Still, a comment on one of our regular must reads claimed that Blizzard could defecate in a box, slap the words “Starcraft 2” on the box and still sell it (or words to that effect) and we tend to agree.

What struck us about the release was not the game itself . No, as usual Blizzard doesn’t release anything unless it is polished to the point where it could be used as the mirror in a refracting telescope. Just as striking are the CGI trailers that Blizzard released about the game. Mind you these are not all that uncommon in the mmo industry. But it is not the quality of the trailer that we find lacking – it is the fact that in most cases they are not at all representative of the game. For a game that, as we understand it, is mostly an isometric (albeit highly detailed) view the trailers seem more akin to the hype we see in movie theaters for movies that are big on special effects but low on script quality – rarely do they represent the actual movie. In fact in such cases, if you have seen the trailer you have seen the best parts of the movie with boring filler in between. Mind you in this particular case Starcraft 2 is obviously a “killer game”. Still a bit more of a pragmatic approach, and a lot more honesty in depicting what the gamer is actually getting would be honest and no doubt more productive in the end.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather