Crysis 3 Pre-Order Incentives Rolled Out

Crysis 3 Hunter Edition, available for pre-order, will include a bonus online XP boost to level five, a unique bow skin and three exclusive dog tags. There will also be the Hunter Nanosuit module which adds additional power and functionality to the super-suit.

The Hunter Edition will be available with every pre-order of Crysis 3 and will also include a digital copy of the first Crysis; full details at Crysis.com/pre-order-offers. The game is priced at $59.99 and will release sometime in February 2013 for PS3, PC and Xbox 360.

Anarchy Reigns With Day One Edition

Sega has revealed that those who pre-order Anarchy Reigns in Europe will receive the Day One Edition with extra multiplayer game modes Mad Survival and Dogfight. This special edition of the game will also unlock Bayonetta as a playable character.

“In Mad Survival, a team of 3 players duke it out against waves of enemies, much as in the normal survival mode. However, these enemies now take the form of the other playable characters in Anarchy Reigns, leading to a far tougher series of battles that require serious tactical thinking to outsmart your foes,” describes Sega. “Dogfight sees players hanging from helicopters -pelting each other with bullets until their opponents fall out of the sky. As well as being a surreal new spin on this multiplayer brawler this aerial-based game mode is an entertaining change of pace from land-based conflict, also offering gamers a new way to explore the locations found in-game.”

Anarchy Reigns Day One Edition will be available January 8, 2012 for $29.99.

Source: Blogs.Sega.com

Zero Dark Thirty Map Pack Developer Diary – Medal Of Honor Warfighter

Art Director Chris Salazar delivers inside access on Medal of Honor Warfighter‘s upcoming Zero Dark Thirty map pack, available at no extra cost with the Limited or Deluxe Editions. It is inspired by a decade-long manhunt in some of the world’s most dangerous places: Darra Gun Market and Chitral Compound.

Facebook Mobile Gets Sharing Function, Finally

Facebook has finally announced the addition of sharing on its mobile website. With many now relying on mobile to access the social net, it’s a long-awaited feature for users including advertisers and brands. Facebook recently reported that mobile users are up to 604 million actives a month, with 20 percent of them accessing the site solely from their mobile devices.

Facebook has become increasingly reliant on mobile for growth. In its last earning report, the company said it generated 14 percent of advertising revenue from mobile alone. Now its mobile users can share branded content, making it easier for ads and sponsored stories to take on a viral effect.

Source: Tech Crunch

Cut A Superbowl Ad, Get To Work On The Next Transformers

Doritos has launched this year’s Crash the Super Bowl contest and is raising the stakes higher than ever before. In a message direct to fans, acclaimed Hollywood film director Michael Bay and Doritos have announced that the grand prize will be an opportunity to work with Bay on the next installment of the Transformers movie franchise, along with a shot at a $1 million bonus.

 

The Crash the Super Bowl contest invites consumers to create homemade ads for the Doritos brand, with two finalist consumer-created spots ultimately airing during the Super Bowl broadcast. One of those ads will be selected by America’s votes; the other by the Doritos brand team. The finalist whose ad scores highest on the USA Today Ad Meter rankings will be awarded the grand prize-career opportunity working with Bay. In addition, if a consumer-generated Doritos ad scores No. 1 on the USA Today Ad Meter, the Doritos brand will award its creator a $1 million bonus. The Super Bowl XLVII broadcast is set for Sunday, February 3, 2013, on CBS.

 

Exclusive: A Kickstarter’s Final Leg — Part 2

By Jordan Hemenway

Since yesterday’s article was posted, Distance has passed the minimum goal needed to receive the funding from Kickstarter. In short, we’re shocked, relieved, burned out and excited, all at the same time. We don’t really have a complete grasp on what’s caused our rapid ascension over the past week, but I believe that the counting down clock is a powerful tool that Kickstarter exploits well. The stress of reaching our goal while having a doomsday clock hanging over our head seemed to be directly tied to the excitement (and fear) of our backers and supporters. Word spread faster than we had imagined possible, and the past 3 days of backers have easily been our best so far.

Looking back on how things could have been different if we could time-travel to the beginning of the campaign, I believe that we honestly went in with most of our assumptions being incorrect or untested. It’s far too easy to look at success stories on Kickstarter, look at how they pitched their project, how they set up rewards, how they did updates, etc., and assume that most of it will be applicable to ours. For example, discovering the details of our market was really fascinating. Despite our experience with the audience for Nitronic Rush, a free game we released as students, we didn’t fully have a gauge of how many would react to a commercial product. It would have been smart to do more research early on to see how many could back the project and what excites them about a spiritual successor. We found ourselves trying to understand this halfway through the campaign, which of course was the worst time for it.

Reaching out to press was another example of immense learning and adjustment. Our announcement press release wasn’t really grabbing people’s attention, so we had to continually tailor our message as more writers brought up what excites them about the game. One example was simply looking at how we initially phrased the game as the next generation of arcade racing. The game borrows from action-oriented elements of arcade racers, but overall it’s an experimental racing game much like its predecessor. Arcade racing to many refers to a dying breed, such as Wip3out and Midway racing games like Rush. While we love the spirit of those games, Distance is about experimenting with the dynamics of a very physical vehicle and seeing what we can do to push exploration in the racing genre.

Leaning less on the return of arcade racing and more on the new things we were trying to do, Distance started to stand out more. We released two new gameplay trailers which were also incredibly helpful in showing the elements of the game we were pushing, and it helped also get us something viral for people to easily share. Of course, our biggest mistake with these videos was that they took 5-6 days to make, complete with new music for each. We also had to schedule times to play with up to 6 others in multiplayer for the first trailer, which would take hours at a time for everyone. Instead we should have been planning these much farther ahead so that we would have enough time to plan their releases when coordinating with press.

In general content creation was slow for our team. If you’re planning to take on Kickstarter, I highly recommend assembling a strike team to work alongside you early on in the campaign. Managing comments, press, updates, content creation and other random things that come up continually buried us. It wasn’t until the end that we wised up enough to bring others into the fold.

We also worked with backers to continually modify and improve the Kickstarter campaign. For instance, our backers recommended reward tiers where they could get access to items like the backer-only vehicle at a lower price that only included one copy of the game. They suggested higher level digital-only tiers that granted Alpha access without needing to get a physical good, like our poster. Once we released these updates, a huge surge of backers would up their pledge, which was of course incredibly encouraging as we were reaching the end. We even listened to backers requesting guaranteed Linux support and split-screen, both of which we added and saw great success.

One gigantic push for the campaign (only a few days ago) was the purchase of one of our top rewards at $10,000, a complete arcade cabinet built exclusively for Distance. As seen in Jason’s 3D rendered mockup image, it has the classic arcade elements such as the steering wheel and pedals, but it also includes new features for car rotation, boost, and flight. We’re incredibly excited to build it and see it come to life. Once the thought of the reward crossed our minds, we spent hours researching the costs and efforts to build it. We saw it as the coolest reward yet that we’ve seen on Kickstarter, and we wanted to ensure that it wouldn’t bankrupt us. As it turns out the greatest cost for an arcade cabinet like this is the time to make it, and eventually the shipping. We’ll be borrowing access to a friend’s workshop to assemble the entire cabinet piece-by-piece.

Kickstarter has been a wild ride that I’m happy to have been a part of, if nothing else for the trial by fire learning experience. If someone were to ask ‘would you go through it again’ , part of me feels that there’s no way I would willfully endure the intense cycle of emotions that came through this campaign. Another part of me though realizes that our team has learned an incredible amount about Kickstarter at this point – the emotional struggle and general expectations – and at the end of the day the connection we have with our backers is incredibly powerful. We get to work with them to make the game of our dreams, with no middleman and nothing holding us back. For us, independence is huge, so it’s more than worth a try whether or not we to have hit the goal. Thanks to our backers, friends, family, and supporters who pushed us through so far, and we’ll see what happens in the final hours!

GTA V: Why Now Is The Right Time For Rockstar

Some were surprised when Rockstar announced its intentions to launch Grand Theft Auto V on the PS3 and Xbox 360 rather than the inevitable successor consoles. According to Rockstar’s vice president of creative Sam Houser, development of GTA IV was tumultuous and that the refining of development over time for this current crop of consoles will make GTA V better.

“Rockstar is a content company, not a hardware company,” said Houser to Famitsu. “We use the technology we have to create content, and we try not to let ourselves get beholden to the hardware.”

“The fact that hardware’s so mature right now is exactly why we’re able to go on to the next level. GTA IV was our first attempt at a new platform and HD visuals, so the first part of development was seriously difficult,” he explained. “Now we know what the hardware’s capable of, so it’s become a lot easier to move things along and a lot more fun, too. GTA: San Andreas came out at the peak of the PlayStation 2’s cycle, and we put out a really good game thanks to that. All the best games for a console come out at the end of the lifecycle, right So now’s the best timing of all.”

Source: Polygon

Kixeye Strikes Back Against Zynga In Counterclaim

Kixeye has filled a counterclaim against Zynga, claiming the company violated California’s fair competition laws. The suit is a response against Zynga’s fillings against Alan Patmore, a former Zynga executive accused of stealing company secrets.

Kixeye, which was included in Zynga’s original suit, says that Zynga intended to grant itself a competitive advantage by intimidating its employees from leaving for Kixeye. Additionally, Kixeye claims that Zynga wanted to gain information from Kixeye and bog them down in litigation while they pursue mid-core market Kixeye has flourished in.

Kixeye is seeking injunctive relief prohibiting Zynga from interfering with the company’s employment rights, restitution and/or disgorgement, plus attorneys’ fees and costs, among other things.

“We believe Zynga is manipulating the legal process and fabricating claims against Kixeye to access our trade secrets,” said Kixeye CEO Will Harbin. “Their illustrious history of using their legal department to exploit and slander competitors that they can’t otherwise out-perform is well documented. We will not stand for it.”

“We will fight to our last breath to keep this predatory company from accessing our confidential information and best practices. We intend to defend ourselves from Zynga’s legal bullying for as long as it takes to reveal the truth – that Kixeye played no part in this,” added Harbin. “As we have stated previously, we have zero interest in Zynga’s IP or ‘trade secrets.’ Our games are categorically different from theirs in almost every way. Claiming that their failed business practices could inform ours further establishes their complete lack of understanding of the gaming business.”