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?

Speaking at Gamescom in Cologne, Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg poured cold water on the idea of the company making a major investment in social gaming via a high-profile acquisition:

Valuations of some of the companies in that space are out of whack, so that’s an issue when it comes to acquisitions…But don’t mistake careful, methodical planning for inaction. Any new place where people are playing games, at scale, is something that we’re interested in.

Unfortunately, in the fast-moving social gaming space, too much planning occasionally does amount to inaction. While Activision has plenty of successful titles, none approach, or even attempt to replicate, the super-wide, super-shallow distribution of titles like Angry Birds and Farmville. Meanwhile, million-sellers are made overnight in waves of virality which Activision seems incapable of producing.

At the same time, the rapidity of the sector’s growth speaks to the volatility of the market. While Rovio is unlikely to suddenly reveal that it’s folding due to an underdiversified game library, it is possible that the next year will bring more sobering results, or a flattening of the field as more examples of quick growth suggest a pattern not unique to these companies — in which case the high valuations might be looked on as optimistic. At this point Activision would have successfully waited it out.

Either way, Hirshberg’s comments don’t suggest any great level of illumination on Activision’s part. This kind of bemused skepticism doesn’t inspire confidence in shareholders, either, who are (like Nintendo’s) probably impatient with the failure of the world’s biggest game-maker to grasp this new gaming paradigm. They may be starting to see the light, though: they are planning on social-izing Call of Duty, one of the most popular franchises in gaming, with the Elite in-game social network. They’re still late to the party; I guess they hope that’ll turn out to be a good thing.

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 they were 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. In fact, the company was actually just trying to go undercover for a while to bring back a new and improved Guitar Hero — one ready to take on the likes of Rock Band and other more instrumental games.

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick told Forbes: “We said, you know what… we’re going to the take the products out of the market, and we’re not going to tell anybody what we’re doing for awhile, but we’re going to stop selling Guitar Hero altogether. And then we’re going to use new studios and reinvent Guitar Hero. And so that’s what we’re doing with it now.”

Why play with our heart strings like that, Activision? Actually, I guess it worked. Around the time that Guitar Hero: Aerosmith hit the market, my interest had already peaked and started to dwindle. Now, I’m more excited than ever to see the refreshed and replenished Guitar Hero.

Only question now is when we’ll get to start shredding again.

[via Reg Hardware]

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?

Activision tells GamesIndustry.biz that rather than canceling the series outright, it’s simply changing the way the franchise works. It will no longer be a yearly release à la Madden, but that Activision will still support the brand. Maybe a release every two years? Maybe a different way to support the franchise, with special DLC and the like?

Somewhat related, Ubisoft recently said that the world needed new game consoles in order to facilitate innovation and whatnot, to tap into the newly developed technologies and techniques that have popped up since the Xbox 360 was designed.

I suppose Ubisoft is unfamiliar with something called a PC? Seems to me there has been plenty of technological development there, and I don’t see Ubisoft treating the PC with anything but contempt.

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.

The deal is that that site, www.findmakarov.com, was set up to promote some sort of Call of Duty-themed indie movie.

Activision told GameSpot that it’s not “revealing [anything] yet.”

All of this means that we’ll have to wait a wee bit longer for the official Activision reveal of its latest hundred million dollar Quake 3 mod.

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.

Activision, in the same earnings call where it announced that the Guitar Hero franchise was as dead as disco, said that it had tapped Beachhead Studios to create “new, innovative Call of Duty content and services.” Such work will “enable tens of millions of players around the world to continue to enjoy the experience that Call of Duty offers.”

Call of Duty “services,” and “new [and] innovative” ones at that? Sounds an awful lot like Activision is preparing for at least some form of pay-to-play.

I suppose Activision could take this in a few different ways. One, it could just outright charge people to play the games, which, eh, I’d doubt. Two, it could follow the hardly-innovative-at-this-point tract of delivering a free-to-play online multi-player game (or mode) while tacking on additional, “premium” content, content that you’d have to pay for.

Maybe there’s a level cap, a cap that can only be removed by paying, say, $5 per month? Maybe premium users—and you know they’d give these users a silly name like “officers,” referring to free users as mere “enlisted men”—will have access to “über-weapons” like tactical nukes and whatnot? Free maps delivered at regular intervals, etc.

Now the question to ask you guys: will this fly? How many of you are prepared to pay something like $5 per month for the privilege of playing Call of Duty? I’m sure Activision has worked it out where they only need, who knows, 10 percent of its existing playerbase to become premium members in order for this to work, but man, I fear for Activision if this doesn’t work out. What do they have beyond Call of Duty? How much harder can they afford to lean on World of Warcraft?

But that’s for another day. Today’s question is all about how big a success (or failure) would a pay-to-play Call of Duty be?

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.

The last game in the series, Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, was the sixth “main” game in the series, having been released last September. It only met with so-so reviews, currently hovering around 72 (out of 100) with the critics; users were still less kind.

Perhaps this is why people lost all interest in the franchise:

Guitar Hero: November 2005

Guitar Hero II: November 2006

Guitar Hero Encore Rock The 80s: July 2007

Guitar Hero III Legends of Rock: October 2007

Guitar Hero Aerosmith: June 2008

Guitar Hero World Tour: October 2008

Guitar Hero Metallica: March 2009

Guitar Hero Smash Hits: June 2009

Guitar Hero 5: September 2009

Band Hero: November 2009

Guitar Hero Van Halen: December 2009

Guitar Hero Warriors of Rock: September 2010

All the while, from late 2007 on, competing with all those Rock Band games. Games, which, incidentally, were better received critically. Let’s not forget the DJ Hero franchise, either.

My question is, how long will people keep supporting the Call of Duty franchise? When will folks realize that they’re paying $60, year in, year out, for what amounts to Quake III mods? And buggy ones at that.

Whatever the case, there won’t be a Guitar Hero 8, or Guitar Hero: Nickelback, or whatever was coming next. Activision is shutting down the franchise, perhaps just in time, perhaps a little too late, but at least before they really ran it into the ground with Barbie Guitar Adventures or some such. The music genre will probably see a revamp in a few years, but it needs to rest for a while.

The aging True Crime series is also getting a pink slip. I don’t have anything against it, but it was never particularly compelling in the way Heavy Rain or the more open-ended games like GTA are. Off it goes to the great retailer in the sky. No hard feelings, little guy.

What’s next? Could your favorite franchise be in line for the guillotine? Studies relate franchise cancellations to murder sprees and weight gain! How will this affect your children? Fox News reports.

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.

As you can see in the complaint embedded below, the patent-in-suit is U.S. patent no. 6,425,828, which was issued on July 30, 2002. The patent is entitled ‘DATABASE DRIVEN ONLINE DISTRIBUTED TOURNAMENT SYSTEM’.

Walker Digital argues that this gaming patent concerns a product and method of distributed electronic tournaments for a plurality of players that exchanges information with a central controller to influence game play while a player plays in the tournament, and stores player information to influence game play in a subsequent tournament.

According to the “invention company”, a whole slew of games from the aforementioned publishers, including Zynga’s Mafia Wars, Wolfenstein, the Call of Duty series and World Of Warcraft, among others, infringe on the patent.

Hence the image on top (it’s a WoW troll).

We’ll keep an eye on the case.

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?

Activision has essentially accused EA of sabotaging the inner workings of Infinity Ward, thereby costing Kotick & Co. many dollars of revenue. (That’s somewhat difficult to believe, given the success of Call of Duty: Black Ops.) Hopefully Activision is as tenacious in ensuring the next 800 editions of Call of Duty are as appealing to people as the previous 300. We all saw what happened to the music games genera: releasing too many, too quickly turned people off (even if the games aren’t too bad).

Part of Activision’s case is a series of e-mails that would *seem* to suggest that EA had courted West and Zampella, with one such e-mail saying: “JR cooks a mean BBQ. I think we could accomplish some interesting chaos.”

“JR” refers to John Riccitiello, EA’s CEO. “Interesting chaos” refers to… I have no idea, but it certainly doesn’t look good.

Incidentally, you can find all the old Doom games on sale on Steam right now. They’re just as much fun as all these new-fangled Call of Duty games, and they’re much cheaper.

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.

In its first five days of availability, CODBLOPS made a whopping $650 million worldwide. That’s more than a few copies sold, a point I will readily admit.

The game also set a record for number of people playing concurrently on Xbox Live. That would be 2.6 million players.

So enjoy your Big Macs, kiddos, I’ll be dining on filet mignon.

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.

The other big EA release last month, EA Sports MMA, sold only 45,000 copies. But we already knew the game was “dead on arrival,” which is a shame because the reviews are positive.

Let that be a lesson to everyone: it’s UFC that’s hot right now, not all of MMA. (The two cover athletes gave bad omens from Day One: Randy Couture, who’s not even in Strikeforce, is considering retirement, and Fedor is no longer the undefeated superman he once was.)

Over in Activision-land, two of their big games didn’t sell too well in October, either.

The latest Tony Hawk game, was described as a “virtual no show” at retail.

DJ Hero 2, which I understand to be much better than DJ Hero 1, sold only 59,000 copies.

Were people saving their cash for CODBLOPS, or maybe Gran Turismo 5?

So, that leaves Activision with how many successful franchises? World of Warcraft, Call of Duty? That’s it? Maybe they shouldn’t have released, I don’t know, 800 Guitar Hero games in the span of a few years.

The real question is, will people keep buying these Call of Duty games? $60 every November for what amounts to a re-skin, maybe a few tweaks here or there, may grow old after a while.

See: all those music games.

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?

The slide also tells us that another Blizzard MMO will be coming out, and I’ve no idea what that could be. World of Warcraft 2?

Cue the jokes…

“Call of Halo: Future Warfare 3: Ultrablack Ops (Semi-Hardened Edition)”

“Call of Halo: Future Warfare 2: The Revengening”

I, however, will wait till Bungie actually shows its hand before hopping on a bandwagon of some sort.

But, hey, PC version. That’s awful nice of them.

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.

But, credit where credit is due: that’s an awful lot of people buying and playing the game. Nicely done, Activision.

Well, PC gamers bought the game, though I’m not too sure how many people can be said to be actually playing it.

Activision says it sold 4.7 million units in the US and the UK.

I still maintain that Half-Life 2 is the better single-player experience (as if saying “Half-Life 2 is really good” is a controversial opinion!), but I fully understand that not many of those 4.7 million people bought BLOPS for its single-player campaign.

You’re free to disagree with my opinion (but you’re wrong).

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.

The game’s Steam forums are of particular note, with users swapping what amounts to old wives tales on how to fix the game. “I hear if you close your left eye while double-clicking the .exe the game runs OK.” It’s the same story on other PC enthusiast forums, like HardOCP and Guru3D.

Tweaks abound.

The game ships with multi-core CPU support turned off for some reason, as if a modern PC gamer doesn’t have a multi-core CPU at the heart of his or her rig.

And yet at the same time, the game ships with multi-GPU support turned on. Everybody has a multi-core CPU, but finding someone with a multi-GPU setup is somewhat rarer.

It would seem that, as it’s currently coded, the game all but ignores the GPU, and instead puts the CPU under tremendous stress. This leads to wonky frame rates, as you might expect.

Activision suggests that people make sure their PC isn’t running any additional applications when they launch the game. Next thing you know Activision will be asking us to make sure our computers are plugged into a power outlet!

Multi-player is another issue altogether. Players have been reporting terribly laggy conditions, to the point that the game is unplayable.

Oh, here’s a video!

So, if the game doesn’t work well on Day One, what’s the point of pre-ordering it? Again: a $60 PC game, and one that, at its core, is based on an 11-year-old engine. Does not compute!

Another thing I noticed: the disparity between professional review scores and and user scores.

The game’s Metacritic average (seen here) is currently at 90, while the average user score is 6.7. GameFaqs shows a similar disparity.

It’s almost the opposite of a summer popcorn film: professional critics hate it, but the general public thinks it’s awesome or whatever.

And yet this game will make a boatload of money, so in the end none of this will matter even one bit.

Super!

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?

You’ll recall that, for much of yesterday, I spent an inordinate amount of time, probably around three minutes, defending the idea that Half-Life 2′s single-player campaign is better than any other first-person shooter’s released since then. You know, as if saying “Half-life 2 is good” is something controversial. Hmm.

The big gaming sites all have their reviews, with The Mighty IGN giving it an 8.5. The very fact that it’s less than a 9.0 should send shockwaves throughout the Milky Way, but let’s not forget: an 8.5 is very good!

The game launched last night with a big party in California. Metallica closed out the event. They played some hits, including a few songs off Black (their best album, obviously).

One thing’s for sure: those guys don’t come cheap, so you know Activision set aside a few dollars in the marketing budget to put that together.

IGN notes repetitive gameplay (“You can’t help but feel that both the single- and multiplayer could use some new life beyond just adding bigger and badder explosions (like smarter AI)”, which is my main beef with the FPS genre these days. It all feels so same-y.

I will say: I played the new Deus Ex a few weeks, and it looks to be just what the genre needs in terms of “hey, something new!”

And for those of you who are fans of multi-player (for some reason): the Guardian calls it “skillfully constructed and breathtakingly expansive.” You’ve got 14 maps right now, but I’m sure there will be map packs in the future.

There are zombies, too, like in World at War.

So the game, “ the pinnacle of the linear military shooter experience,” is just fine. No one expected otherwise, myself included, it’s just that I’ve grown tired of the repetition found in the genre as a whole.

But, it certainly looks as if you buy the game you won’t be disappointed, which is all you can ask for.

NOW PLAY NICE!

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.

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.

Treyarch explains to MCV:

We’re going to support the hell out of Black Ops. That will be our focus post-release: making sure we keep our fans engaged, and hopefully as a result, they’ll want to keep playing our game and won’t want to trade it in.

Makes sense, at least on the surface, which is really the only thing I can speak to.

Let’s say you buy the game when it comes out in November. On Day Two, Treyarch tweets, “Guess what? In exactly one month’s time, we’re going to release two free multi-player maps, and one new multi-player game mode!”

Who’s going to turn the game in then? (And what are you going to turn it in for, a few dollars of GameStop credit?) Then Treyarch keeps doing this, releasing little bits of content here and there, for free, ensuring that you keep loading up the game at night.

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.

The specifics of the mod tools remain unannounced, but the mere fact that Activision is permitting their inclusion should be celebrated by PC gamers. You have to remember that the last Call of Duty game, Modern Warfare 2, didn’t even ship with dedicated server support—unconscionable for a PC shooter.

It’ll be interesting to see how Black Ops does this time around. You have to wonder whether or not Call of Duty fatigue is setting in. And then you have to wonder whether or not all the heat that Medal of Honor is generating will sway more than a few gamers EA’s way this fall.

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.

Mr. Hardened comes with the game, four extra multi-player maps (ugh, way to splinter your player base, Activision), avatar clothes, and a medal.

Mr. Prestige comes with all of the above, and adds a remote control car that transmits audio and video. The car has a 200-foot range and is based on a vehicle found in the multi-player mode.

Now, prices. Hardened will set you back $80, while the Prestige costs $150 (!).

I’m sorry, but $150 for a game and a toy car seems 100 percent insane. Now, no one’s forcing you to buy these fancy-pants editions, but man alive that’s quite a bit of scratch.

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.