Peter Moore's New EA Salary

I want his job. I mean what do you do at EA Sports? Its a good move for him though, less stressful, and no more tattoos.

Bring Back J!

SIGNED.

Oh, wait, no period. Just like J Allard.

SIGNED

PS3 Has Sold a Million in Japan

People who are buying the Wii wouldn't be buying a PS3 otherwise. They are definitely in different markets. One of my wife's friends, a woman who just had a baby boy, for example, just bought a Wii. You think she's in the PS3's target demographic?

I give Nintendo credit for expanding the market beyond what we think of as traditional gamers. But the point is the PS3 (and the Xbox 360, for that matter) don't really need to ever catch up to the Wii to be successful because those people were never intended to be in the system's target demographic. In Sony's wildest dreams, they never thought they'd be getting soccer moms to be a large part of the PS3's target demographic.

One upshot of all this, though, that's not really being explored by the press, is that all this developer attention you see being put on the Wii right now is probably going to backfire. Because developers are going to learn that all these casual gamers are not buying the Wii to play anything other than games like Wii Sports and Wii Play. It's going to be pretty emasculating and pretty limiting for developers in the end.

I think you'll eventually see a point of equillibrium where the PS3 does get the lions share of what we'd consider traditional video games, while the Wii gets mostly original party and minigames, and not so many ports, because ports won't work in the market. And then you'll see PS3 sales start to rise (I'm sure another price cut won't hurt either).

Table Tennis Coming To Wii

Pointless trivia: My girlfriend did the Korean female fan voice work for this game.

2chan Explains Why Japan Hates Xbox 360

As a Japanese, I must say the most comments on 2chan are not very serious, they are just making fun. You need to read through hundreds of these comments, and few are worth reading. The comment about "Hot Shots Golf" is 100% joke I'm sure, as people often make a jest of it.

Regardless, as a big Xbox fan in Japan, there are some comments I can't agree more.
The first and biggest issue is about their marketing strategy. Even though we don't have as many titles as you guys do, there are A+ titles which can satisfy Japanese gamers (like Forza2, Blue Dragon, Lost Planet, Idol Master, Riot-Act, Eternal Sonata, Viva Piñata, etc). The bad thing is, average gamers don't know anything about these titles, because there is no wide advertisement. Yes, we can see these ads on game Magazine like Famitsu, they don't spread the word to more than the users who already own the console.

Yes, sometimes they do run TV ads. However, very, very badly. They only make TV ads when a big title is coming. We've seen TV ads for Blue Dragon, Lost Planet, Eternal Sonata, and now Oblivion (yes it's finally coming here next week!). Not only these TV ads are aired sparsely, they broadcast the same one ad for more than one month. So, these ads only gives users a negative impression that Xbox360 don't have many titles to play with. I seriously wonder there are quite percentage of casual gamers who think Xbox360 only carries Blue Dragon and Lost Planet, nothing else!

So, one thing I want to say is, they need to insist people that Xbox360 now has a variety of titles, not only FPSs, AceCombat 6 is coming, PGR4 is coming, Beautiful Katamari is also coming. They need tell now you can buy the box not only for Blue Dragon, but Forza2, Eternal Sonata, Oblivion, etc, etc. We have more great titles available today than PS3 has, that's what they need to advertise. Even if the Blue Dragon is a AAA title, people can't spend \29,800 only to play one game. Customers want to be sure there are a variety of games to choose from, today, and in the future. I think we now have enough titles to promote this way, but their marketing staff keep running TV ads only for one particular title, as if that's the only title you can play.

Secondly, yes, I think there are too many FPSs for Xbox. HALO is a great game, but Japanese gamers are still not used to this genre. More casual, cheerful games are preferred here. Nintendo's games are great example. If you think of their Smash Brothers, they could have made it more brutal, but they very carefully designed the game not to. It's probably just a matter of taste, but it does affect asian sales.

I think I can go on forever, but too much already... Sorry for my English. Hope their marketing team realize this.

Martha Stewart Bakes a Wii Cake

Well, theres no denying the power of the wii now.
But owning one has suddenly made me feel uncomfortable for the first time. I'm not quite sure how to put my finger on it, but I didn't get into video games years and years back only to one day be associated with soccer moms, housewives and martha stuart.
I'm probably feeling the same fear/axnxiety that 80's punks felt when they saw where their musical genre was going.

Interested in commenting on Kotaku? Know: we ban. And better yet, other commenters are encouraged to nominate people for potential banning by sending emails to tips — which not only helps weed out the tools, but raises the tipster's own ban profile.