Lost Planet 2 Trailer Found

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Lost in the flurry of releases during a busy 2010 is Capcom’s Lost Planet 2. The original game released over three years ago, which is practically a lifetime for a console game. Still, Lost Planet 2 is set to finally release in May, and as evidenced by the trailer below, looks quite nice. May is shaping up to be a very packed month with huge releases like Super Mario Galaxy 2, Red Dead Redemption, UFC Undisputed 2010, Alan Wake and more, so hopefully Capcom’s marketing can get Lost Planet 2 some needed attention.

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Smartphone Gaming Rapidly Increasing

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As mobile gaming evolves, the demographics of who is playing what continues to change. A comScore study today said that users playing games on regular mobile phones dropped 35 percent last year to 29.5 million, while the number of smartphone gamers increased 60 percent to 21.4 million. The mobile gaming audience as a whole has dropped 13 percent to 51 million.

“As the market transitions from feature phones to smartphones, the dynamics of game play are also shifting towards a higher quality experience,” said Mark Donovan, senior vice president for mobile at comScore. “As a result, we can expect to see a profound increase in adoption of this activity, both in terms of audience size and overall engagement.”

Source: MediaPost {link no longer active}

Free Game Demos Going Away, Says Crytek CEO

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Free game demos have existed in one form or another as a promotional method for years.  If your game is solid, one of the best ways to market it is to simply let gamers test it out. Still, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli isn’t a fan of free demos, and believes that they won’t be around forever.

“A free demo is a luxury we have in the game industry that we don t have in other industries such as film,” said Yerli. “Because we’ve had this free luxury for so long, now there are plans to change this people are complaining about it. The reality is that we might not see any free game demos in the long term.”

Yerli seemed unsure if his company’s next big game Crysis 2 will have a demo, saying, “That s something we need to think about, because we haven t fully decided on this yet. But whether we do have a demo or not, do I think companies need to release so many demos I think that we ll see more and more games not carrying a demo in the future, because it becomes prohibitively expensive. Also, given the time pressures in making a demo in fact given the time pressure of making a quality demo I think it all becomes really difficult to work with, and I think we ll see less and less of them in the future.”

Source: Develop

Will Wright Signs With Science Channel

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The Science Channel today confirmed that Will Wright has signed on to produce programming for the network. He will produce shows with interactive components that will look at topics like time travel, different worlds and the future.

“I want to take the way he engages an audience in gaming and bring that into a show,” Science Channel GM Debbie Myers said.

“Gaming is a rich and compelling way to tell a great story,” said Wright. “I am so excited to bring that mind-set to TV projects.”

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Google: Can Marketers Do Without it?

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Google has become practically omnipresent among marketer’s media buys, but that’s led to some lazy strategies in some circles. Chris Copeland, CEO at GroupM Search in the Americas, talked at the Search Insider Summit about other options to reach consumers.

Copeland argued that marketers should make use of multiple mediums like contextual and mobile, as well as search and display ads on Bing and Yahoo. “But it’s not enough to buy just display or search,” he says. “You need to look at behavioral and retargeting options, too.”

There were 15.4 billion searches in March by Americans, and Google sites accounted for nearly two thirds of all searches. Yahoo Sites accounted for 16.9 percent and Microsoft Sites came in at 11.7 percent; Ask Network and AOL brought up the rear with 3.8 and 2.5 percent of search marketshare.

Source: MediaPost {link no longer active}

Interactive Video And Its Potential For Marketers

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Video obviously has strong value for the advertising medium, and interactive videos ads have a good chance of coming into their own now. Things like Innovid’s iRoll (which easily allows marketers to take video interactive), Mixpo (takes TV spots and adds overlays) and Veeple (can take videos and add clickable elements) all have a chance to make a huge splash.

“The value of interactivity in online advertising is not lost on digital marketers,” writes David Rossiter. “It allows us to trade in a few lines of text for an engaging in-banner branding experience, and to encourage consumers to get to know our products and services before they even reach our site. As marketers, we’ve incorporated interactivity into our campaigns in countless ways — to the point where consumers have almost come to expect this feature in the ads they are served.”

“What if you were to unite interactivity – a vital element of display advertising – with video – one of the most effective ad formats, which, according to a recent study, outperforms virtually all other formats in aiding brand awareness, online ad awareness, brand favorability, and purchase intent” adds Rossiter. “In a way, the process would be the technological equivalent of selective breeding, with the result resembling a powerful beast that manifests all the best qualities and genetic traits of its pedigreed parents.”

Source: iMediaConnection

Epic Games’ Japan Opening

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Epic Games has worked very hard in making Unreal Engine 3 the premier middleware in the industry, and not just in the U.S., but worldwide. To that end, the company recently launched its new office in Japan.

“Tokyo is the home of game development,” said Epic Games president Mike Capps. “This is a big step for us at Epic Games. We’re looking forward to giving you support to make the best games ever.”

“Shinji Mikami and I first met Jay at Tokyo Game Show in 2007,” said Goichi Suda51 Suda, CEO of Grasshopper Manufacture, who delivered a congratulatory address. “Jay gave us a private demonstration of the Unreal Engine. We thought, immediately, that this was the engine of our dreams. We decided then and there to use Unreal to develop our next game.”

“Unreal is very easy to learn,” Suda continued. “70 percent of our staff are now using Unreal. It allows us to preview ideas instantly. I hope that Unreal Engine 7 just lets me input a story in novel form and automatically make a game out of it.”

Epic Games Japan Territory Manager Taka Kawasaki then came on to talk about how the platform has grown, showing the characters  that contained little over 500 polygons in the first Unreal Engine, but moved up to two million for Unreal Engine 3. The number of developers using Unreal Engine has also increased, with the first version having been used in just 25 games but the third version now used in over 100 games.

“Most importantly, The Unreal Engine allows developers to focus on creativity,” Kawasaki said.

Epic Games Japan Support Manager Jun Shimoda talked about new features, like a texture density indicator and improved particle effects. He also noted that Epic Games representatives that speak Japanese will be on hand to troubleshoot with developers.

Source: Gamasutra

Twitter Apps That Stand Out

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Twitter’s recent Chirp conference provided new info about the micro-blog’s new advertising model, but it also was a chance for prospective Twitter App makers to show off their wares. One of these apps was Tweet Agora, which has attracted some attention because of the ability to filter responses and mute certain users.

Another app was Twittelator Pad, which allows for content curation where users will be able to easily follow topics of their choice. One popular proposal was CrowdReel, which shows a streaming mosaic of every image uploaded to Twitter.

“I really liked CrowdReel as a consumer experience,” said Twitter product VP Jason Goldman. “I love slicing up the stream by pictures, links.”

Other apps included Project 142, which allows users to search their archives for a particular Tweet, and SonicLiving, which is a user discovery app that searches through Pandora, Last.fm, Blip, Lala and iTunes accounts to find favorite music artists on Twitter.  Finally, Tap11 is a serious brand-focused Twitter client that includes both broadcast and analysis tools for the service.

“We want to do more analytics for companies,” said Goldman. “We’re building an API for that, too: mutli-author accounts, analytics around how those perform.”

Source: Mashable

Eyeblaster Sets Sights On China

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Digital ad company Eyeblaster today strengthened its Chinese presence with the opening of an office in Hong Kong. They have also hired Clement Tsang to be the China sales director and tapped business manager Sally Ng to head up operations locally.

“While our major competitors are scaling down their operations in the Greater China region due to changes in business focus, we feel that this is a great time to invest and expand our presence in Greater China,” said Jordan Khoo, Asia-Pacific director for Eyeblaster. “A Chinese Australian, he has this particular bi-culture understanding about the local business practices and he has developed a very deep network of digital professionals within agencies and corporate clients side.

“Sally has great passion for the industry and is able to add a lot of value to our Hong Kong clients. We believe she will be a great addition to our team,” he added.

Khoo said that MediaMind, the next-generation campaign management system from Eyeblaster, will launch in the region to help agencies and advertisers better manage their business. Eyeblaster’s clientele in the Hong Kong region includes Sony Ericsson and Yahoo.

Source: Ad Week

ESPN Pushing Hard For World Cup

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The World Cup is going to be the biggest sporting event worldwide this year, and ESPN is making sure that audiences in the U.S. pay attention as well. The sports network recently held an event where they said they will promote the World Cup more than anything else they’ve done in the past.

“This will be a watershed moment because the commitment we are putting towards the presentation of this World Cup is unprecedented,” Seth Ader, ESPN senior director of sports marketing. “We know we’ll do well. We’ll improve on where we have been in the past. But the sky is the limit.”

Source: The Hollywood Reporter