Sick of waiting outside in the cold on the wee hours of Black Friday, only to get trampled on the way in to the store when the doors open? Walmart has a better solution: they'll open the doors at midnight. Yes, the sales start at the first minute of Black Friday, and the full list is after the break, but to get the really good stuff you'll have to hang around until 5:00am. That's when a Magnavox Blu-ray player (presumably the oft-discounted NB500) will go for $69, with $10 in VUDU credits thrown in for good measure. Or, you can get yourself a Nintendo DS Lite for $89, which is a very solid deal. Sure, it doesn't do 3D, but who says games need depth?


http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/16/w...lu-ray-player/ ...

A new phone survey apparently indicates the majority of Americans believe that violent video games result in a more violent society.

The study, conducted by Pulse Opinion Research on behalf of Rasmussen Reports showed that 54 per cent of respondents answered 'yes' to the question of 'do violent video games lead to more violence in our society?'

32 per cent believed that there was no direct correlation, with the remaining 14 per cent uncertain.

The number of positive respondents is completely unchanged since the company last ran the survey in April, but the percentage of Americans who see no connection is up from 27 per cent. Elsewhere in the survey, 69 per cent of Americans answered that they were either very or somewhat concerned about violence in video games, with 29 per cent 'not concerned' and 13 per cent 'not at all concerned'. It's unknown what accounts for the extra 11 per cent.

Perhaps somewhat predictably, on average, older respondents exhibited higher levels of concern than younger, but people without children were also more concerned than those who lived with their children.

65 per cent of respondents believe that states should have the power to prevent games of a violent nature being retailed to minors, but only 5 per cent believe that marshalling children's exposure to inappropriate material is the responsibility of the government - with an overwhelming 71 per cent felt it was the job of parents. A further 21 per cent attributed responsibility to game developers.

The study was conducted by automated phone calls to 1000 individuals. Answers were weighted in order to address imbalances in the methodology which resulted in more answers given by older people, females and those in rural areas.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...cause-violence ...

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick has claimed the publisher is not interested in introducing an online pass system to increase its revenues from the trade-in market.

"We can do some of these things that EA and others have done," Kotick told Joystiq. "We actually don't think it's in the best interest of the gamer, and so we've chosen not to.

"We're not doing anything to suppress used games today."

Instead, the publisher is focusing on appealing DLC, especially for its Call of Duty games. "The best way to keep people engaged in your game experience is keep giving them more great content."

Kotick hinted that the high pricing ($15) of Modern Warfare 2 DLC was related to attempts to profit from traded-in games.

"I think we've generally tried to do things like encourage our customers to used-game sales, probably more so than our competitors. But you know, we're very mindful of what's happening macroeconomically and I think that that plays a role when we're thinking about the price of our content."

Kotick also restated his earlier assertion that "Call of Duty games probably represent more than 50% of the total Xbox Live traffic."

While acknowledging that Activision took a small cut of Xbox Live subscription fees, he suggested that Microsoft put its burgeoning Live revenues into "the provision of a higher level of customer service [and] towards game enhancement."

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...t-of-the-gamer ...

A consortium of independent developers have banded together to jointly promote their upcoming Xbox Live titles.

With indie games' profile on the service subject to some scrutiny over the past week, 14 small studios have launched the Indie Games Winter Uprising, seeking to raise profile of what they claim are superior titles.

"If you thought that the XBox Live Indie Games service was just filled with massage apps, clones, and garbage, think again," claimed organiser Robert Boyd of Zeboyd Games.

"We are fighting back against mediocrity and lameness in the best way we know how - by releasing amazing games." The titles constitute a mix of established and new indie developers.

Explained MagicalTimeBean's Ian Stocker, the idea came about "when we were first displaced on the dashboard and sales were in the gutter.

"I asked [Boyd] if he wanted to release Cthulhu at the same time that I released Soulcaster II, so we could do some cross promotion. Even though the games are different genres, they target the same demographic so if we can get someone to visit the channel for one, maybe she'll buy the other as well?

"Robert was into the idea and thought we should take it to the next level. If we coordinate two releases, why not coordinate 12? More traffic = more sales = more revenue for Microsoft = increased likelihood of promoting Indie Games on the dashboard. That's the theory at least."

The initiative will see all 14 games launched during the first week of December, priced from 80 to 400 MS points.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...omotional-push ...

Chris Hecker, the developer behind 2007's infamous "the Wii is sh*t" rant, has for the first time revealed the true extent of the impact his comments have had on his career.

In 2007, while at Maxis working on PC game Spore, Hecker took to the stage at the Game Developer Conference and called Nintendo's motion sensing console "a piece of sh*t", labelling it "two GameCubes duct-taped together".

His comments, predictably, hit the headlines. The following day Hecker apologised, saying, "I do not think the Wii is a piece of sh*t. Nintendo needs to be applauded for trying to interface on the controller front, the user."

That was over three years ago. But Hecker, who is currently hard at work on indie game SpyParty, stands by his original point.

"Game design and gameplay is not separable from CPU power," he told Eurogamer.

"You can do more interesting games with a faster CPU. Nintendo made an underpowered platform, relative to what you could have made at the time.

"You can see the ramification of that now with the games. They're just not as interesting, for a lot of reasons.

"They did a lot of interesting stuff with the control system, but unfortunately there's not enough horsepower behind the thing to actually really explore a lot of that stuff. You can see that in the games.

"I said it in a very inflammatory way, but the underlying message was a serious point about game design and programming.

"It was a direct quote. No one misquoted me. I said it was a piece of sh*t. I said it with Public Enemy blaring in the background and some funny slides. It was a great rant."

Hecker's GDC rant created quite a few problems for the then EA employee.

"When I said the Wii stuff it was at the height of Nintendo. They were selling a zillion units. They couldn't keep it on store shelves. And Spore was at its height. The headline was Spore developer says...

"So I apologised for saying it that way more for the way it was covered than what I was trying to say.

"If I had known it was going to get covered in the mass market press as opposed to just development press, I would have chosen my works more carefully. But I didn't. It was obviously my opinion, not the Spore team's opinion.

"The Wii is a piece of sh*t and it's two GameCubes duct taped together are quotable quotes, and I should have chosen my words more carefully with at least some of them.

"I wasn't thinking that because E3 closed down there would be a lot of people sniffing around for news stories in the mainstream press. It never used to be like that at GDC.

"But then aiming the article for maximum headline controversy, that's journalism's issue.

"In more ways than people even know, that night was the Electronic Arts and Nintendo executive dinner. They were announcing a joint venture for the first time. It was disastrous. It was awful.

"The stars aligned in a completely negative summon a demon kind of way. It was not good.

"I got a lot of hate mail. The Nintendo fanboys are pretty vehement. It's a big fanboy community. My Wikipedia page got defaced endlessly.

"I actually said it and I have to stand by what I said. I apologise for saying it in a way that was too whatever, and making it sound like I was representing the team – I didn't, but the articles did."

Hecker is no stranger to controversy. After Spore was released and some fans were disappointed with its depth, an interview Hecker gave to a science magazine emerged in which he talked about the cute versus science difference in the game.

An angry fan blamed all of Spore's problems on Hecker in a post on the game's official forum, which was subsequently picked up by a mainstream news outlet. Hecker then became the "I ruined Spore" developer.

This, according to Hecker, was more damaging than his Wii rant.

"Even though Will Wright, the creator of the game, took full responsibility for the game we shipped, and I wasn't on the design team at all, to this day people talk about SpyParty in a forum and they're like, isn't that the guy who ruined Spore? Stuff matters.

"Someone will go, 'Is that that game by that guy who ruined Spore?' Someone – hopefully – a couple of posts later, will say, 'No, that was debunked. Here's a link to the post.'

"But sometimes that doesn't happen. Then, what do you do? You feel like a dork going in and posting yourself, 'No, I'm not that guy.'

"It's really hard to fight that kind of hearsay."

SpyParty, which Hecker is self-funding, is a James Bond-esque game set during a cocktail party in which people do normal, party-like things. All the characters are controlled by the computer except one, which is controlled by the player-controlled Spy. That person tries to blend into the party while completing spy missions.

Another player – the sniper – is charged with working out who the spy is and pulling the trigger.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...i-is-sh-t-rant ...

In one week, Call of Duty: Black Ops has sold an unprecedented two million copies in UK shops.

GfK Chart-Track totted earnings from those sales at £81.9 million.

Black Ops sales were 13 per cent higher than those of Modern Warfare 2 (1.8 million) and the new game made 21 per cent more money (£67.4 million).

To put things into perspective, that £81.9 million figure represents more money than the entire UK all-formats chart made in the past two weeks combined.

Call of Duty: Black Ops launched the same week as Microsoft's Kinect. Between them (and all other videogame software), the money-take this week was a record-setting £113.8 million. Christmas week of 2008 had held the record until now.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...many-this-week ...

Zipper Interactive has insisted large scale first-person shooter MAG is one of the most played online PlayStation 3 games amid accusations that hardly anyone's playing it.

A user on the game's official forum (thanks, VG247), dvdpfstr, said: "Look at the numbers of players on MAG for the last week. It would seem to me the writing is on the wall. Socom Confrontation has more players still and that is a game that people have complained about incessantly since its release. It really is sad too, MAG had so much potential only to get worse the longer it was out."

The comment sparked a response from senior community manager Jeremy Dunham, who hit back at dvdpfstr's accusation.

"This is incorrect," he said. "MAG has more concurrent players than SOCOM Confrontation worldwide on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. This has been true for every month since MAG's release on January 26.

"Obviously we don't hit the same numbers we had in our first few months in terms of concurrent and daily users, but we're still amongst the most played online PS3 games out there."

Eurogamer reviewed MAG in January, awarding the ambitious shooter 7/10.

Zipper's supported the game since then with a raft of downloadable content. Last month a massive patch, called MAG 2.0, was released.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...doom-merchants ...

Kinect won't spy on you and gather data to tailor advertising with - despite Microsoft bragging of exactly this feature last week.

"Xbox 360 and Xbox Live do not use any information captured by Kinect for advertising targeting purposes," Microsoft assured the Wall Street Journal.

"Microsoft has a strong track record of implementing some of the best privacy protection measures in the industry.

"We place great importance on the privacy of our customers' information and the safety of their experiences."

That's a dramatic U-turn on what Xbox chief financial officer Dennis Durkin said last week.

With Kinect, Microsoft can be "more targeted about what content choices we present," he told a BMO Capital Markets crowd (reported by Digital Trends).

He used these examples: "What advertising we present; how to get better feedback and data; about how many people are in a room when an advertisement is shown; how many people are in a room when a game is being played."

Kinect, Durkin said, could watch you watching a sports game and be able to determine what team you support because of the clothes - replica kit - you wore.

It's not a million miles away from how Facebook targets its advertising.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...or-advertising ...

Amid all the buzz around Rovio's Angry Birds franchise in recent weeks, something appears to have gone unnoticed this week.
It's being out-grossed by the Smurfs.
Specifically, Capcom's Smurfs' Village iPhone game is ahead of Angry Birds in both the US and UK App Stores' Top Grossing Games charts.
That's all the more surprising because Smurfs' Village is a freemium game: the money that it's grossing is coming from in-app payments for its 'smurfberries' virtual currency.
Angry Birds, by contrast, is making its money purely from its $0.99 download cost.

Smurfs' Village's success shows how freemium games are becoming big moneyspinners on iPhone.
It's joined in the Top 20 Grossing Games US chart by fellow freemium titles Tap Zoo, Restaurant Story, Touch Pets Cats, Kingdoms At War, Zombie Farm, FarmVille, Trade Nations, Texas Poker and We Rule Quests.
Half the Top 20 Grossing Games are freemium, in other words. Forget the Angry Birds plush toys: it seems smart consumers may be digging out their childhood Papa Smurfs this Christmas instead...

http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/39483...-the-App-Store ...