GungHo Buyout Of Grasshopper Will Let Suda51 Be More Creative

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Grasshopper Manufacture was recently acquired by publisher GungHo, and some worried this move would change the focus of off-beat developer Goichi Suda. However, GungHo president Kazuki Morishita and Suda indicate that this move will give Suda more creative freedom and allow him to potentially explore the online sphere that he’s been looking into.

“I’d like Suda-san to remain focused on Grasshopper rather than GungHo as a whole,” said Moroshita. “Of course now I’ll be involved in Grasshopper’s creative output, but since Suda-san is there, in a lot of ways it actually equates to a taking load off my own work. Basically, I’d like Grasshopper Manufacture to continue to make games in the manner they are accustomed to.”

“Around 2011, I was thinking about what I should do with the company, groping about in the dark to try and figure out the real purpose, the real value of Grasshopper Manufacture,” said Suda. “So, while we were deciding our next project, I was too absorbed in the management side of business to really focus on the creative. Morishita-san said ‘isn’t that my job ‘, and it put me back on the right path.”

Source: Edge

Crytek Will Shift Entirely To Free-to-Play

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Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli says that he is looking to orient his company towards free-to-play over the next two to five years. While the company’s free-to-play efforts are limited to Warface on PC at this point, Yerli indicates that he’s hoping to bring the same focus to consoles.

“We decided five or six years ago that we want to marry the quality of triple-A games with the business model of free-to-play,” said Yerli. “And at that time, we decided some other games, in some of our other studios, would head in this direction. But we kept pushing the quality bar higher on our console business, which is the main dominating business for the Western world, but we are observing, plainly – and we see this already with Warface – that the free-to-play market is on the rise. I think over the next two to three years, free-to-play is going to rival retail with quality games like Warface.”

“We’re looking at free-to-play as a force that drives our growth and world-domination plans,” said Yerli. “So we have quite a few console titles in our pipeline that are [traditional retail games] while we investigate free-to-play on consoles. But our primary goal is to make triple-A free-to-play games for the world market and transition entirely to that.”

Crytek believes that Gface, the gaming platform launching with Warface, will help them expand into the free-to-play field. “As a company, [we will] transition from a developer to a service company, and we’re going to offer a platform, with G-Face, to any other [developer that needs it],” he said. “If we could launch our games on a platform that already exists today, and we could get the same results, then we wouldn’t build our own platform. But we’re convinced that our platform does some particularly new things that makes our games behave better. That’s why we plan to offer this service to third parties.”

“This doesn’t mean our main business will be driven by our platform business,” added Yerli. “We are just going to open it up and see how it works. We are always going to be a games-first company. We will always have our own development because we are all about making games. We provide technology, but technology is not our main driver. We make technology to make great games.”

Source: VentureBeat

Dell: The Way Forward From Here

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Dell was recently purchased for $24 billion by a consortium led by the company’s Michael Dell. This is as good an example of any of the transition the PC industry is going through.

“I think everybody in the PC business has had Apple envy, and I would imagine Michael Dell would be no different,” says Forrester analyst David Johnson.

Making Dell a private entity again will make it easier to cut under-performing businesses, performing layoffs where necessary while allowing them to focus on more profitable software, services, mobile, and cloud services. Eventually, the company will want to make Dell more compatible with the modern age of electronic devices and then do another IPO.

“Michael Dell and the Dell brand are very closely aligned. He’s got a lot of personal equity in that,” says IDC analyst Crawford Del Prete.

PC sales slipped 6.7 percent in the fourth quarter compared with a year ago, according to Gartner. Meanwhile, tablet sales worldwide grew 75 percent in the same period, according to researcher IDC.

“They can start experimenting in mobile products,” says Del Prete. “If they get a winner, they can drive that through Dell’s market.”

Source: USAtoday.com

APB: Reloaded Has 3 Million Registered Users

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GamersFirst has confirmed that APB: Reloaded has over 3 million user accounts. The game sees between 25,000 and 30,000 active players every day.

A year out from its relaunch, APB: Reloaded has steadily been in the top five of Steam’s free-to-play chart. To celebrate this news, GamersFirst is launching the “Settle the Score” game update for APB: Reloaded.

Source: VG247.com

Skylanders Reaches $1 Billion In Sales

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Activision Publishing has announced that Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure and Skylanders Giants have generated more than $1 billion in retail sales worldwide between the sale of software, toys and accessories. This milestone was reached in just 15 months and is better than other toy brands like Beyblades, Star Wars and Transformers over that time period.

“The Skylanders franchise became the first kids’ videogame IP to cross the $1 billion mark in just 15 months, and I think we are still just starting to realize its potential,” said Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing. “We knew that the simple, but magical idea, of bringing your toys to life in a video game could change both the video game and the toy industries, and more importantly, change the way kids play. And this fall, we’re looking forward to delivering to fans our latest break-through innovation, Skylanders SWAP Force, which lets kids customize their own characters, bringing toys to life to a whole new level.”

Activision also announced the new Skylanders SWAP Force, which lets players reconfigure 16 special SWAP Force characters into over 250 different combinations. Skylanders SWAP Force will be shown off at Toy Fair 2013, February 10-13.

Read more about the Skylanders brand in this exclusive [a]list interview.

Final Fantasy VII Posters Revisit Iconic Locations

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GamerPrint announced a new set of limited edition posters inspired by Final Fantasy VII. Based around famous in-game locations like Midgar, Gold Saucer, Cosmo Canyon, Nibelheim and Rocket Town, they have appearances like promotional posters for tourists.

“GamerPrint’s distinctive posters are always about the most iconic games’ says Dean Walton, designer and Creative Director at GamerPrint. “Everyone on the team has huge fondness for the adventures of Cloud Strife and the memorable places he visited. Our fans have been crying out for more Final Fantasy VII designs and we have delivered!”

Source: GamingExaminer.com

Exclusive: PlanetSide 2 Launches Into eSports

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Sony Online Entertainment is moving into eSports with PlanetSide 2, taking what it describes as a careful approach into tournament play for the free to play MMO shooter. To kick things off, the company organized a match where YouTube stars and their fans battled in front of a live onsite and online audience.  The event, billed as the Ultimate Empire Showdown, was held the same day Sony Online announced a new partnership with Major League Gaming (MLG).

Speaking about the relationship, Sony Online president John Smedley said, “We have a longterm roadmap with them where we’re going to be bringing PlanetSide 2 into the eSports universe in a very phased and very controlled way.”

MLG representatives were on hand at the tournament, which put YouTube show hosts SeaNanners, TotalBiscuit and LevelCap in charge of building a team and representing each of the three empires in the game.  TotalBiscuit and his Terran Republic team, which adopted their empire’s fascist persona and loudly taunted their foes in the match, took home the trophy.

As part of our exclusive series of interviews with Sony Online on the marketing of PlanetSide 2, [a]list daily went to the Ultimate Empire Showdown to talk with Smedley and head of marketing Laura Naviaux about their drive into eSports.  We also had a chance to hear what competing YouTube stars think of their experience with PlanetSide2 tournament play, and how celebrity hosts Jace Hall and Adrianne Curry came to join the fray.

 

Facebook Hub For App Makers

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Facebook has launched Developers Live, a new destination where developers can educate themselves on best practices for bringing apps to the platform.  The service is described as a curated video channel by Facebook and will feature live, recorded and interactive broadcasts geared towards app maker education.

Facebook positioned the new channel as the “central place to learn about the latest tools and to get access to the product managers and engineers who created them.”

Developers Live is for mobile developers, game developers, websites and publishers, essentially any third-party product or service provider who wants optimized integration with the platform and maximized exposure to users.  Examples of what tutorials will address include app discovery and audience growth, better web to mobile transition, and best practices to drive traffic to product — all from the mouths of industry and Facebook experts.

Facebook director of product management Doug Purdy will host the service’s first live event “What Developers Need to Know in 2013″ on February 19. Interested users can RSVP or watch the first live event here.

Source: Facebook.