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Black Ops now fastest selling game ever

Call of Duty: Black Ops sold some $360 million worth of product on its first day last week, breaking the one-day sales record held by Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 by $50 million. That's 5.

Call of Duty: Black Ops sold some $360 million worth of product on its first day last week, breaking the one-day sales record held by Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 by $50 million. That's 5.6 million unit sales, enough to make one Microsoft exec recant on his prediction that Halo: Reach would be the top selling game of the year. Of course, Halo is only available on the Xbox 360 while Black Ops was simultaneously available on Xbox, PS3, PC and Apple computers.

What's really interesting, aside from the usual controversies that surround realistic video games, is the continuing shift from movies to what I would call interactive entertainment. The Dark Knight currently holds the Hollywood record for earning $158.5 million on opening weekend, which is a three-day period. In terms of revenues, assuming ticket sales for Dark Knight were consistent on all three days, Black Ops earned almost seven times as much on day one as the top-grossing movie of all time.

Obviously the two forms of media are not directly comparable. It costs $12 to see a movie and $60 to purchase a game. Fans may see a movie twice or purchase the DVD down the road.

Development costs are also not directly comparable. It's been estimated that the first Call of Duty: Modern Warfare cost $120 million (U.S.) in marketing alone, but from a programming standpoint all three sequels were made using the same engine and costs from title to title were significantly reduced - as was the marketing budget, given the fact that everybody who purchased the first Call of Duty titles were probably already sold on the latest title without too much arm-twisting.

Although there's no question Hollywood is still a good industry to be in, the profits to be made from top video game titles are prompting all of the big movie houses to get into the video game industry, as well - not just hiring game companies to make games to support their movies, either, but developing their own games using in-house talent.

Sony is probably the best example, making and commissioning their own titles to support their consoles and handhelds.

Paramount Studios is making video game versions of Days of Thunder and Top Gun , and a Star Trek game to capitalize on the rebooted franchise.

Lionsgate is getting into casual games, which suits its indie film reputation. Fox Atomic makes games for Fox. Universal and Warner Bros. are both making games - with the latter making a huge splash with its top-rated Batman: Arkahm Asylum game.

It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Movie studios purchase the licences to intellectual properties like Batman or the Transformers for millions of dollars, and that licence typically includes the right to develop games. By making those games themselves, rather than contracting someone else to do it, they have more control over the property and get to keep more of the profits if a game is a hit.

To boot, game companies are notorious for going bankrupt and getting bought out, as well as for delays, for designers jumping ship, for leaks in the media, and so on. Opening your own game studio next door to the movie studio inoculates you against all of these issues.

In the end, I think this is a good thing. Hollywood and the video game industry are both in the entertainment industry but aren't really in direct competition with one another. In fact, there's huge opportunity to overlap movies, television, musicĀ  and video games, and modern-day consoles - with Netflix, Hulu, etc. - are being sold as entertainment centres these days for good reason.

Still, I bet Hollywood's old guard felt a chill last Wednesday when they saw the Black Ops numbers. I know I did.

 

Word processing tips for the masses

 

Sometimes I have to edit long documents, and it's not easy. For one, everybody has a different writing style and uses different fonts and settings. For another, everybody seems to be using a different word processing program - various versions of Microsoft Word (pre-and-post XML), World Perfect, Open Office, Apple iWork, etc. The resulting confusion can make formatting a constant challenge.

Luckily, I've figured out a few tricks.

If a file is XML (e.g. it's followed by the .docx extension) and you don't have a newer version of Word, then you can import that file into Google Docs or Microsoft Office Online and resave it to your desktop as another type of file.

In Word, I also recommend going to Tools and AutoCorrect to turn things off like straight quotes and hyperlinks. If the fonts and formatting are strange, Word also has a handy reformatting tool that allows you to "Clear Formatting." This will get rid of weird spaces, text formatting and breaks and apply all your basic defaults - including your default font. If spacing is not to your liking, then you can select all of the text, open the Format drop-down menu and select Paragraph. There you can set indents, line spacing, paragraph spacing and other parameters back to zero.

If someone has smart quotes turned off, uses two spaces instead of one at the end of a sentence, puts en-dashes where em-dashes should be, or does something else that's manually challenging to fix, your best friend is Ctrl/Command "F" - this will open up the Finder, which includes the Find and Replace option. You can use Find and Replace to change quotes, dashes and even get rid of extra non-printing characters like spaces and tabs.

Most of these tricks are for Word, but the other programs have similar features built in.