Social Viruses Of A Different Kind

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Writing for NY Times, Brad Stone says viruses popping up on social nets are distinct from regular computer viruses in that they can attack people’s dignity.  Viruses and malicious links are popping up on social sites Facebook and Twitter, and often to take a hold of a user s network to spread their message.  Internet security firm Kaspersky Labs says as many as 500 links on Twitter on a given day are malicious, and another firm Sophos estimates that more than a fifth of social net users have been the targets of viruses.

Stone’s article looks at anecdotal evidence, citing a few cases to highlight how getting infected on a social net has more to do with public embarrassment than the private pain of a corrupted computer.  One example: the poor guy who clicked on a scandalous photo, discovered the image posted on his Facebook page, and then found out it was sent to his entire friends list.

Read Brad Stone s article at NY Times.

NPD Lists The Year’s Bestselling Games

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NPD Group has compiled sales figures for games up to November 2009 to highlight the year s bestsellers to-date.  The list of units sold, including bundles and collector s editions, was provided to Industry Gamers.

Activision took top slot with the Xbox 360 version of Modern Warfare 2 selling 4.2 million units.  The game s PS3 version made eighth on the list with 1.9 million units sold.  The year s second bestselling title belongs to Nintendo, with Wii Fit selling 3.5 million units.  In-fact Nintendo titles dominated overall, selling more than 58 percent of units sold in the top ten according to Industry Gamers.  The company filled the third through fifth bestseller spots with Wii Sports Resort with 2.4 million, Wii Mario Kart with 2.2 million, and Wii Play with 2.1 million units sold.  The publisher’s DS game Pokemon Platinum Version is the seventh bestseller with 1.9 million units.  The New Super Mario Brothers is tenth with 1.4 million units.

Rounding out the top ten are Microsoft s Halo 3: ODST at sixth with 2 million units, and EA’s Madden NFL 10 for Xbox 360 at ninth with 1.5 million units.  As pointed out by Industry Gamers, NPD’s Anita Frazier has also Tweeted the year s top moneymaking franchises.  They are Call of Duty, Wii Fit, Mario Brothers, Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

Read more at Industry Gamers {link no longer active}.

Sega Viral, Burger King On Xbox Get Nods As Decade’s Best

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Ad Age has a list of what they ve chosen as the ten best non-television campaigns of the decade.  In essence, the list is reaching back to when viral was known as community to most, and marketers would execute a street campaign without necessarily videotaping it for YouTube.  For games, nods got to Sega’s pioneering community building campaign for its then NFL-licensed 2K football franchise.  The publisher launched a blog for a fictitious game tester called Beta-7 overcome by the First Person Football feature in its title ESPN NFL 2K4.   The campaign generated massive viewer traffic and impressive engagement for its time.

Ad Age also includes Burger King s innovative decision to create branded games for Xbox packaged like titles boxed for retail and sold for cheap at its restaurants.  The effort benefited from being more than a gimmick, with engaging mini-games using The King character and with up-to-spec Xbox graphics, courtesy of UK game developer Blitz.  Burger King gets a second, well-deserved spot on the list for its seemingly space-time bending Subservient Chicken campaign.

Check out the full list of ten at Ad Age {link no longer active}.

‘Habbo Hotel’ Becomes A Marketing Tool

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Teen-skewed virtual world Habbo Hotel is launching a marketing measurement tool aimed at tracking brand conversations among its users, reports Edge-Online.  Habbo Hotel is a persistent world game operated by Finland-based Sulake Corp.  The company says the community, where users create avatars to communicate and interact, has more than 155 million registered accounts with the majority of users under 19 years old.  Sulake says the measurement tool, called Habble, was recently demonstrated during a campaign for the MTV European Music Awards.  MTV and Sulake say they were able to measure the effectiveness of a campaign promoting the show.  Using Habble, they monitored spikes in conversations regarding the MTV program among “Habbo Hotel” users and also pinpointed where in Europe the mentions originated.

Read more at Edge-Online {link no longer active}.

Sony Hints To Monthly Fees For PSN

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In an interview with Nikkei, Sony Computer Entertainment EVP and CTO Masayuki Chatani has suggested that Sony is looking at subscriber fee models to offset the cost of running PlayStation Network.  He said servers have costs and that Sony couldn t rely on a sell-and-forget model where it sold the hardware without selling content and services.  Chatani suggested that such paid content not only included digital downloads such as games and items for PS3 but also schemes like monthly fees.

Talking about PS3, Chatani suggested a console s lifecycle is about a decade and pointed to the PS2.  He said introducing the PS3 slim follows what Sony did with PS2, getting a slimmed down version to market to give the system a boost and attract more customers at about the halfway mark.   He also touched on how the new PS3 is as slim as it s going to get without major modifications.  He said Sony was able to significantly trim down the PS2 form factor by doing away with the internal HDD, which wouldn t make sense for PS3.  He said another option would be gutting the PS3 power supply to make it an external brick, but he added that would make the system harder to use.

Read more from Nikkei {link no longer active}.

Australia Seeks Public Opinion On Mature Game Rating

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Australia has taken a decidedly public step forward in considering introducing a mature equivalent rating for videogames in the country.  As reported in Edge-Online, the Australian government has reached out to the public for thoughts on whether the National Classification Scheme should extend the R 18+ rating currently applied to mature films to games.  Australia currently has a maximum MA 15+ rating for games, a low rating ceiling that recently barred titles that had 17+ ratings in other territories.  Game publishers such as EA and Sega that were affected by the disparity appealed rulings barring their games, and in turn helped publicize the perception that Australia has a double standard for evaluating games versus films.

In considering the new rating, Australia’s Classification Board has given a deadline of February 28, 2010, for input from the public.  Ultimately the country’s Commonwealth, State and Territory Censorship Ministers would have to be in unanimous agreement to introduce the new rating.

Read more at Edge-Online {link no longer active}.

Spiked Debuts

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MTV sisters GameTrailers and Spike have done the industry a solid and rounded up the lineup of exclusive game debut videos from Saturday night’s 2009 Video Game Awards show.  This year’s show had one of its most impressive collection of exclusives, which thanks to GameTrailers can now be perused at leisure.  Additional props to GameTrailers’ YouTube-like transparency with viewer traffic and user ratings, which allows for a bit of pocket analysis of how each debuts is faring with the hardcore set, as well as a glimpse at the power of getting these videos on Spike’s TV show.

Debuted games include a surprise announcement about a new True Crime from Activision, EA’s big reveal for the next Medal of Honor, and a lineup of first glimpses for Halo: Reach, Batman: Arkham Asylum 2, Star Wars: Force Unleashed II, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, TRON: Evolution, Spec Ops: The Line, Green Day: Rock Band, Crackdown 2, UFC Undisputed 2010, and Deadliest Warrior.

If you have more time to kill, scroll a little further down to see clips of celebrity presenters at the show such as Snoop Dogg and Tony Hawk, and check out how they’re faring.  Wonder if any of their agents got acquainted with GameTrailers this morning.

Launch the trailers at the Spike VGA page at GameTrailers {link no longer active}.

Metacritic’s Best Games And Platforms Of 2009

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Writing for entertainment reviews aggregator Metacritic, Jason Deitz rounds up the year’s best games and the game platform with the highest rated products based on critics review scores.  Sony edges out Microsoft in consoles for the first time in 2009, with both a slate of well-reviewed PS3 exclusives and higher scores for PS3 versions of multiplatform games.  Meanwhile Wii woes get another spotlight, here in the form of software quality where the highest rated games are in the middling 80 or high 70 percentile while top Xbox 360 and PS3 titles trend much higher.

Check out the roundup, including PC games and handheld systems, at Metacritic.

Ubisoft’s Online Play

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Writing for Edge-Online, Tom Ivan talks to Ubisoft digital marketing director Josh Milligan about Uplay.  The publisher launched Uplay last month as a service that runs on console nets Xbox Live and PlayStation Network but customizes the experience for Ubisoft games and community of gamers.  Uplay was integrated into Assassin’s Creed II, and as that game has taken off selling 1.6 million units in its first week according to the publisher Uplay is starting to take its own hold.  One feature Ubisoft is using to set its service apart from the first-party networks it resides on: rewarding gamers with achievement points that can be used to unlock in-game items.  Ivan’s interview with Milligan covers how the idea started, and where Ubisoft hopes to take it.

Read the interview with Ubisoft’s Josh Milligan at Edge-Online {link no longer active}.

Online Event Planning Tools

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Writing for Mashable, Jason Keath has put together a list of fourteen free online tools that facilitate event planning.  Keath’s is a soup to nuts list that covers the steps from getting the word out and inviting guests to pulling it all together and following up.  Whether to discover new tools or find ways to customize well-known ones from Google to Twitter and Facebook, it seems a worthy rundown.  Some of the more nifty tools stand out as possible ways to inject novelty into otherwise daunting or dreary tasks for organizers and attendees alike, and as a result possibly boost buy in for the event.

Check it out at Mashable.