@Brian Crecente: And up until this point all of the iPhone game data we've had access to has been the unit-sales chart. They're still dominated by 99c games.

Race Drivin' anyone? [www.youtube.com]

Just to clarify, this is the AVERAGE amount of time played by each player ever, not the total play time over all games that month? So if Animal Crossing: City Folk were only played by one person, but that one person played for 60 hours, it would be high up the charts. Yes? And if nobody were playing a game anymore…

@EmeraldStorm: I think your square peg and round hole analogy is closer than you think. In this case, the PS3 is a square hole, the 360 is a round hole, and you're trying to make one peg that fits both systems perfectly. The 360 and the PS3 both have very different performance bottlenecks to optimize for, and…

@lavans: From a developer's standpoint, the PS3 has both strengths and weaknesses compared to the 360. Unfortunately, these do not align nicely, and as such an engine developed on one platform will tend to port poorly to the other without a thorough re-write (and major adjustments to assets, etc).

@Spilt_Milk: Jaws was in 3D. As was all of the Toy Story series, and Dial M for Murder.

@Fwiffo: I've often said that a kid's game is successful when it appeals to the kid in the 40 year old parents out there. Kids themselves would rather be playing Halo or Modern Warfare.

@(Zombie) Goldwings: This was a pretty common trick back in the days. Usually you'd get a glitched first screen, or nothing at all. Sometimes you got infinite lives, or the Japanese version. Or you fried the electronics.

Why not bank swap? Have your 100 people that Live1 can see, and use Live 2 to swap in / out of that list any other number of other friends.

@gametaku: Anti-piracy measures are not about perfect protection, but making piracy a bigger and bigger hassle. This makes little sense on the PC side, where 1 cracked game = infinite copies on bittorrent. But on the console side, where each player has to copy over new firmware, or solder more jumpers to their…

@Quilt: The IGDA is the International Game Developer's Association. They're relevant because something like 60% of the world's game developers are members, and they run the GDC out in California and most other major game developer events.

Yes! It's good that there are no old games on that list. Just all-new titles! Like... Counter-Strike. And the Orange Box. The Secret of Monkey Island.

@Mykie Gunderson: The original had basically one amazingly infuriating level. It wasn't very long, but you had to work for every single inch. The beans and responses had to be mapped out, if you fed your blob a bean earlier than you needed it you might as well reboot, you never knew if your route through the level…

@WhaleMenace: Edit: Thanks for the update Brian!

Russell's teapot

@That mop mutant from NES.: You've never hired a craftsman for anything, have you? Those gears figures looks like 3-6 hours of work each. A hundred dollar premium for 5 hours of craft only comes out to be $20 per hour. That's a very reasonable rate, overall.

@gold163 (° д° ): What's with the "most profitable game movies were terrible" list containing half movies that failed to make any profit at all? And the RE movies after the first weren't actually based on any games, but were their own beasts.

@FP_slomo788: Wound? During financial armageddon 2008 they still booked a profit. It was a modest 2.5% profit, but that still beat federal treasuries and the stock market.

@gold163 (° д° ): Well, Nintendo's rewards program keeps track of both your linked Wii and DSI. That could definitely be the start of infrastructure for such a project.

It says something about the state of PC gaming that the console version of titles is routinely 10$ more than the PC version, yet the PC versions generally sell less. Is the cost of maintaining a modern gaming PC really that much higher than a console?