Beneath all the open world madness in Saints Row: The Third, there’s actually a story for the Third Street Saints. And beneath that layer of story, there’s more madness, as shown in this trailer.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=IdSh9e7j5UY
To celebrate their new Picanto, KIA has released a world’s first micro-nail animation to celebrate the micro nature of the car. The impressive little animation took 1,200 bottles of nail polish, two hours of painting per nail, and 25 days and nights to complete all the work.
Fans of Ace Combat on Facebook can play Ace Shooter and compete for a high score to win a collector’s jacket. Each month, the best score is collected on the 1st and the 15th to determine the winner. The score table is reset each time, so come back and play as much as needed to reach the top. Use the arrow keys to move and the space bar to shoot and start dog fighting in the skies to win. Also on Facebook, the skin design contest allows fans to vote for their favorite in-game designs to be chosen by the project aces team.
Flurry Analytics released a report saying that the average in-app purchase through games on iOS and Android platforms is about $14. Only about 3 percent of big spenders pushed this total up, with a majority of revenue generated coming from purchases of $20 and more.
Now, let s look at the amount of total revenue generated per price bucket. Scanning this column, we see the amount of revenue generated per price bucket is flipped in comparison to the price points at which the bulk of transactions occur, wrote Flurry analyst and GM for games Jeferson Valadares. On the low end, we re ‘packing sardines;’ that is, accumulating a lot of small transactions. While the under $10 bucket delivers about two-thirds of the transactions, it only accounts for about one third of the dollars. On the other end of the spectrum, at the ‘over $20’ spend-level, we find the ‘whales.’ In fact, further breaking down the ‘over $20’ category, 30 percent of the total revenue is generated from transaction sizes of over $50. If you re a game designer, your main take away is that very few transactions and consumers who complete those transactions make up the bulk of your revenue. Therefore, your meta-game should be about whale hunting.
Source: blog.flurry.com
Research in Motion (RIM) announced today that they were letting go a number of their employees. This comes as the company loses market share to Apple on the business side and Android on the lower-end smartphone side.
The workforce reduction is believed to be a prudent and necessary step for the long term success of the company and it follows an extended period of rapid growth within the company whereby the workforce had nearly quadrupled in the last five years alone, said RIM. As part of this broad effort, RIM is reducing its global workforce across all functions by approximately 2,000 employees. RIM intends to notify impacted employees in North America and certain other countries this week. The remainder of the global workforce reductions will occur at a later date subject to local laws and regulations. All impacted employees will receive severance packages and outplacement support.
Epic President Mike Capps has argued in the past one of the biggest threats to the gaming industry is the presence and popularity of dollar apps. He’s sticking by that opinion, noting that he’s more worried about cheap mobile games working against Gears of War 3 this year.
If you think about what many people are doing . . . What game did I play today What game did I play yesterday If I have 30 minutes to game, what am I going to play That [time] more and more gets taken up with mobile games, said Capps. And I think that can be said for movies. I think the biggest competition for [XBLA title] Shadow Complex was Netflix not Castle Crashers (great game) or Limbo, but if you fired up your dashboard right there if you already bought Netflix you have tons and tons of awesome content that’s bite sized in 1.5 to 2 hour chunks. So that was our competition, getting mindshare in the dashboard, more than it was against the other games in the space. So rapidly available, free entertainment hurts us just the same way as if everyone pirates Crysis – that doesn’t help Bulletstorm at all since they’ve all gotten a free, really awesome game from the Crytek guys then. So why would they pay for our game ”
“I’m more worried that you can get a really good 99 cent game that occupies you for hours and hours on end and how that impacts $60 SKUs [like Gears], he added. I’m not as worried about how it impacts Infinity Blade I think there will always be room for a premium SKU on a mobile platform. And I think as more buyers [enter the mobile market], there will be more people who are willing to spend a bit more for quality. But I do worry about what it means for the next generation of console games. Are people really going to want to spend $60 on a game I mean, we’re spending tens of millions of dollars making those games that they want to play . . . it’s not a sustainable business model. I’m not sure how it all ends up.
“The arguments we had internally were about pricing and what we should set it at, because nobody really knows, he added. It makes sense that we’re still confused about how to price appropriately in that market. We see a much higher micro-transaction rate on Infinity Blade than most phone games do. But we charge $6 to get in, and that per-qualifies players as probably the kind of consumer that would be willing to spend a bit more money if they want to accelerate their game experience.
Source: IndustryGamers
BioWare recently released six mock ups of female Commander Shepard and asked fans to vote on them by ‘liking’ their favorite. It’s not explicitly stated, but the winner will probably end up on the cover of the Mass Effect 3 Collector’s edition; right now number 5 seems to be running away with things, but that could always change.
Source: Facebook.com
Grasshopper Manufacture’s Suda51 has made some of the oddest games to ever get retail console releases, between Killer7, No More Heroes and Shadows of the Damned. Suda wants to do a social game based around the No More Heroes license, but he isn’t backing away from the quirkiness, or the violence, of the brand chock full of weird assassins.
“We’re aiming to make it the social game with the most blood,” said Suda.
Suda also stated that he hopes the game will have enough “power” and “impact” to see release overseas.
Source: www.andriasang.com
YouTube recently announced a deal with Dell and AMD to live stream Lollapalooza during the first week in August and Austin City Limits in mid-September. The first day of the Lollapalooza festival will be put on YouTube’s front page, which sees 50 million people daily from the U.S. alone.
We re continually looking at how to bring our users exceptional content, said Dana Vetter, a YouTube, music marketing programs manager.
By looking out for content that users want and signing sponsors to pay for the event, YouTube is becoming more like traditional TV providers they long have competed with for time. We started out dipping our toe in the water with single events, said Vetter. Our first big event was an Alicia Keys program sponsored by American Express [in 2009]. And we started to realize we might be on to something.
YouTube has also streamed Bonnaroo in June 2010 sponsored by Ford along with Coachella Festival earlier this year, though Vetter says that a major difference between traditional TV content provides and YouTube is that they have no interest in producing this sort of content on its own. It s about facilitating programming rather than creation,” she said. “It s about finding a partner who has the content who can deliver a phenomenal Webcast.
While only a decade ago, AMD would have gone to MTV for this sort of deal, the company is increasingly looking at non-traditional sources of advertising and sponsorship.
The classic, half-billion dollar ad budget for traditional media is very difficult to break through, especially for the crowd that s under 30, said Leslie Sobon, vice president of product marketing at AMD. They don t watch commercials, they DVR or stream everything. You have to reach them in different ways.
This is very important to us, she added.
Source: AdWeek.com
DeNA has signed up several high profile Japanese creators to their Super Creators initiative. The five developers will make games for the popular Mobage social gaming network.
The creators will include ex-Capcom developer Keiji Inafune at Comcept, Suda 51 working on something No More Heroes related, Sonic creator Yuji Naka at Prope, Marvelous Entertainment’s Yoshifumi Hashimoto working on a Harvest Moon game and Noritaka Funamizu at Crafts & Meister working on a brand called Nama-ge. All of the games will be published by AQ Interactive.
Source: Andriasang
