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
Peter Jackson has issued a response to the boycott from Australia’s Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance for The Hobbit films. There’s been some conflict over contracts for local actors, making for the latest in a series of delays and hardships for the production.
“It sure feels like we are being attacked simply because we are a big, fat juicy target — not for any wrongdoing,” Jackson said in a statement. “We haven’t even been greenlit yet! It feels as if we have a large Aussie cousin kicking sand in our eyes.”
Jackson warned that the two-part filming of The Hobbit could be moved from New Zealand to Eastern Europe. “I also feel a growing anger at the way this tiny minority is endangering a project that hundreds of people have worked on over the last two years, and the thousands about to be employed for the next four years,” added Jackson. “The hundreds of millions of Warner Brothers dollars that is about to be spent in our economy.”
“Why is this endangered Because the ‘demands’ of MEAA cannot be agreed to, or even considered — by law — and therefore the only options that remain involve closing The Hobbit down, or more likely shifting the production to Europe. It could so easily happen,” he concluded ominously.
Source: NY Daily News
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Check us out at facebook.com/pages/The-alist-daily/.
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.
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
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
If you happened to miss out on the fantastic [a]list summit over the summer, fear not. We’ll be bringing you some interviews and presentations straight from the event. In this exclusive [a]list video interview, Gaikai founder David Perry discusses the state of game marketing and how marketers need to adapt with the ever growing presence of online.
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.
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.
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
