Month: January 2018

Enlarge / We will admit, new sales for the consoles shown here did not do very well in 2017

It's a bit hard to remember now, but we're only four or five years out from widespread and confident predictions that the game console market was effectively dead or dying. In 2012, Wired cited mobile disruption and "the whole box-model mentality" in declaring the death of the console. Around the same time, CNN cited a "four-year tailspin" in sales for dedicated consoles (which, coincidentally, started right around the same time as the global financial crisis) to explain "why console gaming was dying."

And IGN, in its own 2012 look at the fate of the console market, offered a bold prediction for the fate of the PS4 months before it was even officially announced: "A better-graphics box at $400? Not going to work."

Today, those and many other relatively recent predictions of doom for the console market look downright silly. The industry analysts at NPD announced last night that the US video game market grew 11 percent in 2017 to $3.3 billion. The reason? "Video game hardware [meaning consoles] was the primary driver of overall growth," as hardware was up 27 percent for the year, to $1.27 billion.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | alexsl)

An iPhone application that attempts to detect whether ISPs are throttling online services is now available on Apple's App Store, despite Apple originally refusing to allow it onto iPhones and iPads.

The Wehe app has been available for iOS at this link since last night. It had already been available for Android on the Google Play store for at least a month.

Wehe tests the speeds of YouTube, Amazon, NBCSports, Netflix, Skype, Spotify, and Vimeo in different ways and uses variances in measured results to judge whether or not traffic is being throttled to your device.. But Apple initially refused to let the app into the App Store, telling its creator that "your app has no direct benefits to the user."

Enlarge / The Zuma mission launched on Jan. 7 from Florida. (credit: SpaceX)

The space community has not learned much about the apparent loss of the Zuma payload launched by SpaceX on January 7, but the mystery has had one clear after effect: critics of SpaceX, including several far-right publications, have weaponized the failure of a national security satellite in their continued stream of attacks on the company.

For example The Federalist, a publication that defended the dating habits of Alabama Judge Roy Moore in his Senate campaign, opined about the accident, "It is concerning, to say the least, that American taxpayers have become the guinea pigs who will bear the risks and the costs before a final determination can be made." The conservative Washington Times also published a critical piece, noting that, "Taxpayers are tired of getting ripped off."

These articles were written by individuals with little apparent knowledge about the aerospace industry. The Federalist author lists, among his qualifications, that he "helped the 2014 freshmen Republican class to set up offices." The Times author notes on his LinkedIn profile that he is a "professional coalition builder."