While we could say that 2012 was a big year for all orders of geekish news, that would be a cheap introduction. After all, every year has plenty of news to go ’round.
Nevertheless, our intrepid team of Damage Control writers will sort out the highlights for you, in case you somehow missed it all and didn’t know if it was good news or bad.
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1. Apple’s Weird Year
Apple naming the 3rd iteration of the iPad as simply “The New iPad” wasn’t so bad, but the second half of the year introduced some confusion. We had new iPad in a six month time span, an iPad Mini that was underpowered and priced too high compared to its competition (which pretty much screams “wait for the second iteration”), and a copious amount of problems were reported with iOS 6 — especially the maps. What happened?
2. Bleeding Japanese Electronics Companies
Sony, Sharp, and Panasonic continued to report staggering losses this year. Though this is bad news for more than geeks, Japanese companies still release some of the highest quality TVs on the market, among other products. To lose even one of them would be a staggering loss for the entire entertainment industry and millions of consumers. Less competition is never a good thing.
3. Homogeneity in Video Gaming
As budgets rise in video gaming, more and more companies are and will be relying on more safe products. As we saw at E3, the trend this year was mimicking Uncharted, after the second game won numerous Game of the Year awards. Hopefully you’re a big fan of linear, scripted spectacles, because we’re going to get plenty in the near future.
4. Calls for Gender Diversity
Though many are arguing for it, you also have plenty of silly people fighting against it, usually while displaying their grasp of vulgarities and immaturity in the process. It was already bad before, and it doesn’t take much for some nerds to feel like the hobby they know and love is being threatened. It certainly made more than a few people forgo associating with anyone who calls themselves a “gamer”.
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1. Kickstarters
Kickstarter was not a recently introduced concept, but it took off in a big way for video games and other entertainment venues this year. Developers who couldn’t get their projects funded by big publishers went directly to fans for crowd funding, thanks to the openness of the PC platform for gaming. Double Fine’s Adventure Project was the first successful venture, and potential projects like Wasteland 2, Shadowrun Returns, and Project Eternity followed in its footsteps. A risky anime project, Kick-Heart, was also successfully funded.
2. New Niche Game Publishers
Though many didn’t notice, we received two new niche gaming publishers this year. Rising Star Games has published many games in Europe throughout the years, but they’ve now opened their doors in America. Also, Japanese company GungHo Online Entertainment established an American base of operations, though they’re focusing on digital products.
3. Calls for Gender Diversity
The gaming industry has mostly been dominated by males, and there’s been some misogyny embedded within it. But this year, many from both genders rose up to combat this worrisome standard and outline the problems. This will hopefully be the first in a very important and necessary step.
4. Minecraft on Xbox Live Arcade
The port of Minecraft for XBLA was expected to be a big seller for the platform. But no one accurately predicted how big it would be, especially since it was priced higher than the average XBLA game. Around 4.4 million copies have been sold as of the end of November, and it’s still selling between 40,000 to 60,000 each week. It’s proof that there’s still a good place for creative projects in the digital space.
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5. The Hobbit?
This one is kind of a middle ground compared to the entries above. Many were ecstatic when it was revealed that Peter Jackson was working on an adaptation of The Hobbit for the big screen, after the superlative The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. They were OK when they heard it would be adapted into two movies. Then it was revealed it would actually be three, which made it look like he was stretching the movies so their length would equal the LOTR movies, pacing be damned. They could still turn out fine, but everyone was expecting more than that from this effort.
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1. Intel’s socket-less future
Coming in before the wire for this edition was Intel’s announcement that its next processor product line will be its last interchangeable processor. Instead, all of their CPUs will be integrated as early as 2014, even in desktop computers. This would be devastating to many high-end computer users, preventing them from simply upgrading their processors as desired. With integrated-only chips, upgrading the processor would mean buying an whole, new motherboard and essentially rebuilding the entire computer. Intel backpedaled after hardware enthusiasts panicked but, like Apple and discs, the writing is on the wall. The trend-setting chipmaker’s vision of the future historically has been the vision that wins, so don’t count on second-fiddle AMD to be the savior forever.
2. No subs for you!
The American copyright monster isn’t the only meddling force seeking to keep extracting profits from an outdated business model. More and more anime companies are dropping the long-standing “Japanese audio with English subtitles” option from their North American-region DVDs and Blu-Rays. Why? Because in its native land, discs of anime can cost upwards of ten times what we pay across the Pacific, and astute fans are saving a bundle of money by importing foreign copies instead of buying their hometown offerings. The solution is, of course, to saddle the states (and provinces) with an inferior product in order to protect price gouging in Japan. I guess the film industry is bonkers everywhere.
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1. SOPA dies, democracy actually works
How can we not mention the apocalyptic Stop Online Piracy Act’s demise early this year? Perhaps the most impressive part of the whole story was the response. Wikipedia, along with other popular websites, blacked out their pages in January in protest of the disastrous potential of the legislation: Internet “blacklists,” allowing the plaintiffs to enforce the law, eliminating due process and killing innovation. The many Internet heavyweights managed to somehow harness the Internet’s most prolific resource — complainers — and got them to do something useful. While the legislation was cruising to passage without scrutiny, the people made their voices heard loud enough that (a sufficient amount of) Congressmen actually listened. How about that?
2. The Final Frontier
Space is a big thing, and human understanding of it keeps having big years. In 2012, we found water-ice on Mars and Mercury. We refined exoplanet-discovering techniques nearly to the point of making Earth-sized lumps of rock detectable. We peered at stars from practically the very beginning of the universe. SpaceX made the first private supply run to the International Space Station. The Voyager spacecraft is on the threshold of being the first man-made object in interstellar space, where its still-working instruments will tell us all about it.
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1. Project Beached ORCA
Testing new technology is critical before it goes live. A Presidential campaign as sophisticated as Mitt Romney’s should have known this. Instead, Project ORCA—Romney’s answer to Project Narwhal, the Obama campaign’s Get Out the Vote Effort, was supposed to use smartphone technology in order to produce higher voter turnout. Campaign volunteers were to receive voter data in real time to direct resources to areas of low turnout on Election Day, replacing old fashioned caller lists. This would have efficiently allowed volunteers to reach potential Romney supporters. Instead, Project ORCA cost the campaign thousands of votes because of its numerous problems including frequent system crashes on Election Day due to a lack of proper stress testing for the servers. That’s pretty bad for a campaign with more than ample financial resources at its disposal.
2. The Clash of the Apple and Samsung Titans
Every few years huge technology firms trade blows in a variety of ways, for a variety of reasons. There was Apple versus Microsoft, Apple versus Google, Facebook versus Google and the list goes on. Unsurprisingly, the biggest battle of today is in the smartphone sector and the combatants are Apple and Samsung. Their fierce fight is taking place in both the courtrooms and the retail space. Earlier this year Apple won an injunction against Samsung for patient infringement and the Korean manufacturer had to stop selling some of its phones. The injunction was overturned but the fight rages on with neither side willing to settle. In the retail space Samsung made a hard marketing push with its Galaxy S III phone and for a brief period overtook Apple in sales. The American tech company is determined to crush its strongest smartphone competitor but the situation is further complicated because the firms rely on each other for technology.
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1. Nate Silver’s Solid Prediction
Maybe the Romney campaign felt Project ORCA didn’t need to be tested because his victory was all but assured. After all, a variety of political pundits and well-known national polling institutes such as Gallup pegged the election at a toss-up. The Republican party’s own internal polling even showed Mitt Romney with a slight edge. So when New York Times blogger Nate Silver predicted President Obama’s re-election, the blogger’s data stood in sharp contradiction to everyone else’s facts. Unlike Gallup polls or the pundits, Silver had focused his attention on who would win the Electoral College by using data from hundreds of state and local polls. In the end, the math geek’s predictions were almost spot on and raw data soundly beat political punditry.
2. Tablet Variety for All
The iPad remains the most popular tablet on the market and is credited with making tablet computers appealing to the masses. Now consumers have numerous types of tablets to choose from at prices that range from very expensive to fairly cheap. At the high end ($600+) we have the newly released Microsoft Surface tablets running Windows 8. The Surface tablets mark the first time the company has released their own computing hardware (not counting its gaming consoles). If Microsoft is smart its Surface line of devices could give Apple and high-end Android tablets a run for their money. At the mid-to-lower end ($300+) we have the newly released iPad Mini. It’s not as powerful as the iPad but it already feels nicer than most Android tablets in a similar price range and it costs just a little more than an iPod Touch. Finally, we have the Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire 2 at $200. Getting on the tablet bandwagon has never been easier for consumers.
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