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by Published on April 28th, 2012 22:11- Categories:
- PS3 News
As part of its investor presentation last night, Nintendo revealed that Sony’s PS3 has taken control of the European hardware market since the turn of the year.
Its data suggests that Sony has enjoyed weekly continental sales of between 100,00 and 50,000 units.
3DS is next in line with sales between 50,000 and 30,000 per week and Xbox 360 just behind, although Microsoft’s machine was selling far stronger until week six.
It’s a different story in Japan where 3DS is selling anything between 120,000 and 65,000 units per week – a decent performance considering the time of year. PS3 remains to sell strongly, too, peaking at nearly 70,000 unit sales in week nine.
In the US the Xbox 360 has maintained its now customary dominance, with PS3 the second best selling platform and 3DS the third.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/ps3-i...in-2012/095170 ...by Published on April 28th, 2012 22:05- Categories:
- Xbox 360 News
Call of Duty is past it. The latest sales data revealed that Modern Warfare 3 has (so far) sold fewer copies than 2010’s Black Ops. A whole 4.2 per cent less. According to some corners of the press, the shooter series has peaked.
Except it hasn’t. Not one bit. A mere 4.2 per cent ‘shrink’ is quite an achievement when you consider how much the overall games market is down (in 2011 the UK games market fell 13 per cent year-on-year. So far this year, it is down 30 per cent).
And anyway Modern Warfare 3 was only half of Call of Duty‘s offering last year.
A priority this year is keeping core gamers on-board well beyond the launch period using the other half. It wants to keep people playing for longer. And to encourage this it launched CoD Elite.
Elite is a social network of sorts that lets users learn more about their games, watch videos, interact with fans, set up clans and a hell of a lot more. It has already amassed over 7m users, with 1.5m of those paying the annual £34.99 fee for the ‘premium service.’ The accompanying smartphone app has been downloaded over 2m times.
ROUGH START
Elite didn’t have the most comfortable of beginnings. In fact, the last time MCV met with Activision’s Noah Heller he was embroiled in a PR battle.
Call of Duty Elite was being shown at E3 for the first time, and the series’ vocal fanbase was not happy. Activision had said that some parts of the online service would be charged for, and although it hadn’t announced what parts and how much, Heller’s insistence that the majority of it would be free fell on deaf ears.
Fans felt Elite was just another way for Activision to extract more money from them. And the outcry was such that the publisher’s CEO Eric Hirshberg joked that nets might need to be erected to stop people throwing bottles during his address at fan expo Call of Duty XP three months later. “The words ‘Call of Duty’ plus the word ‘subscription’ equals ‘unleash blogger hell,’” he said.
A year later, Heller feels the reaction was a good thing.
“It took a while to actually arrive at the conclusion that we wanted to do right by the player base,” he recalls. “How much of the content would be walled off for premium users versus free users was a debate until the end. What you saw at E3 was a very transparent, public struggle we were having internally, in terms of how much we give back to players.
“It was a healthy discussion. If people had heard Elite was coming and there had been no outcry, the picture might have been different.”
TEETHING TROUBLE
Three months later and the fan fury dissipated.
Most of Elite was free, and the premium package was good value for money as it included every piece of DLC – plus the chance to win real prizes – for £34.99 a year.
But the teething problems didn’t end there. Having navigated the PR hurdle, Elite launched alongside Modern Warfare 3 in November and then collapsed. It took almost a month before it was up and running.
“We didn’t anticipate the scale,” says Heller.
“When you benchmark comparable online services that are successful – we were thinking about Netflix, Spotify and Xbox Live – and the conventional wisdom was that it takes a year to get to 1m members. We were at 7m by February with more than 1.5m premium members. And a lot of them turned up on the first day. We just weren’t prepared for that kind of traffic.”
MORE THE MERRIER
Today, Call of Duty Elite is fully operational and developer Beachhead is working relentlessly to make it up to its fans.
The quantity of DLC that’s being given to premium members has increased from 20 to 24. And Beachhead is regularly adding new modes, such as the recent Clan Operations that lets players level up their clans. There’s even a new comedy TV show called Noob Tube, which features user-generated content, plus a second season of the Ridley Scott-produced multiplayer program, Friday Night Fights.
“Every month we try to release one new feature, and fulfill this commitment that we are not going to stop developing Elite,” continues Heller.
“What we are seeing is that people who are into Elite play Call of Duty more. That’s a big way of how we measure our success internally, how much longer do people stay engaged? People who play with a clan are more likely to play Call of Duty than pick up another game. And that is exciting to us.”
Next up for Call of Duty Elite is a new tablet app to complement the existing mobile, console and web versions. And Beachhead is also working on better integrating Elite with the Call of Duty games.
“We want to get to the point where it is really seamless with the game,” Heller says. “I am not allowed to talk much about the next game. But I can say in-game integration is what is exciting the player base. So that is going to be the real focus for the next title.”
ELITE MARKETING
Call of Duty Elite has been a learning process for the publishing giant.
Activision already knows how to launch a boxed product. But an online service is an entirely different proposition. ...by Published on April 28th, 2012 22:03- Categories:
- Wii U News
A leaked Rayman Legends trailer (that is sure to be shortly removed) has revealed not only a Wii U version of the game, but also a host of platform-specific functionality.
As spotted by GoNintendo, players will be able to place certain objects on the new Nintendo controller which open up new perks and features in the game.
Seen in the short is a Raving Rabbids figure and, rather mysteriously right at the end of the video, Ezio from Assassin’s Creed.
Also seen are touch-screen controls and various multiplayer options.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/video...onality/095175 ...by Published on April 28th, 2012 22:00- Categories:
- Retro Consoles/Translation News
Retro emulation-based handheld GameGadget has had its RRP slashed from £99.99 to £59.99.
Makers Blaze say the move is due to “phenomenal demand and support”. Furthermore, the company has said it will refund all current owners £40 to make up for the price drop.
“Demand and support for GameGadget has been phenomenal taking us completely by surprise,” GameGadget creator Jason Cooper stated. “It has enabled us to secure significant cost savings on future production, well ahead of schedule.
“As we are serious about GameGadget becoming a “must have” gadget, that everyone can afford, we are therefore passing on our cost savings immediately.
“From day one we said we would be honest with our customers. We shall be refunding all customers the equivalent value of today’s price drop. They and future customers can now be confident that GameGagdet has reached its optimum price, in record time. There will be no further price reductions.”
Since launch the device has been beset by problems, including a software issue that prevented it functioning correctly out of the box.
Some owners have also been angered that, for the time being at least, only 30 titles are available for the machine, all of which are Mega Drive titles priced at £4.99 a piece.
Blaze is marketing the download service as “the gaming equivalent of iTunes”.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/blaze...-owners/095178 ...by Published on April 28th, 2012 21:59- Categories:
- DCEmu
The market fell below the £10m mark for the first time this year during the week ending April 21st.
Unit sales dipped 17 per cent to 422,280. This was due to another week with few new releases hitting shelves. In fact, The Witcher 2 was the only new title to enter the Top 40.
Namco Bandai’s new Xbox 360 release stormed to the top of the games charts last week. It sold around twice as many copies as second-place FIFA Street, but it wasn’t enough to prevent UK games retail tumbling to £9.7m in terms of value.
You can expect another quiet week around the corner. Prototype 2 went on sale last Tuesday (April, 24th), while just a handful of small titles hit shelves today (Friday, April 27th). This mirrors the week prior, where The Witcher 2 went on sale on Tuesday, April 17th.
EA continued to dominate the charts, with five games in the Top Ten. However, like last week, sales of all these were down, as were the majority of games in the Top 40. Only a handful of titles saw sales rise slightly – including F1 2012, The Sims 3 and Football Manager 2012.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/uk-ga...st-week/095183 ...by Published on April 28th, 2012 21:55- Categories:
- DCEmu
Game Retail Limited is the UK's new leading High Street video games retailer.
It's the new permanent name for the Baker Acquisitions Limited, the OpCapita owned company that acquired the UK assets of GAME Group's UK operations on April 1st.
GAME Group Limited remains in administration, with administrator PwC in the process of trying to sell off its remaining parts.
Having saved the UK operations, OpCapita then went on to acquire GAME Group's Iberian assets.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/baker...limited/095184 ...by Published on April 28th, 2012 21:53- Categories:
- Wii U News
Nintendo will adopt a simultaneous digital and retail release policy for its own Wii U games when the console launches later this year, the company's investor briefing reveals.
The news comes from president Satoru Iwata's briefing to investors following the release yesterday of Nintendo's annual results. As expected, the company posted a loss for the first time in its 30 years in the videogame business. Iwata, naturally, focused on the ways in which Nintendo intends to return to profitability, and it appears he is following through in his previous pledge to grow digital revenue.
Nintendo-published 3DS games will also be available in retail and digital formats from August, with the recently announced New Super Mario Bros 2 leading the charge - though the briefing makes no mention of whether 3DS digital versions will be available on day one.
Digital versions will be available from the Nintendo eShop, but also from retailers via codes - a move the report partly puts down to the increasingly short shelf lives of boxed releases and retail's resultant cautious attitude to re-ordering stock of ageing games.
Nintendo won't set recommended retail prices for codes, allowing traders to set their own, but it's unlikely that many retailers will choose to significantly undercut boxed prices with little incentive to do so.
"To adapt to the changes in circumstances surrounding the video game industry, Nintendo is intending to deploy its digital business significantly," Iwata said. "We would like to prove that our challenges in the digital business will result in an expanded business sustainable for the long term."
As has been the case with all eShop purchases, downloaded software will be locked to the 3DS - unlike purchases made in XBLA and PSN which are tied to the account, not hardware - which could cause problems if you lose your device, or want to upgrade to the seeminfgy inevitable 3DS Lite, further down the line.
Nintendo, a company that has been famously slow to embrace online, is clearly working hard to revise its position. But the company's strategy is markedly different to Microsoft's, recently told MCV that it believes retail should remain the focus on day one, with digital sales following on a few months later.
"We don't do Games on Demand on day one, we focus on boxed retail for day one," Xbox Live UK product manager Pav Bhardwaj said. "That's where our focus has always been and will remain that way for the foreseeable future.
"We release a game roughly six months after it arrives at retail at full ERP. That's our model and we'll be sticking to that. It's a successful model, so why change something you don't need to?"
Sony, however, currently makes digital versions of Vita games available at retail launch, and EA's experimental day-and-date digital and retail release of the PlayStation 3 version of Mass Effect 2 - Sony's first test of such a strategy - proved a huge success.
http://www.edge-online.com/news/nint...se-wii-u-games ...by Published on April 28th, 2012 21:49- Categories:
- PS3 News
Sony has announced PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, a fourplayer PS3 brawler featuring characters from Sony IP that owes more than a passing debt to Nintendo's Smash Bros series.
The game, unveiled last night, is in development at indie studio SuperBot Entertainment and features the likes of Kratos, Parappa The Rapper, Sly Cooper, Twisted Metal's flame-haired clown Sweet Tooth, and Fat Princess. Stages are mash-ups of Sony properties, with one showing God Of War's Hades invaded by Patapon.
On the PlayStation Blog, game director Omar Kendall writes: "The developers here at SuperBot really like fighting games. We set out to make an experience accessible enough for all PlayStation fans to enjoy while also creating something deep enough for the serious fighting game afficionado. We think this 'accessible yet deep' strategy is the perfect way to bring PlayStation fans of all stripes together."
http://www.edge-online.com/news/play...yale-announced ...by Published on April 28th, 2012 21:45- Categories:
- PC News
The launch of Intel's Ivy Bridge CPUs made headlines earlier this week, but the next-gen processor's story is still being told. When overclocked, Ivy Bridge runs as much as 20C hotter than its Sandy Bridge predecessor at the same speed, despite the fact that the two chips have comparable power consumption. There are several reasons for these toasty tendencies. The new 22-nm process used to fabricate the CPU produces a smaller die with less surface area to dissipate heat. Intel has changed the thermal interface materialbetween the CPU die and its heat spreader. Ivy also requires a much bigger step up in voltage to hit the same speeds as Sandy Bridge.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/1...s-last-gen-cpu ...by Published on April 27th, 2012 22:29- Categories:
- Nintendo 64 News
Just looking at this little thing makes our hands ache. But [Kirren] did do a great job ofbuilding an N64 controller inside a tiny project box. It’s not a mod, but a ground-up build based on a PIC 16F628 microcontroller.
It has most of the buttons found on a standard controller, and he assures us that you can play most games without missing the ones that didn’t make it into the design. You can just make out the analog stick to the left, but that silver ring on the right is actually a 4-direction tactile switch which stands in for the C buttons. He’s also included Start, A, B, R, and Z.
The link above goes to his Wiki, and there are more than enough details if you’re interested in doing this yourself or just understanding how everything works. Check out his writeup on the protocol, and you can even get a copy of his code. There’s also a video demo after the break which shows [Kirren] playing some Bond with the controller.
http://hackaday.com/2012/04/27/tiny-...amp-guarantee/ ...- Search DCEmu
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