the studio hopes to turn it into an LotR-style fantasy blockbuster
As if! At best it will look like Eragon or Dungeons & Dragons, they just need to be sure to hire poor Jeremy Irons to play one of the characters.
This record is hard to believe. They give the monetary value of the sales like in the film industry whereas in the game industry companies are more inclined to provide the number of units sold, making it difficult to figure their actual revenue per title. Oblivious of the exact numbers of the competition, it's easy then to claim they broke a record.
According to Wikipedia, which links to a Reuters article, the worldwide number of sales would be of above 8 million. Some games have sold much more than this (Pokemon Red/Blue, Super Mario Bros, The Sims...). Even if Guitar Hero III is more expensive, it is highly unlikely to be the first video game to pass the billion mark.
GH3 has also the advantage of being a multi-platform game.
Screw Penny Arcade! Everybody knows Penny Arcade and xkcd.com, if you don't, consider yourself lucky, they're not even funny. At the very least they don't need some more linking to their site, they don't deserve all that attention. If you want to link to a web comic, link to Dueling Analogs, maybe he doesn't update very often but at least he bothers to change the scenery and characters quite a bit, and astonishingly, he does manage to write very funny trips.
It certainly is not like MySpace, only one block on the right is fully customizable by the user and the ads are smaller and not so intrusive. I think the layout is pretty clear: your music stats in the middle with a shoutbox at the bottom, radio and site stats on the right. Actually, I love last.fm as a website, it's easy to navigate and interact with, everything feels very intuitive, it's a really well-made site; I often wish they had made Facebook...
What I'm more critical about is the way they handle data. I fail to see the prowess. "Playing with that data is one of the most fun things about working at the company.", it says in the summary. Well, perhaps they should play less and work more with it. It's quite common to see different pages referring to the same track only because of slight alterations in the track's title when it was scrobbled. Last.fm is pretty much incapable of recognizing identical tracks if they don't have exactly the same name. Same goes with the artists, if the name is written a bit differently, say with the alphabet from the Japanese set of characters, it might create a different page (example: this = that).
You wind up seeing all sorts of oddities in the artists charts, check Beethoven's for instance: Fur Elise appears in a countless number of forms along work which is wrongly credited (Flight of the Bumble Bee). Discernment isn't last.fm's greatest strength. Yet, I still think it's one of the best sites out there, because of the wealth of existing data, because of the little-advertised group radios (which let you listen to pretty much any kind of full tracks if you search right), it is to music what imdb is to films, with their own flaws. Interestingly it's sometimes described as a social networking website, but the fun part is about the statistics and data archiving. While it may sound very nerdy, I think that is what primarily appeals to people.
In the sciences, we are now uniquely priviledged to sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand. -- Gerald Holton