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by Published on February 28th, 2012 00:00- Categories:
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Generation Media reveals the best performing video game TV ad campaigns of last year, including marketing for 3DS and THQ's uDraw.
As 2011’s only major hardware release, it’s no surprise that Nintendo’s campaign for the 3DS was the largest of the year. Spreading the campaign across 22 weeks, however, meant that it had one of the lowest weekly TVR weights in the Top Ten.
This was not Nintendo’s only strategy, as the Pokémon Black & White, Mario Kart 7 and Super Mario 3D Land campaigns demonstrated. Nintendo’s willingness to mix up their strategies contributed to having six campaigns in the Top Ten.
Sony was a last gasp entrant into the Top Ten, beginning their Christmas-themed campaign for the PS3 on December 2nd.
The PS3 and 3DS were not the only hardware that made the chart. uDraw and Kinect meant that hardware made up four of the Top Ten.
Kinect ads was on air for 23 weeks – longer than any other 2011 campaign. The campaign actually averaged fewer TVRs per week than any other campaign in the Top Ten. A TVR represents one per cent of a target audience. This number can go over 100 if a viewer saw an ad more than once.
Supplied by Generation Media
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/top-t...of-2011/091834 ...by Published on February 27th, 2012 23:50- Categories:
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Sony's new handheld the PlayStation Vita has dominated the UK software charts this week. Not only did Uncharted: Golden Abyss take the number one spot, with FIFA Football securing second place, but together they accounted for 50 per cent of Vita games sales.
When it came to the hardware 79 per cent of Vita sales were of the wifi version, as opposed to the more expensive 3G model.
The Vita effect was also felt further down the chart, with a new entry for Wipeout 2048 at 11, and boost for Rayman Origins that pushed it up from 36 to 5 despite it not being stocked in specialist retailer GAME.
It's worth noting that the charts don't cover digital sales, which are a large part of the Vita offering, and so don't give a complete picture of the machine's overall software sales.
Core console titles Syndicate and The Last Story also made their debuts on the chart, at 7 and 15 respectively, while RPG Fallout: New Vegas returned to the chart at 17 in the form of a new Ultimate Edition.
...by Published on February 27th, 2012 23:47- Categories:
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Charity SpecialEffect, which helps disabled gamers find ways to play a range of titles, has seen a massive rise in demand for its services.
"There's been a big change since we saw you in autumn," said director Dr Mick Donegan.
He says there's been a rapid increase in requests for help, from children, war veterans and the general public, thanks to recent appearances in the games press and consumer channels like PlayStation Access.
"When that went out there were a lot of people who got in touch as a result as a result of that wanting support, and wanted it on a one to one basis."
SpecialEffect give disabled gamers all types of support, from simply modifying controllers to allow someone with limited movement to use them, to building and supplying more complex devices for those that barely have any movement at all.
"In other words a process that takes time to get the device just right, and that time requires people to do it. We're working extremely hard but the numbers are going up, so we need to increase the support that we give."
As such they'll soon be introducing a regular giving scheme to allow people to make donations to the service beyond one off events, something that Dr Donegan says will be vital to expanding the team and the number of people it can help.
Ella and Chloe try out Kinect with SpecialEffect
"Regular giving will help us plan ahead, it will enable me to take on additional staff. For example we need some more occupational therapists because at the moment we only have one day a week, and the requests for visits are far higher than that."
He also reported that while demand has gone up, so has support. For instance the numbers involved in the British 10K London Run for the charity have doubled to 40, with teams from companies like Splash Damage, Eurogamer, Namco Bandai, Audio Motion and Future Publishing taking part.
They're also working more closely than ever with developers to collaborate directly with game production to make sure they're as accessible as possible. Dr Donegan is currently in talks with Spash Damage about its games, as well as Microsoft's Soho Studios about making its Kinect titles a viable option for children with disabilities.
Splash Damage's Paul Wedgewood and Sports Interactive's Miles Jacobson have also signed up as vice presidents to support and promote the charity.
"We've had such incredible good will from gamers and people who work in the games industry that it has been really overwhelming."
To find out more about the charity you can read the GamesIndustry.biz feature, and visit the Special Effect site to find out how you can donate time and support to its amazing work.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...rise-in-demand ...by Published on February 27th, 2012 22:56- Categories:
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US game academic Eric Zimmerman was recently asked by the Jace Hall show to contribute his thoughts about its 50 favourite game endings list. But rather than coo over Portal 2 or something, the eggheaded killjoy instead took the opportunity to state that his favourite games don't have endings.
...traditionally games don’t have endings. Games like Basketball, Chess, and Scrabble are activities meant to be repeated, rather than a series of levels to be beaten or a story to be played through. Many digital games, from Asteroids and Tetris to Street Fighter and Smash Bros to Sim City and Civilization are on this model of games designed for repeated play – and they don’t have endings. I prefer these kinds of games, as they are less premised on a desire to imitate cinema or linear storytelling and they are more focused on games as games as systems of rules that reward deep and repeated exploration.
Obviously, each of the games Zimmerman likes do indeed have endings - many endings. A game of Street Fighter ends with a victory or defeat screen, and beating the arcade mode on hardest difficulty grants you the above reward. Even the longform narrative-based games that Zimmerman is really talking about often have replayable elements, whether because of an unlocked hard mode, hunts for collectibles and secrets, score attack sub-modes or co-op sections.
But, yes, properly replayable games depend on rulesets over their stories. Playing the same story over and over would invite boredom, but a beautiful set of rules will never grow old.
http://www.edge-online.com/news/out-...ames-never-end ...by Published on February 27th, 2012 22:50- Categories:
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Researchers from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, designed every kid's dream study: they passed out Wii consoles to 78 kids who didn't already have one, and gave half the kids their choice of active game — such as Wii Sports or Dance Dance Revolution-Hottest Party 3 — and the other half their choice of inactive game, such as Disney Sing-It Pop Hits or Super Mario Galaxy. The research team tracked the youngsters for 13 weeks, testing their physical activity levels with a motion-measuring accelerometer. Participants wore the devices on a belt during four different week-long periods throughout the study, which allowed the research team to determine when they were sedentary or lightly exercising and when they were engaged in moderate-to-vigorous exercise. Accelerometer logs showed that throughout the study period, kids with the active games didn't get any more exercise than those given inactive video games. There was also no difference in minutes spent doing light physical activity or being sedentary during any week the researchers monitored."
http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/0...-exercise-more ...by Published on February 27th, 2012 22:36- Categories:
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'You don't want to worry about the people who were never going to pay you' says Seamless Entertainment boss
Offering customers good value for money is key to limiting piracy, says Seamless Entertainment’s studio director.
Speaking to The Sydney Morning Herald, Dan Mahaga said that creating a game that has a high-perceived value means that consumers are more likely to purchase a game.
"The argument most of us make is let's try to make it inexpensive and let's try to make it such a good value and so much fun that they go, 'You know, I want to support these guys, and I want to buy a copy’," said Magaha.
He added that the studio’s space combat simulator SOL: Exodus, had been pirated numerous times after being made available on Steam, with people even posting links to illegal downloads of the game on social networking site Twitter.
Magaha said to overcome this, it is important for studios to engage with their customer base and respond quickly to any in-game issues that may arise.
http://www.develop-online.net/news/3...ces-says-indie
...by Published on February 27th, 2012 22:29- Categories:
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Nokia unveiled a camera with an astonishingly high resolution camera sensor at MCW 2012 with the Nokia PureView 808 boasting a 41-megapixel camera.
Quite why you'd want to take an insanely high resolution photo on a phone is another matter but that hasn't deterred the Finnish phonemaker. The PureView 808 is apparently the product of some years of development which explains why the device is still running the aging Symbian OS rather than Windows Phone.
Nokia had to come up with a new fancy image compression scheme to get the 41-megapixel images down to a mere 10MB in size. Not really the sort of images one might upload to Facebook. That said the point seems to be to take wide angle images of such quality it's possible to massively zoom in to crop out a section of the image later.
This is probably like the phone equivalent of those implausible crime shows where a savvy chin-scratching investigator asks that their resident boffin zoom up on some detail and 'enhance', revealing the identity of the murderer in the reflection of a name badge from several kilometres away.
To be fair, Nokia is rather sensibly using the massive pixels of the 1/1.2-inch oversized sensor to create better quality standard resolution shots, including the ability to deliver superior low light performance. Even so, the PureView 808 is fitted with both a LED 'flash' for video recording and a Xenon flash for still photos.
Pricing is said to be under the £300 mark ex contract when the device appears in the second quarter. It doesn't seem much of a stretch to suggest that Nokia will port the fancy Symbian camera app to Windows Phone and ship the overachieving image sensor in a Microsoft based phone later in the year.
http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/read/...erphone/028002 ...by Published on February 27th, 2012 22:28- Categories:
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51 per cent of smartphone users say they would be lost without texts.
Although instant messaging apps such as WhatsApp and BBM are hugely popular, mobile messaging firm Acision says 95 per cent of UK consumers actively use SMS messaging, while 93 per cent of smartphone users with access to IM services still send texts.
74 per cent of smartphone owners say they 'need' SMS, while 51 per cent of that number went as far as to say they would be lost without it.
Additionally, Facebook Chat, Skype, Twitter, BBM and WhatsApp are the five most popular IM platforms on the market.
42 per cent of smartphone users claim they prefer SMS because of its reach, another 42 per cent cited reliability, 38 per cent said price, while 37 per cent said speed of delivery, according to the report.
In comparison, just four per cent of smartphone users said IM is more reliable than text messaging.
http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/read/...-use-it/017190 ...by Published on February 26th, 2012 21:33- Categories:
- DCEmu
“There's no margin to be made on new releases anymore.” MCV hears this more and more from specialist stores every week.
Once upon a time boxed games would be sold very close to their RRP on release day. But this hasn’t been the trend for years.
Earlier this month we revealed the average cost of a boxed game drops by 23.5 per cent after one month on sale, 30.8 per cent after two, and 39 per cent after three. On day one the average cost to the consumer can be lower than the trade price.
Online retailers and supermarkets are the drivers here. This has put extra pressure on the traditional High Street specialists who can’t compete.
Konami’s UK general manager Pete Stone explains: “Discounting by UK retailers has been ferocious during the past few years. Major retailers justified their discounting by using phrases such as ‘driving volume’ but the reality has been the opposite: it has been a downward spiral.
“In the long-term we are moving towards a new era in gaming, but UK pricing has probably devalued the perception of boxed games and is leading to retailers no longer finding the category profitable.”
Major chains like GAME and HMV had a very difficult trading period last year, as well as indies who are feeling the pinch more than ever. This is due in no small part to the lack of margin on new titles.
“The discounting is serious and suicidal,” says a leading indie, who wishes to remain anonymous. “The £37.49 average launch price for FIFA 12 was already £5.71 below our cost price.
“I wonder what will happen to publishers when the retailers stop funding the discounted prices for them. Surely at some point the goodwill will run out, and would the consumer really pay £54.99 for FIFA 13? Or £24.99 for a new Blu-ray?”
It’s now such a problem, says HMV, that consumers and retailers could miss out in the long-term as price-cutting distorts the market.
“Such a high level of RRP discounting is not likely to be in the best long-term interests of the market or even the consumer, who may find it will ultimately result in reduced choice,” the retailer’s head of communications Gennaro Castaldo tells MCV.
“But when you have supermarkets and internet giants using content to drive traffic and share as part of a wider business agenda, it’s hard to stand back if you want to remain competitive.”
Some online retailers have reacted to maintain profit. ShopTo says it ‘sells closer to the RRP than ever’.
“ShopTo has changed its strategy over the past six months,” says purchasing director James Rowson. “We no longer want to be involved in the price war to chase orders at a loss.”
Gameseek’s MD Stephen Staley adds: “We stock new releases to drum up interest in our site but we’re not bothered if we sell any. There’s no point having a big market share on something that makes you a loss.”
There are ways for specialist retailers to make decent money on new goods.
“I have been encouraging indies to diversify into other lines and products, like mobile phone accessories, and hi-tech toys and gadgets,” says The Game Guide’s Chris Ratcliff. “Of course, it isn’t commercial suicide if you can subsidise the losses on new games sales with a healthy pre-owned business model, but even that has been ‘invaded’ by the nationals.”
Online indie Xbite believes a change at the supplier level would help solve the problem.
MD Nick Whitehead tells MCV: “If the publishers under supplied the market just by five per cent, it would actually ensure a more stable retail price point in the market.”
ShopTo says the answer is not so simple.
“If all games prices go up then the publishers will see a drop in units and may struggle to cover their ever-growing development costs, so the whole strategy needs a review,” Rowson adds.
But with such a competitive UK retail market, there’ll always be those who go low on new releases. The outlets willing to diversify could be the ones which really prosper.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/featu...-prices/091771 ...by Published on February 26th, 2012 21:26- Categories:
- DCEmu
One of the most successful Japanese console game developers has predicted that the console market will continue to shrink and in its place will rise a stronger, dominant portable games market.
“Consoles – PS3, PS4, Xbox 360-2 – the market for those will get smaller, and the main market will become portable games,” Super Monkey Ball and Yakuza creator Toshihiro Nagoshi told PSM3, as reported by CVG.
“I don’t think consoles will disappear, but more and more people will use home PCs for gaming, and a long time in the future it will just be PCs and mobile phones, and eventually mobiles will become just as powerful as games consoles.”
And of course, as a games developer Nagoshi is keen to stress that from his perspective the biggest change this represents is one of interaction and control.
“Right now, that means either buttons or touchscreens – those are the only two interfaces we have,” he argued. “So I think the next big evolution will be the introduction of a new type of interface.
“Sure, we have voice input, but voice will never become the main input. So I think that whoever can figure out that new type will be victorious.
“It’s strange the number of buttons has increased and never decreased. So that means we need to reset things, somehow. I think your hands will always be directly involved. That will never change. It’ll be something you can touch.”
http://www.mcvuk.com/index.php/news/...smaller/091773 ...- Search DCEmu
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