Wasteland 2 Kickstarter At $2 Million, New Goals Set

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The Wasteland 2 Kickstarter has pushed over $2 million in funds, so inXile entertainment CEO Brian Fargo has set new milestones. At $2.5 million they will bring in another couple of designers to help fill out the world more and at $3 million, it will would be possible to do a mod kit without cutting into the plan for the main game.

“As our Kickstarter continues to build momentum, we will keep focusing on how we can best deliver what our fans want,” Fargo noted. “We’ve seen quite a few messages from our international fans expressing concern with the cost of shipping and physical goods relating to VAT and customs costs. For that reason, we opened up a purely digital pledge level at $55 that contains no physical items. You will get the digital copy of the game, digital soundtrack, digital novellas 1 and 2, digital concept art book and early beta access.”

Source: Kickstarter.com

Kinect ‘Voice And Body Stance’ Might Be Next Advancements

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The Kinect has come a long way since it launched, with added abilities like scanned objects and seated play. However, Microsoft’s head of Kinect development Kudo Tsunoda is looking forward to making detection even more precise and seeing what independent developers can do with it.

“We’re also looking at how we can make people more like actors within a narrative. I think the work done in Mass Effect 3 has been awesome,” said Tsunoda. “We want to get to the stage where not only can Kinect detect what you’re saying but also tone of voice and body stance, and work that into the narrative. There are some really compelling experiences to be gained from that.”

“It’s been great to see how people are using Kinect in ways that we would never have thought of. I’m continually surprised by the stuff we see from Kinect’s development community on a daily basis,” he added. “That’s what I’m most excited about: how much room there is to invent new things with Kinect.”

Source: MCV

Lollipop Chainsaw Cosplay Too Hot For PAX East

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Jessica Nigri was hired to cosplay Juliet Starling from Lollipop Chainsaw by WB Games. However, her outfits apparently received many complaints from people who brought young children to the show, and she was asked to leave.

Nigri changed her outfit and, as Robert Khoo, the president of business development for Penny Arcade said, expo staff “notified the WB booth on Friday of our concerns regarding the costumes, and although there was some confusion initially about which outfit was appropriate … they understood the situation.”

The replacement outfit.

PAX maintains a no “booth babe” policy, and this outfit is a borderline case since Nigri was clearly being genuine to the character from Lollipop Chainsaw.  “Although the policies regarding appropriate attire are clearly laid out in our exhibitor rules, there are times when edge cases like Lollipop Chainsaw, which technically is allowed since it’s the main character in the game, pop up,” said Khoo. “For scenarios like that, we need to make a judgment call, and a big factor for this one was looking at the number of complaints we has received.”

“Ultimately the costume policy is designed to keep the show family friendly, as we see a good number of parents being their young children to the show,” Khoo said. “No one, including WB, wants to upset their fans, so I’m perfectly fine standing behind the decision and policy.”

Source: Kotaku

Square Enix’s Free-To-Play Push

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Square Enix has announced that they are developing an online game that will be reliant on user created content and will have social game elements. The game will release in roughly six months, exclusively for Bigpoint’s platform.

“We are so excited to have the opportunity to work with Square Enix,” said Bigpoint CEO Heiko Hubertz. “The combination of Square Enix’s long-standing experience in providing digital entertainment and Bigpoint’s expertise in developing browser games promises to yield quite the exciting new game.”

“We’re very excited to have teamed up with Bigpoint who are leaders in browser gaming,” added Square Enix Europe’s Phil Rogers. “This is the start of both an exciting new project and a strong relationship.”

Madden NFL 13 Prepped With Nike Uniforms

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EA Sports has unveiled the first Madden NFL 13 screenshot showcasing new Nike uniforms. The developer was granted early access to the new designs of the NFL uniforms and used this insight to meticulously recreate the Nike clothing in Madden NFL 13.

“The Madden NFL 13 development team has been working closely with Nike and the NFL to ensure that all in-game uniforms are identical to their real-world counterparts. EA Sports was given access to the earliest Nike templates, and the two companies have had numerous meetings, working closely together to ensure complete authenticity in Madden NFL 13,” reads the release by EA Sports. “Fans who Like the Madden NFL Facebook page will be among the first to see in-game screenshots of NFL teams in their new Nike uniforms, and can look forward to additional assets which will be released in the coming days.”

Machinima — Part Of Cable 2.0?

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Machinima saw 149 million unique users racking up 1.3 billion video views in March 2012. Machinima has about 101 million subscribers across all its websites. By contrast CBS TV network has about 350,000 subscribers on YouTube and has earned about 1.2 billion views for its online content in six years.

The site has been heralded as part of YouTube’s original content strategy and its influence on the coming generation is likened to MTV during the ’80s. “As a genre, I’d say that 90 percent of gamers know what it is,” says Tom Akel, executive producer of MTV Geek. “As a company, maybe every college kid playing Madden and Tiger Woods golf doesn’t know them, but most millennial male gamers do.”

“The thing you have to remember is, 10 years have passed since the dawn of Web 2.0, when creativity on the Web exploded,” says Hugh Hancock, founder of the Machinima studio Strange Company and one of the co-founders of Machinima.com. “You’ve had the growth of all these platforms like WordPress and Blogger and Tumblr. It was all driven by UGC. And then you take gaming, which is arguably the most significant cultural trend of the past 100 years. It’s a vast medium, but unlike, say, film, is not as accessible. Yet there are a significant number of users in that group who want to do more than consume. They want to produce, and they can do that for as little as $50.”

Hancock actually sold his stake in the company around 2006, right before YouTube changed the way video is consumed on the Internet. “At that time, we started to forget about trying to do this on Machinima.com and put all our efforts into YouTube,” recalls Machinima’s CEO, Allen DeBevoise.

While Machinima focused first on game videos, it expanded out with instructional videos, talk shows, fantasy battle series, reviews, and events coverage. “We started remaking the traditional model,” says DeBevoise. “There were all these networks out there pushing their own sites. This was more like cable. YouTube pays for the bandwidth. They’re like the ultimate killer MSO.”

“The interesting thing about gaming is that it doesn’t do well on linear TV,” says DeBevoise. “Think of the old MTV model, where you’d have to wait for videos. If you’re a Gaga fan, you probably don’t want to sit through an Eminem clip. Gamers are the same. So Machinima works because it’s on demand. And with YouTube, it’s instantly global.”

Sampson has brought in 13 sales executives, adding staff in New York, Chicago and San Francisco and ad sales have surged 300 percent over the last three years. “We don’t talk about cable households; we talk about getting on a billion devices,” adds Jay Sampson, a 15-year Microsoft veteran who became Machinima’s evp of global sales, marketing and advertising operations last August.

Nanea Reeves, Machinima’s new COO, says they need better analytics off of YouTube. “We need to mature and become more data driven,” she says. “That’s our first big opportunity. We need to understand who our influencers are. We’re going to put the machine in Machinima.”

The company has already started to expand out with Mortal Kombat: Legacy, which generated 4 million to 6 million views per episode. “Machinima isn’t really about machinima anymore,” notes MTV’s Akel.

Despite the good reception to series like RCVR and Bite Me, Machinima’s programming isn’t necessarily the focus of Machinima the brand. Machinima’s content has generated over 3 billion views, while the Machinima YouTube network has scored 24 billion.

While comScore puts Machinima’s YouTube channel at just 23 million users, the reason for any discrepancies is that Machinima has over 4,200 partners—amateurs and semi-professionals who produce Machinima videos and partner with Machinima on distribution and ad sales. For instance, the Online Gamer was picked up by Machinima, which offered founder Jason Schnell a partnership and Reckless Tortuga saw its number of subscribers go from 50,000 to 150,000 in just a few months.

“It exposed us to a whole new audience,” says Schnell. “[Machinima handles ad sales,] and they don’t ever ask for creative control.”

While there have been complaints that Machinima retained the rights to sell ads against videos produced for its YouTube channel in perpetuity, the company has since shortened its contracts and made it easier for producers to opt out. “Of the entire group of nearly 4,000 partners, very few have ever had problems or issues—about one or two percent—over the past two years,” says DeBevoise.

While some of Machinima’s content is far from family friendly, they’re looking to incorporate more ad-verification tools like AdSafe. “The long-tail content you might find across our global network is very diverse,” says DeBevoise. “Advertisers look to us to help them enter that world, translate that audience to them and translate their brand to that audience in a safe way that’s authentic. That’s something a lot of traditional media are not really able to do.”

“Edgy is a relative term—P&G used to think that Dawson’s Creek was edgy,” notes Michael Kassan, CEO of MediaLink, which consults many digital media companies.

“What Machinima’s done better than anyone else is that they’ve been insanely focused on this incredibly active community. That’s the radical difference between TV and the Web: the community,” says Fred Seibert, original creative director at MTV in 1980 and one of the co-founders of the video programming pioneer Next New Networks. “And ultimately, Madison Avenue goes where the audience tells it to go. It’s not the other way around. There are these moments that happen in media. Machinima’s just the most obvious case of this. There are dozens, probably hundreds of others percolating.”

Machinima’s flexibility is a bonus and a recent product placement deal with History generated 3 million views. “No other network would let us do this,” Chris Meador, History’s VP of consumer marketing. “[Machinima is] far from niche—the hardest thing to get over was that they are on YouTube, and it took us a month to pronounce their name right.”

While some think Machinima wants to be acquired, Jay MacDonald, CEO and managing partner of Digital Capital Advisors, doesn’t think so just yet. “Machinima’s sort of in phase two this year,” he says. “It’s the same kind of concept as Facebook and Twitter: get big, figure out what content is acceptable and later on figure out monetization. They appear to be on that track, and their investors don’t appear to be that concerned. But some of their third-party content is questionable. They’ll probably focus on cleaning that up.”

Source: AdWeek.com

Assassin’s Creed III To Have More Of Desmond

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Previous Assassin’s Creed games have hinted that the third title in the series will focus more on Desmond that previous games. Despite a new historical protagonist in Connor, lead writer Matt Turner indicates that more time will be spent with Desmond in the present day in Assassin’s Creed III.

“All I can say about Desmond’s story is you’re going to experience more Desmond than you’ve ever had before,” said Turner. “We’re spending more time on the present than we have in past games. It’s a big part of our story and I don’t really want to give too many details away because I want people to experience what that is. But rest assured, you’re going to see a lot of Desmond. More so than in any past game.”

Source: CVG {link no longer active}