Monthly Archives: June 2009

Activision boss Bobby Kotick’s bombshell threat to drop Sony formats earlier today is nothing but posturing, Wedbush Morgan’s Michael Pachter has told VG247.

“Of course Bobby’s bluffing, and good for him,” said the analyst in a phone call.

“I think Bobby’s obviously interested in Sony selling as many PS3s as they possibly can, and he’s not happy with their penetration so far. I think he favours a price cut, and would rather see one sooner than later.”

Pachter said that he expects Sony to react to Kotick in the same way it did when he said Sony was “ripping off consumers” with its PSP Go pricing: by saying it’s offended.

“I think they’ll say to Bobby, ‘You hurt our feelings.’ And Bobby will say, ‘Who cares?’ It’s interesting. Bobby’s very much feeling his power, and he’s exercising it.

“He’s saying what a lot of people think, which is, ‘We’d really like to see a bigger installed base.’ And, ‘We, Activision, will sell more copies of Modern Warfare 2, and Guitar Hero 5 and DJ Hero if there we more PS3s out there.’ And that’s just true.”

Pachter went on to say that he thought “the PSP price is intended to subsidise the PS3 price cut.”

Sony price PSP Go at $250/€250 at E3, dating the machine for October 1.

Kotick told a UK paper this afternoon that he’ll consider dropping support for Sony hardware formats unless PS3′s price comes down.

PEGI ratings and the new labels are expected to be enforced before Christmas rolls around in the UK.

ELSPA chairman Andy Payne has said that the Video Standards Council will legally be able to start classifying games after the UK Government returns from recess, which runs from July – October 12.

“There’s a whole load of things that will need to happen and they are all geared around the political process,” Payne told GI.biz. “In terms of this actually becoming law, it’s got to get through Parliament and that will happen but that will take time.

“Parliament is going into recess and this won’t even get looked at before then. In terms of making it absolutely law, and that’s the VSC taking over the legislative duties the BBFC has, that won’t happen until the autumn at the earliest, and there’s a whole load of things that have got to happen before that.

“In this political climate I would expect this to be going through due legal process before Christmas and I fully expect the new symbols on boxes for the big major products that are coming out in the fourth quarter.”

The full interview is through the link.

Play.com has dated Gran Turismo 5 for November 27.

This date has not been confirmed by Sony, so don’t get too excited. Retailers have been known to be wrong on occasion.

Yamauchi has said that GT5 can be released “any time we want” but has yet to define just when that may be.

Hopefully, we’ll know whether this is a real date or an estimated projection soon.

This week the US PS movie store has HD movies Death Wish II, Friday The 13th, Fletch and others.

The list of HD television shows is a bit thin as usual.

Full list of HD offerings are listed below, while the rest can be found over on the US PS Blog.

HD Movies

• Death Wish II
• Coffee and Cigarettes
• Friday The 13th
• The Cell 2
• Garfield’s Pet Force
• Ambush Bay
• Fletch
• Wolf Creek
• Scary Movie 4
• School for Scoundrels
• Pulse

HD TV Shows

• Kings – Season 1 “Brotherhood”
• Worst Week – Season 1 “The Party”
• In Plain Sight -  Season 2 “A Frond in Need”
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent – Season 8 “The Glory That Was…”
• The Unusuals – Season 1 “E.I.D.”
• Rescue Me – Season 5 “Mickey”
• Jesse James is a Dead Man – Season 1 “Arctic Bike Journey”
• Burn Notice – Season 3 “Episode 3″
• Royal Pains – Season 1 “Episode 3″

EG’s just said it’s to re-review EA’s Grand Slam Tennis, and has pulled its original 5/10 score.

The site’s editor, Tom Bramwell, said on his blog today that the game’s retail version is significantly more responsive than the dev kit set-up used for the review.

“As a result, I’m immediately withdrawing Eurogamer’s Grand Slam Tennis review until we will publish a new review based purely on retail console play,” said Bramwell.

“The existing text will remain online with big whopping signposts on it that highlight the above, and once the replacement review is published, it will redirect to that.”

The new score will go live on Monday.

Megaton. Acti Blizz head Bobby Kotick’s said he may stop supporting Sony with software unless it drops PS3′s price.

“They have to cut the price, because if they don’t, the attach rates [the number of games each console owner buys] are likely to slow. If we are being realistic, we might have to stop supporting Sony,” he said.

Asked when Sony titles may be pulled, Kotick added: “When we look at 2010 and 2011, we might want to consider if we support the console — and the PSP [portable] too.”

Wow.

“Games generate a better return on invested capital on the Xbox than on the PlayStation,” he said.

Kotick added that Acti Blizz paid $500 million to Sony in royalties and other goods last year, which “probably still worked out at 400 percent of the profit they made”.

DEF. CON. 1. Lock the mountain.

Update: Just spoke to SCEE PR. A statement’s being prepared, we were told, and it “shouldn’t be too much longer”.

Update 2: Kotick’s “bluffing,” says Pachter.

Update 3: The Sony statement’s in.

Twitter. We’re now so addicted to it we choose it over speaking to people in the same room. Rare’s clearly seen the potential, and has now signed up for the “service”. Hit this to get following.

Boss Gregg Mayles has already been pimping Natal jobs on that feed, as you can see here. So keep an eye on it.

Battlefield 1943 won’t have a beta, EA DICE producer Gordon Van Dyke has said in a live interview on Eurogamer, but there’ll be a demo to make up for it.

Said the developer: “No beta, but we have a trial version that lets you confirm what you already thought – that this game is the best $15 I will ever spend!”

It’s out this summer, download-only. Full thing through there.

Today is a good day. First, 18 minutes of StarCraft II, and now a whopping 13 minutes of God of War III gameplay.

It’s out March 2010. Thanks, Kotaku. Hit the link.

More »

If you were holding out for Splinter Cell Conviction to eventually make its way to PS3, you’re out of luck. Ubi just said on its forums that it really is an MS exclusive thanks to a “link of heart” between the franchise and the platform.

“Splinter Cell Conviction is a true Microsoft exclusive title and there are no plans to have Splinter Cell Conviction on other platforms,” said the company.

“There are several reasons behind this choice. First of all, Splinter Cell games are historically linked with Microsoft platforms. The first Splinter Cell on the original Xbox was one of the first games to fully exploit the console’s technical possibilities. At that time, Microsoft really believed in the game potential and provided strong support to promote it. So, there is a “link of heart” between the franchise and the platform. Some games are like this (think of Final Fantasy for instance).

“The second reason behind this choice is purely linked to production. Having a single target platform means that we can optimize the game even further, because we only have one type of – console – hardware to support.”

It’s out at the end of this year. Assuming you’re not solely reliant on PS3, obviously.

You’ll be able to watch some LucasArts developers play Monkey Island on Justin.tv tonight at 3.00pm PST (11.00pm BST), Joystiq reports.

There’s no direct link to is over there, unfortunately. If you do find it, though, you’ll be able to ask questions of the devs for about an hour.

Good luck.

By retaining global ad agency TBWA/Chiat/Day, Activision reckons Modern Warfare 2′s release can be the “biggest entertainment launch of all time.”

“We believe the idea that TBWA presented to us delivers on that goal,” said Activision chief creative officer Brad Jakeman.

“What we liked most about the TBWA campaign is that it’s an idea that’s big enough to be articulated in lots of different kind of media… that is always the acid test for a great idea.”

For the record, GTA IV’s launch on April 29, 2008, saw 3.6 million units of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 title generate $310 million in global sales in 24 hours. Let’s hope those ads are good ads.

More on Gamespot.

It’s Friday! That means you’re allowed to not work/pretend to work and watch 18 minutes of Zerg Vs Protoss combat in the almost-beta-ready StarCraft II.

Get it from Gamez.nl, exclusively, apparently.

Beta please, Blizzard. Thanks, Centipede.

This is rubbish. id’s confirmed to Destructoid that Hitler won’t be appearing in Raven’s imminent Wolfenstein thanks to timeline issues.

“No,” said community manager Peter Sokol, “in this game there will be no Hitler. We love ‘Mecha Hitler.’ Obviously, he’s one of the classic bad guys in videogames. It’s so famous in Wolf 3D when you finally killed him off, but this time around… it takes place after the events of Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

“So, we wanted to expand on that story, make it a lot deeper story arc this time around. For the story we were trying to tell this time, it just didn’t really fit to have Hitler and Mecha Hitler in the game.”

Look, Peter. We want to shoot Hitler in the face. Can’t you just raise him from the dead, or something?

The game’s out this “summer”.

Gamestop’s posted up details of the Forza 3 Limited Edition, which’ll roll into US stores at a mere $80 this October.

For that, you get:

• Forza Motorsport 2GB USB Storage and keychain.
• Forza Motorsport VIP Membership and Exclusive Car Pack
• Exclusive Collector’s Edition Car Pack
• Exclusive Forza Motorsport 3 Theme

Woo. Full details through there.

Warhammer Online is to launch in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau next week via GigaMedia’s FunTown game platform, Kotaku reports.

The Mythic MMO currently has around 300,000 subs in the US.

BioWare? On Wii? Not the most unlikely thing in the world.

“We’d be intrigued by the idea of developing on Wii but we have nothing to announce right now,” BioWare boss Ray Muzyka told IndustryGamers.

“We do have some unannounced projects that we’re not ready to talk about yet, and they are different from some things we’ve done in the past.”

Cross your fingers, Wii fans. Remember that BioWare did Sonic Chronicles for Sega on DS. Cling on to the dream.

Doing these every week is just depressing. Flat lines of dreariness, moving imperceptibly up and down. Sad Japanese people trudging into flaking games shops, grumpily buying a PS2 for little Yoshi to play ten year-old Gundam games on a black and white TV in the basement.

Go nuts, Japan. Have some kind of PS3 fit, or something. Data below for the week ending June 14. Last week’s charts here.

• DSi – 36,872
• PSP – 26,904
• Wii – 18,442
• PS3 – 10,009
• Xbox 360 – 8,015
• DS Lite – 5,408
• PS2 – 3,498

You may have been holding out for news that Dragon Quest IX has Wi-Fi co-op. You can stop. It doesn’t.

“From the beginning of development, co-op play hasn’t been via Wi-Fi, but rather DS wireless play,” said a Square Enix Japan rep.

Sorted? Good. The game ships in Japan on July 11.

From IT Media, via Kotaku.

God’s sake. To cut a very long-winded story short, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer said at The Executive’s Club of Chicago last night that a new Xbox 360 will hit the store shelves in 2010.

The machine, said Ballmer, is to have a “natural interface,” with built-in camera with the ability to recognize movement and voice.

The internet, obviously, went nuts, causing Xbox product boss Aaron Greenberg to get on the phone to various sites (including Destructoid) to say in no uncertain terms:

“I can tell you that we are not launching a new console in 2010.”

He added: “We’re not going to have to require customers to reinvest in an entirely new platform,” he says. “We’re able to add [Project Natal] on top of what’s already there.”

And: “This will work with your Xbox 360 if you’re buying one today, a year from now, [or] if you bought one at launch.”

Nelson also threw in his tuppence, saying, “We are not even halfway through the current console generation lifecycle and believe Xbox 360 will be the entertainment center in the home for long into the next decade.

“Project Natal will be an important part of this platform, but we have not confirmed a launch date at this time.”

So what was Ballmer talking about? A new 360 SKU with integrated Natal, probably, although Greenberg insisted in the wake of his comments that Natal’s route to market hasn’t been finalised in terms of time or method.

Back to DEFCON 3. Unlock the mountain.