Bing & Decide For Pigs

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Angry Birds is continuing its assault on all things in popular culture, this time teaming up with Microsoft. Check out the first two promotional cartoons with Bing below.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=SZpLzixzjXU

https://youtube.com/watch?v=so3hz1KqmXY

LinkedIn Gets The News

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Lots of social media networks have looked more towards providing more content for their users and LinkedIn wants to get in on the act. The professional social site rolled out LinkedIn Today, which is designed to give headline stories the 90 million-plus members are sharing.

LinkedIn Today will provide feeds on from 22 different industries depending on the user’s preferences. LinkedIn has signed content discovery partnerships with StumbleUpon, Bloomberg.com, Wall Street Journal Digital Network, CNN Money and more to encourage news sharing.

Source: AdWeek

FarmVille Ventures To English Countryside

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Zynga has announced that they will launch a follow-up expansion to FarmVille. FarmVille English Countryside is deigned to be the biggest change ever made to the popular FarmVille game.

The large wag of this expansion is sheep breeding, where players can have two sheep mate and produce an offspring with an unpredictable wool pattern. They plan to include more story to address feedback concerns from fans about the game, with gameplay that resembles the quests in FrontierVille and CityVille.

Source: VentureBeat

Xbox Live Getting Kia Promotion

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Kia Motors America (KMA) announced a special promotion with Xbox Live. Users that download Kia content and register to play Kinect Sports on specific Play & Win dates can win Microsoft Points and Xbox Live Gold memberships.

Between now and March 27, players must download the month s free Kia Optima Registration Pic gamer picture, log into Xbox Live, and play Kinect Sports to enter. There will also be a registration period between April 8  and 24.

Facebook Movies = Serious Business

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Recently, Facebook announced that it would be offering movies for the first time, starting with The Dark Knight. Michael Learmonth argues that this change of distributing content through social media is a game changer.

It’s yet another distribution platform for the film and TV industry, much bigger (soon to hit 650 million users) and more global than any other, writes Learmonth. The entertainment industry is eager to cultivate a competitive market for content, rather than hand its business to one dominant player, as the music business did with iTunes.

Facebook is a service available on multiple platforms, which opens up new possibilities for distribution, and this might even open up possibilities for YouTube to sell and rent content. All the other studios are looking into this, because it’s a new platform and shares important information on how people consume this data.

Facebook is already the fastest-growing video site on the web. It’s No. 6 today (up from No. 8 a year ago), according to ComScore — ahead of Turner, Fox and Hulu — and everyone else is pretty much standing still, adds Learmonth. While that’s interesting, the really important stat is that Facebook accounts for one in eight of all minutes spent on the web (in the U.S.). Beware anyone who says a new media platform will “destroy” another. If that were true there would be no radio or network TV today. Facebook has shown no indication that it’s building another iTunes or Netflix to formally take on this market. It doesn’t have to: giving users yet another reason not to leave is enough.

Source: AdAge

EA Looks To Resident Evil In Growing Dead Space

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Dead Space 2 launched recently and it was a reasonably well received both critically and commercially. Still, EA Games President Frank Gibeau sees room to grow the franchise similar to what Capcom has done with Resident Evil.

“The Resident Evil series was awesome, the early versions were phenomenal. [Capcom] did a good job of growing the franchise to a very large market,” Gibeau said. “I think we still have some areas to grow with Dead Space in terms of trying to reach a broader audience without losing the quality and that survival-horror mechanic. That’s how we’re going to think about it as we think about Dead Space 3 and what we do next with the IP.”

“Overall, we want to try and grow the business in the action category,” Gibeau added. “EA doesn’t really have a very strong stake there; survival-horror kind of lives in that genre. 3rd-person action is something that we think we can build and our Visceral Games team is really working hard at crafting some new IPs as well as building out ones that have succeeded.”

Source: IGN

Rage Gets Dark Horse Comic Series

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Dark Horse Comics is working with id Software on a Rage comic series. Debuting June 22, it will have three issues that will set up the story for the game releasing September 13 for PS3, PC and Xbox 360.

Can’t people just calm down and stop being so angry

The Rage comic series will be written by Arvid Nelsion (Rex Mundi), penciled by Andrea Mutti (DMZ) with the cover art by Glenn Fabry (Hellblazer and Preacher), with Rage‘s creative director Tim Willits working on the comic’s creation. The setup is an Earth ravaged by asteroids, with the survivors emerging from underground Arks to discover that the Authority, a global military dictatorship, has taken control, though the truth behind what happened is not how the Authority presents it.

Team Fortress 2 Turning Japanese

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Sega and Valve have announced that there will be cross promotion between Total War: Shogun 2 and Team Fortress 2. There will be eight samurai inspired items offered in Team Fortress 2.

For those that pre-order Shogun 2 via Steam before March 15, they will receive the eight Shogun Pack items. The items will also be available via the Mann Co. Store, along with through drops and crafting.

Call Of Duty: Black Ops Best Selling U.S. Game Ever

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The NPD has confirmed that Call of Duty: Black Ops is now the best selling game in the history of the U.S. The game has passed Wii Play, having sold over 13.7 million units.

Call of Duty: Black Ops has been the top selling game since its release in November and that has continued into the month of February. Helping the game reach the sales mark that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 did not is the fact that it release on DS and Wii as well as PS3, PC and Xbox 360.

Source: IndustryGamers