Conspiracy Saturday one day earlier edition: Is Corporate Espionage behind PSN Shutdown?

If you are a PS3 owner you are one of many millions shut off from Sony's online playground "PSN".  Sony's PSN online service has been shutdown coincidently since 4/20/2011.  April 20th(aka:420) is a date synonymous with many evil's, bastardly deeds and of course "Pot" Weed, Mary Jane, and Ganja.  Adolf Hitler was born on 4/20/1889, Columbine High School shooting was 4/20/1999, Serbian army bombs hospital in Goradze Bosnia, 47 killed 4/20/1994, France declares war on Austria, Prussia and Sardinia 4/20/1792 and 4/20/1941 one hundred German bombers attack Athens.


Now 4/20/2011 will be a day etched in stone as the day Sony pulled the plug on it's PSN online services due to "External Intrusion".  According to Patrick Seybold Sr. Director, Corporate Communications &  Social Media: "An external intrusion on our system has affected our PlayStation Network and Qriocity services. In order to conduct a thorough investigation and to verify the smooth and secure operation of our network services going forward, we turned off PlayStation Network & Qriocity services on the evening of Wednesday, April 20th. Providing quality entertainment services to our customers and partners is our utmost priority. We are doing all we can to resolve this situation quickly, and we once again thank you for your patience. We will continue to update you promptly as we have additional information to share.

This has been a very contentious, bitter and extremely costly console war between Sony and Microsoft. Sony's has just announced that they've hit the 50 million mark, trailing just slightly behind Microsoft's Xbox 360. With Microsoft's sales number's heavily tinted because of the RROD fiasco and the slow demise of the core-gaming experience; Sony's momentum needs to be slowed to a grinding halt.

Microsoft has thrown billions of dollars to attract timed exclusives and innovated technology to enhance it's core & motion gaming department.  But no matter how much money Microsoft spends and how many feature they cram unto Xbox LIVE it seems that Sony's PS3 with it's hefty price tag(obvious lack luster online service), is on pace to catch if not surpass Microsoft this year in global console sales.

When Microsoft released Window Phone 7 back in November 8th 2010 to a silent whimper.  News started to swirl a month or so later that Windows Phone 7 had been hacked, thereby enabling homebrew programs to be run on the platform and circumventing the Marketplace. 


So the guys who made it possible to run homebrew apps on the Marketplace-centric Windows Phone 7 platform got a nice piping hot cup of coffee and a fun little t-shirt to their wardrobe? But is that all?

While giving away t-shirts to people that hack your code isn’t the way  Apple or Sony would roll, it certainly seems to be the future for Microsoft who seem to be engaging with their computer savvy users in a whole new slightly disturbing way since the release of Windows Phone 7.

Now, this new yet strange and twisted relationship with the Hacking community may have benefited Microsoft in a huge and unexpected ways.  


Could these new found friends Microsoft has embraced be behind the current PSN outage?   Could this have been sanction by Microsoft to help slow the momentum Sony is currently high on? Is the outage an act by the shady for the "people" group" called "anonymous".  Or was it a single splinter from that group?  Only time and Sony of Japan engineers will shed some light on what will be Sony's 4/20 debacle.

Share your thoughts; could it be Corporate Espionage or some lone wolf with a sick twisted vendetta against Sony?

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Conspiracy Sunday's: Is the Main-Stream Gaming Media Tainted?

The current virtual guerrilla warfare being waged on the Internet has the Main-Stream Gaming media to blame.

The battle between console owners has been a fierce battle of the words with some trolling with elegant grace. In my many years in gaming I've  never seen the gaming community so fractured and segmented before. Many may ask "why has gaming become a rabid angry war of words?".  I believe the answer lies in the way the "Main-Stream Gaming Media" goes about doing it's business.

Today we will look into the a  popular gaming website and I will provide my opinion on why, I believe there is a hidden or tainted agenda when it comes to Main-Stream Gaming Media. Please be advised that my views are based on the all mighty dollar aka: "Cha Ching".

IGN.com

"New York, NY, September 8, 2005 - News Corporation announced today that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire IGN Entertainment, Inc, a leading community-based Internet media and services company for video games and other forms of digital entertainment, for approximately $650 million in cash"  Coincidentally the Xbox 360 was released on November 22nd, 2005, in the United States and Canada; December 2nd, 2005, in Europe and December 10th, 2005, in Japan. The PlayStation 3 was later launched in Japan on November 11th 2006 at 07:00 and in United States on  November 17th 2006.

Oh and let us not forget "Jan. 6, 2011— GameStop (NYSE: GME), the world's largest video game and multi-channel entertainment software retailer, and IGN Entertainment, the leading online media network for video game enthusiasts, have announced an exclusive, large-scale partnership that combines content from IGN with expert review content from Game Informer Magazine to make GameStop.com a single destination for gamers who want to maximize their game experience."

Now you may be asking how the fuck does all this ties into the main-stream gaming media being tainted.  Well, for one News Corp and Microsoft have a very special relationship.  Back in 2009 Wired.com wrote an article about NewsCorp threatening to pull the company’s news articles from Google and putting them on Microsoft search engines instead, in return for an undisclosed payment. In April 2008 Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation was in talks with Microsoft about joining in its contested bid for Yahoo, according to people involved in the discussions.

Conspiracy Theory:  NewsCorp purchases IGN in September for $650 million dollars the following month Microsoft's Xbox 360 debut's 364 days before the PS3.  During this time period and beyond IGN has had a love feast with all thing Xbox related. Back in August 2007 it was revealed by Metafuture a new game review watchdog blog that inflates or deflates a review score based upon the reviewers history of awarding that score multiple times. The analysis of both IGN and Gamespot reviews revealed a large rightward shift of the good 'ole bell curve, possibly confirming what many have believed for years (cough, cough; "get'n pay'd to review games").

IGN's average review score was a whopping 8.0, and the site heavily favors evenly rounded scores. Gamespot, while a little more balanced and even in their curve, has an average review of 7.0. So either there are a butt load of great games we're overlooking, or something fishy is going on.

Now also consider IGN's one year honeymoon with the only next generation video game console on  the market.  Ad dollars and hits enables a large site to survive.  With many developers debuting their games on Xbox 360 during it's launch, they had to let millions of gamers around the world know their game existed.   The best way to accomplish this besides television ads,will be a large main-stream gaming website with 28 million unique users(IGN).  So in theory developers paid IGN to have their games get favorable review scores to help cement the early success of the Xbox 360.

There is something strange going on this generation in gaming, there is no denying it.  The proof is out there in the open, the way the gaming community is so segmented.  And not let's forget the total imbalance of review scoring that we see across the board between PS3 and Xbox 360 games. You may call me crazy or delusional, but there are unscrupulous and shady back door dealings going on in the main-stream gaming media, money is being exchanged in indirect ways and direct ways-to ensure a "Console King" is crowned.

[Sources: Wiki, IGN,WSJ,Metefuture,Wired]

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