General Gaming Article

General Gaming Article

Analyst Estimates Amazon Rakes in over $130 per Kindle Fire

Posted: 22 Jan 2012 08:23 PM PST

Kindle FireWhen Amazon announced that the Kindle Fire would launch below $200, the audience literally erupted in applause. Getting that first number down to a one, even if only by a penny, has important psychological consequences on consumer behavior. Even more surprising were the analyst reports that circulated around the same time suggesting Amazon was paying around $210 to build each unit. Taking a $10 loss might not sound like much for a company with such deep pockets, but multiply that by millions of devices sold and its one heck of a risky move.

Amazon doesn't share much information publically about revenues from the Kindle division, however a new analyst report is suggesting not only is the $199 price point a smart move, the company is raking in massive revenues on content sales. According to RBC Capital analyst Ross Sandler, sales of books, videos, and apps have been strong, and have validated Amazon's approach to sell the devices on the cheap, but make it up in content sales. "Our assumption is that Amazon could sell 3-4 million Kindle Fire units in Q4, and that those units are accretive to company-average operating margin within the first six months of ownership. Our analysis assigns a cumulative lifetime operating income per unit of $136, with a cumulative operating margin of over 20 percent."

Sandler attributes most of the average $136 profit per device to e-book sales, citing statistics that show 80% of Fire buyers having purchased at least one book, and 58% buying more than three titles within the first two months of ownership. The overall average he claims works out to about five e-books, three apps, and several movie and music tracks purchased per user each quarter.

Only Amazon knows for sure, but if Sandler is right Jeff Bezos has proved once again he's not to be second guessed. 

Ubisoft Loosens Anno DRM Restrictions To Allow GPU Upgrades

Posted: 22 Jan 2012 04:40 PM PST

Anno 2070We've almost completely given up discussing Ubisoft DRM here at Maximum PC, and with good reason. Just about every PC release seems to ship with some draconian and insanely punishing copy protection mechanism designed to drive paying customers insane. Anno 2070 was no different, releasing with an activation system that limited you to a total of 3 lifetime activations, ohh and upgrading your video card, as discovered by Guru3D, counts against this total.

After briefly toying with the idea of completely excluding all future Ubisoft titles from graphics card benchmarks, Guru3D did the right thing, and decided only by reporting on the issues would any action ever be taken to improve the situation. Thanks in no small part of their efforts, Ubisoft has lightened up a bit on its restrictions, now allowing users to upgrade graphics cards without triggering an additional activation. 

Swapping out your motherboard, CPU, or of course formatting Windows still counts, and no, you still can't manually deactivate to reset your total. The only option is to call customer service and beg forgiveness, ohh or buy another copy that works too. 

Arctic Planning To Sue AMD Over “Fusion” Branding

Posted: 22 Jan 2012 04:20 PM PST

fusionComing up with new and hip brand names isn't an easy task, that is unless you take the easy road and just stuck "I" in front of everything.  For those most part these days marketing departments are finding all the reasonably catchy buzz words have been snatched up, and much to the surprise of AMD, so was Fusion. According to Arctic (formerly Arctic Cooling), the brand name Fusion is already used to promote the companies power supplies, and the trademark was acquired long before AMD came along. 

Normally this would be a pretty cut and dry case of trademark infringement, but at least in this case, there is a bit of an interesting twist. AMD doesn't use "Fusion" as a brand name on anything other than internal documents, and its main slogan "The future is fusion". Outside AMD, Fusion APU's are branded under the Vision processor family, giving AMD the opportunity to argue the use of "fusion" in its name is merely a descriptive verb.

AMD has even renamed its "fusion architecture" to "heterogeneous architecture", so Artic has a bit of an uphill battle on this one. 
Posted by Shri Krishna

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