Crytek says that Warface has over 9 million registered players since launching one year ago in Russia. The game has grown since having 1 million players its first month and 5 million players in November 2012.
Mail.Ru indicates that 5 percent of players come from beyond the borders of Russia, usually from countries falling in Russia’s sphere of influence like Belarus and Kazakhstan. Crytek is currently making plans to launch the free-to-play shooter in other regions.
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Platinum Games has put out several games during its five years of existence, and almost without exception all have found critical acclaim. President Tatsuya Minami would give the effort by the team over that time an “A” rating. “The team has been working really hard,” he says. “They’ve held up their end of the bargain and done a really good job of putting out really high-quality games.”
However, he’s less bullish about the business half of things. “Whether we’ve sold as well as we would have liked, or whether the company has the amount of money that everybody would love to have in the company, I think I’d probably rate it as a C or even a D,” Minami said frankly.
“We obviously grew up being part of the domestic Japanese market — a lot of our staff spent time in domestic Japanese publishers, focused really on the domestic Japanese market. And now we’re trying to expand and focus more outward and think about gamers worldwide,” he added. “But when you think about what global success really means, that means we need to be selling more titles. Our games need to sell more copies.”
Bayonetta was the studio’s best selling title, having sold well over a million titles since launch, but Minami says the game still didn’t meet expectations. “Bayonetta didn’t sell what we wanted it to sell,” he says. “We were hoping it was going to do a little bit better than that, though you can’t put it all on the game itself. I think there were a lot of issues with when it came out, the kind of marketing behind it.”
Minami is hopeful over Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, given the strength of the brand and the marketing support. “We’re expecting Metal Gear Rising to sell better than Bayonetta, and obviously it’s just come out,” he says. “But if you look at games developed in certain Western studios, as far as sales go, they’re clearly ahead of us there, and we’re not going to be satisfied until we’re at that level.”
For the next generation, Minami said that Platinum will look into outsourcing and role specialization amongst team members, and also spend time looking at what players around the world want from its games. “We have to think a lot about what resonates with consumers globally and find that secret sauce and make sure that goes into our games,” he says. “And there’s a lot of places we need to look for that: it’s not just in art, it’s also in game design, it’s also in music … I think the one thing that we want more than anything in the immediate future — and it’s something we continue to work hard on — is we definitely want people to understand that we’re making games here in Japan, but we’re making games for everybody.”
Source: Polygon.com
Wilder Hamm, the owner of Save Point Video Games in Charlotte, North Carolina encountered the rarest of video games: Stadium Events, a game which Nintendo bought the rights to and tried to destroy all the remaining cartridges for. Those that exist go for thousands of dollars on eBay, but this one was found for $7.99 at Goodwill.
This complete version of the game, with the box and instructions, was simply worth more than Hamm had on hand to offer for it. The customer said she will sell it herself on eBay.
“It’s given people a lot of hope,” Hamm said. “People say that they never find anything at their Goodwill, well, the holy grail has been found there.”
Source: Kotaku.com {link no longer active}
Bethesda Softworks has made its fortune creating and publishing single-player focused titles like Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Dishonored. While this part of the market has taken hits from used-gaming, Bethesda Softworks vice president of public relations & marketing Peter Hines says that they are doing things to mitigate that and solo gaming isn’t going anywhere.
“Absolutely it’s a concern. We have tried to mitigate it by creating games that offer replayability, by supporting them with DLC that’s worth hanging onto the game for, or offering tools that let them take things further,” said Hines. “Games are not cheap to buy because they’re expensive to make, and people are looking for ways to keep it affordable. I’m not sure anyone has figured out a solution that works for everyone, and there simply may not be one until someone figures out how to include developers and publishers in the loop on used games sales instead of keeping it all for themselves.”
“Single-player games aren’t going anywhere,” he added. “Bethesda Softworks has been making single-player games for all of our 25+ years in the industry. We’re still here, we’re still making them, and people are still buying them. Dishonored was single-player and people really loved it, and it sold well. Skyrim was a complete success. A single-player RPG. There’s practically a cottage industry dedicated to talking about how that isn’t possible or why that won’t succeed. Console fans won’t get a game like that. Has to have multiplayer of some kind. PC gaming is dead. It’s gotta be a shooter. RPGs are a niche.”
Source: Destructoid
Aksys Games has confirmed that Muramasa: Rebirth will release on PS Vita on June 25. The remake of Muramasa: The Demon Blade will have a special edition called the Muramasa: Rebirth Blessing of Amitabha Collector’s Edition.
The Blessing of Amitabha Collector’s Edition will feature an appropriately themed Vita face cover and skin by Hori, a PS Vita system pouch and a high res framed lithograph by creator and lead designer George Kamitani. Those that pre-order the game at Amazon or GameStop will receive an exclusive Muramasa: Rebirth Abridged Soundtrack.
The portrayal of women in games is a consistent topic of discussion and the industry fights every day to be more inclusive. Dontnod creative director Jean-Maxime Moris says that it wasn’t a huge issue for the developer at first that they made the female Nilin the protagonist of Remember Me, but he says that gender equality became a theme in the game
“We didn’t think of gender equality being a major theme in the game, but thinking back on the world we designed, it is true that women have key positions in its governance,” said Moris. “In 2013, we have a long way to go in terms of gender equality, so take this as a subconscious militant act.”
“You have to avoid the pitfalls of making her just a damsel in distress or a sex bomb, because this is what you think would appeal most to the hordes of men that constitute your fan base,” he said. “But if you respect your public, then you refuse to dumb your work down, and eventually it pays back because what you do is different. But I’m not saying we’re the only ones. I’m quite happy to see that more and more games feature female protagonists.”
Source: Shacknews
By Meelad Sadat
Late last year, Plantronics rolled out a series of headsets branded with popular Valve games. It was a clear indication that the long-standing audio equipment maker is turning its focus back to the game industry. The Valve line represents the first game-licensed products Plantronics has put out since 2004, when it released a Halo 2 branded headset. The Santa Cruz, California-based company is looking to broaden that effort.
“Some of the things we’re doing right now is we’re in conversations and reaching out to [game] IP and developers and trying to integrate a lot deeper into games. It’s one of our goals,” says Plantronics’ product marketer Kyle Bokariza.
“With IP, right now we’ve partnered with Valve in terms of becoming a license partner. One of the things we did is partner with them on four games, DOTA 2, Counterstrike [Global Offensive], Team Fortress 2 and Portal 2. The DOTA 2 one is the more successful one in terms of sales. Valve has been gracious and has given us an in-game exclusive item through the headset. It’s a weapons skin for DOTA 2. It’s doing great. We’re looking forward to doing more of those things with other developers.”
Plantronics is trying to carve out a space in the increasingly competitive gaming headset field as not just a pair of high-end headphones for audiophiles, but rather military-quality communicators for online gaming.
“What we think we can bring to the table is communications, something that we’ve done for a long time,” says Bokariza. “We’ve been around for 50 years in mission critical communications. It’s what we do, and it’s one of our strong corners that we try to work up into our messaging.”
“We just came out with the Commander, a very militarized headset. It’s actually from our military side of the company. We put in stereo speakers to give it left-right audio, or directional audio for first-person shooters. The headset has passive noise isolation so it can block out around 80 percent of background noise, which is around I think 18 decibel levels.”
Targeting online gamers who are serious about communications is what Plantronics tried with the Halo 2 headset, which looked like something Master Chief might wear. The headset was based on a patented Plantronics design melding an ear piece together with a microphone on a flexible arm, the kind still favored by space and military command centers.
Neil Armstrong wearing “Snoopy” cap with Plantronics (SPENCOM) headsets. (Photo and caption courtesy of Plantronics Wikipedia)
In reality, Plantronics has come closer to equipping a space marine than any other video game headset maker. The company’s roots are in air and space flight. It was founded when it introduced the world’s first lightweight headset for commercial pilots in 1961. Eight years later it soared a lot higher, equipping NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong and his crew on their trip to the moon. That distinction of being good enough to communicate in space might translate well to convincing gamers this is the communicator for their hardcore online gaming. Bokariza doesn’t see it becoming part of their key messaging.
“We won’t probably play it up too much. It’s one of those things that people think, ‘hey that’s a cool tidbit,’ but maybe not the main messaging platform,” says Bokariza. “It’s just something to let people know that we’ve been around for a while and we know what we’re doing. It’s a conversational piece more so than the marketing platform that we’d move forward with.”
Plantronics is also looking to its own history in eSports, a part of gaming culture that has recently made strides in growing out of its hardcore niche to appeal to mainstream fans. The company hopes that growing interest in competetive gaming and how its products are well suited for it will help put Plantronics headsets on more players’ radars.
“We sponsored a couple of teams in our history,” says Bokariza. “We partnered with the ESWC (Electronics Sports World Cup) France. We’ve been partners with them since I think 2004. What we did was we held the North American qualifier at PAX Prime last year. We had CS GO (Counterstrike: Global Offensive), DOTA 2 and Starcraft 2. We flew out the top American teams who won our tournament to the ESWC to compete. We had our headsets on stage there, because it was a loud environment because they had more than 10,000 people watching.
Electronics Sports World Cup 2012
Bokariza adds, “[eSports] is definitely a focus, so we’re reaching out and we definitely have our eye out on leagues and teams because they’re the top of the class and they need the best of the best in both audio quality and communications. Those team sports really come down to minor hits or misses, and we really feel like we can succeed in that space.”
Tennessee Democratic State Representative Steve Cohen has claimed that a tweet calling musician Cyndi Lauper “hot” is part of a ruse to teach the media a lesson in journalistic integrity.
The tweet read, “@cyndilauper great night, couldn’t believe how hot u were. see you again next Tuesday. try a little tenderness.”
Cohen sent the tweet after attending a concert at the White House that showcased music from Memphis. He left it on his Twitter thread for 21 minutes before it was deleted. Cohen says it was all orchestrated.
The scrubbed post got picked up by a website called Politwoops, a site which archives all deleted tweets by Congress members. The site is part of Sunlight Foundation, an organization that aims to make government more transparent.
Cohen says he suspected this would happen with his Cyndi Lauper tweet. Politwoops ignited a Twitter controversy earlier this year that Cohen admitted hurt his relationship with his estranged daughter.
“Two months ago, my family was personally hurt and victimized by sensationalized, fact-less speculation masquerading as journalism,” Cohen said in a statement.
During the State of the Union earlier this year, Cohen sent a tweet thanking a young blonde 24-year-old woman for tuning in, calling her a “beautiful girl” and adding “Ilu,” which is internet shorthand for “I love you.”
It turned out the woman was not Cohen’s inamorata but his long-lost daughter who he was attempting to shield from the public eye.
With his ruse panning out as planned, Cohen was good natured about the outcome.
“I hope this serves to bring attention to the need for journalistic integrity as well as encouraging everyone to watch the spectacular and hot performances of Memphis music by Cyndi Lauper, as well as Justin Timberlake, William Bell, Steve Cropper, Sam Moore, Booker T. Jones, Queen Latifah, Ben Harper, Charlie Musselwhite, Eddie Floyd, Alabama Shakes, Joshua Ledet, and Mavis Staples on PBS next Tuesday evening,” he said.
Good one, Cohen.
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In Splinter Cell Blacklist, Sam Fisher will be more deadly than he ever has been before. The leader of Third Echelon will stalk his foes, strike with precision, and silence them in the blink of an eye.
