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Microsoft is looking to launch a Kinect Comes To You promotional competition in the U.K. They are inviting those interested to petition Microsoft to bring Kinect to their area, school, street or backyard via Facebook.
I m really excited to be announcing Kinect Comes to You , where we re giving someone the chance to experience Kinect before it hits the shops, said model and competition judge Sophie Ellis Bextor.
This is an open invitation for people of all ages to join the Kinect party and be among the first to play the fun-filled array of new, controller-free Kinect games, added Microsoft U.K. s director of Xbox and entertainment Stephen McGill.
Kinect for Xbox 360 will release on November 10.
Source: MCV
The integration of Chevrolet into Kinect Joy Ride was established in June and detailed in [a]list. Now, Kinect Adventures and Kinect Sports are getting sponsorships of their own with Sprint and T-Mobile, respectively.
With Kinect for Xbox 360, we are removing the last barrier to interactive television the controller, said Mark Kroese, general manager of the Interactive Entertainment Advertising Business Group at Microsoft. We have seen tremendous momentum from the advertising community, including big campaigns from Chevrolet, Sprint and T-Mobile. These visionary marketers are leading the entertainment revolution with ground-breaking campaigns that are highly engaging.
For Sprint, they will be sponsoring the launch of Kinect Adventures, with a contest where contestants will compete to have their pictures featured on Xbox Live. Additionally, stations for gamers to enjoy Kinect Adventures will be at Sprint’s New York Comic Con booth.
Kinect Sports will feature fixed product placement for T-Mobile throughout the various mini-games, including volleyball net signage, custom bowling balls and foam fingers held by the arena audience. T-Mobile will also sponsor two Kinect Sports Play & Win programs with two Xbox Family Game Nights in November and January.
DJ Hero sold well for an original music property last holiday, but Activision is determined to make its sequel even more successful. With a free copy of the first game going to everyone who purchases the turntable bundle of DJ Hero 2, Guitar Hero European boss Peter Royea is giving the game his full attention.
This is a real statement of intent from DJ Hero that we really do want to bring the party home in 2010, he said.
Source: MCV
In the latest in our series of [a]list summit interviews, we chatted with DFC Intelligence president David Cole about the challenges presented to the industry, social networking trends in advertising and the summit itself.
Zynga has gone from a start up to Facebook powerhouse in a short time. Zynga’s CTO Cadir Lee recently spoke at Oracle’s OpenWorld and detailed just how vast the company has become.
Among the stats laid out was that 10 percent of those on the Internet worldwide have played a Zynga game, and 215 million play a Zynga title monthly, with them adding 1,000 servers a week to accommodate the traffic. Zynga’s collection of games move 1 petabyte of data per day, with 3 billion neighbor connections supported between games.
Zynga has 1,200 full time workers working in 13 game studios worldwide. To show how enthusiastic the user base of Zynga was for its games, they noted that the special item Superberry in FarmVille was planted 700 million times by 10 million users.
Source: TechCrunch
We’ve been told numerous times by EA executives (they’re publishing Epic’s BulletStorm) that sometimes “it’s just really satisfying to shoot sh*t.” Indeed, and there’s tons of that in BulletStorm. In this new gameplay vid, the game’s producer shows off a new weapon, The Bouncer, and the crazy level which has the player traversing a collapsing building.
In the console world, Sony is pushing 3D harder than anyone. After all, they have a corporate-wide stake in the business with their electronics too. But in terms of developers, no other studio seems to be as big a believer in 3D as Crytek, the talented folks behind the Crysis franchise.
Crytek boss Cevat Yerli wants Crysis 2 to be seen as almost an ambassador for stereoscopic 3D in games. “If you play Crysis 2 in 2D on a normal TV, you will have a lot of fun, but if you buy a 3D TV, you will have even more. I want our games to be one of the first games out there to show how 3D could be and what it means for first-person gaming,” he said.
“It’s you who plays, it’s you who is in charge, you are empowered, you are the super soldier, you are badass, you are kicking ass. That’s what I want players to feel,” he added, noting how 3D can add to those feelings.
Source: Gamasutra
Activision certainly has a challenge on its hands this holiday season, and no we’re not talking about trying to top Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 with Black Ops. We’ll find out this holiday if the decision to publish a Wii exclusive GoldenEye (a game that was hugely popular on N64 over a decade ago) was the right one. This new multiplayer trailer shows that they’re certainly enticing gamers with a ton of interesting modifiers for gameplay.
It’s debatable just what kind of indicator Internet search terms are when it comes to genuine interest from consumers, but Sony can at least put a small feather in its cap for the UK territory, as last week its PlayStation Network topped all other Google searches, including controversial X Factor contestant Chloe Mafia, X Factor guest judge Nicole Scherzinger and the returning BBC series Spooks.
The PS3 itself was 12th as a search term. Speculation points to PSN’s scheduled maintenance and resulting downtime as one of the reasons people were Googling the term frequently. Also, last week the PS3 got its newest firmware update over PSN, which introduced full 3D movie playback for 3D Blu-ray discs.
Source: Tech Radar
