Monthly Archives: August 2009

Activision Blizzard has significantly reduced its full-year guidance on the now-confirmed StarCraft II delay, pulling revenue estimates for calendar 2009 down to $4.05 billion from $4.3 billion.

The publisher admitted the slip in its Q2 earnings last night, saying the delay was necessary to match the upcoming relaunch of Battle.net. Both will now happen in “early” 2010.

The company yesterday showed revenues in excess of $1 billion for the second quarter.

Valve’s Chet Faliszek has weighed in on Natal, and while he thinks it’s “really cool”, he is more concerned with the games that will be created for it.

“We [Valve] got to check it out, and it’s actually really cool,” he told D’toid. “Like, there’s someone running around, jumping around and someone else walks up and it instantly recognizes this other person, splits them off and [they do] their own thing. There’s a lot of coolness around it, but I’m not sure about the game that comes with that, and I’m not sure, personally, how much I wanna move around. I’m a lazy, lazy man. I don’t want to move. I don’t want to be fatigued playing a game.

“I think Wii hit it out of the park with the titles that it shipped with. I bought two Wiis, and they’re both [for visiting] family, and playing. I can’t seem to box them up and carry them, so I had to buy two. [Wii's launch titles] are perfect games for that … I haven’t found much else that’s compelling.

“I want to see the compelling game first.”

Half Life 2: Episode 3 using Natal to simulate a crowbar attack across the face of a hostile Combine – now that would be compelling.

Activision was quick to talk about its line-up of music-centic games coming this year during its call to investors, and there are loads of ‘em as you would expect.

Guitar Hero 5, Band Hero, and DJ Hero are all expected before the end of the year and now you can add the elusive Guitar Hero: Van Halen to the mix.

Expected to launch on December 22, the title will feature 19 other bands besides Van Halen, as we’ve told you before, and has 25 VH tracks on the disc with three guitar solos for a total of around 47 songs.

It is to be made available for PS2, PS3, Wii and Xbox 360.

Full track list is posted after the break.

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Speaking in the Acti Blizz Q2 earnings call tonight, Blizzard boss Mike Morhaime caved on the subject of whether or not two Blizzard games would release next year, saying it was “correct to conclude” that StarCraft II’s now-confirmed delay into 2010 means the publisher’s about to double up.

Morhaime stated in a previous earnings call that Blizzard plans to release one major game per calendar year.

“I’d just like to reiterate that we haven’t announced any release dates on any future titles, and I’ll also reiterate that the move of StarCraft into next year does not impact the schedule,” he said after being asked whether or not we’ll see two Blizzard games next year twice by two separate analysts.

“So, it would be correct to conclude that you could expect two releases of Blizzard next year, but I would not make any conclusion on what those titles are going to be.”

The second analyst mentioned Diablo as the 2010 game, but, as you can see, Morhaime was having none of it.

StarCraft II was delayed into 2010 tonight to match up with Battle.net’s relaunch in the first half of next year.

Activision CEO Mike Griffith announced today the company’s expected console install base for North America and Europe by the end of 2009.

• Handhelds: 108 million
• Wii: 50 million
• Xbox 360: 33 million
• PS3: 20 million
• Total: 211 million

Expectations for the console install base were lowered by one million units.

The figures came from the publisher’s Q2 earnings call.

Activision CEO Mike Griffith just confirmed that Tony Hawk: Ride will only launch in the US, UK and Germany this year.

Other territories will get the peripheral-based game in 2010.

The comments came in the company’s Q2 financial call, which is ongoing.

Activision’s Mike Griffith has just announced that a new Bond game will release in 2010.

No release date or details were announced.

In the same breath, he stated that new Tony Hawk and Spider-Man games were also expected in the next calendar year.

This is in line with the company’s commitment to proven franchises, said the boss.

Mike Griffith said today that CoD4 has now sold close to 14 million units.

This was stated during the company’s Q2 financial call to investors. Griffith said that Modern Warfare 2 has netted more pre-orders than any other game in Activision’s history.

He also went on to discuss the company’s commitment to map packs and other DLC for the CoD franchise.

Activision’s Mike Griffith has said that multiple sections in stores during the holidays will have ActiBlizz kiosks featuring games and demos.

This is to push proven titles and new ones coming out for the year.

The call is on going, so stick with us.

The upgraded Battle.net needs extra development time to be critical to Activision’s vision for the service, according to a mailer just sent our way.

The service will now launch in early 2010. StarCraft II has now been delayed to match its release.

“Our mission is to develop games that deliver an epic entertainment experience,” said Blizzard PR.

“As part of that commitment, we will always take as much time as needed to ensure that our games and services meet the expectations of our players and the standard for quality that we set for ourselves as developers.

“As we work to make Battle.net the premier online gaming destination, we’ll also continue to polish and refine StarCraft II, and we look forward to delivering a real-time strategy gaming experience worthy of the series’ legacy in the first half of 2010.”

Acti Blizz boss Bobby Kotick said tonight that the upcoming Battle.net relaunch will be comparable in scope to Xbox Live.

The service is now confirmed to be launching “early next year.”

“To put Battle.net into context, it will be a service similar to Xbox Live, and it will leverage the technologies, infrastructure and expertise that Blizzard has developed over the last decade in multiplayer play and social networking,” said the exec, speaking in the firm’s Q2 earnings call.

He added: “A true online destination platform, Battle.net will become the foundation for connecting the tens of millions of members of the Blizzard community in a social gaming network across all Blizzard’s future games.

“This will begin with World of Warcraft and StarCraft II.”

StarCraft II has now been delayed into 2010 to match the release of the new Battle.net.

Acti Blizz just beat guidance in the second quarter, bringing in $1.04 billion revenue compared to a $1 billion estimate.

EPS was was $0.15.

The company claimed in its release that it grew quarterly North American and European market share 2.8 points across all platforms to 12.7 percent from 9.9 percent for the previous year, and was the top North American third-party console and handheld publisher for both the quarter and first six months of the calendar year.

Prototype, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the Guitar Hero and Call of Duty franchises, as well as WoW, were singled out as top scores for the period.

The conference call starts in ten minutes.

Acti Blizz just confirmed that StarCraft II will launch in the first half of 2010 “to coincide with the relaunch of its upgraded Battle.net online -gaming service.”

The news Blizzard fans have been dreading to hear came in the company’s just-released Q2 financial report.

“As we prepare for next year, we have moved the expected release dates for two games, Activision Publishing’s Singularity and Blizzard Entertainment’s StarCraft II, into 2010,” said company boss Bobby Kotick.

The firm had previously delayed Singularity into next year last month.

Nintendo has announced that since its launch on July 25, Wii Sports Resort has sold over 500,000 units in the United States.

“Through Monday we sold one copy of Wii Sports Resort roughly every 1.5 seconds continuously since it launched in the United States,” said NOA’s Cammie Dunaway, “This tells us consumers were eagerly waiting to get their hands on these fun activities, and it’s a great start for a game that will have long-lasting appeal.”

Wii Sports Resort includes archery, Swordplay, table tennis, basketball, golf, bowling, Air Sports, Power Cruising, Frisbee, cycling, canoeing and wakeboarding and comes with Wii MotionPlus.

Loads more through the press release.

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The ESRB has revealed an upcoming Rock Band metal track pack for PS2, PS3, Wii and 360.

Tracks listed include D.O.A. by Haunted, Transmaniacon MC by Blue Oyster Cult, Killed by Death by Motorhead, Hair of the Dog by Nazareth, and Master of the Universe by Hawkwind .

MTV, Harmonix, nor EA have announced this, but its the ESRB, and it has better things to do than sit around and make things up, we reckon.

Via Joystiq

Direct2Drive has a fabulous indie sale going on at the moment.

It’s a bundle consisting of five games for one price.

For just $17.75 you’ll get: Defense Grid, The Path, Zeno Clash, Democracy 2 and Cogs.

Hell, Zeno Clash is worth that all by it’s lonesome.

No end date for the sale was listed, but it shan’t last too long.

Thanks, BigDownload.

Treyarch has released a video for the third map pack for Call of Duty: World at War, which comes out tomorrow.

You can watch it after the break.

It will run you 800 Microsoft Points/$9.99 on 360 and PS3.

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According to a trademark filed by Sony, the company is planning a rewards program.

Called PlayStation Thanks, the trademark filing states its an “incentive rewards program” for the top consumer base.

No word on how this alleged program will work, but Siliconera suggests that Sony could “hand out points for each item purchased and reward frequent buyers with PlayStation products sort of like Club Nintendo or they could quantify top players by skill via trophies and reward them.”

More over on Siliconera.

Shigeru Miyamoto made a surprise appearance at Koei Tecmo’s Samurai Warriors 3 press conference in Tokyo where the Wii exclusive was being shown.

According to a live blog of the Japanese event, Miyamoto took the stage to announce the Mysterious Murasame Castle mode in the game, which was never released outside of Japan.

Mysterious Murasame Castle’s main theme showed up in Super Smash Bros Brawl. and was included as a treasure item in Pikmin 2.

Samurai Warriors 3 will support a standard controller and is expected to release in Japan this November.

More over on GameSetWatch along with a video.

David Perry has spoken out about his multi-million dollar title which Atari dropped three years ago.

“It was going to be called Plague,” Perry told Eurogamer. “It was a really big idea: lots of new hooks – kind of me. I wanted to get back to old Shiny where it was always a surprise and lots of new hooks and things you’d never seen before.

“The idea was you could fire nano-weapons into things that would actually generate objects and delete objects in real-time. It was pretty neat. I was working with a book author, and we were going to get a movie made. It was a big deal.

“But it was a little too big for Atari. They weren’t ready for that.”

Perry stated that his idea for the game is “nowhere near done yet”.

“Am I done with big games? Hell no. But I’m way too busy to do one right now,” he said.

More through the link.