Proving that the stars of Resident Evil: Afterlife in the least have a sense of humor, here they are reading some of the most infamous lines from the original Resident Evil. Even hamming it up on their first take, they can’t do it worse than the original “actors.”
BioShock: Infinite is two years away, but the game cannot come here soon enough. Check out this trailer, which takes us on a literal roller coaster ride in parts.
Castlevania: Lord of Shadows is the much ballyhooed reboot of the franchise, and its being handled by a European developer. Still, it is a Japanese franchise and it somehow seems very natural for the dialog to be in that language.
Heard of Miniclip.com You should have, it’s one of the top free-to-play game sites in the world, and they’ve expanded out with a new smartphone development division. In a long reaching interview, we talked with Rob Small, CEO and co-founder of Miniclip, and Antonio Sergio Varanda, director of the smartphone division at Miniclip, about the founding of the new division, their relationship with Apple and the App Store and marketing games simultaneously online and for smartphones.
Rob: The key news is the launch of the iPhone division, but we’ve had iPhone games since 2008. Most of the work has been with dedicated developers that have built things for the website. We thought it was the right time to get the iPhone development studio, mainly because we want to exploit our IPs on the iPhone.
The hardest thing about the App Store is getting into the Top 10, so what we’ve found is useful is getting our users to experience the Flash game on their PCs and linking them directly to the corresponding title on the App Store to get the game. We see a large audience that are interested in our sort of games on the iPhone; we’ve had over 2 million click-throughs this month.
Rob: We needed to make sure that our user base has iOS devices and we were toeing the water with previous titles and sold 100,000 copies. The Monster Truck Rally game was particularly successful; that was one that was featured in the Super Bowl. It’s great to dip into our own catalog. We want to develop our own IP, but with Flash developers and struggling iPhone developers, we can help them with a leg up.
Rob: Well, one fellow we didn’t know called us up late on a Friday evening about it and we blurted out, ‘Great!’ The game was used on TV and rich media ads. It was the ad that had the air hockey game and they had our game because it used the accelerometer, so it was a really good way to articulate the feature.
Sergio: That happened with one of our games! Nobody got asked about it, but it was at a WWC presentation in a folder.
Rob: You get a lot of sales from that exposure.
Rob: I think so, definitely. I think of the casual gaming audience as anyone from 5 to 95. It’s not just 14 to 30 year old males that are into shoot-em-ups. Now, everyone’s a casual gamer, so it really has opened up for us. For a lot of our users, the first thing they do on the App Store is see what content we also have available on Miniclip.com, so it’s a great way to move into the space.
Rob: In Asia, a lot of the business we do is through the phone, and the iPhone is becoming a mainstay device, so it’s important to focus on that. Should another platform emerge we’ll focus on that too.
Rob: Games have been central for me the past 10 years, and right now games are the hottest they’ve ever been. We want to develop intuitive easy to play games; for most people, time will be at a premium and we wanted a snack sized experience for them. They’re also very easily ported over because of their nature. They showed off one of our games on the Nexus and we’ve also made some of our games Nintendo Wii compatible.
Rob: Yeah people dress up their games to make everything similar. Sometimes it takes a lot to simplify them! Designers want to design, so they want to make it more complicated. On Miniclip you click an icon and get a game; we know if a game is not easily accessible because we get immediate feedback!
Crazy Karts, one of the many titles on Miniclip.com.
Rob: For us, with the release of the iPhone 4 and the polished experience, it helped make this the right time.
Sergio: With the new retina display and gyro, we can come up with more content and we want to focus on the new functionality of the device. As the devices evolve, expectations increase. That makes the conditions for use . . . well, it made sense for us to have a team right now for the highest level of quality.
Rob: I recently did some calculations . . . compared to my first PC, a Spectrum, my smartphone is over 300 times more powerful.
Sergio: Apple says they have 100 million users out there, including millions of iTunes users. It’s becoming much larger than the portable consoles.
Rob: The jury is still out for what impact this will have for the DSi. For parents, the first things their kids want to do is get on the iPhone, and for a buck a game they don’t mind paying that. For a DS game, if it’s $40 and they stop playing after a week, you’re going to be cheesed off.
Rob: People already have too many devices. As for young kids and their intuitive ability… my two year-old son was using the iPad and he knew exactly how it worked. Traditionally, Miniclip has lots of young users, and for us it’s a gateway to that generation. Every kid wants to have an iPhone, so it’s a natural extension for them.
Rob: We do a simultaneous release with the Flash and iPhone versions of the game. It’s launched on our game spot and that helps them to get many game plays. By launching [the two versions] simultaneously, it helps get attention and launches it into the top 10. With the website pointing to the App Store, it really gives them more leverage and enables it to do really well.
Some people try to grow their site by linking or by running a lot of ads, but oftentimes users find that they don’t have extensive services on their website. We’re 100 percent organic traffic, though, with a very active base. The value of our 56 million users is very high.
Sergio: Many small developers have tried their luck in the wild, wild west of the App Store. They quickly lose viability, unless it has a big marketing push. What we can do for them is relaunch their game and launch a flash version that promotes the iPhone version, and many developers have done this in order to get it to the top. We’ve been working with indies on the portal for a long time and they know our reputation.
Rob: The revenue model is we share a certain amount of sales with that developer.
Sergio: Developers realize working with us is much better for them than launching on their own. We have a website with 56 million casual gamers looking for this content and you can talk with anyone and none of them have this sort of exposure.
Rob: We have titles like Fragger and we have fully free titles, so I think we have a good variety of games appealing to different users.
Sergio: Portugal actually has a greater than 1:1 ownership rate of cell phones compared to the population! We’re 15 minutes from the university that teaches programming and all of our developers were at the university — it’s a good hotbed of talent.
Entertainment Media Council has announced that its president and CEO Morgan Ramsay has signed a deal with Apress to publish a new book. Tentatively titled Gamers at Work, this new book will explore entrepreneurship in the gaming industry.
The book will examine personal accounts of gaming’s most successful companies, with information on how the companies survived and thrived. There will be over 30 interviews included with personalities like EA founder Trip Hawkins, Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, Junction Point Studios founder Warren Spector, Shiny Entertainment founder David Perry, Obsidian Entertainment co-founder Feargus Urquhart, and Oddworld Inhabitants co-founder Lorne Lanning.
Gamers at Work is scheduled for release in February 2011.
No one does cutesy game swag quite like the Japanese do. While making a pair of slippers out of your protagonist might seem tacky or bizarre from most places, this depiction of Okamiden’s Chibiterasu (based on the Capcom game) is amazingly adorable and cool.
Celestial brush not included.
Source: Kotaku
After the release of Halo 3, the franchise has seen the release of Halo Wars, Halo 3: ODST and now Halo: Reach. Regardless of how one thinks of those games, it’s the sort of pace that Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Game Studios Phil Spencer would like to continue.
“There’s no explicit strategy that says we’re to ship a Halo game every year. I will say I think one Halo game every three years — which was kind of our old cadence is probably not frequent enough, said Spencer. “We’re coming up on, what, next year is the 10th anniversary. You watch the change in gamers in 10 years. The percentage of players who are playing Reach that were I’ll say not old enough to play Halo 1 at the time, 10 years is a long time between launches. We definitely think about a more persistent Halo engagement for customers and not going dark for two years, and Live helps obviously with multiplayer to keep people engaged.”
“343 Industries is thinking a lot about how to take this franchise and turn it into something that people feel like they have an ongoing relationship with and they can entertain themselves more often, added Spencer. But it’s not, hey every November 6 or whatever we have to ship a game and build a production plan around that. We want to do things that make sense as a first party.”
This strategy might sound akin to what Activision has done with Call of Duty, and Spencer had nothing but praise for what Activision has done. “I’ll just, again, be honest as a gamer. I used to look at annual releases of non-sports games as people just trying to milk me, described Spencer. I figured nobody had enough time to do a good job, and all of the negatives that we would associate with those kinds of scenarios. Kudos to Activision because they’ve done a good job building a good game, continuing to release each year and I think the fans feel like it’s a good thing that they do that. I think there are some things to learn, some positives and some opportunities, in what they do with that. Obviously they’ve kept the quality extremely high, which I think is important.”
“We have some unique challenges and opportunities with Halo because it is a story based game built around a certain set of characters, which is a bit different than what they do with Call of Duty. Not better or worse, it’s just different. But watching them and seeing what they do — we take inspiration from a lot of places — but obviously they’re a big success, he conlcuded.
Source: IGN
Because of privacy concerns, the amount that Facebook games are able to advertise themselves among users has decreased. The social network hopes to change that with a refreshed notifications system, which will hopefully reduce the number of complaints about games on Facebook and not show these notifications to those who don’t show interest in games.
Despite some misgivings from some quarters, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg indicates that over 200 million people play games on the site every month, which is roughly 40 percent of its user base. Facebook Credits will be offered to new users free, which Facebook intends every game on the network to use eventually; also, new functionality will see games suggested based upon usage and app icons will inform users of pending tasks or notifications for the games.
Source: MCV
Some consumers and game developers rue the fact that the Xbox 360 contains no support for Blu-ray. While Microsoft has been dismissive of such complaints in the past, Stephen McGill, Microsoft U.K.’s Xbox & Entertainment Director, makes the company’s perspective on the HD storage format clear.
I think people may have spoken about that originally, but that’s long gone. I think people now recognize what a smart decision it was to keep the pricing low, and actually Blu-ray is going to be passed by as a format. People have moved through from DVDs to digital downloads and digital streaming, so we offer full HD 1080p Blu-ray quality streaming instantly, no download, no delay. So, who needs Blu-ray
Source: Xbox360Achievements.org
The true release date of the 3DS remains shrouded in mystery, but its hardware capabilities might not. Sources familiar with the hardware have apparently leaked the specs for Nintendo’s latest portable system.
The Nintendo 3DS will pack not one, but two 266MHz ARM11 CPUs, along with a 133MHz GPU, 4MBs of dedicated VRAM, 64MBs of RAM, and 1.5GBs of flash storage, writes Scott Lowe. The information comes from persons familiar with the hardware who spoke to us under the condition of anonymity.
For reference, the ARM11 is used in numerous portable devices, including the Zune HD, some Android smartphones, and older versions of the iPhone and iPod touch.
Source: IGN
