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In Asian gaming markets like Korea and, to a lesser extent, Japan, there is an entirely distinct business model for video game releasing that's never been tried here in the US at any broad scale or with any success: free games, supported by ads and micro-transactions.

Certain games, like EA's FIFA and a few titles from NC Soft are released for free to download in Korea but give players the option to purchase in-game objects and upgrades. EA's FIFA, for instance, lets you pay a few bucks for customized jersies as well as limited upgrades to a player's stats. Most people just play with what they can get for free, but enough people buy the extras that, combined with revenue from ads placed inside the games (be it actually within gameplay itself or just ads that appear within the interface) for the game to turn a profit.

EA's new chief executive, John Riccitiello, and Gerhard Florin, EA's executive vice president, aim to bring that model to the US starting with a brand new game just announced: Battlefield Heroes.

Not to be confused with Medal of Honor: Heroes, Company of Heroes, Bionacle Heroes, Sonic Heroes, City of Heroes, Heroes of the Pacific, Heroes of Might and Magic, or the TV show Heroes, Battlefield Heroes is a "dumbed-down", cartooned-up entry to the Battlefield franchise aimed at slightly more casual gamers.

“The existing Battlefield games are fairly deep; you have to be pretty good or you’ll die pretty quick,” Gerhard Florin told the New York Times. “Now we’ve toned down the difficulty, shortened each game session to 10 or 15 minutes and made the visual style more cartoony.”

He says that if this is a success, other EA library titles could be given the ad-supported treatment. Worth noting is that these are only PC titles we're talking about here, there's been no mention of applying this model to the console realm.

Here's to goofing off at work and not having to pay for it.

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The New York Times has caught on to the fact that the Wii has been out for a year now and they're still impossible to get without waiting in a line or bruising your scruples on eBay.

From the article:

The unsated demand is costing Nintendo more than face. Estimates from industry analysts and retailers indicate that the company, which is based in Kyoto, Japan, is giving up $1 billion or more in sales in the ever-important holiday retail season, not including sales of games for those unbuilt consoles.

“It’s staggering,” said James Lin, senior analyst at the MDB Capital Group in Santa Monica, Calif., who estimates that Nintendo is leaving $1.3 billion on the table. “They could easily sell double what they’re selling.”

Well gee, maybe they should make some more....

Howard Stringer, head of Sony worldwide and never missing an opportunity to seem like a jackass, says, "I’m happy that the Wii seems to be running out of hardware" and again points out that the PlayStation 3 has finally started to outsell the Wii.

Now that there are no Wiis.

That's a cool thing to be proud of. The alternative is impossible to get, so your product is outselling it. Awesome. Kudos. Ten points to you.

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 According to an analyst quoted in the linked Ars Technica article, as of October of this year, more video games had been sold than in all of 2006. Considering that November and December are the biggest game-buying months of the year, this is huge news.

DVDs, on the other hand, are starting to slow in sales. Chalk it up to market confusion over High Def formats, or the fact that movies lately have been pretty bad, but DVDs have always been the great redeemer for movies that do poorly in theaters ("Eh, I'll wait for the DVD") so I imagine studio execs are pretty worried, in addition to the worrying they're doing over the fact that they have no writers.

For instance, Halo 3 sold more copies than Shrek 3, even though Halo 3 costs at least 3 times as much at $60. That could, of course, have something to do with the multi-million dollar ad campaign behind Halo 3 that spanned nearly all forms of media versus the fact that I didn't even know Shrek 3 was out on DVD yet (nor did I altogether care).

The story isn't lagging DVD sales, though, it's the increased game sales. Market saturation has at least seeped beneath the layer of hardcore gamers and meathead Madden fans. The Xbox's allure and the Wii and DS's casual gaming push may be the cause. Or it could be Peggle. Everybody's playing Peggle.

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Not to stoke the fires of the great Console War, but according to this quarterly income report filed by EA, in the last six months the mega-publisher has earned roughly $218 million from Xbox 360 game sales and a paltry $17 million from PlayStation 3 game sales.

That comes out to slightly under 13 times more revenue from Xbox 360 games than PS3 games.

EA even made more money on from PSP games than PS3 games. Hell, they even made more on cell phone games.

In short, the largest video game publisher on Earth is making practically no money from a system nobody wants to buy, because there's no good games, because nobody would buy them if they made them, because nobody has that system.

Or because the only notable games released for the PS3 have been first-party releases.

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