So, there’s been some hubbub around Electronic Arts over the last few days, as the company ramps up for the release of its third quarter earnings on February 1st. Yesterday, EA’s stock closed at $17.54 per share, which, in context, meant that the gaming goliath’s stock was down 30 percent since hitting its 52-week high in early November. This drop was mostly due to the collective shock relating to the news concerning its recently released title, Star Wars: The Old Republic, which now has a ridiculous price tag attached to it — as Wall Street is estimating the cost to be between $150 and $200 million.

EA’s studio responsible for creating the much-touted online game, BioWare, spent some six-odd years developing Star Wars, and obviously there are concerns over whether or not the game will be able to satisfy the geeky desires and high expectations of both Star Wars fans and the avid World of Warcraft-playing, MMO gaming fans — especially as they’ll need to sell millions. Not always an easy audience to satisfy, but an eager and quick-to-spend audience if the game meets expectations — as the LA Times points out. (Though Trion has been having some serious success in this arena — see our post from yesterday.)

Some are saying that it could be the most expensive online game in history, and at $60 a pop, obviously there are those concerned that the deficit will be too great. However, analysts at Macquerie Equities Research today said that they believe initial sales of Star Wars will still be relatively good, and are still on track to hit their target of 1.5 million. It also helps that the costs were already absorbed into EAs financials.

Macquerie said that how the stock will perform will be largely affected by Star Wars’ sales, but if sales get close to their projection of 1.5 million, the firm expects the stock to make a bounce-back. While some are saying that, because EA hasn’t announced sales numbers yet, the likelihood is that sales have been not-so-good. Instead, EA has only said that it’s in a “quiet period” and will not be commenting as a result. Fair enough.

Others have said that the analysis of the game’s server loads show that there isn’t as much activity, but Macquerie would like to remind those people that it’s not easy to make accurate estimates of the numbers of users based on server loads — especially without knowledge of how they’re allocating server loads.

Glitches and mechanical problems have also been mentioned as influencing poor sales and low excitement, but, again, Macquerie defends EA, saying that, while this could affect the long-term outlook for the game, these kinds of problems are expected at initial release, and may not have as big of an affect as some might believe.

Thus, Macquerie isn’t having any of this nay-saying, and is expecting EA’s stock to outperform — and be on the rise. The game will need about 500,000 subscribers to get close to even, and, of course, the other side is that, they could be way ahead of the ball, and if they were to get several million, well than what one analyst called “the single largest bet” of the EA CEO’s career might just turn out to be an enormous, money-raining win.

What do you think?

Back in August, social game developer Kixeye raised $18 million in series C financing, and added Zynga Andrew Trader to its Board of Directors. And today the self-proclaimed “largest maker of online strategy combat games” has announced the addition of another ex-Zynga exec into the fold.

Brandon Barber will be joining Kixeye as the SVP of Marketing, where he will report directly to Chairman and CEO Will Harbin. Barber brings significant gaming experience to Kixeye, as he previously co-founded online sports game developer Lionside, which was acquired by ngmoco (qua DeNA) in June of this year. Behind Barber (who was also VP of Marketing and Production), Lionside brought sports games to Facebook, and created titles like NBA Legend and Lionside Football.

Before founding Lionside, Barber was the first VP of Marketing at Zynga, establishing the company’s initial communication, brand, and product marketing strategies. Zynga created that role specifically for him and, considering that he reported directly to Andrew Trader, it seems that the former Zynga duo is linked up again.

Prior to Zynga, Barber served as the Director of Global Marketing at EA, where he was “responsible for the concept, design, deployment and profitability of EA’s web services based business model”, among other things.

Kixeye has had a great year, picking up a few key staffers, as well as becoming profitable and cash-flow positive. Look for more big moves in 2012.

After churning out a parade of sequels to all of their flagship games, has EA finally learned its lesson? Last month, EA CEO John Riccitiello said that his company is taking dead aim at Zynga, implying that perhaps the company understands what’s at stake, and is determined to be just as much of a player in digital games as it has been on consoles.

EA’s acquisition of PopCap Games, the makers of Plants Vs Zombies and Bejeweled, was a great way to convince investors (and fans) that it’s serious about making a play into online and social games. Granted, EA paid upwards of $1.3 billion for PopCap (with a market cap of right around $8 billion!), but it succeeded in snatching the casual game maker from the eager claws of Zynga, which made a $1 billion offer for the game developer.

On EA’s Q2 earnings call yesterday, Riccitiello reiterated that EA’s competitive advantage over Zynga and the other big game developers is the strength of its some dozen globally recognized brands, like Battlefield, Need for Speed, Mass Effect, FIFA and Madden, to name a few. The company has set a $3 billion target for online revenue, and is pushing its well-known titles into social and online verticals.

“This is a strategy only EA can deliver on”, the CEO said yesterday. “Our competitors either have too few brands or have not demonstrated the ability to project their games on multiple platforms”.

The earnings report backed up the CEO’s statement, revealing that sales of EA’s major sports titles like FIFA and Madden are up 20 percent year over year and digital sales are up 30 percent year over year. This boost was also a result of the company launching Sims Social on Facebook, which has risen to be the second most popular game on Facebook behind Zynga’s CityVille, with over 8 million daily active users and 40 million monthly users.

What’s more, EA shared yesterday that it has exceeded guidance expectations of $925 to $975 million in net revenue for the second quarter, with net revenue coming in at $1.03 billion. The company also saw its digital revenue grow to $907 million on a trailing twelve months non-GAAP basis, with strong growth in smartphone games leading to a non-GAAP revenue jump of 87 percent from the same time last year.

EA is still be viewed as one of the last remaining Big Kahunas of video game development and design in the U.S., and luckily for them, its console games don’t really show any signs of slowing down. The company said yesterday that it has sold nearly 8 million copies of FIFA 2012 and over 3 million copies of Madden NFL 2012 over the last quarter. What’s more, it’s already shipped more than 10 million units of Battlefield 3 and is already receiving reorders from retailers. With the holiday season approaching, the outlook for EA’s console games looks good.

On the digital side, thanks to EA’s big acquisitions over the last two years of PopCap and Playfish, PopCap’s Plants Vs. Zombies is now available on EA’s Pogo game site, and the company will continue to see increases in the number of users and sales as PopCap titles are released across EA’s platforms. Furthermore, to that point, the company said yesterday that Playfish increased Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) for the sixth consecutive quarter.

Yet, while EA now has a 25 percent share of the Western games market due to the strength of its sports and social games (Sims) and its pricey acquisitions, it also saw $657 million in operating expenses and a $340 million net loss for the quarter. Becoming a hybrid startup is not such an easy (or cheap) proposition.

Of course, EA also slipped another interesting piece of info in its earnings report, saying that Origin, its digital distribution and DRM system that lets users purchase games online for PCs and mobile, has been downloaded by over six million consumers and has already signed big publishers like Warner Brothers Interactive, Capcom, and THQ.

And today the company announced that it will be opening up Origin to third-party publishers in November, which will likely bring an array of titles from smaller publishers to the platform. For EA, this is advantageous because it allows them to avoid the expensive task of development and marketing while still managing to distribute great content from large and small publishers and make money by taking a distributor’s percentage of sales.

With these further sources of revenue, the outlook for EA is becoming bright. It made some very bold moves in purchasing Playfish and PopCap for big bucks, but with those companies came top personnel talent and popular social titles. Of course, simply porting old console games onto new gaming medium and buying casual game developers doesn’t necessarily seem like an innovative $3 billion plan. Or maybe it’s that it seems too easy.

The real key is to balance old titles with new titles and develop a seamless distribution medium for its online titles — this is what will keep customers happy. Hopefully in trying to ramp up Origin to become a competitor with Steam and a source of significant revenue, EA can use that future cash to direct toward developing original, new concepts and titles that are optimized for mobile. That’s where the future lies.

Because, as Devin wrote in September: “Repackaging The Sims for a social setting was a cakewalk. Successfully repackaging Battlefield and their sports franchises is another task altogether”. EA is on its way, but it has still yet to prove hands-down that social, mobile, and digital games can become a significant part of its “new” DNA. And, as more and more EA execs jump ship to Zynga as it prepares for its potential $15 to $20 billion-valuation IPO, the company has to retain its top talent if it’s really going to give Zynga a run for the big digital money.

The last ten years have been kind to game publishers. The mainstreamification of console gaming has led to enormous sales numbers, budgets rivaling Hollywood’s, and an arms race between the majors to create the next big game. But while EA and its ilk were buying up development houses, expanding like crazy, and having franchise-measuring contests with each other, an unperceived menace was growing in the dark bosom of Facebook. As millions flocked to the new platform, EA continued churning out sequel after sequel until they almost sequeled themselves into a death spiral.

Now the gaming giant says it has learned its lesson, and is ready to take on the new kid in town: Zynga. EA’s CEO has gone on the record saying they hope to hit $3 billion in digital revenue in the next two or three years. Big talk, but is it in EA’s DNA?

One former EA executive jumped ship to join Nexon, which is pulling in nearly a billion a year and is expected to announce an IPO soon. If Mahoney had been able to steer EA in that direction, I’m sure he would have, but chances are the suits were too pleased with the growing income from the console business and didn’t want to go chasing butterflies like casual gaming.

EA CEO John Riccitiello is speaking at a US Chamber of Commerce event today, and prefaced his talk by mentioning some big wins by the company in the social space. Their Sims Social game has over 53 million users, and their total user base is approaching 100 million. Sure, that’s less than half of Zynga’s, but considering how poor EA was doing in this market just a year ago, it’s definitely worth celebrating. Tripling your user base over a quarter? You better believe there was champagne involved.

Their goal, naturally, is to surpass Zynga in users, and Riccitiello has set a $3 billion goal for online revenue. They have a head start on Zynga there, as the move to further monetize their major franchises through subscriptions and DLC is only just starting to really take hold. They are already making over a billion a year in online sales, but the ways in which EA and Zynga earn that money are totally different. Whether EA will imitate Zynga or take its own path isn’t easy to foresee, but it seems to me that the hard part is yet to come. Repackaging The Sims for a social setting was a cakewalk. Successfully repackaging Battlefield and their sports franchises is another task altogether. At least they’ve got Popcap now. At all events, it’s better than Activision’s approach of sticking their heads in the sand.

As we initially reported a few weeks ago, EA has acquired PopCap Games. The acquisition price is $650 million plus $100 million stock and a multi-year earn-out. The total acquisition price is as much as $1.3 billion.

PopCap Games is the company behind such hits as Plants vs Zombies, Zuma and Bejeweled. PopCap games have been installed 150 million times worldwide. Last year, approximately 80% of PopCap’s revenue was on digital platforms.

EA CEO John Riccitiello said in a release: “PopCap’s great studio talent and powerful IP add to EA’s momentum and accelerate our drive towards a $1 billion digital business. EA’s global studio and publishing network will help PopCap rapidly expand their business to more digital devices, more countries, and more channels.”

In terms of the earnout structure, PopCap sellers are entitled to additional cash bonus upon the achievement of certain non-GAAP earnings before interest and tax through December 2013. If the two-year cumulative earnings are $91 million or less, PopCap sellers won’t receive anything. If the earnings are $110 million, sellers will receive a total of $100 million. With $200 million in earnings, sellers get $275 million. And if earnings come in at $343 million or more, sellers get a whopping $550 million in earnout, making the total acquisition price $1.3 billion. EA says that it will also provide up to $50 million in long-term equity retention awards to PopCap employees to be granted over the next four years.

A $1 billion plus acquisition price is huge for any company, let alone EA. But clearly EA wants PopCap badly. The acquisition will help the gaming giant break into mobile and social gaming — areas where the company hasn’t done nearly as well as it has in the console arena.

Electronic Arts has many successful franchises that cater to casual users (including The Sims), but many of its popular properties appeal to the hardcore crowd. PopCap could be a away to compete with social, casual gaming companies like Zynga, Rovio and others.

The high price of the deal ($1+ billion) means that this would be a huge bet for EA — we’re talking over 13% of the company’s market cap. But we’re hearing that this is a Hail Mary pass from EA to break into mobile and social gaming — areas where the company hasn’t done nearly as well as it has in the console arena.

Possible logic behind the deal: Electronic Arts has some successful franchises that cater to casual users (including The Sims), but many of its successful properties appeal to the hardcore crowd. This is problematic on mobile, where iOS’s top grossing apps are dominated by Angry Birds, Zynga, Pocket Gems, and other casual games. PopCap could help with that — their arsenal of games includes Bejeweled and Plants vs Zombies, each of which is a powerhouse in mobile and casual gaming.

We’ll continue to provide updates to the story as we hear more.

“Crytek has an agreement with another download service which violates the new rules from Steam and resulted in its expulsion of Crysis 2 from Steam.” Since Steam is a very popular platform, it’s doubtful that EA or Crytek would let its terms be superseded by anything but an internal agreement. “Another download service” likely means EA’s new internal service Origin (on which Crysis 2 is indeed available), and the agreement is probably exclusivity on DLC or special offers that won’t be reflected on other download sites. That likely violates several Steam rules, so out it goes.

EA is understandably jealous of Steam’s success (as are the likes of Games for Windows Live and other platform-specific services), and I don’t blame them for trying to break free, though it’s unlikely that the winners table will include gamers. In this case it’s less places to buy the game, and more bother for the end user, who will now have to have Origin, Steam, and probably a few other services installed simultaneously. Crysis 2 is on multiple sites, but The Old Republic will be Origin-only.

Exclusivity isn’t an EA invention, of course; the Half-Life series among others is only available on Steam, so it may just be that these flagship titles will have complicated agreements for a while, until these chumps can get their act together.

Electronic Arts is today debuting Origin, a direct-to-consumer gaming platform, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal. According to the placeholder website, expect Origin to go live around 9 AM Pacific time.

The platform will enable gamers to discover, buy and download more than 150 games from EA at its debut, with exclusive limited edition copies of EA games like Battlefield 3 and FIFA 12 coming later.

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Electronic Arts is today debuting Origin, a direct-to-consumer gaming platform, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

According to the placeholder website, expect Origin to go live around 9 AM Pacific time.

The platform will enable gamers to discover, buy and download more than 150 games from EA at its debut, with exclusive limited edition copies of EA games like Battlefield 3 and FIFA 12 to be added to the fray later on.

Other content from EA Partners such as Alice: Madness Returns and 38 Studios’ Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, as well as digital downloads of Star Wars: The Old Republic will be available exclusively on Origin later this year.

In addition, EA is today launching the Origin beta application, a desktop app that works much like Steam or iTunes, enabling users digitally download and play PC games straight from EA but also to find and connect with friends and see what they are playing.

Origin will also be available to gamers on the go, with the service on mobile devices giving gamers access to an Origin mobile profile where they can connect and play with friends in EA’s smartphone titles, including SCRABBLE and the upcoming mobile version of Battlefield 3.

In the future, EA says, mobile gamers will also be able to see what games their friends are playing, as well as compare high scores.

Update: in other news, EA this morning also revealed the games it will present at E3 at the Los Angeles Convention Center June 7-9.

This year’s E3 press briefing, GAMECHANGERS: EA 2011 Preview will feature news from big EA titles such as, Battlefield 3™, Need for Speed™ The Run, Madden NFL 12, FIFA Soccer 12, SSX™ and Mass Effect™ 3; and the highly anticipated new MMO, Star Wars™: The Old Republic™. The briefing will include news and announcements on new games and digital/online initiatives. The briefing can be viewed live exclusively on SPIKE TV Monday, June 6 at 3:30 PM ET/12:30 PM PT or at www.ea.com/e3.

EA Interactive will be hosting media demos throughout E3 for key EA mobile, Chillingo and Playfish titles at the JW Marriott located at 900 West Olympic Blvd. in Salon B.

A fireside chat with Gordon is always…unique. We didn’t get poetry this time, but we had a fascinating talk about how the cost of entertainment has collapsed from $1 an hour to as little as $.05 per hour. In terms of gaming, Gordon was one of the people who set the $1-per-hour price back in the 1980s while at Electronic Arts. (When the Bill Cosby-esque shirt to your left was also in fashion.) Now, he’s helping erode it as a board member and investor in Zynga. That’s the Silicon Valley ecosystem in a nutshell.

He expects the cost of media– whether news, movies, or games– will settle out at $.15 to $.20 per hour. That doesn’t mean EA is necessarily toast, but it does mean the company needs to radically rethink its business model. Game quality and playtime aren’t the issues, he argues. All of that is increasing. It’s missing this fundamental shift in what people pay for an hour of entertainment that is slowing strangling the gaming giants of yore.

Gordon and I also chat about the similarities between hockey and venture capital, and a he gives a warning for entrepreneurs. Playing hard to get doesn’t work with him.

Electronic Arts (EA) has acquired Firemint, a privately held mobile development studio based in Melbourne, Australia.

Firemint is the 60-people strong company behind games like Flight Control (see video below) and Real Racing.

EA says the deal is not material to the company, overall. Terms of the acquisition, which is expected to close within four weeks, were not disclosed.

Firemint was founded in 1999 (as “ndWare”) by CEO Robert Murray, and will now become part of EA Interactive (EAi), a division of Electronic Arts focused on digital business that includes EA Mobile, Pogo and social gaming outfits like Playfish.

The deal follows in the footsteps of EA’s purchase of Mobile Post Production, a specialist in cross-platform development and porting of games for smartphones.

EA also recently bought Angry Birds publisher Chillingo for $20 million in cash.

Fans will be able to help decide who will be the Madden NFL 12 cover athlete. EA has teamed up with ESPN, creating a bracket system to narrow down a field of 32 players (one player from each team) to one lucky gentleman. Don’t mention the Madden curse.

The full brackets will be shown today on ESPN’s SportsNation at 4pm ET.

The actual voting goes from today until April 27 on ESPN.com/MaddenVote.

My question is, what happens if the NFL season is cut short by the lockout? Seems to me would be able to market the game all the more easy: “Need to get your NFL fix this season? Madden NFL 12 is where you need to be!”

Yet more evidence that applying a number score to a work of art, be it a movie, a novel, or a video game, is a complete waste of everyone’s time. Well, unless you’re the publisher of that work of art, or otherwise stand to benefit from being able to say, “The critics agree: it’s a ten out of ten!” People associated with BioWare have been caught (if “caught” is the right word) giving Dragon Age II user scores of 10/10 at Metacritic. I suppose this isn’t as serious as when Belkin was caught paying people to give its products good Amazon reviews, but it something about it doesn’t sit right.

A Reddit user discovered a 10/10 Dragon Age II Metacritic user review written by someone with the handle Avanost. A couple of keystrokes later, thanks to mighty Google, revealed Avanost as BioWare employee Chris Hoban.

Another 10/10 user review was written by BioWare social network (read: message board) mod.

Both reviews have since been removed.

No, this isn’t exactly the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, but it’s worth discussing for a moment.

EA, Dragon Age II’s publisher, told Kotaku that this isn’t a big deal at all, and that people vote-up their stuff all the time. It happens in the Oscars and it happens in presidential elections. (In fact, I could have sworn that it was considered uncouth to vote yourself as a presidential candidate. Then again, it was also considered uncouth to openly campaign for yourself, as you can read about in Shelby Foote’s books about the American Civil War.) But while it may not be a big deal, it certainly betrays some sort of expectation I’d have as an everyday person reading up on the game.

The problem with Metacritic is that it’s completely useless. People who like something, in this case, Dragon Age II, give it a 10/10 while saying things like TOTALLY AWESOME BUY EIGHT COPIES. And people who dislike it give it a 0/10 with TRASH ON WHEELS BIOWARE SHOULD BE ASHAMED.

There’s no nuance, no substance. It’s the equivalent of yelling into a bullhorn at a bullhorn factory.

The point of a review isn’t to come up with a number, but to discuss the merits of the item in question. Who doesn’t laugh when they see a site give a game a fraction of a score, like an 8.2? What could that extra two-tenths represent? Why not an 8.3, or an 8.4? Why is it all that much better than an 8.1?

Maybe if we get past this obsession with with labeling this or that work of art with all powerful number we won’t see such sillines.

Did EA ship the PC version of Dragon Age II with SecuROM DRM without telling anyone? It certainly looks that way. Reclaim Your Game’s analysis [PDF] of the DVD (ie non-Steam) version of the PC game found that it does, in fact, contain SecurROM, and despite the fact that EA has a 28-page (!) EULA nowhere in there—nor anywhere else—is SecuROM mentioned. Furthermore, once installed, you can’t, as yet, cleanly uninstall SecuROM from your system, as the analysis finds that “DRM Removal tool not provided in game; Some files and registry keys remain.” Thanks, EA!

EA’s own online DRM scheme also requires a constant connection to the Internet in order to play DLC content.

The beauty, of course, is that you could download a pirated copy of the game and not put up with any of this DRM nonsense—legitimate customers treated like potential criminals while actual pirates laugh in their faces. Makes sense.

The game itself has proven to be quite divisive, with hundreds of Metacritic user reviews panning the game for its re-use of environments, the lack of strategic and/or free camera, and the general “hit button for something awesome to happen”-ness of it all.

There’s also the fact that EA seems to have banned a user from playing the game because he made a critical remark about the game on its official forums, accusing BioWare of “selling its soul” to EA, and thereby betraying BioWare’s storied lineage. (The forum account that made the remark is linked to the account that’s need to play the game. Because the forum account was banned the player can’t activate the game to play it.) That’s neat.

I played the demo, and was immediately put off the childish amount of blood in the game. Not even the Total War series—Rome, Medieval, Empire, Napoleon, Shogun 2, etc.—have that much blood, and they’re actual war games.

When that dev build of Crysis 2 leaked a few weeks ago, EA was quick to condemn the PC gaming community, saying that piracy “continues to damage the PC packaged goods market and the PC development community.” I do wonder whether EA will be as quick to condemn console piracy now that Dragon Age 2, to be released next week, has also leaked. That’s right: the Xbox 360 version is now floating around out there, so it’s clear to me that console owners should now be subjected to the same kind of silly DRM that PC owners have had to put up with for years now.

The game can now be found wherever you find such things, and any 16-year-old with a free afternoon can figure out how to rig his Xbox 360 to run it flawlessly.

But no, PC gamers are the ones responsible for the collapse of the industry, right?

Please.

UPDATE Well look at that, the PS3 version has now leaked, according to a famous, owl-mascotted database. And we all know how terribly difficult it is to jailbreak a PS3, right? Oh, wait: it takes less than five minutes. So that’s both console versions leaking on the same day, and both before the PC version. But again, PC gamers are somehow responsible for the world’s injustices. Give me a break.

Battlefield 3 doesn’t even have a release date yet, but EA has already started talking about DLC. Sigh. It’s a bit disappointing: so many of us here (well, me, Matt, and Devin) are genuinely looking forward to the game, and we’re already being teased with offers of almighty DLC. It’s so unsettling.

In any event, the first bit of DLC will be called Back to Kirland, the existence of which was confirmed two days ago. In the past few hours an EA community manager has confirmed exactly what maps will be included in the DLC.

And they are:

• Wake Island

• Strike at Kirkland

• Gulf of Oman

• Sharqi Peninsula

Keep in mind that Dice, the games’ developer, told Game Informer that it “learned [its] lesson” with regard to DLC, saying that it’ll release more DLC for Battlefield 3 than it did with Battlefield Bad Company 2. Oh boy.

http://player.ooyala.com/player.swf?embedCode=45eDMyMjqRU_By2YwDMmpXHOhcx8P5P3&version=2

I now leave you with the Battlefield 3 teaser trailer.

Danger Close, the developers of last year’s Medal of Honor reboot, has confirmed that it’s working on a sequel. In the words of Opie, “Good luck, bro.”

The game’s producer, Greg Goodrich, confirmed the development on the Medal of Honor blog, and promised that the team has taken the game’s criticism to heart:

Since our launch last October, we’ve studied, listened and absorbed much of your feedback and are very excited to be marching forward on the next title. We can’t wait to tell you more about it, so check back often to the website and the fan page on Facebook.

What should Danger Close do for the next game?

The multi-player wasn’t too bad, but that’s primarily because it was essentially a “streamlined” Battlefield. But Battlefield 3 will be released later this year: why play a “streamlined” game when the real deal is readily available? It’s tricky: where do you find the balance between sophomoric nonsense (Modern Warfare 2) and sophisticated elegance (Battlefield 3)? More bluntly: why would this even need to exist? A glut of multi-player military shooters has cluttered the landscape, and it’s harder and harder to tell these things apart.

The campaign mode? For my taste it was entirely too linear, but that’s probably a symptom of it being a console shooter more than anything else. I’m not saying the game needs to be Stalker, or even Crysis (at least the first part of the game before you discover the “other”), but at parts it felt like I was playing Time Crisis or House of the Dead: on rails the whole time, always pushing forward, with the left-click button essentially being the “win” button. For all the talk of it being a visceral experience, I felt decidedly let down. The very first Medal of Honor game, first released for the PlayStation in 1999, felt more impactful.

Another problem with Medal of Honor: people tend to be put off by “real” war. How well have any of the movies based on the Iraq War have done? One of them, The Hurt Locker, even won an Oscar, and more people probably have probably seen a random episode of iCarly than have seen that. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare takes place in a fictional country with a caricatured “bad guy” that you can tell the audience to hate without having to get too political. And even if Danger Close goes out of its way to only tell the story of the solider on the ground (as opposed to the various machinations that put him on the ground in the first place), there’s still a feeling of, “Man, this is actually happening right now, and here I am playing it on my couch. Hmm.” In the Call of Duty games you’re very clearly playing a silly video game that doesn’t dare try to be “heavy” or “weighty.”

But more than anything else, the fact that every other publisher now has its Call of Duty killer necessarily means that each game seems a little less special, a little less unique.

How many more totally awesome scripted sequences can you play on your Xbox 360 before saying, “I could have sworn I played this same thing last year”?

It would appear that Crysis 2 for the PC has leaked in some capacity. A quick look at some of the more popular sites when it comes to this kind of thing suggests that many thousands of people have no problem downloading Crytek’s unfinished game, which is due for release next month. Well, was due for release next month—who knows how this leak will affect development?

You’ll find no links here, of course, but the fact that such a big game leaked weeks before its intended release date is certainly worth mentioning as a news item.

According to various threads I’ve been reading, the game is absolutely playable and includes the CryEngine 3 editor.

Needless to say, this isn’t probably what the folks at Crytek (or EA) had in mind for their weekend.

It’s not rare for games to leak a few days before their official release date (and these are usually plain ol’ retail copies), but well over a month? There’s trouble afoot, that’s for sure.

Still waiting for the PC version of Battlefield 1943? You’re going to be waiting quite a bit longer, I’m afraid—which is to say you’re going to be waiting forever as the game has been cancelled. Dice says it wants to focus on making Battlefield 3, the next game in the popular series, “the best Battlefield ever,” hence the cancellation. No use diverting resources to what amounts to a noisy distraction, right?

In a post on the company’s official blog, Dice General Manager “King” Karl Magnus Troedsson (note: I made up the “King” nickname) said that the decision to cancel Battlefield 1943 and Onslaught, an expansion for Battlefield: Bad Company 2, was a “hard” one, but one taken with the best interests of the Battlefield franchise in mind.

Our goal is crystal clear: we’re going to build the best Battlefield game ever, and we’ll do whatever it takes to make this the biggest launch in DICE’s history…. our talented teams will focus on delivering the greatest possible gaming experience in our next behemoth release. We’re confident this will lead to an even better experience in Battlefield 3, not only on PC, but on all platforms.

Let’s not forget that Dice delivered the generally well-received Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam expansion pack a few months ago.

Battlefield 3 doesn’t have a release date, but I’d be shocked if it’s not released later this year. Along with Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad, it’ll be among the biggest PC releases of the year. Word.

Quite a bit has been written about Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare’s upcoming MMO. So, here’s more writing. The latest is that EA, the game’s publisher, says that it will be profitable with only 500,000 subscribers. If all the planets align and they’re able to nab 1 million subscriber, whew! Swimming in money.

The question becomes, will they even get that many subscribers? The game has been subject to rumor after salacious rumor—at its conference call yesterday, EA said that it “chuckles” at some of those rumors—detailing a chaotic development, incompetent management, and all sorts of other tales of intrigue. EA did admit that the game is incurring “significant” development costs, but that can quickly be made back at $10 per month per subscriber.

The game was recently pushed back to September. Oh, dear.