Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized' ↓

Plenty of them this year.

Surfer girl did an open letter, supposedly from John Riccitiello full of such delights as: “all physical products published by EA will see two editions, one that is free of advertisements and one that features advertisements, which will have $10 below the advertisement free edition.”

Bungie came up with this visual Halo 3 spoof.

ThinkGeek put a lot of work into this one. It involves a new Wii peripheral and a game called Super Pii Pii Brothers. Very well crafted, it took people in.

World of Warcraft coming to console with Molten Core is another that a lot of work went into and which some believed.

Microsoft put four seperate Xbox jokers into theirs. Once again very well crafted but less believable than some.

PS3 Addict photoshopped a CBR 600 motorcycle into Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. Nicely done.

PSXExtreme have Sony launching a $150 PS3 with no BluRay drive.

GTA IV to feature masturbation and intercourse. Yep, sure.

There were more, but some have already been taken down, so the links above may not last too long.

Will the tabloid newspapers ever grow up and realise that games are just another form of popular media? Judging by this story it seems to be unlikely to be any time soon. What we have is a casting website called StarNow which is used by all sorts of performers and their customers. It is also used by television and print media to find people for their stories.

So to anyone interested in games the following advert is a bit disturbing:

Did computer games make you turn to a life of crime?

Listing no. 63806 – All regions, UK
A national newspaper wants your story and will pay hundreds of pounds to the right person. Write a few lines about how computer games turned you to crime and if it’s something we like, we’ll call you straight back.

Payment details: paid role

Created: 27 March 2008
Applications accepted for at least another month
Application criteria: Males & Females aged 0 to 60 from UK

So there you have it, a national newspaper will pay you hundreds of pounds if you help them stitch up the games industry. This is the standards of the British gutter press today. I can even have a good guess as to which newspaper this is.

Many thanks to willc for finding this.

On November 29, at the Reuter’s Media Summit John Riccitiello said: “Is it ripe (for mergers), or has it already been picked? I would argue that it’s been largely picked.” So he was telling the world that consolidation in the video games industry was pretty much all done.

Then on December 2 Vivendi bought Activision. Which relegated EA to the position of number two global games publisher. And confirmed the trend that big global media companies need to be in gaming and are buying the industry out.

So on December 10 this blog asked the obvious question, who is going to buy Electronic Arts? Because it really does look like a juicy target for one of those massive media companies like News Corporation. How to acquire a powerful worldwide gaming presence in just one purchase. A typical Rupert Murdoch move.

Then on February 7 there were rumours that Viacom was going to buy Take 2 for $1.5 billion. Which made sense in the overall scheme of things. But it turned out to be so much hot air. Nevertheless, with these things there is rarely smoke without fire so Viacom were probably thinking about something.

If they were they have had a shock because on February 15 Electronic Arts put in a near $2 billion bid for Take Two. This was rejected so EA upped the bid slightly only to be rejected again. EA even have a special website to explain what they are doing. The proposed merger would bring the classical consolidation advantages of removing duplication, especially in sales, marketing and distribution. They would also be able to get rid of wasteful competition in sporting games. Best of all it would make EA the number one publisher again and make them so big that even the biggest predator would have to think twice before trying to gobble them up.

As the December 10 article here said: “The main way to remain independent is to rapidly become a lot bigger.” So, does John Riccitiello read this blog? 

In this article they tell you stuff that you have been reading here for some time.

However they use a very dodgy graph:

They seem to have the 360 and PS3 captions the wrong way around! Seriously there is still no good reason why anyone should buy a PS3. Next year Sony will be releasing some AAA exclusives (MGS4 Q2 and GT5 Q3) that will change this. However by then there will be even more good reasons to buy a 360 instead.

The fundamental problem for Sony (now they have solved the retail price anomaly) is that the development community have switched a lot of resources away from their machine. So, ultimately, it will have a smaller library of games to run on it. So it makes a far less appealing purchase proposition for the end user.

Another problem with that graph is that it shows no seasonality in Wii sales. This just cannot be right.