Ice Age Online Coming From Bigpoint

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Bigpoint has announced that it will will publish a game called Ice Age Online. The free-to-play game will be based around the fourth film in the franchise, Ice Age: Continental Drift, releasing from 20th Century Fox in theaters in 3D July 2012.

“We’re excited to work with one of the most successful film franchises of all time,” said Heiko Hubertz, CEO and founder, Bigpoint. “We’re equally happy to begin working with Fox on this project and are eager to give Ice Age fans another way to enjoy the fun they’ve had at the movies.”

“Video games and film have an organic connection, and the online game space offers virtually limitless creative opportunities to extend the cinematic experience and the Ice Age brand,” said Jeffrey Godsick, President of Fox Consumer Products. “Bigpoint, the market-leading pioneer among online video game companies, is the natural choice for us to partner with in building the world of Ice Age Online.”

GoG.com Thinks Heavy Discounting Hurts Games

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Steam tends to aggressively discount the price of their games, sometimes by as much as 80 percent. According to GoG.com’s managing director Guillaume Rambourg and head of marketing Trevor Longino, this doesn’t do consumers or publishers any favors.

“Of course, you make thousands and thousands of sales of a game when it’s that cheap, but you’re damaging the long-term value of your brand because people will just wait for the next insane sale,” they said. “Slashing the price of your game is easy. Improving the content of your offer when you release your game, that’s more ambitious.”

“Heavy discounts are bad for gamers, too,” they added. “If a gamer buys a game he or she doesn’t want just because it’s on sale, they’re being trained to make bad purchases, and they’re also learning that games aren’t valuable. We all know gamers who spend more every month on games than they want to, just because there were too many games that were discounted too deeply. That’s not good for anyone.”

Source: Rock Paper Shotgun

Ford, Yahoo Push Electric Car In Reality Series

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Yahoo and Ford are teaming up to promote the Ford Focus Electric in an attempt to show the car as fun and convenient to drive. The 10-episode branded entertainment series Plugged In, produced in conjunction with Ford and Magical Elves, will see two-person teams completing a series of challenges in 10 U.S. cities.

Celebrities will lead the players to their favorite places in cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, and Austin. Each episode will be featured every week on the video hub Yahoo Screen and target a wide demographic.

Yahoo airs 21 of the top 25 video series online, and hopes watchers become emotionally invested in the series, though there is an unconventional character this time around. “The car is going to be a character,” said Yahoo video head Erin McPherson. “It’s not going to be an advertorial or an infomercial, but the car is going to be featured in a very organic way that is not over the top.”

Contestants will be shown using features like the car’s navigation technology to find various venues or making hands-free calls to connect with friends and family, and hopefully dispelling fears that electric cars can work. “We want consumers to become educated, and this show helps us address that comfort level,” said John Felice, gm of Ford and Lincoln sales. “And we want to do that in a non-preachy way…the show’s got to be entertaining. If not, the online social community is brutal.”

Plugged In episodes will be shareable via Facebook and Twitter and viewers will be asked to post photos of their hometowns to special Flickr pages. Despite the original production, Felice said that Plugged In will be far more efficient than the average car launch, which can cost $80 million to $100 million in media.

Source: AdWeek

Yahoo Cuts 2,000 Jobs

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Yahoo! has announced they are eliminating 2,000 jobs (roughly 14 percent of the company) as part of an aggressive reorganization around consumers, geographic regions, and technology. The company has seen its stock wane over the past year as it has lost ground to both Facebook and Google.

“It’s time for Yahoo! to move forward, and fast,” wrote CEO Scott Thompson.“There’s a lot to do and that’s why I can’t stress enough that we all need to focus on getting stuff done. Getting stuff done is short hand for eliminating bureaucracy and barriers so we can all innovate as fast as our customers and the industry require. That’s pretty fast.”

Fight My Monster Reaches 1 Million Young Registered Players

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Fight My Monster has hit 1 million registered players that are under the age of 13. The social trading card game has seen over six million cards created, 32 million battles fought, with the average player age at 10.4 and the average play session at 41 minutes.

“I think the reason we’ve grown so fast is that we’re not a virtual world,” said Fight My Monster chairman Dylan Collins. “We’re an online trading-card game. Most of our direct competition is very much the former or a clone of the former.”

Fight My Monster is competing with games like Skylanders and Monkey Quest, by Activision and Nickelodeon respectively, that have spent about $35 to $50 million trying to pull in boys under the age of 13. “We’ve done it with what they spend on a good night out. $150k, to be exact,” said Collins.

Source: GamesBeat

Netflix Adds Xbox 360 Enhancements

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Netflix has updated its app on the Xbox 360 and added a number of features. Users can now skip between movies and TV episodes quickly, even using the power of Kinect to say or wave your hand to activate this function.

There will also be a zoom function to let them enlarge letterboxed video content to full screen, and superior color contrast and darker black levels. There will also be a cloud profile that allows users to sign in from any Xbox, and there will also be Facebook share options for users in Canada, Latin America, the U.K. and Ireland

Clinton Submits To ‘Texts From Hillary’

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Showing the level of virality that a Tumblr site can manage, Texts From Hillary (featuring a photo of Hillary Clinton checking her cellphone on a military plane) got a submission from Secretary of State Clinton herself.

“Her staff reached out to us with the submission yesterday,”says co-founder Stacy Lambe. “And we just met with her this afternoon. She was very delightful and thought kindly of us. I can tell you, her staff just thought the whole thing was great.”

Source: Mashable.com

Smart Twitter Spot

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To launch Smart Argentina’s Twitter account, @smartArg, they created a “Twitter commercial.” Using Chrome, users can scroll through a cute animation of a Smart car traveling through the city made out of 140 characters or fewer.