The Disney Dream Portraits continue with Jack Black, Will Ferrell & Jason Segel depicted as ghosts from the Haunted Mansion and Russell Brand as Captain Hook. The images created for this are used in advertisements for Disney Parks, in magazines, on billboards, and online.
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MapleStory is seemingly an eternally popular game on the web, but Nexon keeps on promoting it with ads like these to help its continued growth. These Ayzenberg Group produced spots have gone viral and are now among the top 10 trending game videos on YouTube!
Presented by the Guardian U.K. interactive team, “Could you be a Medallist “ is an 8-bit style retro game where you can see how you would do in the Olympics. See how your personal best in the 100m, 10km, 100m freestyle swim and bicycle road race compares against the all-time greats – and whether your time would have ever earned you a place on the podium. You can also share your results with your friends on Facebook, become a keyboard warrior, unlock secret codes and much more.
Try it with some cheat modes:
Turbo charge mode: up up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a
Jesus mode: jesus
Crackle mode: konami
All-round weirdness: debug
The “viral” phenomenon behind Resident Evil 6 is showing evidence of it spreading at nohopeleft.com. The C-Virus is taking a grip on a global level, so visit the site and start to warn your friends through Twitter to be part of the new C-Virus World Map.
In the past two weeks, approximately 8000 sightings and counting have been reported. Global sightings have been recorded, but how it is getting transmitted is still unknown. People are disappearing, dying or hiding, or just praying for their lives. Help track the spread of this and according to the blog that will help work out what it does and how we all might be able to avoid it before it’s too late.
Efforts to contain it within North America have failed, with Mexico City being totally overrun. It can only be a matter of time before it spreads throughout the entire South American continent.
Western Europe has been hit badly too. Although the only saving grace is that it seems to have spread less east of this. Can we pray that there is some level of resistance
The 2012 Social Network Analysis Report breaks down demographic, geographic and search data that shows which networks are doing the best right now. The study shows, among other things, that Twitter and Tumblr are among the top five networks with the strongest rate of growth with Pinterest, Reddit and LinkedIn coming on fast.
Source: Mashable.com
Riot Games has announced that they are launching their own Championship Series for League of Legends. Starting in 2013, they will have regular season matches every week, HD streaming broadcasts of games, salaried players and prize pools for competing teams.
“Talking to players around the world, they repeatedly asked if we could kick League of Legends eSports into higher gear,” said Brandon Beck, co-founder and CEO of Riot Games. “The new League of Legends Championship Series is our answer. Millions of fans tune in every time we support a major League of Legends tournament, so we’re broadening that support in an unprecedented way.”
Winners from the current Season Two championships in Europe and North America will be rolled up into the Championship Series next year. “[Intel Extreme Masters, Major League Gaming, and the IGN Pro League] are invaluable partners, and we’ll continue to work closely with each of them in Season 3 as they foster the next generation of League of Legends competitors,” said Dustin Beck, vice president of eSports at Riot Games.
Activision Blizzard has had an incredibly steady stock over the past few years, despite a general downturn for AAA publishers during that time, mostly due to the consistency of income from subscriptions in World of Warcraft. While 74 percent of analysts rate Activision Blizzard a buy and 26 percent of analysts rating it a hold, there’s reason to be concerned in the near term.
“Vivendi is a publicly traded French company that has seen its shares steadily battered for the last three years,” writes Agustino Fontevecchia. “The shares have fallen from a high of 23.90 euros all the way down to a low of 12.70 euros, leaving shareholders very angry with management. Fearing for their jobs, management at Vivendi has decided to sell some of their equity interests around the world in an effort to boost their own share price.”
“Activision was their first logical candidate for sale. The stock has done virtually nothing for the past two years, usually trading in a tight range between $12.50 and $11.50,” he notes. “The only times that we have seen this company spike was when a new hit videogame was released, usually causing the stock to make a sudden 5 percent jump only to quickly trickle back down over the coming week. Not much can be said about this company in terms of dividends either; the common has a yield of 1.6 percent.”
Vivendi wanted a 20 percent premium on the private market for their majority ownership of Activision Blizzard. When they found no takers, they slashed the price down to 12 percent, and despite using veteran bankers at Goldman Sachs and Barclays, they were unsuccessfully… and it might be due to a game that Blizzard does not even produce.
“World of Warcraft (WoW) has helped Activision Blizzard maintain its stock price, with this one single game providing roughly 30 percent of the revenue for the entire company via its expansion packs and monthly payments,” writes Fontevecchia. “Subscription revenue alone totaled $1.2 billion both in 2008 and 2009, and an additional $1.36 billion in 2010. Corresponding costs (the overhead cost of maintaining WoW’s virtual world) totaled a mere $404 million in the first two years mentioned, and $241 million in 2010. This means that WoW subscriptions have generated gross margins over 80 percent consistently. Since WoW has very high operating leverage any decline in revenue will have dramatic effects on the bottom line.”
“Guild Wars 2 is a fierce competitor that is creeping up on Activision’s WoW title at the end of August 2012 that we believe many investors have not factored into their ATVI recommendations. Guild Wars 2 has already been ruled by many on blogs and discussion boards as superior to WoW just based on the experience gamers shared while playing the Guild Wars 2 beta. Competition seems to be coming in strong indeed against WoW,” he notes. “To play Guild Wars 2, all you need to do is pay $60 for a copy of the game and you no longer have to pay any monthly fees. WoW requires an initial purchase of $60 and a payment of $15 per month just to play the game. Guild Wars 2 will has the potential to attract many of the new MMORPG players that have been stuck in limbo. What we have now is an entire generation of gamers that tried to switch from WoW to a new MMORPG but found themselves exactly where they started due to lackluster titles being released. With the release of a new game that has better graphics and better gameplay than WoW, one would be hard pressed to find reasons why gamers would not make the switch.”
“The bottom line here is that gamers like to start on level playing fields. Gamers love to save money. Gamers are always in a frantic rush to play superior games. These three factors are the main reasons why Guild Wars 2 will win over market share from WoW,” Fontevecchia adds.
If World of Warcraft lost 25 percent of its subscribers to Guild Wars 2, gross profit of the subscription business could drop to $779 million from the current $1.12 billion, reducing software gross profit drop to $75 million from $100 million. This could translate to a drop of up to $366 million in gross profit in the 6 months following the release of Guild Wars 2 at the end of August 2012.
The consensus target from analysts for Activision Blizzard is $15.59 for the current fiscal year and the stock is currently trading at slightly below $12. If WoW loses 25 percent of its subscribers to Guild Wars 2 in the current fiscal year, the stock could slip to $9.
“Now once the stock goes to $9, what do you think Vivendi is going to do?” asks Fontevecchia. “A company that has seen its shares fall by over 45 percent in the last 3 years is not going to just sit back and watch billions of dollars erode from their balance sheet. If Vivendi cannot find a buyer on the private market, and we are confident that they will be unable to do so, then management will begin selling their position in Activision on the open market in order to avoid heavy losses. This is where the real money will be made. If we were to see Vivendi selling even 10 percent of their position on the open market the damage to the stock would be devastating.”
“Even though Vivendi is currently exploring several options to raise its stock price, we ask you to make a simple judgment call here. If you were Vivendi, would you not sell a company that is losing massive percentages of market share to its competitors If you were on the management team of Vivendi would you honestly not cut your losses by selling Activision when the chief game of the company suddenly begins failing to competition Let the bulls bid up the stock based on the record breaking Diablo 3 sales, it only helps to mask the coming fundamental problem of the business,” concluded Fontevecchia.
Source: Forbes
The Surface tablet represents a departure for Microsoft, inserting themselves into the field of personal computing manufacturing that traditionally they have left to third parties while they made the OS. Now that this relationship is in jeopardy, Acer CEO J. T. Wang has expressed reservations about what Microsoft is planning to do in an increasingly challenging PC hardware market.
“We have said [to Microsoft] think it over,” said Acer CEO J. T. Wang. “Think twice. It will create a huge negative impact for the ecosystem and other brands may take a negative reaction. It is not something you are good at so please think twice.”
“If Microsoft … is going to do hardware business, what should we do ” Campbell Kan, Acer’s president for personal computer global operations asked. “Should we still rely on Microsoft, or should we find other alternatives ”
Source: Financial Times
Gamesys has released Bingo Friendzy, which will allow players in the U.K. to gamble with real cash. The U.S. has far stricter laws on online gambling, so it’s easier for Gamesys to bring this bingo game to the U.K. with other casino games like Slots Friendzy likely to follow.
“Gambling is very popular and well regulated in the U.K. . . . for millions of bingo users it’s already a social experience [so] it makes sense [for us] to offer that as well,” said Facebook’s head of gaming for Europe Julien Codorniou.”We are a distribution platform for Gamesys – they have the games and we bring the audience.”
“Bingo is at the softer end of the gambling spectrum and online bingo often has chat forums alongside, so it’s an obvious match for Facebook,” commented the Remote Gambling Association’s Clive Hawkswood. “A lot of people have said why haven’t they done it before because there’s a difficulty in monetizing what they have – this is one way of bringing in revenues.”
Source: Financial Times
Jim Veevaert’s career has included time as an executive producer at Vivendi and Microsoft, president at Jerry Bruckheimer Games and most recently general manager at Zynga’s social game division. Having been a developer for nearly 20 years, he’s in a unique position to observe the game development differences between console and mobile/social games.
“In my console history, we spent so much time working on graphics and on the 720p resolution, making sure we had proper tiling. The framerate had to be perfect,” said Veevaert. “Well, what’s interesting is you have a certain amount of people who just have software renderers. So we have to make the game fun for people who’ve got a 4-year-old computer and still want to play. They won’t have any hardware-accelerated effects, but for people who have great laptops and great computers, why not leverage all that technology In console, you had a unified platform. You knew exactly what you were developing to. Here we have to scale high and low. It’s like back in the PC days, when you had to support everybody. Windows 95 and 98, remember that ”
One major difference between social development and console development, notes Veevaert, is the data Zynga gets back from players.
“After we change one feature, we can see the adoption rate go up or go down – or the way people are sending gifts to each other, and how they’re responding from a social perspective,” said Veevaert. “By getting the realtime information, all that’s done is solidified our relationship with the audience. There was a real distance between us, the way it worked in the console world.”
“We would do updates and look at Bungie.net to get information, and think, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ But it’s only the core of the core that are posting on Bungie.net and telling you what’s going on,” he added. “Of the 12 million people who bought the game, I had no idea what the vast majority were doing. Now, I love this process. It’s great, and it’s fast. We can get to a prototype really quickly. We can get to benchmark tests quickly as well.”
“There doesn’t seem to be a limitation to what we can actually do in the space of Facebook, and now it’s happening on mobile. Technology is improving so fast, and we’re racing with it. You just read about Flash 11.4, right Suddenly now you can have console games being played right in the Facebook window. That’s incredible,” he said. “That’s what’s so fulfilling about this industry right now: the sense of being able to be creative, responsive, and move fast – really moving fast and finding satisfaction in what we’re creating today and what we’re going to get done in one, two, or three weeks. It’s having the team feeling a sense of momentum and connectedness. I just love it.”
Veevaert contrasted the fast turnaround for mobile/social development to the long development times for console titles.
“Maybe that’s going to take me another two-and-a-half or three years to build I don’t know what the year’s going to be like in three years. Or, as has happened to me in the past, you start developing a game, and then they say, ‘Yeah, that would look good on Xbox 1, but we really need you to make this for the 360. Can you please emulate the 360 and start working on it ‘” Veevaert began. “And, guaranteed, if you’re going to develop a game that takes two or three years, you run the risk that that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
For Veevaert, he’s happy to be where he’s at. “There’s a great deal of satisfaction in thinking about, ‘What do we get from that first two to three to four minutes of gameplay ‘ We never thought that way in the console world,” Veevaert said. “We’d be saying, by level three, here’s where the player is going to be. We assumed you’d get here, move a bit forward, shoot, keep going, and you’d just get to level three.”
“We spend a great deal of time even thinking about how we introduce the gameplay mechanics to you. There’s a great deal of satisfaction in watching the adoption and what we call the falloff rate. How fast do people fall off when they’re playing with the first-time user experience How fast do they fall off, and how often do they stay engaged A game designer likes to design game mechanics. When they get great feedback, and when they get validation and their decisions are working, that’s fun. So I’m finding the same level of fun and satisfaction in a game like Ruby Blast as I would in bringing a game like Halo 3 and working on it level by level. It’s like a minuet versus a symphony. Both are complex. Both have a lot to offer. Both have a lot of richness and depth, and both have something for a different audience,” Veevaert noted.
Source: VentureBeat
