A few months ago, Amazon announced that they were giving Amazon Prime customers access to their Video On Demand. I’m not an Amazon Prime member, but I order quite a bit from Amazon. For $80/year, I thought that sounded like a pretty good deal, since I was interested in some of the stuff they had – like Mad Men and some of their movies. I finally went to Amazon today and discovered that only a subset of the Video on Demand is free to Amazon Prime members. More specifically, of the 44,485 Video on Demand items, only 2,386 of them are free for Amazon Prime members. That works out to about 5% of Amazon’s catalog, and it included none of the videos I was interested in watching.

I should’ve known it was too good to be true.

I have to credit Penny-Arcade for pointing this out today. It’s some games made by GameLoft that are basically clones of Blizzard’s games, but they’re built for mobile devices. Of course, all of this is legal — they aren’t using any of Blizzard’s source code, artwork, or product names. (And people say copyright is too restrictive and is strangling creativity. Heh, heh.)

See how quickly you can figure out what Blizzard games they’re cloning. It shouldn’t take too long.

I stumbled on this interesting graphic the other day. They looked at per-capita spending on music in the United States and adjusted for inflation. I think this is interesting on a few levels. First, it shows how the move to digital sales hasn’t rescued the music industry (despite the occasional claim that ‘if you give people a chance to buy it digitally, people will pay’). The movie industry has also taken a hit over the past ten years (a slight decline in box-office revenue of about 15% or so, and a larger decline in DVD sales and rentals). While I think these declines can be traced (at least in part) to piracy, I do wonder why the games industry hasn’t seen a similar hit, though I can think of a few factors that might be affecting things: the increased danger and difficultly of pirating games on consoles (e.g. the XBox requires a mod-chip and you can still get kicked off the Microsoft network, the PS3 wasn’t cracked for years), the increased danger of pirating software (because malevolent software is far more dangerous, since it can infect your computer with viruses), the music industry was generally pretty nasty and unlikeable, the money spent on music wasn’t seen as going to the artist but going to the rich “suits” at the top.

See if you can guess where on this chart Napster was released.

This also makes me think of other issues, like: what is “enough” money needed to sustain an industry, versus when artists/creators are overpaid. Software is something that increases the number of workers (i.e. costs and functionality) as more money comes in. Movies are a bit similar to software, in that, the more money that comes in, the more money is spent creating elaborate special effects. It’s harder to argue that music gets better if a band is paid $1 million versus $20 million a year.