EA Sports Unveils Season Ticket

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EA Sports has announced that they are offering a $24.99 Season Ticket plan with three days of early access to NHL Hockey, FIFA Soccer, Tiger Woods PGA Tour and NCAA Football as well as a 20 percent discount on all DLC. There will also be exclusive online recognition on easports.com profiles and premium web content like Creation Center packs for FIFA Soccer.

“We’ve been looking at ways to enhance the experience that our core consumer has with our games, and we started to talk to core consumers in focus groups and a bunch of online marketing [to find out what they want],” said EA Sports President Peter Moore noting that early access to games was “far and away” the most requested feature.

Available to Xbox Live and PSN users, they will have to download the game for the early access with all of the achievements and progress transferring over to the full retail game when it releases. “The game will be made available commencing at 6 p.m. on the fourth day, the night before the three days start; we recognize that in this country, not everyone has fiber to the home,” Moore commented. “We want to make sure to give you ample time to download it. It’s going to be a multi-hour download, but right now there’s no other way around that if you want early access.”

Source: IndustryGamers {link no longer active}

Batman: Arkham City Talent Speaks Out

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In the latest episode of GTTV, we get an interview with some of the top actors involved in Batman: Arkham City. The episode also features some interviews with Hulk Hogan and Sasha Grey for Saints Row: The Third.

http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:moses:episode:gametrailers.com:126

{video link no longer active}

 

  

Google, Microsoft Take Swipes At Each Others Email

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During the Microsoft Global Exchange sales conference on July 20, they ran a video dissing Gmail and advertising Office 365 with Gmail Man. Perhaps coincidentally Gmail launches its “Email Intervention” effort designed to encourage people to convert friends to Gmail. Decide which video is funnier!

{one video link is marked “private”}

 

Absolution Training Grounds Now Open For Target Practice

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On a dedicated Facebook connect site, Absolution training grounds are now open. Dedicated to promote the sci-fi western Cowboys & Aliens, fans can blast away and shoot out targets and try and score maximum points before time runs out. Try and shoot bulls-eyes, bottles, outlaws and more to gain points, but avoid earning negative points and don t shoot innocent victims. Use D for slow-motion deadeye to take out enemies moving quickly.

Mind Candy Not Completely Excited About Console Games

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Consoles are the ultimate goal of some developers, though with success online PCs success, others are less interested with the increased development time that comes with such releases. While Mind Candy founder Michael Acton Smith is somewhat interested in console versions of Moshi Monsters, he’s not exactly rushing to do it.

“We are dipping our toe in the water with the DS, yes, and we think that’s the perfect platform for our audience to try, and if that works well then I think we’ll look at other areas as well. Maybe the Wii or the Kinect,” he explained. “But with my commercial hat on, it’s just not quite as exciting as building an online game. The development cycles are long, the upfront risk is high, the returns just don’t seem that attractive, there’s a lot of other partners that would be involved, so there’s just more headache and more uncertainty involved than creating our own game where we’re developer and publisher, where we have a direct relationship with the end audience, where we make 90 per cent less gross margins etcetera etcetera.”

However, he added, “We need to be everywhere that our audience wants us, and that does mean console, and magazines and books.”

Source: GamesIndustry.biz

Google+ Slowly Prepping Brand Pages

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Google+ brand pages has manged to make a bit of a stir in its nascent stages, with brands showing great interest for the Google service. They suspended all brand pages and just had one for Ford for testing purposes, and then announced it would be available to one and all over the next couple of months; it is not the idea situation and even Google admits this.

“Google+ tries to take the best from Facebook and the best from Twitter and brings it together,” said Shiv Singh, global head of digital at PepsiCo. “Google has said publicly that its going to roll out with really strong analytics.”

Indeed, this is a large hole in Facebook’s offerings, and could especially help brands with different products in different parts of the world. “An accurate assessment of who is engaging with our content and where they’re from — that’s particularly important since we’re a global company,” said Scott Monty, head of Ford’s social media. “We’re looking for the ability to determine the specific demographics about our followers in a way that’s not as basic as what we see on Facebook, but more in depth so can target our posts.”

Right now, Ford has been testing it with various kinds of content and that fans of Ford have been asking, like access to the engineers and car designers in the company. Regardless, it’s still in progress and Google spokesman Jim Prosser says Google+ just isn’t ready for business just yet. “We don’t want brands doing this in the consumer experience, it’s not built for businesses,” said Prosser. “Businesses can expect from Google marketing tools like analytics and measurement.”

“I’m happy waiting a bit,” said PepsiCo’s Singh. “Because I know they’re putting in the rigor behind developing the right analytics and designing the brand pages so they meet business needs. Giving their history with AdSense and AdWords, I’m confident that they will do a really thoughtful job when rolling out the brand pages. They’ve been working with brands for years, they really know us and know what we want.”

Source: AdWeek

Jell-O Billboard Powered by Smiley-Faces, Twitter

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Jell-O Pudding has launched a new billboard that’s powered by Twitter. It went up on Thursday and at the corner of West Broadway and Grand in New York City as a sort of interesting outdoor real-time response to the social web.

The way the billboard works is that it measures the mood of the world based on the number of smiley- and sad-face emoticons posted to Twitter. The twist is that whenever overall “smileyness” dips below 50 percent, the Jell-O gives out coupons to the randomly downcast.

Source: adweek.com

Kinect Allows For More User-Driven Storytelling, Says Kudo Tsunoda

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Games that can produce a real emotional connection are something that’s been a goal for years. According to Kudo Tsunoda, general manager of Microsoft Game Studios, Kinect is an important step in this process.

“[Something] we struggled with in the games industry for a long time is building an emotional connection between the person playing and the characters inside the games, said Tsunoda. “With Kinect, [you are] able to talk to characters inside the games, and experience not just voice recognition but them being able to understand the tone of your voice and how you’re saying things, and being able to see your body and incorporating that into relationships.”

“I think with the launch game Kinectimals you’re starting to see a type of human-to-digital character relationship that can be built using Kinect, he added. I think Kinect technology allows us to build stories and storytelling in a way that is more user-driven, that hasn’t been done before.”

Source: CVG