Infinity and Beyond

Ever watch a video on YouTube and been inspired to buy the album? Instead of using iTunes to listen to :30s previews of songs do you often find yourself on YouTube listening to the entire thing? What about video game trailers; I know I geeked out when I watched ‘Halo 3′ ads when they first came out. I was watching anything I could with the Master Chief running around and blowing things up. Lucky for you YouTube has the answer to all your purchasing needs.

YouTube Blog

This past Tuesday YouTube announced on their blog that they would be ‘taking our first steps to providing YouTube users with this kind of instant gratification, by adding “click-to-buy” links to the watch pages of thousands of YouTube partner videos.” The post goes on to say that the links will be non-obtrusive and placed beneath the video with the rest of the community features that have led to YouTube’s great success. To start they will be ‘embedding iTunes and Amazon.com links on videos from companies like EMI Music, and providing Amazon.com product links to the newly released video game Spore(TM) on videos from Electronic Arts.”

This is naturally just the beginning as the site slowly shifts to become a strong eCommerce platform for the company. When Google purchased YouTube it wasn’t entirely clear what their motivation was. Why spend so much money on a site that was drawing huge traffic numbers, but not as many advertising dollars? Well, I think we’ve found our answer. As this develops further and we see more and more product links attached with videos the site will become half user generated nonsense (as it always has been) and half corporate sponsored commercials. If only MTV had a way to have done this for television 10 years ago.

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Figures just in from last week report that “Grand Theft Auto IV” has surged past “Halo 3″ and “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” to set the record for the biggest opening week of any entertainment product.”

Selling over six million units in the first week to gross over $500 million, ‘IV’ surpasses ‘Halo 3′ by $200 million. $310 million of it’s total gross came from the 3.6 million units sold on its opening day alone. It also helped that ‘IV’ was released on multiple platforms and not just Xbox 360 like ‘Halo 3′. While it’s hard to compare video game sales to the multiple windowed film format, it is easy to say that ‘POTC: AWE’ grossed a worldwide b.o. total of $960 million over a period of 19 weeks and ‘IV’ grossed over half that in one week.

I’m a big fan of the ‘Halo’ franchise as well as ‘Pirates’ but the GTA series is just not one I’ve been able to get excited about. Aside from the mature content, the style of game just isn’t my style. I don’t think Take-Two is really bothered by my lack of interest but it is interesting to see what content has brought about the ‘biggest opening week of any entertainment product’ ever.

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According to a statement by Don Mattrick, Senior VP of the Interactive Entertainment Business unit at Microsoft, Halo 3–which went on sale at 12:01AM, September 25th at more than 10,000 stores across the US–became the biggest entertainment launch in US history:

“Beating all expectations, Halo 3 became the biggest launch in the history of entertainment in the US, grossing more than $170 million dollars on Day One alone. In a year filled with blockbuster sequels, Halo 3 still stood out, passing both Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ($166 million) and Spiderman 3 ($151 million).”

I picked up my copy from the company store for a nice discount, and spent a bit of time with it Tuesday night and last night.

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I’d have a great picture of the pallets full of discs and employees lined up at the registers, but my Windows Mobile powered device froze after I took the picture and it seems to have gotten lost…

So far I’m personally not blown away by any one thing in particular, and am having to get used to the slight changes in controller configuration. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t a fanatic and never did play Halo or Halo 2 all the way through. And I haven’t spent hours upon hours immersed in this next installment.

That being said, the graphics are certainly gorgeous, and the environment seems significantly richer than the last version. The textures are rich and detailed, water looks amazing, and the lighting effects are spectacular. Also little things I’ve found that are cool so far are things like pre-loading certain parts of levels while you’re setting up games and what appears to be significantly decreased load times in general. That’s definitely a great improvement.

But, like I said, I haven’t been blown away yet (except by some hard-to-hit sniper creature things and things with giant war hammers). Also, having played a lot of Gears of War, I kind of miss the cover feature. However, it’s still early…

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