Monthly Archives: January 2009

After a slight leakage earlier this week, Microsoft’s finally decided to pop the bubble shield of silence surrounding Halo 3’s Mythic map pack. IGN has the scoop.

Map descriptions are as follows:

Sandbox — Combines large-scale vehicular combat with a limitless amount of Forge customization. Boasting a tiered, open-world layout, “Halo 3″ players will be able to build their own unique game experiences using the Forge map editor. Sandbox is a map unlike any Bungie has ever created.
Assembly — Set in the heart of a Covenant Scarab manufacturing facility. With two identical bases on either side of this medium-sized map, it’s a perfect environment for both Slayer and objective games like Capture the Flag and Assault.
Orbital — A small asymmetrical map, is set in the docking station of the Quito Space Tether. One-sided games like One Flag, and One Bomb are sure to become quick fan-favorites, but the Slayer faithful will also find plenty of action on this battleground.

Now the bad news: If you’ve built up a great big grunty thirst that can only be slaked by the Mythic pack, and absolutely must own it on day one, you’ll have to toss your piggy bank at Halo Wars. Otherwise, you’ll be forced to wait until “later this spring” when the maps hit Xbox Live Marketplace.

The last time this happened, though, we got Crackdown, so we think we’ll take our chances with Halo Wars. How about you?

By Nathan Grayson

THQ’s boss Brian Farrell’s confirmed the publisher is to “restructure” its wireless division, as reported yesterday, resulting in the loss of 100 jobs.

In a note to employees, the exec said:

“As part of our goal of aligning our business to focus on our most competitive product categories, we have decided to streamline our THQ Wireless operations to focus only on games for high-end handheld devices. Given today’s market environment, we believe our focus on the high-end handheld market is critical to strengthening our market position and achieving profitability. As a result, we will be downsizing our wireless group and will be closing our San Diego, UK and Germany wireless offices. Approximately 100 employees will be affected.”

More on Moconews.

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has confirmed that DJ Hero – basically Guitar Hero with turntables – is in development and will be released later this year.

The game will come with a plastic deck and will demand that you tap along to dance music.

“We have this product called DJ Hero coming out later this year, which is a turntable that you actually can play competitively and spin discs and mix songs,” said Kotick in the CNBC video that we linked to earlier.

No formats were mentioned.

We’re still waiting for Triangle Hero.

Thanks, EG.

By Mike Bowden

The man behind the legendary Crisis on Infinite Earths, Marv Wolfman, has joined the other comic book stalwarts Jim Lee and Geff Johns in SOE’s superhero MMO, DC Universe Online.

According to BigDownload, Wolfman will be expanding on Geoff “The Green Lantern” Johns’ storylines.

Our interest in this title is growing daily and Wolfman’s addition to the team can only be a good thing.

More through the link.

By Mike Bowden

It’s so on. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said in Japan this week that he’s aiming for Wii’s sales to beat PS2′s. That’s a lot of sales. It’s 97.5 million sales, to be specific.

What we are looking at are the cumulative Wii and DS sales through the end of 2008. Wii has been selling at industry’s record pace so far, and with new customers acquired by the gaming population expansion efforts, it is not impossible for Wii’s total sales to exceed the final install base of PS2. Wii still has much more room for expansion. We can expect more sales of software in the next fiscal year than in the current year. With what kind of software is Nintendo going to achieve this goal? Well, it will be shown at E3 to be held in the U.S. this June.

Wii, by comparison, has so far sold 39.3 million worldwide. We’re pretty sure another Zelda isn’t going to net 60 million hardware sales.

It’s January. And we’re pumped for E3. Big Satoru: you’re the best.

Design studio Gridplane has revealed one of the many mock-ups it developed for Microsoft’s NXE.

The company was tasked with creating new ways for users to interact with multimedia.

Gridplane also mentioned that it came up with an “immersive 3D environment” for users to explore games and events within the Xbox Live Community which also never made it (obv.).

Everything’s over at Joystiq.

By Mike Bowden

This week’s US-only PSN video store update includes the classic psychological horror-slasher thriller, Carrie.

Other notables are Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman, Escape from Alcatraz and American Psycho.

Full list over at PSBlog.

By Mike Bowden

In response to Splash Damage studio director Paul Wedgwood’s claims that Metacritic pressure on devs was “ridiculous,” Sega Europe president Mike Hayes said that reckons Metacritic provides “objectivity into the business.”

Hayes added the caveat that the meta-review site needs to be used sensibly, however, if factored into future developer deals.

“The first thing is that we’re always trying to put objectivity into the business,” he told GI. “We’re a creative business, and how do you put objectivity into it?

“But at the end of the day publishers will always want to do that, particularly if you’re spending USD 20 million – you have to try and find that objectivity, and it’s going to come from how much it costs, when it’s coming out, and how good the game is.

“I don’t think you can get away from that, and Metacritic provides a service that gives you a part of that,” he explained.

“If you’re going for a high-end PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 game and you want to break out in the genre, or something like that, you have to target that quality – because otherwise you don’t have a hope in Hell,” he went on.

“There’s too much evidence that shows games which score below a certain level in certain genres are not going to cut through.

“However, there are other genres and other platforms where we wouldn’t put a developer against that score, because it’s more about the brand, the license, the release timing – it’s probably something that in the Metacritic basket of reviews, they’re not going to look at the same things that we’re going to look for when making a game,” Hayes continued.

“So when we’re doing developer contracts, we won’t say to every developer we work with that there’s a target in there. But where we’re spending a lot of money, and the score is essential to the success of the product, absolutely I think there’s a value in it.

“We value the scores that we’re given by the media – it’s a very good way of measuring it – and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for publishers spending that much money to have certain expectations of quality levels. But to demand it on absolutely everything wouldn’t be right at all.”

By Mike Bowden

In a video interview with CNBC, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has said that the one factor that videogames has to take into the recession against other forms of entertainment is that the cost per hour is very low for the consumer.

“I don’t think [the videogame industry] is exempt from kind of [financial impact] over the next few years but I think the one thing we benefit from is the cost per hour of videogame entertainment is lower than any other form of entertainment.”

Kotick went on to say that this dollar-cost per hour is such an advantage to the average consumer and is why companies like the “Disney’s, the Viacom’s, the Time-Warner and the Sony’s” are all now in the video-game business.

See the full interview with Kotick through here.

By Mike Bowden

Sony’s David Reeves has told Eurogamer has told Eurogamer that any speculation regarding a next-gen PlayStation is premature as he hasn’t ever heard anyone mention it.

“I have never even heard it mentioned,” he said. “I think people are concentrating so much on what’s happening now that they’re not even thinking about it.”

Read about Reeves’ views on on the future of PSP, platform exclusivity, 360 reliability, armadillos, price cuts destroying the market, PS3 being in second place and about Sony making a profit, not sales through the links.

By Mike Bowden

SCEE president David Reeves has admitted that PSP performance has not been good enough but promised a stellar line up for 2009.

“The competition has been such that publishers have had four consoles, plus PC, to publish for. They did not put their chips on PSP, certainly in the US and Europe,” said Reeves when asked about why he thought the PSP’s performance had been lacking.

“In Japan, a lot of publishers put their chips on PSP. So games like Monster Hunter, Phantasy Star Portable and Dissidia have caused enormous spikes for PSP in Japan. But there haven’t been big platform drivers in Europe.

“Now I can look you in the face and say, the line-up for PSP in 2009 is two or three times stronger than it was last year, ” said.

“We ran out of steam on games around August, September last year. We didn’t have a Monster Hunter or a Dissidia. But probably from March to July, you’re going to see that type of thing starting to kick in.”

Eurogamer then confronted Reeves with the fact that 185 DS games have been announced compared with 44 for PSP. To that Reeves responded: “It depends on the quality of the games, doesn’t it? People come out on DS and want to compete against Nintendo first-party, and that’s a tough thing.

“It’s like when you watch six year-old boys play football, and they all follow the ball right the way across the field. Sometimes developers and publishers do that, and that’s what they’ve done with DS.”

Ok, David. If you say so.

By Mike Bowden

In a recent interview with Eurogamer, Sony Europe president David Reeves says he has no regrets about titles like Grand Theft Auto, amongst others, going multi-platform and completely understand the publisher’s rights to do so.

“I don’t think we were in a position not to give up exclusivity,” he said honestly. “You can’t live on exclusivity forever; in the end, you’ve got to be master of your own destiny.

“We’ve invested in studios like Media Molecule and gained exclusivity that way. We’ve made studios like Evolution and Guerrilla wholly-owned.

“Our strategy is to have 15 to 20 IPs by the time we get to 2009, 2010,” he added.

“We don’t have to go to Capcom or Take-Two and ask for an exclusive. And I don’t think we could afford it anyway. In the cold light of day, I would do exactly as those publishers have done and go multi-platform.”

When asked what his response would be if Konami announced it was going multiplat with Metal Gear Solid, Reeves replied: “That’s totally their decision. We’re not going to fall over ourselves just to try and keep that exclusive. We have to stand on our own two feet.”

More, as ever, through the link.

By Mike Bowden

When asked what the average [read: not 'hardcore', doesn't care about Blu ray] consumer would choose if he/she went into a shop and saw the expensive PlayStation 3 compared with the cheaper 360, SCEE president David Reeves expects them to go for “the green machine” – though only because they haven’t done their research.

“The price will affect their decision,” he told EG. “Yes, if I haven’t got that much money to spend, I will go for, let’s say, the green machine. Because the salesman will say, ‘Well, it’s got all the games,’ and he wants to sell that machine.

“But there are people who come in having done their research, thinking, ‘PS3 has got all the games, it’s free to go online, it’s got a Blu-ray player.

“I know I’m not going to have to ring up the customer careline saying ‘I’ve got three red lights.’”

“We recognised that those numbers would go down because we did not drop the price,” added Reeves. “But we reached the targets we expected to reach under those assumptions.”

By Mike Bowden

When quizzed on whether PlayStation 3 would remain the most expensive console on the market, Sony Europe president David Reeves concurred saying that you need a thick skin in order to know how to weather the economic storm.

“I think it will [remain the most expensive console, yes," said Reeves to EG. "I'm not saying there are going to be any price cuts at all in the short term or the medium term. I'm not saying we don't need to do it - we are expensive.

"It is possible that as the cost [of manufacturing] comes down, we will be able to do it.

“But we’re protecting ourselves with a very hard shell to get through the next one or two years of an economic situation,” he warned.

“If you’re experienced, you know you have to go into that mode – it’s like being an armadillo. You have to be hard, and then you will come out when the sun comes out.

“If, as an industry, we can get through the next six to seven months, we’re going to find a massive uplift in September and October. I’m very optimistic about it. ”

Still more through the link.

In a rather volcanic interview with Eurogamer, SCEE president David Reeves has said he feels that despite the recession, the videogame industry is in good health and will remain if “people” don’t go around “cutting prices” and ruining it for everybody else.

“It’s a function of the economic situation that you are going to find people who are resilient, who do not play with their pricing, who are very efficient,” said Reeves.

“Those people in that particular studio, they don’t have a job, but I think in a few weeks you’ll find them housed in other studios,” he responded when confronted with the many development houses that have either gone under or laid people off recently.

“Of course there are going to be some people who fold. But the videogames industry is inherently very healthy.

“It’s not a question of survival of the fittest, it’s the survival of people who are professional, and don’t just go around cutting their prices and destroying the market,” he added.

There’s more than you could possibly imagine through the link.

By Mike Bowden

David Reeves has told EG that despite Microsoft’s claims to the contrary, Xbox 360 is not as far ahead as the company thinks.

Reeves compared Sony stance of not dropping the price compared with MS as like “going ten rounds with Ali” and still standing.

“I don’t want to talk about the competition too much, but Xbox 360 is not ahead by a million units,” said Reeves, looking back on the post-December NPD fallout.

“We sold through 500,000 PS3s in November. We sold through 1.1 million units in December. Our installed base now is very close to 8.5 million units in PAL territories. Our numbers show we are absolutely neck-and-neck,” he said.

Looking ahead to the remainder of the PS3′s lifecycle, Reeves remains positive as now he claims that PS3 is number two in the market.

“What happened was, we overtook them, and they dropped the price. It’s almost as if we’ve gone ten rounds as Mohammed Ali and we’re still standing, because we didn’t drop the price. We held firm.

Now, going into the remaining rounds and the next seven years, we are going to be very strong. The last few weeks have shown we are clearly number two in the market. I’m as confident as I was before.

SCEE president David Reeves has said that in light of yesterday’s moribund Q3 financial results, Sony’s plan was never sales-minded, but profit-focused.

“We’ve said it would be 10 million, and it is 10 million,” said Reeves. “We had a price decrease in the previous year, and we didn’t have a price decrease this year. Xbox 360 did, and Nintendo was already quite low.”

“The plan wasn’t necessarily to hit sales, it was to hit a profit target – to do better than break even in Q3.

“The financial results show a break even in Q3 for Sony Computer Entertainment worldwide. So rather than then going for market share and sales, we went for profit, at least to break even,” he added.

“We’re two-and-a-half years into a ten-year cycle,” Reeves re-iterated. “For October, November and December we were in a holding pattern, especially with the pricing.

“We had to demonstrate we could make a profit with the business model, and that’s what we’ve done.”

Full thing over at Eurogamer.

Sony has just announced Buzz! Brain of the UK, a new iteration of the rather excellent quiz series featuring over 4000 questions based purely on the United Kingdom.

“It’s not just kings and queens, though,” says the press release in case you were wondering.

“You’ll find questions on diverse aspects of UK life: there’ll be questions on bands, cities, sports personalities, television favourites, wildlife, food and more.”

Buzz! Brain of the UK is out for PS3, PS2 and PSP in March.

Full press release and screenshots after the break.

By Mike Bowden

More »

Sony UK has told videogaming247 that its £2m Killzone 2 ad campaign including the newly announced web-game is to launch “mid Feb.”

“We’re targeting mid Feb to pre-promote Killzone 2,” a Sony UK rep told VG247 this afternoon.

On top of the web-game and advertising spots, Sony has also revealed that a Killzone 2 bundle will also be available at launch (Feb 27) for £299.99.

Febraury is now officially Killzone 2 month.

By Mike Bowden

Wedbush Morgan’s Michael Pachter has issued a research note declaring that the analyst foresees “weak results” ahead of EA fiscal Q3 09 results that are due to be published this Tuesday, February 3.

“We expect EA to report pro forma Q3 revenue of $1.88 billion and pro forma EPS of $0.88 (excluding deferred revenue, charges for restructuring, acquisition, amortization, and stock compensation expense), compared to consensus estimates for revenue of $1.92 billion and EPS of $0.90,” says the note.

However it’s not all bad, as Pachter admits that EA’s US sales are doing better than Wedbush anticipated.

“EA’s U.S. sales are tracking ahead of our estimates for the quarter, according to data from the NPD group,” he states.

“The company’s U.S. retail sales are up 17% over the same period last year, compared with our estimate for +8% pro forma revenue growth.

“However, we expect large additions to the company’s reserves, limiting revenue upside. Much of the revenue upside is expected from the co-published Rock Band and Left 4 Dead and from new releases such as Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space (which we believe had significant development costs), so we expect tempered earnings contribution,” concluded Pachter.

Full thing after the break.

By Mike Bowden

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