With skyrocketing valuation numbers for upstart tech companies, it’s not just naysayer pundits crying “bubble.” Activision (Activision-Blizzard, to be precise) is skeptical of the numbers being put forth for competitors like Zynga and Rovio, whose billion or multiple billion dollar valuations put them out of reach for easy acquisition. Perhaps they’re hoping to pick them up for a song after the supposed bubble pops. Is Activision playing a long game, or is it just wishful thinking? → Read More
As a barely 23-year-old, my deepest connection to most classic Rock songs is through a PlayStation game. My favorite PlayStation game. You may have heard of it — it’s called Guitar Hero. So when Activision said that it was calling it quits on Guitar Hero, I found myself humming: “lay your weary head to rest, don’t you cry no more.” Ok, maybe I exaggerate. But it was a sad, sad day — not just for me but for fake guitar players everywhere. Since then I can’t bring myself to play, a little tinge of sadness poking at me every time I pass the now-dusty collection.
But it’s been a little less than a year, and Activision has told Forbes that the whole “Guitar Hero is over” thing was a bit of a fib. → Read More
Activision now says that Guitar Hero hasn’t been outright cancelled, but merely placed on hiatus. The publisher had said in February that it was going to disband the Guitar Hero business unit, and that the 2011 edition of the game had been cancelled. What gives? → Read More
We regret to inform you that the Modern Warfare 3 “teaser” from the other day was, in fact, nothing of the sort. You can almost hear the angels crying. → Read More
Now here’s a rumor that will stop many people in their tracks. An analyst at Wedbush Securities, “one of the largest securities firms and investment banks in the nation,” says that he’s “certain to [his] core” that Activision is planning a pay-to-play Call of Duty. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the sound of millions of gamers around the country flipping out. Picture an anime character with a giant teardrop running down his cheek. → Read More
Kudos to Activision for doing exactly what so many people had been predicting for years now. The world’s biggest video game publisher said yesterday that it was going to “disband Activision Publishing’s Guitar Hero business unit,” citing a decline in interest in the music game genre. And what could possibly be the reason for that, hmm? Maybe releasing sequel after sequels after sequel in such a quick succession that you don’t give gamers any room to breathe? Gotta maximize short-term profits! The future? That’s someone else’s problem. → Read More
Sad news today. Looks like the music genre doesn’t have room for two (or is it three? four?) overpriced DLC machines. To be sure, Guitar Hero has sold a lot of copies, but you’re not going to get a lot of return business when people have already spent three times the normal amount on your game. Plus, it’s a copyright nightmare, and probably very expensive to produce. → Read More
Walker Digital, the “invention company” founded by Priceline.com co-inventor Jay S. Walker, isn’t just suing Facebook, he’s also trying to take on some giant game publishers.
More specifically, Walker Digital has just filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Zynga, Activision and the latter’s subsidiary Blizzard Entertainment. → Read More
Tis the season to be suing the pants off your nearest rivals. Activision’s lawsuit against former Infinity Ward gents Jason West and Vince Zampella has expanded to include—you guessed it!—EA. Activision claims that EA “set out to destabilize, disrupt and to attempt to destroy Infinity Ward.” Ooh! West and Zampella left Infinity Ward earlier this year, and have since formed a company called Respawn Entertainment, which will create games for EA. Oh: the lawsuit against EA is worth a cool $400 million. Why innovate (or even iterate) when you can litigate? → Read More
Yeah, we know, Activision. Call of Duty: Black Ops made a lot of money. It should, being that’s it’s $60 a pop. But just because McDonalds has “billions and billions” served doesn’t mean I’m going to go out of my way to partake. → Read More
Man, October was a pretty bad month for video game sales, particularly those published by the big guns. Medal of Honor, EA’s modern day reboot of the series, sold a little more than 1 million copies. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, 1 million copies sold, but the expectation was for closer to 1.5 million copies sold. Perhaps people saw that the game was just OK: nothing stellar but nothing to freak out over. → Read More
Activision: a company! A company with presentations, presentations that contain slides. One recent slide, seen here, suggests that Bungie’s “New Title”—you’ll recall that Bungie inked a deal with Activision some months ago—will come out not only for the usual consoles, but also for the PC. How about that? → Read More
As a caller on Ron & Fez reminded us a little while ago, Call of Duty: Black Ops (also known as BLOPS) had the biggest entertainment launch in history, taking in some $360 million in first-day sales. But as we all know, that’s a reasonably misleading statement. How do you compare “entertainment launches” across different entertainment, um, sectors? Let’s take movies. If one person buys BLOPS, then Activision makes ~$60 (minus retail’s cut of the action, etc.). Yet if one person sees Avatar in 3D, then Fox makes ~$15. (It’s around $15 to see a 3D movie in New York.) So if 10 people buy the game, that’s ~$600 in Activision’s bank account. If 10 people see Avatar in 3D, then Fox makes ~$150. So, yeah, not really a fair comparison. → Read More
Call of Duty: Black Ops launched to great fanfare yesterday, but, at least on the PC side of things, it hasn’t exactly been a flawless launch. Users are filling up message boards from here to somewhere else with complaints of all shapes and sizes, from stuttering frame rates to unplayably laggy multi-player sessions. And keep in mind that the game is based on the 11-year-old id Tech 3 (Quake 3) engine. Any computer released in the past, I don’t know, five years (being generous), should be able to run that thing flawlessly. Clearly something is amiss. → Read More
The Guardian says that Call of Duty: Black Ops has “easily the most cogent and well-constructed story we’ve seen from the Call of Duty franchise in a number of years.” Could it be, gasp, that the single-player mode is actually worth a damn this time around? → Read More
And it would have done so fairly quietly, given that EA’s Medal of Honor had gotten much more heat in the past few months. Was that good heat or bad heat? Who knows. But what we do know is that people are pre-ordering Black Ops like crazy, so much so that HMV, a big retailer over in the UK, says that it has “every chance of being the biggest game release ever.” Well! One of HMV’s bigwigs told Eurogamer as much, which should indicate that people still haven’t gotten enough of the first-person genre, which is patently mind-boggling to me. I understand there’s a certain comfort with playing a first-person shooter, but they’re now becoming a bit like Madden or one of those WWE games: marginal refinements every single year. In any event, Activision is clearly sitting on another big hit, despite that whole Infinity Ward brouhaha. Good for them. → Read More
How best to battle the scourge of trading in your used videos games? (Remember: video game publishers scream bloody murder when you buy a used video game.) Credit to Treyarch, the developers of the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops, for doing something novel. Rather than use the stick, as EA does with its Project Ten Dollar, Treyarch will use the carrot. That’s right: they’ll make you want to keep the game by actually supporting it post-initial release. Amazing. → Read More
An olive branch to PC gamers, and from Activision of all people? It would appear that the PC version of Call of Duty: Black Ops will ship with honest-to-goodness mod tools. This is a most unexpected development. → Read More
There will be at least two special editions of Call of Duty: Black Ops. There’s the Hardened Edition and the Prestige Edition, the Prestige being the fancier of the two. But let’s start with the Hardened Edition. → Read More
If anyone wants to know where to find me, I’ll be in my cave, banging two rocks together. That seems to be the only place for me, since I can’t seem to wrap my head around DLC as a good thing — yet millions have decided to shell out, just recently passing the 20,000,000 sold mark for the Call Of Duty franchise. Congratulations all around, I guess, as they have clearly put out a highly successful (and very fun) product, but I still feel like DLC being co-developed with a game is kind of like robbing the gamer before he’s even paid his money. → Read More
