Facebook Says 230 Million Actively Playing Social Games

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Doug Purdy, director of developer products for Facebook, announced that over 230 million Facebook users played a game on the social network in the last 30 days, or 25 percent of its entire user-base. He noted that Facebook has directed users to the App Store and Google Play more than 150 million times in the past month and disputed that one publisher dominates gaming on Facebook.

“We’re seeing the rise of new publishers like Kixeye and King.com, who are building really awesome games and making a lot of money doing that,” said Purdy. “We’re really happy with the diversity we’re seeing. We have over 130 apps on Facebook that have more than a million monthly users, which is phenomenal. It isn’t just one publisher dominating this space; there’s a plethora of [publishers] being successful.”

Source: TechCrunch

World Of WarCraft Movie ‘Important’ To Blizzard

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Legendary Entertainment has tapped Charles Leavitt (The Seventh Son, Blood Diamond, The Mighty and K-PAX) to write a new script for World of Warcraft. They’re looking to bring on a new director, as Sam Raimi has moved on to work on Disney’s Oz: The Great and Powerful.

“[If it’s] important to Blizzard, it’s important to me,” said Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick. “They’re very excited about having a World of Warcraft film. They’ve been very careful and thoughtful about the development process.”

Source: Variety

Guy Adams’ Twitter Trials And Tribulations Over NBC’s Olympic Coverage

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Guy Adams, a reporter for the U.K.’s The Independent, has recently been ripping NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. His tweets were becoming rather well known, falling in with the #nbcfail crowd.

“I have 1000 channels on my TV. Not one will be showing the Olympics opening ceremony live. Because NBC are utter, utter bastards,” he tweeted on the opening night.

“Am I alone in wondering why NBColympics think its acceptable to pretend this road race is being broadcast live?” said Adams before adding. “According to NBC’s commentary team, the Surrey countryside is full of ‘chateaus’.”

This was the Tweet, however, that got him suspended: “The man responsible for NBC pretending the Olympics haven’t started yet is Gary Zenkel. Tell him what u think! Email: Gary.zenkel@nbcuni.com.”

NBC complained that he shared a private email address Adams responded to Twitter’s European PR head, “I didn’t publish a private email address. Just a corporate one, which is widely available to anyone with access to Google, and is identical to one that all of the tens of thousands of NBC Universal employees share. It’s no more ‘private’ than the address I’m emailing you from right now.”

His account was restored after much media coverage of the event. “It really brought home to me as a journalist how much I rely on Twitter these days to do my job and, secondly, raised some questions about Twitter and its relationships with its commercial partners,” noted Adams.

Noted BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis, “We in journalism understand the often-violated rules of church vs. state, but I think the technology companies need this as well so that we can trust them.”

“I don’t think I should’ve been suspended in the first place,” Adams said. “I don’t see how I broke any of Twitter’s rules. I think Twitter ignored its own rules… because they were in bed with a commercial partner.”

Twitter nor NBC is offering an apology and neither is Adams for his part. “It was his work email. It was easy for anyone to find. It was not written in a private format. And above all, it’s a corporate email address… I don’t think I invaded this guy’s privacy at all,” he said and when asked if he would do anything different, “No I don’t think so. I strongly believe that people who run businesses ought to be responsible for what those businesses do. And by that I mean that they ought to not ignore their customers.”

He continued, “NBC has clearly ignored what the viewing public wants throughout its coverage of the Olympics. If the President of NBC Olympics does not want to hear from the viewers… I don’t think he’s in the right job.”

As for future occasions of tweeting someone’s email address, Adams said, “Not without having a good think about it, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t.”

Source: Huffington Post

Star Wars: The Old Republic F2P Decision Applauded By SOE

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Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley has seen his company’s transition from being almost completely reliant on subscriptions to switching over almost all of their games to free-to-play. In light of that fact, it is unsurprising that he applauds the decision by Electronic Arts to switch over Star Wars: The Old Republic to free-to-play.

“It is the only way to go for new games,” said Smedley. “It was the right decision for SWTOR (which is a fantastic game). Wait till you see our next round of games after [Planetside 2].”

Smedley also bashed the concept of retail sales determining the health of PC gaming, saying, “I hate it when people talk about the decline of the PC industry. It’s idiotic garbage spouted by morons that can’t count where the players are playing. It’s not like League of Legends reports numbers to NPD. The players are playing F2P games on the PC not going to retail.”

Source: Reddit.com

Olympics Parallel Made By Hideo Kojima

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While the London Olympics are in full swing, many game developers are hard at work in their own way crafting products that will release in the near future. Speaking on Twitter, Hideo Kojima likened his magnum opus series Metal Gear Solid to its own Olympics.

“When asked what the MGS series is to you, I once responded, ‘It’s like the Olympics.’ A big event held every three or four years,” tweeted Kojima. “You devote your life to the major goal of a fight on the world stage. You think of nothing beyond that. The latter half becomes difficult, and you think that you’ll retire after this. But after release, you think about the next tournament.”

The MGS Olympics

Kojima is set to reveal his next “Olympics” at the Metal Gear 25th anniversary event on August 30.

Source: Andriasang.com

Ouya Limited Edition Announced

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Ouya announce details for their Limited Edition Backer Exclusive Ouya. The console will ship with a ‘Rich brown brushed metal finish’ and come with a matching controller.

“Behold the limited edition Ouya and controller! Yves Behar personally selected the color for this special console and controller, and it will only be available NOW, through the end of Kickstarter campaign,” said Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman. “To collect one of these rare drops, stretch your donation to $140–the additional cost will cover the small production run.”

Also, bowing to fan demand, the buttons for the Ouya console now officially read “O-U-Y-A.”

Source: Kickstarter

Assassin’s Creed 3 – Official AnvilNext Trailer

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Assassin’s Creed III has the proprietary AnvilNext engine under the hood, and it looks marvelous. This trailer shows off Frontier, Homestead, Boston and New York areas, the ability to display 2,000 NPCs, and 1,000 new animations for Connor, which Ubisoft claims is “the most detailed third-person action character ever created.”

 

Minecon 2012 Announcement!

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Last year’s Minecon was held in Las Vegas to celebrate the launch of Minecraft and 5,000 people came out to play games, meet up with their friends, and have an great time with Minecraft fans from around the world. Minecon 2012, by contrast, will have a little bit of Disney magic…

 

Diablo III Cut Into World Of Warcraft Subscriptions, Claims Blizzard

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World of Warcraft saw its number of subscriptions drop from over 10 million to around 9.1 million during the past couple of months. To Blizzard president Mike Morhaime, this is a natural part of the cycle for the game before an expansion, helped by the release of Diablo III.

“Historically we have seen usage decline towards the end of an expansion cycle,” said Morhaime. “We saw a similar drop in subscribers in the months before Cataclysm, followed by a substantial return of players around the Cataclysm launch. We’re also seeing that a number of players took a break from WoW to play Diablo III.”

Speaking of Diablo III, Morhaime acknowledged issues with the game, saying, “While Diablo III was our 14th #1 seller, we did experience some challenges. Due to the unprecedented influx of players a number of service issues arose that we needed to work around the clock to address. The vast majority of these issues were ironed out within a couple weeks of launch. As I mentioned in a letter to players recently, we’re not satisfied with just breaking launch records. We want people to play and enjoy Diablo III for a long time. We’ve already made a number of fixes and updates, including activation of the auction house… and the Diablo team has also been working on improvements to in-game rewards and having a player vs. player mode which we hope will enhance the value and longevity of the game.”

Source: GamesIndustry International