MCV catches up with Games Media Legend and IGN’s US head of news and features, Colin Campbell.

Square Enix has announced that the Xbox 360 version of Final Fantasy XIII-2 will be getting an exclusive piece of DLC not available on the PS3. It takes the form of a weapon – a bow called… MCV is the leading news site for the game industry. Check out our news, press releases and interviews.

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Xbox 360 gets exclusive Final Fantasy XIII-2 DLC

Race and Silicon Valley has been in the news lately, especially after CNN used an out-of-context clip of TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington to promote a documentary on the subject. Lost in that gotcha moment was a more substantive discussion of the issues. Namely, is Silicon Valley a true meritocracy or does it have a diversity problem? Navarrow Wright , the co-founder of Global Grind and current CTO of InteractIve One , which operates BlackPlanet.com and other sites, came into the TCTV studio to have “the race conversation” with me. “It is a meritocracy at some level,” Wright acknowledges. “I think the challenge is how do you get involved in that ecosystem.” In his view, one of the biggest factors keeping the number of black tech entrepreneurs down is that not enough people from his community are trying to become entrepreneurs. There is a “perception problem in the minority community,” he says, that “it is easier to become a celebrity or athlete than an entrepreneur.” How do we change that? Watch the video.

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Navarrow Wright: There Is A Diversity Problem In Silicon Valley

Antti Vilpponen , co-founder and CEO of ArcticStartup , a competitor to TechCrunch Europe when it comes to coverage of – surprise – tech startups from the Arctic region, wrote a post yesterday about the way we – supposedly – handle embargoes around here. We don’t always respond to criticism, especially not from competitors, but I figured this presents us with a wonderful opportunity to clarify some things. Vilpponen asserts that we sometimes go too far in how we treat startups by not just telling them we want to have stories exclusively but by somehow determining if and when they get to talk to other journalists and bloggers after we run our post. When startups don’t abide to our demands, that jeopardizes their chances for future coverage. Or as Vilpponen calls it, we blackmail startups. I’ll say it right off the bat: that’s bullshit. The notion that we ‘treat startups’ one way or another is in itself a very strange way to describe how we work. Regardless of what you think of TechCrunch, you should realize that we’re not at all that difficult to work with (most of the time). We didn’t get to where we are today by screwing over the very people we champion every day. We’re just really, really good at what we do, and once you get to that point there’s always going to be someone that wishes things were different. In our case, multiple someones. High trees catch a lot of wind, etcetera. It makes absolutely no sense for us to alienate startup founders and to prematurely blow up relationships and suspend all future coverage of any company based on the way they choose to work with us and other media. It would be a lot like biting the hand that feeds us. Do we break embargoes? Sometimes. Do we break embargoes even after agreeing to them? Sometimes (but very rarely). Do we agree to embargoes and then respect them? Sometimes. Do we refuse to cover some startups we they don’t want to give a story to us exclusively? Sometimes. Do we agree to cover a startup even when we know other media were briefed? Sometimes. Do we turn away some startups and then cover them even more vigorously after we ‘lose’ the story? Sometimes. Basically, it all depends. If you’re an entrepreneur and you think you have a good story for us, why not just ask us what we think, and we’ll find a way to work together if we agree that it’s something we think our readers will want to know about. We will be much more accommodating to you than to the PR agency you employ, whether they like it or not. We talk your talk better than they ever could. If you’re a regular reader, you will remember that Michael Arrington, our founder and once fearless leader, killed the embargo almost three years ago. Go read his post and tell me if this looked like a clear policy to you. It wasn’t (spoiler alert: “we’ll break every embargo, but there will be exceptions”). It was more like a big middle finder to the rotten industry called PR, and some of their methods. Now read that post again. Try and find any mentions of ‘startups’, ‘founders’ or ‘entrepreneurs’. You won’t find any, simply because it wasn’t about them. We have a lot of respect for startups, especially compared to the majority of PR people out there, so we go out of our way to accommodate them. Here’s what really happens. Most of the news we break here comes straight from sources we know, or originates from readers who give us tips, anonymously or otherwise (more of that, please). Oftentimes, we’ll break a story exclusively because a startup founder explicitly offers it to us that way. If the story is good enough, we’ll accept the offer. We’re not fools, after all. We’ll ask startups if we can cover their news exclusively, because, well, that guarantees that we break the story and that’s what we’re all about. Calling that bullying or blackmailing is either a bad case of sour grapes or a regrettable misunderstanding of how this world works. If startup founders don’t agree to an exclusive, we’ll determine whether we want to still cover or pass up on it. In fact, that’s a big – and possibly the hardest – part of our job. Sometimes, we’ll turn away startups when we know that other media will be covering them, especially if they’ve briefed publications who also have a record of breaking embargoes (if you thought we were the only ones, think again). As a rule, we do not tell entrepreneurs that this means that they’ll never get any coverage from us in the future. Again, we’re not fools. TechCrunch is a group of individual bloggers, and we all have our preferred way of working, our quirks, our specialties, our nuisances and our views on how we should cater to our audience. One common trait: a passion for breaking news about the industry we love so dearly. So, is there such a thing as a ‘TechCrunch embargo’? Have we ever dictated to an entrepreneur if and when he or she can go talk to other media? I certainly haven’t in my three years at TechCrunch, and I seriously don’t think anyone who works here would ever resort to such tactics. I agree with Vilpponen that this would be harmful to the startup ecosystem, and, again, we go out of our way to make sure we build solid relationships with anyone operating in this space. Our one goal is to keep breaking news and scooping competitors at every chance we get, but never at the cost of hurting the community of entrepreneurs we’ve worked so hard to raise awareness for over the years. The simple truth is that we’ve long found ourself in a position where we wouldn’t have to ‘bully’ or ‘blackmail’ entrepreneurs at all even if we wanted to, FUD spewing competitors be damned. Startups have absolutely nothing to fear, except maybe our transparency and honesty. (Photo courtesy of Flickr user burstingwithcolor )

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Going Too Far: The ‘TechCrunch Embargo’ And Other Myths

When someone you haven’t seen in a while asks you “What’s up?” or “How are you?”, you probably give them a high-level summary of the major life events from the months since you last spoke. When you speak to someone you see frequently, you probably respond to the same questions with close-up, specific descriptions of your activities over past few days. Humans are aware of when and what we last communicated with someone, and we dynamically alter what information we provide to avoid repetition. While most of the discussion about Facebook’s latest changes has centered around the real-time Ticker , the switch to a news feed that displays different content depending on when you last visited will also profoundly change how we use the social network. Eventually, I think the “return visit-aware” concept will also change how we consume content across the web. Before the switch, Facebook was struggling with repetitive content and a user base that engages with the site in very different ways. Frequent visitors — those returning multiple times a day — would often see the same stories first on the default Top News feed. Some wouldn’t go to the trouble, while others didn’t even realize they could switch to the Most Recent tab to see what had just been published. This led them to feel that Facebook was stale and caused them to quickly navigate away. Meanwhile, those who visited once or twice a week would only see the the most Liked, commented on, and clicked stories of the last few hours or day, leading them to miss highly relevant stories that happened a few days ago. This made it seem like nothing really interesting was happening on Facebook and that there was no reason to stop by more frequently. These interactions didn’t mimic the tradition of human communication. With the single-tabbed return visit-aware news feed, Facebook has solved all these problems by aligning its interface with natural human habits. The Top News and Most Recent tabs have been combined into a single one, shifting the initial burden of choice from the user to Facebook. This works because a human typically doesn’t ask someone “Tell me what’s happened to you in the last [78 hours or 35 minutes]?” The respondent simply knows when they last spoke and tailors their transmission appropriately. When you vist, the news feed surfaces the most relevant stories from between then and your last visit. If it’s been a week since your last visit, it shows only the biggest stories from that timespan, making sure you don’t miss anything important. This mimics how friends who’ve been out of touch for months communicate when reunited. If you visited a few hours ago, it will show you the most relevant stories from those hours, but also a “25 more recent stories” link at the top. Similarly, if you’ve spent a day apart from someone, you might tell them the most significant news of the day, but also about your current mood. If you’ve visited the Facebook home page multiple times that day, it shows you the latest updates so there’s something fresh to see. Similarly, after working together all day and discussing bigger news, but then taking a lunch break apart, two coworkers might discuss in person who they had lunch with. Otherwise, this information might seem inconsequential like the minutiae the news feed shows if you constantly check it. But since all other information has already been discussed, the very recent becomes relevant. By marking and unmarking stories as “highlighted” using the blue corners in the interface, you can teach Facebook’s EdgeRank news feed ordering algorithm your preferences. This mirrors how you can interrupt a friend’s boring story and ask about something else, or ask follow up questions about a topic such that they bring up that topic more in the future. The end result is a news feed that usually shows interesting content. This inspires longer session times; more return visits; and more Likes, comments, and shares on news feed stories that trigger notifications or create content that pulls in other users. Return Visit-Aware Content Streams For The Rest Of The Web Sites and services around the web are seeking these same benefits, and therefore I believe they’ll look to develop their own versions of consumption-sensitive content streams. Right now, most news sites try to approximate this by featuring the most important content of the last day or so, and rearranging and demoting top stories as they grow older. Techmeme is probably the best example of this, but still they all essentially operate on the premise that you visit every 12 to 18 hours. Vist less frequently than that, and a must-read piece of news may have slipped down and off the home page. Last week I reviewed an iOS app called the Riversip Tech Reader . It tackles the problem by letting users toggle between viewing the latest news, top news of the day, or the biggest stories of the week. This is probably the easiest solution and it doesn’t depend on tracking a user’s previous actions. It also works for streams which don’t require click-throughs to expand individual pieces of content. However, it does place the burden of choice on the user. Twitter or some Twitter app could try this, surfacing the stories with the most retweets from a given time period. An approach for when users must take an action such as clicking through to consume content is to remove, demote, or set aside content a user has already viewed. Imagine if the CNN home page replaced tiles or headlines of any story you’ve already read with something you haven’t. This could possibly be done through cookies or another tracking scheme, but it would presumably be more accurate if a user was logged in. Sites services, and apps with login functionality or another way to tie actions to identity should be considering how they can make their content displays truly sensitive to when a user last visited without explicit input. Using its login and other social plugins, Facebook may even seek to power this shift of other sites. In either case, the content relevancy arms race is on. The same way newspapers look hopelessly static next to Techmeme will be the way the sites of today will look next to the personalized, return visit-aware sites of tomorrow.

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Return Visit-Aware: The Future Of Content Streams That Know What You’ve Consumed

The free-to-play model, while disparaged by some developers as exploitative of players, has certainly proved itself over and over to be financially sustainable if done right. And although I myself have paid a buck or two for extra in-game content myself, I have always found it hard to believe that there are people out there who will sink scores, hundreds, or thousands of dollars into their online personae. No better proof of this than the news that’s propagating today : German gaming company Bigpoint, which operates a few free-to-play games, has sold 2000 (and counting) items just in the last few days – for the whopping price of €1000 each. Where is your horse armor now? In Bigpoint’s free-to-play game Dark Orbit , you can find little drones that help your ship in combat. Up to ten of them, in fact, but the last one is extremely hard to find. Lots of searching around, collecting blueprints, end-game busywork. So, perhaps seeing that people were frustrated with the mechanics they’d put in place, and perhaps smelling a business opportunity (or likely both), they decided to offer the last drone for sale in the in-game marketplace. For the (one would think) absurd price of €1000. It’s one of those things that you hear about and you’re not surprised later when it turns out that a dozen people went in for it. But to Bigpoint’s delight, more than 2000 players have shelled out for this little drone as of a few days ago, producing a total of at least €2,000,000 after less than a week on the market (that’s about 2.6 million of your American dollars). This isn’t the first time extravagant items have been offered in games or app stores, and certainly not the most money that has ever changed hands in a virtual market (that honor probably belongs to WoW), but it’s a surprising event nonetheless. Who would have expected such widespread and lavish spending in a game like this? Apparently Bigpoint did, and they’re reaping the rewards. Underestimate the “casual” games space, in which hundreds of millions of people play every day, at your peril. With so many involved, there are bound to be, as others have put it, some whales . I look forward to the next ludicrous milestone.

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€1000 Virtual Item For Game Raises €2 Million In 4 Days For Bigpoint

Facebook’s Open Graph is ushering in a monumental shift in how we curate what we share. Curation used to mean opting in to sharing. You found or did something you thought your audience would care about, and you went to the trouble of sharing it. This worked when we didn’t have so much content at our finger tips, but as more news and media consumption moves online, the friction of constantly opting in exhausts us and we don’t bother to distribute what others might enjoy. That’s why I believe we are entering the age of curation through unsharing, and it will force us to change. Some believe “frictionless sharing” via Open Graphs will be the death of curation. That signal will be drowned out by noise as the content we consume but that’s not worth the attention of others is automatically published to our friends and followers. This is a big problem for curation, but it is temporary. It stems from a lack of understanding of curation through unsharing by both the users and developers of Open Graph apps. Users still expect to have to actively share something in order for it to reach their audience. That’s no longer true. Instead we’ll need to learn to filter out the noise in reverse, opting out when we don’t want to share instead of opting in when we do. That’s a huge behavioral realignment that will take time and won’t come easy. If learned, though, we’ll be able to dance across the web from one piece of great content to the next, sharing it all effortlessly, and only having to stop when something deserves to be struck from the record. And as algorithms improve to show us what’s most relevant, we won’t have to unshare as often. I love listening to music and reading news, and I love helping my friends discover songs and articles. But before Open Graph apps, I had to actively share each piece of content to the news feed. To my audience, there was no distinction between what I really wanted to highlight, and what was enjoyable but not necessarily crucial. This is why Ticker is brilliant. It creates a channel for casual opt out sharing of high volumes of content, a distinct complement to the channels for explicit opt in sharing we’ve always known. This granularity allows for more curation, not less. I can still take a song that touches me and opt in to posting it directly to the news feed, where Facebook intelligently gives it more visibility. But through the Ticker I can also share hundreds of songs, all that I enjoy to a lesser extent, and give people who respect my taste a way to discover vetted content. To make this work, though, we’ll need the app developers to cooperate by making it easy for us to mark an article as unread, remove the last song we heard from the Ticker, etc. I reviewed the sharing controls of all the major news reader apps, and some like The Washington Post and The Guardian are doing their part by providing simple unsharing options. Unfortunately, some developer like Newscorp with The Daily app are trying to maximize virality by not offering unshare options. They are overemphasizing the short-term, and not thinking enough about being apps that facilitate the new model of curation — apps people will want to return to. We need to pressure them to provide unsharing options by telling them so and not using them if they don’t. Until we have both learned to unshare and have the capability to do so, this will indeed be the dark age of curation. But we have the power to set the norms. Go read a ton of articles using a responsible app, unshare from the Ticker each one you wouldn’t recommend, and explicitly post links to the news feed to those you think are must-reads. If you see low-quality content shared to the Ticker, tell your friends to utilize the unshare button. This isn’t natural. Often the best product design is translating existing behavior patterns to new mediums. But the proliferation of content, in both volume and access, requires a brand new conception of sharing and curation. Together we can bring about a golden age.

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Facebook and the Age of Curation Through Unsharing

The WD TV Live may not have the clout of Roku or Boxee, but these little streaming boxes are a good choice for streamers and home media enthusiasts. They added Spotify to the lineup last month, which makes the box a solid replacement for your laptop or iPod when you just need a few tunes, and now they’ve announced Vimeo and Playjam access as well. That’s really all there is to it. You know Vimeo, no doubt, and Playjam is a games channel full of time-wasters to play while you’re waiting for your movie load up or transfer. They’ll both be installed via a firmware update for the WD TV. I really can’t make the news last any longer than that. I’m going to use this space to say that hopping around Vimeo randomly really produces some excellent results. A ton of people I know in the creative industry have cool side projects and things there, and you can find all sorts of crazy animations , short documentaries , and insane music videos there, and the community is very supportive. It’s better than YouTube for just leaning back and browsing for interesting stuff. Okay, that’s probably enough words that this post doesn’t look weird.

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Western Digital’s WD TV Gets Vimeo, Playjam Support

It’s been a hard night and Erick and I thought it would be fitting to reflect a bit on Steve Jobs and his legacy. We’re both understandably crushed by the news but rather than look back we wanted to look forward, forward to what comes next in a world without one of its greatest thinkers. Steve Jobs is important to us because the gifts he gave mankind are innumerable. He gave us the gifts of elegance, of clarity, of drive. He gave us computers that spawned industries, phones that paid millions of salaries. He made it so I can Facetime from the road with my children before they go to bed and not have to worry about connection issues, downloads, fiddling. The stuff he made just works. Call him prickly. Call his products overpriced and underpowered. Call Apple a toymaker, not serious, not real. But remember that everything Steve Jobs touched was a masterpiece of engineering in a world where “just OK” is increasingly the norm. His products outsell almost anything else by an order of magnitude. He’s not being praised here because millions of people are bewitched and ignorant. He’s being praised because millions of people see the future as he did: a place where things get increasingly better, where we are more connected, better informed, and generally happier. There’s a reason the old Apple logo was a human and a computer smiling at each other. That smile is primordial. It’s the smile of a worker with his best tools. It’s the smile of a thinker over her favorite book. It’s the smile of a man, alone in a hotel room, watching his daughter read Cinderella to her dolls.

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TCTV: Reflections On Steve Jobs And His Legacy

It seems the the Book of Mormon is one of the first Broadway musicals to receive the popular pirate treatment. As of yesterday, there was a bootleg version of the show floating around the sharing sites complete with instructions on how to improve your watching experience. A bootlegger shot the show in March, 2011 on a video camera, thereby assigning it the BROADWAYCAM moniker – a CAM being a video shot surreptitiously by a pirates. Ironically, one could say that the rise of bootlegging came with the recording and distribution of live shows by audio-savvy bootleggers, leading to the regency of the Grateful Dead and other jam bands. Thus far, however, Broadway shows have been immune to this kind of wholesale theft although I suspect the next show to get this treatment will be that Spiderman musical. To be fair, Book of Mormon is a perfect storm of pirate-able performance. The provenance, the hype, and the creators all make this a must-see in the geek set and the fact that tickets are sold out and that the only performance in New York will encourage folks to download it. While I doubt Cats or Mama Mia! will ever get a bootleg, I’m surprised the Monty Python musical didn’t show up as a shaky cam on the Interwebs a few years back.

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Is Nothing Sacred? First Broadway Cam Surfaces