This spring a game-company analyst at UBS named Ben Schachter published a report with a subversively innocuous title: “Does Video Game Quality Impact Sales?”
To find out, Mr. Schachter and his team reviewed data for more than 1,500 games released from 2002 to 2005, looking for correlations between sales and the gamesÂ’ scores on Gamerankings.com, which compiles reviews from many publications and Web sites into a numeric verdict between 1 and 100. Their conclusion was simple: Top-rated games sell a lot more copies than bad ones. Sounds obvious, right?
Not so fast. The provocative angle is that if you look at film and popular music, for instance, there is almost no correlation between what critics say and what the public buys. That may be because movie tickets and iTunes downloads cost so little, relatively, that many people simply ignore movie and pop-music criticism. (Conversely, one reason theater critics traditionally have enjoyed influence with the public is because theater tickets are expensive.) But in music and movies it can seem as if a bit of a civil war has been brewing for decades, with reviewers on one side and the mass market on the other.
There must be a reason NBC chose to lavish an hour of prime time tonight on “Victoria Beckham: Coming to America.”
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Victoria Beckham: Coming to America A soccer wife moves to Los Angeles in this reality show tonight on NBC.
But conspiracy theorists will be hard put to connect the dots. ItÂ’s not clear what links Philip F. Anschutz, the billionaire who agreed to pay David Beckham $27.5 million over five years to play for his soccer team, the Los Angeles Galaxy, to General Electric, the conglomerate that owns NBC. At first Google-glance, there appears to be little overlap between the corporations. If anything, their film divisions are competitors.
With the July 4 holiday last week, NBC’s evening news broadcast sank to an all-time ratings low, though it still ranked solidly second, ahead of CBS. According to Nielsen Media Research, NBC’s “Nightly News With Brian Williams” drew an average of 6.8 million viewers last week as Mr. Williams, the newscast’s regular anchor, vacationed Wednesday through Friday. ABC’s “World News With Charles Gibson,” who did not go on leave, remained No. 1 for its 11th consecutive week, attracting 7.5 million viewers. CBS’s “Evening News With Katie Couric” finished third over all (5.6 million). Among adults 25 to 54, the demographic most sought after by advertisers, all three evening newscasts posted their lowest numbers since Nielsen began tracking them in 1987.
AVA GARDNER, I once read, pulled up loose skin on her face with hooks, and stuffed it under a wig. That was her makeshift face-lift. Joan Crawford is said to have smothered her acne with a morticianÂ’s layer of makeup. Marilyn MonroeÂ’s scalp was reportedly visible to intimates, shining scarlet from the scalding bleach she used. She was also, legend has it, going bald.
The mission of the popular television show “So You Think You Can Dance” is not to crown America’s favorite dancer, but to find Leroy from the 1980 film “Fame” — a gritty dancer with attitude who possesses nothing but a soaring jump and the ability to spin on a dime. It won’t hurt if the new Leroy is also an emotional wreck. America loves nothing better than to see arrogance crushed to reveal deep vulnerability.
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Danny Tidwell dancing with Anya Garnis on “So You Think You Can Dance” and, right, performing with American Ballet Theater in 2004.
But Leroy, it turns out, is an elusive muse, and the show, now in its third season and open to both men and women, has failed to produce a dancer of much distinction. (“So You Think You Can Dance” pairs dancers who perform a different style of dance each Wednesday at 8 p.m., Eastern and Pacific times, on Fox; the following night, results of an audience vote are announced. After a round of 30-second solos performed by those in danger of elimination, two dancers are sent packing.)
The provocative new BET series “Hot Ghetto Mess” has been confronted by online campaigns to halt it, but Reginald Hudlin, the president for entertainment of BET Networks, said yesterday that BET is “still making the tone and intent of the show clear.” At least one advertiser, State Farm Insurance Companies, has confirmed that it will not advertise on the show, which will have its premiere on July 25. With the comedian Charlie Murphy as its host, “Hot Ghetto Mess,” inspired by the controversial Web site of the same name, uses commentary, video clips and man-on-the street interviews to examine black communities and other neighborhoods. “ItÂ’s straightforward in its condemnation of bad behavior,” Mr. Hudlin said of the series, a mix of comedy and social commentary. But critics at the sites Read the rest of this entry »
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — HBO’s new one-hour relationship drama, “Tell Me You Love Me,” won’t have its premiere until Sept. 9, but if DVDs of the 10-part series are enjoying marathon viewings in Hollywood, it might have something to do with how it was labeled before a single frame had been shot.
“It was known as ‘the pornography show,’ ” said Ally Walker, who never had to worry about taking her clothes off on “Profiler,” the NBC psychic detective series and plays Katie in “Tell Me You Love Me.” “One of my agents said: ‘You’re not going to want to do this. There’s lots of nudity.’ ”
Ms. Walker’s agent was correct about the amount of racy scenes in “Tell Me You Love Me.” “Honest” is how Cynthia Mort, the creator and an executive producer of “Tell Me You Love Me,” preferred to describe the show when she first pitched her concept to HBO: a close look at four committed couples, ranging from their 20s to their 60s.
LONDON, July 10 — The European Union feels unloved. Too many Europeans consider its governing bureaucracy, the European Commission, to be meddlesome, stuffy and generally out of touch. It has, you might say, an image problem: even when it does something useful, no one seems willing to give it credit.
Just imagine, then, how the carpets of power in Brussels must have buzzed with excitement when some hip marketeer — perhaps a well-paid consultant — came up with the idea of reaching out to the public through a newly created Web site linked to YouTube. Surely young Europeans would now pay attention.
A picture from Killzone 2, created by Sony’s internal development studio for its PlayStation 3. The game will not be available until next year.
As succinctly as possible, that is the message from this yearÂ’s E3, the video game industryÂ’s top annual conference, which wrapped up here today. Having attended nearly three dozen meetings, presentations and parties since Tuesday and seeing at least 100 new games, it appears to me that after more than a year of gobsmacking miscalculations, missteps and plain old mistakes, SonyÂ’s game group is possibly getting its act back together. After being kicked around by its main competitors, Microsoft and Nintendo, Sony is taking the first real steps to generate momentum behind its troubled PlayStation 3 game console, a critical component of the companyÂ’s overall future and a contender for the attention of hundreds of millions of gamers around the world.
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