Warner Bringing Sesame Street Back To Games

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Warner Bros. and Sesame Workshop have partnered to create Sesame Street games for consoles including Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, reports AP. The pair aim to make educational games targeted to preschool age children. Warner s game marketing head Russel Arons said the publisher hopes to create games that use the motion controllers coming to both systems later this year. AP says the deal to collaborate on games comes three months after Warner Bros. partnered with Sesame Workshop to distribute Sesame Street home videos. The news outlet points out that the last game based on Sesame Street was Bonsai Entertainment’s 2001 title Sesame Street Sports, with the license more prolific on game platforms in the 1980s and 1990s. Read more from AP.

EA And Dr Pepper Launch Yearlong Co-Op Campaign

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EA and Dr Pepper have launched a yearlong promotional partnership, reports Promo. The partnership is a co-op marketing campaign with EA games branding appearing on a range of Dr Pepper products, including packaged sodas and fountain drinks sold through convenience store chains such as 7-Eleven. The campaign, slated to run through the end of 2010, gives buyers of Dr Pepper products special codes that unlock exclusive content for EA games. EA’s current lineup of games involved includes Mass Effect 2, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Spore, and Sims 3.”  The publisher intends to roll other games into the campaign throughout the year. Promo flavors the news with recent data from 7-Eleven that sales of prepaid game cards at its stores doubled between 2008 and 2009. The chain said as a result it s now looking to double the number of games for which it sells the cards. Read more at Promo.

Best Buy Springs Into UK

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Best Buy has launched a UK web site paving the way for its entry into the country’s brick and mortar retail market, reports Gamesindustry.biz. The US-based electronics retailing giant opens its first UK stores this spring. The Best Buy UK site is not yet offering online purchases, rather it’s preparing Britons for the debut with a welcome message along with guides and information on consumer electronics products. The categories currently being prominently highlighted on the site include 3D TVs and motion-controlled videogames.  Read more, and access the Best Buy UK site, at Gamesindustry.biz.

Marketing With Sunshine

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Messing with Mother Nature just became a marketing technique. Cream reports that German car rental company Sixt has harnessed the same rain cloud dispersal technique used at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing to promote rentals of its convertible cars. The technique involves seeding clouds with silver iodide to speed up the process of precipitation, therefore lessening cloudy and rainy weather periods.  It’s commonly used by airports to combat fog. Sixt used the technique last summer in Halle, Germany, known as one of Europe’s wettest cities.  The company hired a military pilot to disperse the chemical using infrared air-to-air missiles whenever rain threatened the city. Cream says as a result Sixt’s hired pilot has been hailed as a local hero responsible for the best July weather on record.

 

Read more at Cream.

Visiting Cybertron

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Activision un-tethers its Transformers license from the films with developer High Moon Studios Transformers: War for Cybertron. While foregoing any glimpse of game play, the game’s storyline trailer is pure CG eye-candy showing a promising premise set on the giant bots war-ravaged home planet.

 

Watch it at IGN.

Mixing Zen With Money

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The TV spot for financial management service Zendough is freakily engaging, and mostly for all the wrong reasons. Adweek blogger David Gianatasio sums it up nicely.  The only thing to add is that, to the gamer set, the evil hovering bank-bots may come across as more Pac-Man than Star Wars.

 

Watch the spot and read about it at AdFreak.

Gaming With Android

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Writing for Edge-Online, Alex Wiltshire pens an extensive piece on mobile gaming on Google’s Nexus One and other Android-powered smart phones. He looks at the phones capabilities and the current market for Android game apps, sizing them up to category leader Apple iPhone.

 

 

Read the article at Edge-Online.

The Move Towards Motion-Sensing

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Writing for NY Times, Ashlee Vance looks at motion control devices coming out of this year s Consumer Electronics Show.  Along with Microsoft’s Natal controller for Xbox 360, companies were showing technology ready to enter living rooms to control TVs and other entertainment devices.

 

Read the article at NY Times.

New Media Jargon

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Ad Age is featuring a glossary of new media buzzwords, mostly of the cheeky jargon variety, compiled by Nielsen digital group VP Pete Blackshaw.

 

Check it out at Ad Age.

Survey Finds PS3 Expected To Thrive, Wii Optimism Waning

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Gamesindustry.biz has surveyed the game industry on game platform and publisher performance expectations for the year. The survey culled responses from Gameindustry.biz Network’s members comprising more than 10,000 industry professionals. The findings show a robust year expected for Sony’s PlayStation 3 from more than a third of those surveyed. About 34 percent said they expect the PS3 to outperform all other game platforms, more than doubling those who picked it in last year s survey. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 was a close second in the survey, named as likely to win out this year by about 30 percent of respondents. Neither console maker fared well in expected performance for their first party software. Microsoft didn’t make the survey’s top five list despite an anticipated new entry in its Halo series, and Sony listed fourth with only six percent despite big titles such as God of War III and Gran Turismo 5 slated for this year. Activision-Blizzard was the hands down winner for software, with nearly 44 percent of respondents picking it to beat the competition this year. Gamesindustry.biz points to anticipated Blizzard fare in the World of Warcraft and Starcraft franchises, as well as a potential Diablo sequel, as buoying the publisher s prospects. EA came in a distant second as an expected software leader, picked by about 19 percent of respondents. Nintendo suffered in both categories, with only about nine percent of respondents picking both the Wii and Nintendo software to perform best in 2010. The drop in optimism for Wii is a more than eight-fold fall from last year’s survey, putting it below Apple iPhone. About ten percent of respondents picked Apple’s smart phone as the game platform with the biggest potential for success in 2010. Check out the full results at Gamesindustry.biz.