Quantic Dream Staying Loyal To Sony

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Quantic Dream’s David Cage is still not talking what his company is doing next. Whatever it is, though, he indicates that it will be with Sony and not a multiplatform title.

“We have an exclusive relationship with Sony,” said Cage. “The relationship on Heavy Rain has been fantastic. They trusted us from day one, supported us all the way through. It was really a very risky project [for them] and they never let us down. Being a part of a company with what are probably the best studios in the world is something really pleasant for us. We’re happy to continue this relationship and create content for the PlayStation brand. But they fund our projects, so we’re staying exclusive to PlayStation.

“We talk to Naughty Dog, Santa Monica, Guerrilla, Media Molecule – all these great studios,” he added. “We talk about technology, best practice, how we do things – we share experience and expertise. I think that’s of real value for everybody.”

Source: CVG

Hogrocket Takes Off With Bizarre Crew

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Former members of Bizarre Creations have done what many in the gaming industry are doing these days getting into social and mobile gaming. Saying they will work on “connected platforms three members of Bizarre has founded Hogrocket.

Hogrocket is an indie game developer based in North-West England, reads the company’s site. We make games for multiple platforms and we’re currently working on our first. Soon you’ll be able to track our progress and activities over the web. For now though, we’d love it if you signed up to our mailing list, or became a friend/follower on your choice of social network. If you’d like to talk to us directly, send us an e-mail. We’ll give you a shout when we get this little piggy airborne.

Source: hogrocket.com

Download, Paint, Submit

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Choose a frame from the Sucker Punch trailer and paint over it to be part of a global collaborative UGC video project. Facebook connect is required for frame submission and rating, but anyone can watch the videos or play with the browser application s painting tool. Download a frame and paint it on your own PC using your own preferred application and toolset. Anyone can vote on each frame with a horizontal slider and frames can be sorted for playback by highest rated or most recent to get another look at the ultimate action trailer.

Zynga Partner SocialVibe Gets $20 Million Funding

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Long time Zynga partner SocialVibe has secured $20 million in equity financing. They say their methodology around creating targeted, shareable brand content has produced results for GE, Best Buy, Disney, Nestle, McDonalds, Coke, American Express, AT&T and Toyota.

By engaging with consumers at a time when they are most receptive, SocialVibe empowers ad agencies to get the most out of their clients media dollars, said Jay Samit, CEO of SocialVibe. We re honored to have Norwest Venture Partners join us as both an investor and as an integral part of our Board of Directors as we continue to transform brand advertising online.

With consumers now in control of the conversation, brands are hungry for technologies that enable them to target an audience at scale, create an emotional connection and drive purchase intent, said Jeff Crowe, general partner of Norwest Venture Partners. SocialVibe is changing the nature of the brand advertising model, and the company s early success with hundreds of leading brands simply reinforces that the time is right for a shift of brand dollars to social media.

Zynga Wants To Make Impact On Mobile

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Zynga is the king of Facebook games, but the company is very dependent on the social platform. Eventually, however, they want to dominate in the mobile space as well.

“[Mobile] is something that we actively care about, think about. It’s the major place where we think the future is,” said Zynga chief game designer Brian Reynolds.”The reason that Zynga isn’t ginormous on mobile yet is because the friction of social networking is still high on mobile. It’s ironic because when you think about your phone, it should be an inherently social device. It’s got your contacts. You can text. You e-mail people. You talk to them. It’s a hub; it’s a social hub. And people use it as a social hub but it’s missing some of the critical wiring that does the magic that Facebook does.

“What Facebook is doing very efficiently is letting you communicate with your more distant friends, said Reynolds. Sometimes it’s also a way to show pictures to mom, but I would’ve called mom anyway or e-mailed the pictures, right At a certain point – and maybe it even made it faster – I can post pictures that all my relatives can see instead of e-mailing them one at a time and forgetting who. And then there’s the people at the lower end of the social,  the more attenuated distant relationships – people from college or high school, people that I don’t keep in touch with as well, that I might not keep in touch with at all if not for Facebook. What I found when Facebook exploded a few years ago, suddenly people that I hadn’t kept in touch with at all for decades I was back in touch with.”

“So when mobile gets to the point where I can eliminate all that friction – so I can broadcast something to my friends, for example – [that’s when we’ll dive in], he added. Social games are about expressing myself in front of my friends and part of the value of investing in the play is the fact that I know my friends are going to see my farm and I’m going to help them and all my friends are going to be there. Right now there’s a lot of extra friction because it’s not just auto-wired in – which is the way the web used to be, before Facebook.

“We’re thinking very carefully about it and we are working with appropriate partners; there are people that are making platforms or have platforms and want to make it more social. We work with them . . . Or they have social platforms and they want to make them more mobile, whatever direction they want to go,” Reynolds concluded.

Source: IndustryGamers

Resident Evil 5 Sees Return Of Jill Valentine

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Sienna Guillory will be reprising the role of Jill Valentine for the fifth Resident Evil film. She played the role in Resident Evil: Apocalypse and Resident Evil: Afterlife.

RE:5 alert! Training begins! wrote Guillory. I aim to mostly put less in the big hole on the front of my face than comes out of the little one on my arse.”

Resident Evil 5, currently lacking a subtitle, is expected to release September 14, 2012, with Milla Jovovich returning in the starring role of Alice.

Source: Twitter

Kinect Marketing Potential Huge

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The Kinect has come out and sold over 8 million units in two months, making it the fastest selling technology device in history. While it was designed for gaming primarily the PrimeSense technology in the Kinect allows the Xbox 360 to detect facial expressions in real time, interpret voice and and tell players apart could be very appealing to marketers.

Big brands, including Burger King and Samsung, jumped in first with Kinect gaming promotions, writes Tomer Tishgarten. But the marketing potential of Kinect extends far beyond video games. In the near term, marketers could leverage Kinect technology to create eye-opening trade show displays and in-store promotions. Freed from the gaming console, the technology can draw people into an immersive, interactive experience. Innovative web-based applications will also be worth considering as the technology reaches a critical mass of 15 percent of households or users, a point at which adoption rates tend to accelerate.

There’s huge potential down the road for players’ Avatars or even their own scanned in selves and interaction. Consumers could try on clothing, tour a vacation spot and or see how furniture looked in your living room.

Marketers have tremendous opportunities to differentiate themselves from their competitors in this new environment. Yet they also face the challenge of developing those experiences without instructions or precedents, notes Tishgarten. Before agencies and developers can create the architecture of this new world and customized applications for brands they must first study what makes the new technology tick, which is why developers have been so busy ‘hacking’ Kinect. The development tools for Kinect are still fairly immature at this stage, but they do provide enough capabilities to build some interesting applications. As more work is done to support these tools by Microsoft and the larger development community, the possibilities for Kinect will grow exponentially.

Source: Mashable