Valhalla Teams With Doobic For Tablet, PC Version Of Devil’s Third

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Valhalla Game Studios announced that they have hired Korean studio Doobic to work on a new PC and tablet version of Devil’s Third. Valhalla and Doobic will also establish a new joint venture corporation, Valhalla&Doobic Co., Ltd.

“In addition to both home console and PC versions, Valhalla Game Studios plans to expand the Devil’s Third universe across a variety of digital devices and through various forms of entertainment. The technical collaboration agreement we have reached with Doobic will greatly help in accelerating the expansion of the Devil’s Third franchise,” said Valhalla CEO Satoshi Kanematsu. “We will continue to do our best to fulfill your expectations, and we sincerely hope for your continued encouragement and support.”

EA CEO Says Industry Health Has Grown Beyond Retail Sales

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Retail sales have been slumping lately in the industry, and the stock for Electronic Arts has taken a beating as a result. EA CEO John Riccitiello asserts that retail sales are not reflective of the company’s whole business anymore.

“Just five years ago people said that the PC game business was in a radical state of decline because NPD said it was down 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent, year-in year-out,” said Riccitiello. “The fastest growing platform for video games today is the PC, but it’s growing through subscriptions, through micro transactions and through downloads.”

Source: CNBC

Valve Says Steam Sales Don’t Hurt Games

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Steam’s sales have become somewhat controversial lately, with some asserting that they devalue the games they offer too greatly. Valve’s director of business management Jason Holtman has a counterpoint to that line of thinking.

“If that’s what we thought was happening, or that’s what we saw happening, we wouldn’t do it,” said Holtman. “Actually, all the data is contrary to that. A promotion is not a policy; a promotion is just a feature to give people more value. It’s not as if a 75 percent offer or a 50 percent off sale at some point in time cannibalizes a sale that would have happened earlier, it’s just not true. We’re actually seeing both of them growing. We don’t see one cannibalizing the other. If we did, we wouldn’t do it.”

“We put Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal 2 on sale. If we thought that was killing our franchise, or hurting the value of games, or hurting the revenue we could generate as a company, we wouldn’t do it,” he said. “We’ve even gone so far as to give away Portal for free a couple of times. Whole days where it’s not free for a day, it’s just free. We looked at this amazing data afterward. The day after the sales were exactly the same, if not more.”

Source: PC Gamer

Kinect Sesame Street TV Coming Soon

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Microsoft announced that they are working on Kinect Sesame Street TV, an interactive version of the TV series. While it’s been, confirmed for the Xbox 360 for Kinect, Microsoft Soho Studios’ director of game design Josh Atkins hints that they might be pushing it out to other platforms and noted it is “not exclusive to retail.”

“It’s coming out this Fall, we haven’t announced a specific date yet but it will be coming out on Xbox and in a multitude of different ways,” said Atkins. “When I get asked how it’s being released I can’t answer that question in great detail, other than say that any way that you can get TV, this product will be released.”

Source: CVG

WWE ’13 Gets Austin 3:16 Collector’s Edition

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THQ today unveiled WWE ’13 Austin 3:16 Collector’s Edition for PS3 and Xbox 360. The game is scheduled for release on October 30 and will have Mike Tyson as a pre-order bonus.

The along with a copy of WWE ’13, the collector’s addition will feature an exclusive package with the Stone Cold Steve Austin skull, a collectible art card personally autographed by Stone Cold Steve Austin, and the DVD/Blu-ray of Stone Cold Steve Austin: The Bottom Line on the Most Popular Superstar of All Time. The digital additions to the package include the red skull t-shirt Stone Cold Steve Austin and an exclusive Stone Cold Steve Austin in-game ATV ring entrance.

Splinter Cell Blacklist Pops-Up Some Context

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The Splinter Cell Blacklist trailer at E3 certainly looked cool, but it didn’t give a lot of context for some of its elements. This pop-up trailer, however, tells us more about info about the world surrounding the Blacklist and intel on the key members of the 4th Echelon team who will be assisting Sam.

Moved Back In With Mom And Dad?

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KFC has partnered with Comedy Central to create the original content digital series and contest dubbed ‘Growing Up and Getting Out’ to help promote the new Original Recipe Bites. The web series consists of five episodes web series plays off the theme of millennials who are moving back home to live with their parents.

Consumers are encouraged to take part in the weekly contest by sharing pictures and stories on freerentcontest.com that express the humorous side of living at home with their parents. Fans on the site can vote for their favs and Comedy Central will spotlight the funniest entries.

The campaign will run till August 20, when five winners will receive $12,000 cash, the so called ‘rent for the year’ to let ‘basement dwellers’ to set out on their own. They will also get an additional $500 in cash and $600 in KFC Chicken Checks redeemable for Original Recipe Bites or other KFC products to cater a moving out party. Not all money just for them — winners will be asked to give $100 of the Chicken Checks to their parents.

So, the first episode is available to watch on the web site, the rest is coming in the following weeks. Each week, fans will have some fun watching the dramatic relationships between at-home millennials and their parents. The following episodes include: Homecoming (July 17); Dinner (July 23); Chores (July 30); Date (August 6) and Video Games (August 13).

 

Ouya Getting The Human Element

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The Ouya team revealed that the first exclusive game for the Android-based console is a prequel to Robotoki’s upcoming zombie-apocalypse title Human Element. The game will be an episodic series leading up to the planned release of the full title in 2015.

“What this allows us to do – because Ouya has been so accessible – we able to bring you a look at the world of Human Element, a month, a week, a year after the events of the game,” said Robotoki president Robert Bowling. “We’re going to work with the Ouya team and bring you an exclusive episodic look of the world as it develops and collapses over the course of the event happening.”

Source: Kickstarter

Zynga’s Mark Pincus Talks Ad Possibilities

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Zynga is in a pretty good position for companies looking to advertise, and they’ve already teamed up with State Farm and Microsoft for their products. To Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, there are multiple opportunities to advertise moving forward using Zynga’s resources.

“I think we’ll see a couple of trends continuing to play out in the next five years in social game advertising, which I think will be its own real business segment if it isn’t already,” said Pincus. “One is the growth of the commodity ad business, getting more and more valuable, the display ads that are pay-per-click, I think just the sheer volume will continue to make that interesting, and I think game developers will always be some of the biggest buyers of those ads.”

“The second is higher value ads for brand advertisers, what we think of as engagement advertising,” he added. “We think that has enormous potential to deliver great value to brands in ways that they haven’t been able to unlock online before. The opportunity to let a brand like McDonald’s or Best Buy or American Express start to integrate with your games and integrate with the game experience and sponsor part of the game experience, and even gamify parts of that experience, in ways that are repeatable and scalable, where you now have currencies and you can play with those currencies.”

“An example is putting a McDonald’s in your city; it has greater payout than a regular burger joint, it has cooler looking art, and we can even give it more dimensions than that. It could connect you to everyone else who has a McDonald’s in the game,” he gave an example. “It could become a social object. There are so many things that you could put in there that are scalable and repeatable but give the brand advertiser a way to drive measurable engagement. Not just engagement with their brand, but something that’s actually measurable in a more meaningful way than just clicks, than just did I buy a search word and people clicked on ‘burger joint’ and McDonald’s, what does it mean They could actually get you to respond in more meaningful ways to their brand.”

“The third way that I’m really excited about is actually gamification of the ads themselves. I think, especially on mobile, the opportunity to make the ads fun and interactive and the chance to win things – it’s just cool. From an end-user’s standpoint, the same way that Google made ads interesting, I think we can do that by gamifying ads. Think about what you could do in Draw Something; imagine a Pepsi Challenge in the entire game today where everyone is drawing some Pepsi bottle, and they’re going to announce winners, and we can take that Pepsi Draw Something Challenge across our whole network, not just Draw Something. So you could see a little Draw Something screen, and ‘Take the Pepsi Challenge today’ and draw a little bottle and it’s like a scratch-off, you can immediately win something and enter this bigger contest. Or imagine Scramble as an ad; a Scramble ad interstitial anywhere on mobile, sponsored by AmEx or somebody, and they say ‘Find these words.’ I’m more intrigued by all of the low-hanging fruit that hasn’t happened yet than what has happened,” he concluded.

Source: GamesIndustry.biz