Just as the annual Consumer Electronics Show kicks off this week, according to a report from the NPD Group: Consumer electronics sales during this past holiday period dropped six percent from last year.

That should be some not-so-welcome news for the vendors at the Las Vegas gadget confab, which is seeking to show off new wares to excite said consumers.

Those offerings had better step it up, from a look at the NPD Weekly Tracking Service, which noted that the decline was coming off another decline from a year ago.

While 2011′s drop was not as bad as 2010′s, it’s not the right direction, although the tally did not include some of the more explosive device categories being prominently featured at CES, such as tablets.

Said NPD: “Total consumer technology sales (excluding cell phones, tablets, e-readers, and video games) fell 5.9 percent to around $9.5 billion for the 5 weeks ending December 24, a slight improvement over the 6.2 percent decline in 2010.”

Sales of personal computers and televisions fell 4 percent, with flat unit volumes.

“2010 was the first year in quite awhile where the real drags on the core CE marketplace were not TVs and PCs,” said Stephen Baker, VP of industry analysis at NPD, in a press release. “Revenue for those two segments outperformed while the rest of the market dropped by more than 7 percent. The accelerated rate of decline in older technology categories such as DVD, GPS and MP3 players put a ceiling on how well the industry could perform during the holiday.”

Consumers did snap up flat-panel TVs, with screen sizes of 50 inches and higher rising by 32 percent in unit sales.

And the rocky 3-D TV business also grew by more than 100 percent, with TVs with “3D capability accounting for more than one in every five dollars spent on TVs during the holiday.”

Also up: Home theater systems (10 percent) and stand-alone streaming devices (65 percent).

But those increases did not stem the overall negative tide.

For other sectors, here’s the damage to holiday revenue in percentage change from 2011 dollars spent:

Blu-ray players: Down 17 percent.

Camcorders: Down 42.5 percent.

Digital picture frames: Down 37.5 percent.

GPS: Down 32.6 percent.

HDD: Down 25.1 percent.

Mice and keyboards: Down 7.1 percent.

MP3 players: Down 20.5 percent.

Multifunction printers: Down 9.9 percent.

Point-and-shoot cameras: Down 20.8 percent.

MORE CES NEWS:

• Complete coverage
• HP’s Former CTO: Ultrabooks Are Nothing New, webOS Still Has Life Yet
• Walt Shows Off CES Gadgets for Fox Business News (Video)
• What Kind of Web Video Plans Does Sony Have? (Video)
• Fujitsu Seeking Way Into Crowded U.S. Smartphone Market
• Why Rhapsody Is (Probably) Bigger Than Spotify — In the U.S.
• Microsoft Beefing Up CeBit Presence Even as It Pulls Back on CES
• Inside the CES Lost & Found
• FCC Chairman Has New Tablet, but Same Script: More Spectrum!
• Verizon Wireless: We Want to Connect Five Devices for Every Subscriber
• Ultrabooks From HP and Lenovo That Are (Kinda, Sorta) Different
• Walt and Katie Take a Tour of CES (Video)
• Schmidt-Storm Alert: The Google Chairman Didn’t Like Your Question
• T-Mobile Expands Bobsled Messaging Service
• Intel Shows Just How It Plans to Get Into Phones (Video)
• Motorola CEO: We’re Going to Release Fewer Phones This Year
• Kinect Helps Keep Aging Xbox at the Top of Its Game
• More From T-Mobile CEO: On Pricing, LTE and That Ever-Elusive iPhone
• Exclusive: New Boss Acknowledges Windows Phone Still Has “Awareness Problem”
• And You Thought Jawbone UP Was Going to Miss the CES Party!
• Interview: T-Mobile CEO Says No Second AT&T Deal Out There
• Grover Is at CES and I Am Missing It
• BlueStacks Bringing Android Apps to Windows 8
• Why the Future of TV Won’t Be Here Soon
• Nvidia’s Tegra 3 Tries to Save Battery in All Sorts of Different Ways
• Dynamic Dual Coverage: Ballmer’s Last Act in Vegas and the BCS Championship in 3-D
• Microsoft Phoning In Its Last CES Keynote
• Myspace — Yes, Myspace — Says It’s Going to Sell You Web TV
• Samsung Unveils “Super” 55-Inch OLED TV
• Nokia Unveils That LTE Windows Phone It’s Been Dying to Share
• Steve Ballmer Gives Ralph De La Vega a Very … Vigorous Greeting (Video)
• Interview: AT&T’s De La Vega on LTE, Tablets and Life After T-Mobile
• AT&T’s De La Vega: Shared Data Plans Still in the Works
• LG: 55-Inch Glasses-Free 3-D Screen Is on the Way
• LG Pushes 4G Smartphone Through Verizon: The LG Spectrum
• Live: AT&T’s Vegas Act Stars LTE and, Making Her Return to the Stage, Nokia
• CES Notebook: The Constant Search for Power and Vegas’ Worst-kept Secret
• Belkin Bringing Mobile TV to Lots of Cellphones, Will Anyone Tune In?
• Acer Introduces “World’s Thinnest” Ultrabook and a “Me-Too” Cloud Service
• There Better Be Some Cool Stuff at CES, Because CE Holiday Sales Data Bytes!
• CES 2012: Snooki and Bieber Are In, Gaga Is Out!
• Coming to a Smartphone Near You: Gorilla Glass 2
• RIM Hopes Next PlayBook OS Will Impress at CES
• Ultrabooks, the Ultra-Fancy New Name for Laptops
• At CES, Expect More Gadgets Telling You to Get Off the Couch
• Intel to Detail Its Phone Plans at CES Next Month
• Microsoft Pulling Out of CES After Upcoming Show
• Intel to Detail Its Phone Plans at CES Next Month
• Dell Will Drop the Flashy Vegas Act for CES This Year
• Ultrabook Conga Line Preps for CES 2012

This one, based on the crazily addictive and popular Portal games, is great. It’s also free, and short — a mere seven minutes long. And really, the last 90 seconds are credits, so you can knock this out very quickly.

“Portal: No Escape” comes to us via director Dan Trachtenberg, whose resume to date seems to consist primarily of commercials and some hosting work at Revision3 video podcasts; note that Diggnation co-host Alex Albrecht is billed as one of the guards.

This looks like it went up on YouTube just a day ago, and it’s getting very popular, very quickly.

Love to know the backstory on this one — it’s clearly not something Trachtenberg put together on a whim, but there’s no indication that there’s a formal tie-in with Valve here.

The research arm of Japanese videogame magazine publisher Enterbrain said the 3DS sold 371,326 units on Saturday and Sunday. Separately, Nintendo said it had shipped out 400,000 3DS units to Japanese retailers ahead of the launch, although the company said the shops could stagger sales if they so choose.

Japanese consumers certainly flocked to stores in droves over the weekend to be among the first to shell out 25,000 yen ($305) to buy a 3DS, which plays 3-D games without requiring special glasses to create the illusion of depth. The strong first-weekend sales come in the face of concerns that a warning by Nintendo about possible health risks from 3-D for children six years old and younger could crimp sales.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

His company, OnLive, has pioneered the concept of running fast-action videogames over the Internet without the need for users to own a gaming console or a PC with a fancy graphics card. The software runs on servers OnLive maintains “in the cloud,” as people like to say in Silicon Valley. Those machines handle the chore of rendering sophisticated gaming images and compress them so they can be delivered to any computer with a Web browser, or to an HDTV equipped with a small add-on device OnLive sells.

On Tuesday, OnLive announced that it had received what Perlman says is a fundamental patent that covers that concept. Among other things, claims of the patent discuss a video game server executing a “high twitch-action” videogame, a compression unit, a transceiver to transmit compressed game video to one or more players located over a remote distance.

“This is an industry-changing patent,” Perlman says.

What irks him is that it took eight years to receive it.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Also, view coverage of Steve Perlman demoing OnLive’s capabilities from last week at D: Dive Into Mobile and from last June at D8.

But Kinect, when it goes on sale Thursday, will also be the most visible test in years of whether Microsoft can churn out breakout consumer products from its huge investment in research and development.

Microsoft faces increasing pressure from investors to show a payoff from those investments, which amounted to $8.7 billion for the fiscal year ended June 30–bigger than the R&D budget for any other tech company. Microsoft has poured a chunk of that money into improving existing products and services like its Bing search engine, as well as more traditional franchises like Windows and Office.

Kinect will be especially visible: an entirely new $150 device sold at retail outlets and aimed squarely at the consumer market, a field in which Microsoft has been more sluggish to respond to trends than Apple Inc. and other competitors.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

On a company blog, EA Sports President Peter Moore said the publisher made the decision to delay “NBA Elite,” which was slated to hit stores next week, because of the company’s conclusion that the game “would benefit from more time in development.” No expected launch date was given.

“We are going to keep working until we’re certain we can deliver a breakthrough basketball experience,” Moore wrote on the blog.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The first person shooter about a space marine with a penchant for off-color humor who battles aliens with increasingly destructive weapons, was to be the fourth installment in a series of games that garnered critical praise and generated controversy for its depiction of women. After 10 years in development, 3D Realms, the studio behind the game, announced it was shutting down in 2009.

The game is being finished by Gearbox Software and will be published by Take-Two Interactive, maker of the “Grand Theft Auto” series. The game is being shown to consumers and the press for the first time at a video game convention today.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Mr. Smallwood did not specify how this differs from the condition of the average videogame aficionado.

Silly as the suit may be, it isn’t without legal ramifications. Steven Roosa, a lawyer doing research at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, sounded almost giddy this week at the prospect that a court might chip away at the enforceability of End User License Agreements, or EULAs. These software license agreements often radically limit how, and for how much, customers can sue if they feel harmed by an electronic product.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The study finds that 35 percent of social network gamers have not previously participated in computer gaming. In one surprising finding, NPD finds that female social gamers outnumber male social gamers, 53 percent to 47percent.

The report also finds that 10 percent of social network gamers have spent money playing the games.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Although videogame sales are in a slump, expectations for “Starcraft II” are high. Blizzard’s parent company, Activision Blizzard (ATVI), has spent more than $100 million developing the computer-based game.

Analysts expect it will sell several million units globally this year, giving a profit boost to Activision’s bottom line.

“There is no shortage of consumers for ‘Starcraft’,” Activision Chief Executive Bobby Kotick said in an interview last month. “For a game that is more than 10 years old, there’s millions of people still playing it.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The Pac-Man-style video game is based on a real-life tussle involving endangered Olive Ridley Sea Turtles. India’s Tata Steel has been building a series of ports along the coast of Orissa, in eastern India, along beachfront that also happens to be one of the biggest nesting sites of the endangered turtle. The environmental organization Greenpeace launched the game last month on Pac-Man’s 30th anniversary to protest the project.

Greenpeace oceans campaigner Areeba Hamid says “entertainment-campaigning” has brought hundreds of thousands to the group’s environmental causes.

“Since we have had the same audience for a long time, we do different things online to try to engage new interest,” said Ms. Hamid.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

“Call of Duty” publisher Activision Blizzard (ATVI) on Monday filed an annual report with regulators that said the company was “concluding an internal human resources inquiry into breaches of contract and insubordination by two senior employees at Infinity Ward.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Spurred by the release of a hot videogame and earlier-than-usual promotions on televisions, U.S. shoppers spent 6.1 percent more on electronics in the first half of November the month, through Nov. 14, than a year ago, according to a recent analysis from MasterCard SpendingPulse, a unit of MasterCard Advisors.

The new data, based on MasterCard SpendingPulse data, which reflect estimates on all payment forms, including cash and checks, comes days before Thanksgiving, the traditional kickoff to the holiday selling season, when consumers traditionally spend several hundred billion of dollars. Retailers count on holiday sales for as much as 40 percent of their annual sales and half their annual profits.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

“It’s something that my wife and I can both agree on,” he says, adding that he plays Xbox 360 games only a few times a week–and often only after his wife is asleep. Each night, he and his wife, who live in Berkeley, Calif., spend an hour or two catching up on TV shows with the console. “It’s kind of taken over from our DVD player,” says Mr. Schefers.

Videogame consoles like the Xbox 360 and Sony Corp.’s (SNE) PlayStation 3 were designed primarily to play games, but the gadgets are increasingly evolving into multimedia home-entertainment devices as manufacturers add nongame features.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Nintendo, whose gadgets and software dominate the portable-videogame market, faces the greatest risk from the emergence of Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch as gaming platforms. But Mr. Iwata says attempts to create a rivalry between the two companies make him “uncomfortable,” because he says it isn’t true. He argues the companies appeal to different consumers.

Yet Apple has made clear that it intends to go after Nintendo’s turf.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The new videogame Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, set to hit stores Tuesday, is a sequel spawned by sequels. But rather than following the frequent pattern of franchises fading as they age, Modern Warfare 2 is the most highly anticipated game of the season.

“It’s the biggest launch in our history, bigger than Halo 3,” said Tony Bartel, merchandising and marketing chief for videogame retailer GameStop, which has been taking pre-orders since April.

The manufacturer, Activision Blizzard Inc. (ATVI), has been advertising the first-person shooter game since March.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

For the quarter, the video game publisher posted non-GAAP revenue of $755 million and non-GAAP profits of 4 cents a share; previous guidance had been for $700 million and 3 cents.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

According to a statement, China’s General Administration of Press and Publications said it rejected NetEase’s application to operate Burning Crusades, the latest version of World of Warcraft. NetEase acquired the license to the popular game after Activision Blizzard (ATVI) dropped its previous China licensee, The9.

The regulator demanded, however, that NetEase stop taking payments and registering new game accounts, or else face punishment that includes “suspension of its Internet service.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Here’s the new trailer for the upcoming videogame-to-live-action Disney (DIS) movie, “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.”

It still looks an awful lot like a videogame and is chock full of special effects–but the adaptation also seems to feature much in the way of shirtlessness and mascara-wearing on the part of star Jake Gyllenhaal.

Directed by Mike Newell, the fantasy-action adventure is produced by Jerry Bruckheimer of “Pirates of the Caribbean” fame, so you just know a theme park ride is next on the list.

Opening May 28, 2010, the story follows along the lines of the videogame, as a rascally prince and a comely princess try to stop an ancient dagger that can reverse time and give unlimited power to evil folks.

If this sounds like every plot of every videogame, with a little “Lord of the Rings” and British accents for all thrown in, you win!

The original videogame series was published by Ubisoft.

Here’s the trailer video, which does look kind of good (and now leads as the choice for the annual movie outing for the D8 staff before our next conference):

One that is causing a particular stir is a change in “Her Majesty,” the final song on the final album that the Beatles recorded. In the album “Abbey Road,” the song starts and ends with distinction: a surprisingly loud opening and an abrupt end. To many Beatles fans, the unresolved ending conveys special meaning, a sense that the iconic band’s music has no end to it.

Well, not anymore.

Read the rest of this post on the original site