Every week we do a quick wrap-up of some news items that may have slipped through the cracks. The wrap-ups will be shorter versions of our articles, lumped together to give you an idea of things you may have missed.

King of the Hill retains crown in January

The sales figures are in for January, so it is time to study them and make forgone conclusions about the future of each console. Okay, not so much the latter, but it looks like Nintendo is still the champion of this generation with the Wii and DS selling 679,200 and 510,800 respectively, putting them at first and second on the NPD Group’s console sales list. Xbox 360 managed to pull into third with just over 300,000, beating out all of Sony’s platforms. Sony’s PS3 sold over 200,000 units, the PSP around 170,000 and the PS2 moving gradually into the shadows with 100,000. A very different picture than what was painted a year ago, with Sony showing a large leap over the 360 and just about everyone saluting Microsoft for their efforts with a “nice try, maybe next time.” While it’s tempting to watch for white flags around the Sony camp, they did manage to push out a lot of hardware across their 3 platforms, but it’s starting to look like they need a big shake-up in order to solidify a position on their ten year plan. Price cuts are rumoured to be looming, so we’ll just have to see what hand they play in the coming months.

Software figures tell a similar fate, with Wii Fit sitting at the top spot just over 750,000 units sold. Wii Play and Mario Kart Wii round out the top three with no surprises, but coming in fourth this past month was Left 4 Dead for the Xbox 360. Not a sequel, nor a Wii title, and the zombie fright/fight fest made it into the top five with 243,000 copies. Call of Duty: World at War and Skate 2 are next in line, both for the 360, and the last title for the console was Lord of the Rings: Conquest making a surprising appearance at the final spot in the top ten. Mario Kart DS and New Super Mario Bros. also made the top ten, despite being years old, and the new Guitar Hero broke in with the Wii version. A good show for Wii, a pretty solid one for the 360, and a very sad showing for Sony.

Listening to your consumers is important – Valve Boss talks truth

Gabe Newell, co-founder of PC-darling Valve Software, was picked to be the keynote speaker at this year’s Design Innovate Communicate Entertain (DICE) Summit and delivered an interesting message: be as close to your consumer as you can, add value to your products and you will succeed. Seems like a simple formula, but in the days of yore time was better spent putting as much work into a product as possible and then throwing it to the store shelves and hoping for the best. Newell made sure to communicate that the PC crowd was also not as frugal as many seem to perceive them as, with customers dropping thousands of dollars on new gaming rigs on a much more regular basis than console users are expected to. His point was that when you turn your products into a service, rather than just a one-off purchase, it encourages people to talk about it, play it and come back to it on a regular basis. Pricing structures shouldn’t be a fixture the way they are in many retail environments either, with many games doomed to simply hit the bargain bin after a year of their release. The example he pushed was an experiment they tried with the pricing of the popular Left 4 Dead Steam version, where last week they offered the game for half price ($24.99 USD) for a few days. Sales over that time spiked 3000%, which is a phenomenal number considering the strength of the game’s sales already, and the sale had no impact on the retail version of the game.

Valve seems to be taking their own path when it comes to how they distribute and support their games. Weekly updates for many of their titles, and big sales for their major titles like the example used are just small ideas that can be very progressive for the way that games are treated by the industry as a whole. Reflecting on how well Burnout Paradise has been supported by Criterion and the success that the game has seen as a result is just a demonstration of Newell’s ideals at work outside the PC market. Digital distribution is important to the market, and while retail sales aren’t exactly going to quickly shift off the market, the way in which games are handled by company’s like Valve and Criterion are slowly setting the benchmark for how games should be treated; as a entertainment service to the consumers that spend the money on the products.

Single Player is doomed…eventually

In his continued campaign for online gaming industry veteran Dave Perry has focused his talk at DICE 09 to the continued growth in free-to-play browser games and how the strength of these titles is going to eventually overtake the single player experience that gaming has its roots in. Perry stressed that the expansion of cloud computing will allow users to experience gaming through Flash based applications without having significant impact on their own PCs, a technology that would bring even more focus to the oft-overlooked online gaming sector. With games taking a shift to the olden days of terminal computer, rather than the modern concept of the desktop, and with the strength of digital distribution, Perry believed it marks the end for single player experiences in games.

It’s a touchy subject when you poo-poo an entire element of gameplay, especially one that I’m quite fond of, but the shifts in technology and trends he is describing do make a lot of sense. Digital distribution and micro transactions are the focus of a lot of developers right now, and more so through multiplayer platforms than through most single player experiences. While I don’t see the single player element completely dying out, it’s overall importance has significant diminished in a lot of markets. The strength of single player titles is still evident on the sales charts now, but the elements of long term success for many developers are sewn through their continued support of online games, and with the growth seen in browser based games in the last few years it is not out of the question to see that revenue stream supersede the traditional markets we focus on now.