Official Halo 3 Web Launches: Great to see this long awaited site up. We should have news of interest about Halo Wars soon also. halo3.com

ESO Accounts: Our community team reports that we recently went over the 500,000 mark in ESO accounts created. That seems like a big number to me. I remember when we were hoping to sell that many copies of Age of Empires I. Our community team tells that we also are nearing 16 million Age III games played online and more than 1.6 million WarChiefs games played. That is a lot of entertainment created without counting the solitaire games played.

Games Outside Work: X-Box Live Arcade (XBLA) games are very popular with us and there was a lot of favorable comment recently following the news that Puzzle Quest from the DS was coming to the Arcade. In the words of one of our guys (who shall remain nameless), “my wife is level 31 or 32 in this game and has not done the dishes or fed our children in two weeks. But I love it!” Other people are looking forward to the Settlers of Catan on XBLA. That is one of the all-time favorite board games at ES.

PS3 Has Lost This Round?: A recent article on CNNMoney.com asserted that SONY has already lost this round of the console wars (to Ninendo’s Wii) and that Ken Kutaragi, the driving force behind their twelve year run atop the console game industry, was leaving the company on a sour note. The writer seemed to base his assertion on the relative sales of the major consoles in Japan only and extrapolated that to the world market.

I don’t believe that success or failure in Japan will determine necessarily who will win or lose in this competitive business. And I think making the call a little over one year into the current cycle is probably premature. The current console cycle has years yet to go and counting SONY out this early seems very aggressive. The independent game publishers are happiest when all the platforms are competitive so they can sell the products on each. They don’t want to see one manufacturer in the driver’s seat.
However, if Microsoft is going to continue pushing the technology side of this business and bring a new X box out in a couple of years, the pressure on the PS3 might be heavy.

WoW Visa Card: You know games are going mainstream when one offers its own Visa card that accrues points toward monthly fees every time you use it. Our people wanted to accrue WoW gold instead of credit toward their fees.

Playing Shooters for Real Money?: ES’r Chris Van Dorn noticed recently that developer Valve is working with a group called Tournament.com to establish an official Counter-Strike/Half Life 2 multiplayer game competition service. Basically players ante up a small amount for each game and the winner takes the pot. You win $1 for a kill and lose $1 for being killed. When you are out of money you are out of the game. The set up now is for small stakes (six players with a total $18 pot), but if takes off and tests out okay, high stakes games could be coming.

But John Evanson pointed out some potential problems with this model. First person shooters (FPS) have a lot of possible client-side hacks. If people use them when playing for free then they will obviously try them when playing for money. Also, to continue playing for money people have to think they have a chance to win. It helps for a game to have a luck element. In a FPS game it is possible that really highly skilled people would drive out the average players without some way to fairly balance player skill. Every competitive online game is already wrestling with that problem, without having money involved.
People have been monetizing their skills as game players now for some time. There have been professional Starcraft players in Korea for years, playing on sponsored teams in leagues.

There are more cash tournaments each year and a few top players earn a good living. There are the people farming gold for MMOs. We have recruited top Age players to work with us, as have other studios. But this new model reaches out to players who are not at the highest skill levels and is accessible to anyone with a broadband connection. It will be interesting to see if it becomes popular and spreads to other genres besides first person shooters and to other platforms beyond the PC.

Ensemble Studios Acquisition Anniversary: This past week marks the sixth anniversary of our acquisition by Microsoft. Our studio has probably doubled in size since that event but for those of us who were here then it was, and remains, a good thing. And with the sales of our games approaching 20 million units worldwide I am pretty sure our colleagues in Redmond feel the same way.

Vista Games to Blow Console Games Away?: Fox News reported recently that forthcoming Vista platform games supporting DirectX 10 will have graphics far superior to current generation consoles and thus have a competitive advantage. I am not getting too excited about this idea. There is no doubt that PC technology improves rapidly and continually, while console technology is mainly a snapshot of the best current technology around the console launch. But console games have other advantages, particularly tray & play, which give them a huge advantage with casual gamers. High end graphics are critical mainly to first adopters and really hard core gamers, and there aren’t enough of those people who have to have the latest technology right now to outspend the average gamers buying consoles for their family rooms.

Bruce Shelley