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Battle Islands or your friends.
Wii game Worms Battle Islands will launch on 26th November, THQ has confirmed.
“Reasons to pay attention to yet another rehash of Team17’s turn-based warhorse might seem elusive, but how’s this: Battle Islands is that rare beast, an online multiplayer game for the Wii with a proper, contemporary feature-set,” wrote Eurogamer’s Oli Welsh when he previewed the game as a WiiWare title late last year.
Somewhere along the food chain Battle Islands was upgraded to a retail release.
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Battle Islands or your friends.
Wii game Worms Battle Islands will launch on 26th November, THQ has confirmed.
“Reasons to pay attention to yet another rehash of Team17’s turn-based warhorse might seem elusive, but how’s this: Battle Islands is that rare beast, an online multiplayer game for the Wii with a proper, contemporary feature-set,” wrote Eurogamer’s Oli Welsh when he previewed the game as a WiiWare title late last year.
Somewhere along the food chain Battle Islands was upgraded to a retail release.
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Or Worms Reloaded for 16.
Eurogamer’s sister site Get Games is doing a special deal on our Game of the Week at the moment, allowing you to snap up Football Manager 2011 for a mere £23.99.
Elsewhere on Get Games this week, there’s a special offer on Worms Reloaded for only £16.29 as British developer Team17 joins the service.
There are plenty of other offers too – just check out the Get Games homepage to see what’s available.
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Digital specialist at worlds largest library is concerned over the need to preserve UK’s development legacy.
Paul Wheatley, a specialist in digital preservation at the British Library, has indicated that he would like to build on the work already started by the National Videogame Archive. Wheatley has said that he is interested in collating UK-developed games – and any associated documentation – to preserve the UK’s 30-year development history.
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Next generation of online games will make consumers question the need to buy the next Xbox or PlayStation system, says Battlefield Heroes head Ben Cousens.
Electronic Arts has been going through a torrid time of late. Having addressed criticism from gamers about churning out sequels with little effort or imagination, it’s now dealing with the wrath of investors who think that the firm isn’t making enough money and is spending too much in unproven markets and new IP. Talking at the London Games Conference today, Ben Cousens, MD of EA’s free-to-play Easy division, talked about what the company has learned and how free-to-play games such as Battlefield Play4Free will shake up the marketplace further, hinting that the newly announced title will add to this learning experience.
Consumer behaviour is leading the industry, he said, and within two to five years the market is going to be seriously disrupted. That time period for publishers such as EA will be all about how to “grab the TV screen away from the console manufacturers” and use new technology to break down the barriers to gamers. In this time frame the quality of free-to-play titles will make players ask: “Do I really want to buy a new console?”
The one thing that may act as a “parachute” for console makers is opening up their platforms, Cousens said. “Anyone who thinks in terms of walled gardens is in trouble,” he explained, talking about the enclosed and secure nature of both XBLA and the PlayStation Network as the only way to play downloadable titles on Microsoft’s and Sony’s consoles.
The market here is huge, Cousens emphasised. He said he feels the market is changing so fast that there is a gap large enough for a shift as big as the original PlayStation. This could be filled by something like Google TV or Apple TV, he said, or it could be filled by a new device entirely that acts as an open platform for online Web-based gaming that allows publishers to easily reach gamers’ TVs with their free-to-play offerings.
Read and Post Comments | Get the full article at GameSpot
“EA: Free-to-play will threaten console business” was posted by Alex Sassoon Coby on Fri, 05 Nov 2010 05:25:53 -0700 -
Bodycount now due early summer 2011.
The general manager of Codemasters Guildford, the developer behind shooter Bodycount, has left the British publisher, Eurogamer can exclusively reveal.
Adrian Bolton, ex-development director at Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit creator Criterion, follows Bodycount creative director Stuart Black out of the company.
Bodycount is now slated for release in “early summer” next year it had been due out in the spring of 2011.
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Virtual goods are much more important for free-to-play titles than in-game and display advertising, according to the megapublisher.
Speaking at yesterday’s London Games Conference, two senior executives within EA made it clear that display advertising was not going to be key to the success of their free-to-play titles, though there was a future for in-game advertising to become an important revenue source.
Ben Cousins, head of EA’s Easy division, said that at the launch of Battlefield Heroes, the virtual goods market was in its infancy and the company hedged its bets with an attempt to integrate advertising into the platform. As time wore on, it was worked out that advertising items available for purchase in-game would generate 300 times the revenue that selling the space to external advertisers would.
John Earner, general manager of European studios for Playfish, a recently acquired EA subsidiary that focuses on Facebook games, was similarly skeptical about the value of display advertising. However, Earner suggested that within two years, 20 percent of his firm“s revenue would come from in-game advertising through branded product placement and other similar virtual goods.
This view was not limited to EA either. Floris Jan Cuypers, business development director for Spil Games, a Dutch portal that currently generates most of its revenue through advertising, agreed. “User paid will be the bigger part,” he said.
Read and Post Comments | Get the full article at GameSpot
“EA: Item sales more important than advertising” was posted by Alex Sassoon Coby on Fri, 05 Nov 2010 05:19:18 -0700 -
Trials ahead for those working on the social network’s “wild platform” according to senior execs.
LONDON–Facebook gaming is big business. Zynga, which develops Farmville and other top Facebook games, was recently valued higher than Electronic Arts, and other social publishers have been snapped up for large sums of money. At the same time, changes to rules and regulations have caught some publishers out, as have worries around privacy and the illicit sale of user data. Speaking at the London Games Conference today, two senior executives in social and casual games spoke out on the troubles facing those developing social games for Facebook.
Heiko Hubertz is CEO and founder of BigPoint, one of Europe’s largest developers of social games, which was recently partially acquired by NBC Universal. He warned that Facebook games faced a rocky future. The high costs of user acquisition combined with Facebook’s capriciousness with regard to platform rule changes made it a very hard market to enter. He highlighted Facebook“s attempt to take up to 30 percent of firms’ in-game revenues via the Facebook Credits system as a particular threat.
John Earner, European MD of EA subsidiary Playfish, suggested that this outlook was too bleak. While Facebook was a “wild platform,” things were going to get better. The current changes on Facebook and the increased revenue share being demanded by the social network were challenging, he said, but for the best. Comparing the recent changes to a forest fire, he suggested that the changes in policies on Facebook would make the platform a much better place for developers in the future. “In the long term it creates a healthy ecosystem,” he said.
Developers looking to be successful on Facebook needed to be nimble and to make sure they lived “within the spirit of the law” rather than skirting the boundaries of what was acceptable to insulate themselves from the dangers of policy changes.
Read and Post Comments | Get the full article at GameSpot
“Developers sound Facebook warning” was posted by Alex Sassoon Coby on Fri, 05 Nov 2010 05:17:15 -0700 -
CEO of browser game publisher asks, “Why should you buy an extra console if your new TV has the capability to play games?”Heiko Hubertz, founder and CEO of Germany-based browser game publisher and developer Bigpoint, talked to us before his keynote speech at the London Games Conference last night.
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Strong performance of key franchises returns record revenue and profit – publisher raises guidance as a result.
Activision Blizzard has revealed its fiscal third quarter results for the three month period ending September 30. The publisher reported a $51 million profit (up $15 million year-on-year), and $745 million in revenue (up $42 million year-on-year).