Shack News lists this week’s releases for PC, Xbox 360, Sony’s PS2, PS3 and PSP, and Nintendo’s Wii and DS except during these barest of weeks in the year. The only games of significance are Konami Classics Vol. 1 and 2, with arcade and NES throwbacks from the likes of Contra and Castlevania, coming to Xbox 360.
Check out the full list at Shack News {link no longer active}.
If Spike s 2009 Video Game Awards show managed to prove one thing this year it is that what s on shelves is as important to game consumers as what they can anticipate to play one, two, maybe even three years from now. The program, which aired on Saturday night, wasn’t just about honoring the year s best games. While titles such as Sony’s Uncharted 2, Take-Two’s Left 4 Dead 2, and Nintendo’s The New Super Mario Brothers took top honors, the spotlight may have been shining more brightly on what s coming down the pike from the likes of Halo, Batman, Star Wars and Rock Band. Exclusive first-look trailers have always been a part of the VGA, and a coveted placement for game marketing and PR folks.
This year it became central to the show, with the network dedicating considerably more air time for the game announcements, as well as making it a central part of its promotions for the show. Spike may have made it easy for marketing heads to circle the calendar on when to pull the veil off of their games. Now the onus is on their PR teams to keep some semblance of that buzz alive for the months and years to come until the products see the light of day.
Check out the list of winners and games announced at the 2009 Spike VGA at Joystiq.
While NPD Group’s November game industry sales report shed further light on a slumping market for music games Microsoft has said digital tracks are selling well on Xbox Live, reports Gamesindustry.biz. November showed considerable declines of 65 percent for Activision’s Hero music games and 59 percent for MTV Games Rock Band franchise. The declines were in spite of high-profile fall releases such as The Beatles: Rock Band for MTV, and DJ Hero and Band Hero for Activision.
Microsoft says despite the slumping sales for the new titles, downloadable music tracks are selling well on Xbox Live. While not providing figures or specifics, Microsoft’s David Dennis told GI.biz that digital sales of individual tracks and song packs are going strong. He said that as players adopt games in the music genre where new titles require purchasing expensive plastic peripherals they become “passionate” about building their music collection by buying digital tracks.
Read more at Gamesindustry.biz.
In a story that Ad Age broke on Friday, Spike revealed that it had enlisted Burger King to provide live online streaming of Saturday night s 2009 Vide Game Awards.
Ad Age calls the feat a rarity when compared to how even the biggest award shows such as the Oscars, Emmy s or MTV’s Video Music Awards have never attempted to stream their broadcasts online. Burger King was an integrated sponsor for the online portion of Spike’s awards show, with a branded video player fed through Spike s web site and its MTV sister site GameTrailers.com. Burger King worked its Have It Your Way slogan into the sponsorship, not only feeding live camera streams but also letting users pick different cameras all the way from the red carpet entries to green room waits and backstage at the show.
Spike’s marketing head Dario Spina said the partnership with Burger King helped offset the cost of production needed to stream the show online as well as helped limit the number of pre-roll ads viewers would have to sit through. Burger King had also sponsored the online broadcast for last year’s Video Game Awards but only as a delayed feed. Ad Age says that last year Burger King had accounted for 71 percent of the traffic to the awards show site.
Read more at Ad Age {link no longer active}.
A study by Nielsen has found significantly higher adoption of consumer tech such as HDTV, videogame systems, digital music players and internet broadband access in U.S. homes with children, reports MediaPost. Nielsen s report shows the biggest disparity with a tech device in households with children compared to all U.S. homes is with game consoles, with nearly 68 percent of Americans with children owning one versus 32 percent for all others. The respective breakdown for handheld game systems were 54 percent versus 22 percent. Households with children also owned more HDTVs, at 73 percent versus 58 percent, internet broadband service, at 82 percent versus 66 percent, and digital music players, at 72 percent versus 42 percent.
Nielsen s report also shows media consumption among children is still dominated by television. Among children 2-11 years old it found the average child watched 28 hours of TV per week, with a combination of live TV, DVR programming and DVDs. The study found 60 percent of teens and adults simultaneously watch TV and use the internet.
Read more at MediaPost {link no longer active}.
Activision has said that sponsoring a Kiss concert streamed online on Thanksgiving day helped make the band’s song pack for Guitar Hero 5 a bestseller. Ad Age reported on Activision and Anheuser-Busch sponsorships of the Kiss 35 Alive tour performance in Los Angeles on Thanksgiving. The companies promoted products on the concert’s live online broadcast through video streamer Ustream. The online stream attracted more than one million unique users who spent an average 43 minutes watching the broadcast, figures that Kiss manager Doc McGhee said surpassed expectations.
Activision’s Will Kassoy told Ad Age that the downloadable three-song pack for Kiss promoted through the sponsorship has sold more copies than any of the other 15 song packs released for Guitar Hero 5. Kiss song pack featuring Modern Day Delilah, I Was Made for Loving You, and Lick It Up was advertised as a text scroll in the video of the streamed concert. Kassoy said Activision intends to look to sponsoring more online concerts from top bands in the future.
Read more at Ad Age {link no longer active}.
Atari has appointed chief operating officer Jeff Lapin as CEO taking over for David Gardner, reports Edge-Online. Lapin joined Atari in December 2007 and became COO in May of this year. He s previously worked at RazorGator Interactive, Take-Two and THQ. Lapin said in a statement that Atari has a new publishing strategy and has shifted its operations to the U.S. resulting from a challenging time.
Read more at Edge-Online {link no longer active}.
Ad Age lists the top 10 viral videos for the week of November 30.
The highlight in this week s chart is a video from LG’s Give it a Ponder campaign, one of several the mobile phone maker has made to promote responsible texting among teens. The off-the-wall spots star James Lipton, host of Bravo’s Inside the Actor’s Studio. They play on the paradox of having the cultured drama coach provide thoughtful advice on relatively trivial teen dilemmas. Beyond that, they’re hard to describe.
For videogames, Microsoft hangs on with Natal at number five with about 450,000 views. More impressively, the Tillman the bulldog viral for Activision’s Tony Hawk: Ride stays at number two with more than a million views.
Three other new entries make up the bottom of the chart, including videos from a couple tech companies quite obviously on opposite ends of the cool factor spectrum. Google, please tell Cisco that the point of hiring marketing folks to make your viral videos is to inject just a bit of chic into the geek.
Ad Age s chart includes number of views for the week and percentage change in views for videos that stayed on the chart. The list is compiled by Visible Measures.
Check out the full list and watch the videos at Ad Age.
Business Insider is featuring the top ten TV ads of the decade, as chosen in a poll conducted by Adweek. As Business Insider points out, Adweek was focused on creative that defined the decade and not necessarily those judged on entertainment factor alone. The list also doesn’t include Super Bowl ads, which Adweek is ranking in a separate poll.
Creative for videogames gets a nod in Microsoft s diorama spot for Halo3. A Sony ad for PlayStation was nominated but didn’t get the votes; it’s in the expanded list.
Watch the top ten at Business Insider.
The expanded list of all nominees and voting results are at Adweek {link no longer active}.
GameTrailers has the exclusive debut trailer for Activision’s Transformers: War for Cybertron, the publisher s third title based on the IP. The trailer opts for slick CG over any glimpses of in-game, focusing on a premise reveal that separates this game from Activision’s prior film-based Transformer titles. Slick set pieces and well-directed action highlight the setting as a battle-scarred Transfomers home planet, with the game taking place long before the robots brought their hulking mess of a war to Earth.
Watch it at GameTrailers {link no longer active}.
