You and your friends can star in your very own Starhawk Trailer! Check out the Starhawk Facebook App on the Playstation Facebook Page and Starhawk page, and get a voucher for the exclusive Rift Hunter Multiplayer skin just for viewing the trailer. Check out this video to see a demo of how it works.
To help celebrate Kinect Star Wars, Microsoft has released more free downloadable gifts. Build your own Rancor, and then turn it loose on Mos Eisley. Download both papercrafts for free today.
UNIQLO WAKE UP is an innovative new social alarm app that aims to make waking up every day an enjoyable experience. The alarm music, which is automatically created based on the weather, time, and day of the week, was co-written by 51st annual Grammy nominee Cornelius (Keigo Oyamada) and Yoko Kanno, who is active in songwriting across a wide range of genres including video games and anime (COWBOY BEBOP, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Macross). The app allows users to share a record of their awakening — specifically, the time, weather, and temperature at the moment they stopped the alarm — via social media (Facebook, Twitter, RenRen, Weibo). In addition, the “wake up records” shared by users around the world are displayed in a part of the app entitled WORLD WAKE UP.
It has been revealed that Minecraft for the Xbox 360 has sold over a million units. The game has seen over 5.2 million online hours, 4 million multiplayer sessions, and 2.4 million multiplayer gaming hours.
“Uhhhh, Microsoft just sent out a press release saying Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition has sold a million copies in five days,” tweeted Minecraft creator Notch. “Wow.”
Source: Twitter
Ernst & Young has named Dr. Lars Buttler, Founder and CEO of Trion Worlds, as a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year 2012 program in the Northern California region. The award will be announced on June 2nd at the Fairmont San Francisco.
Trion has achieved success with their first MMO Rift, which launched in 2011 and helped produce over $100 million in revenue. The company is currently working on End of Nations, a MMO real-time strategy game, and Defiance, a collaborative project with Syfy to simultaneously produce a TV show and an online action game in the same universe, with merging storylines where consequences can be shared across mediums.
Veterans from Shiny Entertainment, Heavy Iron, EA and Sony Computer Entertainment have formed a new developer called Checkpoint Studios. Their first title will be AviNation for Facebook launching in June, later expanding to smartphones and tablets.
“When I first started playing social games, I was frustrated by what I felt was a lack of quality and real game play in so many of the titles,” said Brian Wiklem, CEO and Founder of Checkpoint Studios. “The click-reward-repeat nature felt more like an activity or social chore than a game and, while there’s clearly an audience for that, I know we can do better.”
“While at Heavy Iron, I worked closely with Pixar to create the console versions of several of their properties such as Ratatouille and Up for THQ,” continued Wiklem. “I once asked how they made such successful kids’ movies, to which they responded that they didn’t make kids’ movies, but instead ‘made movies they would want to watch’. That philosophy really resonated and stuck with me, so our driving force is to make social games we’d actually want to play.”
2K Sports has announced that 21-year-old Christopher Gilmore of Melbourne, Florida is the winner of the MLB 2K12 Perfect Game Challenge. His victory will be highlighted by a 30-minute special on Spike TV on May 24, 2012 at 11:30 PM.
“Winning this year’s Perfect Game Challenge is an amazing achievement that required great skill and composure in an intense tournament atmosphere,” said Jason Argent, vice president of marketing for 2K Sports. “Chris is incredibly deserving of the $1 million prize; he certainly earned it by beating some really stiff competition.”
Gilmore won the tournament by defeating 25-year-old Charles Bates of Conway, Arkansas in the tournament final, 10-1. The tournament field was made up of the eight individuals from a large qualifying based that included more than 900 verified perfect games and nearly 1,000,000 attempts.
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has said that it’s going to be tough for Sony and Microsoft to convince millions of games to upgrade from their current consoles. “To do that you need awesome games that provide a level of graphical fidelity that people have just not seen or even imagined previously,” he said.
“The thing that separates consoles from FarmVille is the fact that consoles define the high-end gaming experience,” said Sweeney. “When you look for the best graphics available in the whole game industry today, you look at Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and those games are the best out there, bar none. And so the big opportunities for future consoles is to bring that to an entirely new level by delivering a dramatic increase in raw computing power.”
“We measure that in floating-point operations per second, and now we talk about teraflops – trillions of floating-point operations per second,” he continued. “What we want is as many teraflops as is economically possible to deliver to consumers, because that enables us to create the best quality experience as possible, and that will drive people to buy a new machine.”
He also wanted to see more online integration with console games, saying, “There are great games with Facebook integration that enable you to hook up to social network sites and find your friends in there. To be able to do that from next generation games and consoles will be really valuable,” said Sweeney. “To be able to go and easily buy and download games like we do in the iOS App Store on future consoles will be incredibly valuable to us as developers, and make it that much easier to get our games out without over-reliance on manufacturing a whole bunch of pieces of spinning plastic to ship to consumers.”
Source: Gamasutra
Capcom has gotten hammered by fans for its on-disc DLC policies and has even been downgraded by the Better Business Bureau. Capcom SVP Christian Svensson has taken to the forums to address the future of on-disc DLC.
“We would like to assure you that we have been listening to your comments and as such have begun the process of re-evaluating how such additional game content is delivered in the future,” said Svensson. “As this process has only just commenced in the past month or so, there will be some titles, where development began some time ago and that are scheduled for release in the coming months, for which we are unable to make changes to the way some of their post release content is delivered.”
“One such title is Dragon’s Dogma, where the decision to include some additional (but not all planned additional) game content for the game on disc was made at the beginning of the game’s development cycle as at the time this was determined to be the most efficient way of ensuring certain content was made available. Owners of Dragon’s Dogma will be able to further their gameplay experience with the release of additional quests, weapons and other items in the months following the game going on sale,” he said before adding, “Just wanted people to know in advance the whys, wherefores and where we’re going in the future. You are being heard. Thanks.”
Reports are that Zynga has acquired Wild Needle Games. Is is believed that the acquisition is being done for the talent of the studio and is likely in the $5 to $20 million range.
Wild Needle was a female-focused casual games company that was backed by Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson. The company’s title, Shoptown Hero, had players buy goods for sale and then negotiate prices with their customers to earn profits.
Source: TechCrunch
