Kickstarter Record – Torment: Tides Of Numenura Fastest To $1 Million

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inXile Entertainment’s Torment: Tides of Numenura raised $1 million in 7 hours and 2 minutes, making it the fastest project to $1 million ever, breaking Ouya’s total of 8 hours and 22 minutes. Only 21 of the 37,000 successfully funded Kickstarter projects have ever reached the $1 million milestone.

“Even though this was our second Kickstarter campaign, we were very cautious in our expectations,” inXile CEO Brian Fargo said. “We knew there were some negative sentiments regarding crowdsourcing fatigue, and the fact that we are still finishing Wasteland 2, but the massive community acceptance to our latest Kickstarter effort was overwhelming, unexpected and a great honor. With great honor, comes great responsibility to our backers that we will deliver Wasteland 2 in October 2013 and then deliver Torment: Tides of Numenera by December 2014.”

Sony Says Wonderbook Important For Positioning PS3 For Families

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Wonderbook: Book of Spells, didn’t perform as well as Sony Computer Entertainment U.K. MD Fergal Gara had hoped. “It could have sold better, but it sold respectively well,” he said.

While the Harry Potter based game didn’t do gangbusters, the peripheral will see another release in Wonderbook: Diggs Nightcrawler. “I am encouraged that we have more titles coming and it may just take a little longer to get it to settle in consumer’s consciousness,” noted Gara. “It was also relatively expensive if you didn’t already have a PS3 or a Move controller. But I think as people learn it’s about more titles, then that would give it some added momentum.”

“From a marketing perspective, Wonderbook was an important step in becoming more family-focused as a platform,” added SCE UK marketing director Murray Pannell. “That is not an easy job and can take years to achieve.”

Source: MCV.com

Sony’s Howard Stringer Departing As Chairman

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Sir Howard Stringer is set to retire from Sony as the chairman in June, after the company’s annual shareholder meeting. The former CEO (first non-Japanese CEO of Sony in history) was succeeded by Kaz Hirai in April 2012.

“Howard’s achievements as CEO of Sony are innumerable, from breaking down silos and driving ‘Sony United,’ to fundamentally realigning the focus of Sony’s product development,” said Hirai in a statement.

Stringer will reportedly leave to pursue “new opportunities I’ve been presented with lately.”

Source: Financial Times

Ubisoft Issues Statement Over Whaling In Assassin’s Creed 4

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The announcement of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag drew condemnation from PETA, which said the game “glorified” the killing of whales and that whaling is “disgraceful”. Ubisoft, when contacted, gave a rather cheeky response.

“History is our playground in Assassin’s Creed. Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag is a work of fiction that depicts the real events during the golden era of pirates,” said Ubisoft in a statement. “We do not condone illegal whaling, just as we don’t condone a pirate lifestyle of poor hygiene, plundering, hijacking ships, and over-the legal-limit drunken debauchery.”

New Facebook Leaves Brands Guessing

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Facebook has announced an all-new News Feed showcasing a more visually rich interface, mimicking the aesthetic of Timeline in some ways and giving users options that amount to Reddit-like filters for different categories of content. For now, the revamp doesn’t seem to offer anything that brands and Facebook advertisers can immediately take advantage of, with early feedback that the changes in-fact seem to help users filter out ads.

The unveiling took place at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters, where Facebook presented News Feed as its new and improved ‘third pillar’ of social networking, the other two being Timeline and Graph Search. It also positioned the revamp as enabling three major new functions for users: an influx of media rich content, a way to create feeds based on interests and, in what it seemed to stress most, a “mobile-inspired” user interface. Underlining the first two benefits, Facebook highlighted how the overhaul is more visual, displaying larger thumbnail and logo images and highlighting video content.

Mark Zuckerberg said News Feed could become “the best personalized newspaper,” where users can now categorize content under headers such as music, photos, games and close friends. Facebook Software Engineer Chris Struhar described the change by saying, “Facebook is getting out of the way as much as possible.”

The reaction so far has been that the News Feed change is meant to win over users but with unclear benefits to brand pages and even advertisers on the site. In fact the current feeling is that it’s going to help people filter out more ads, a growing complaint from users. It’s a change from post-IPO Facebook, which has been primarily focused on changes and new products, such as Promoted Posts and Sponsored Stories, designed so advertisers can reach more of its audience.

As far as brand pages go, Mashable quickly outlined four ways publishers and brands can begin their journey into the new News Feed, most of it revolving around improving rich media content.

Facebook’s mobile users won’t see much change yet. In fact, the new News Feed is borrowing from features that were already part of Facebook’s mobile interface such as the scrollbar. Facebook put out a video highlighting what the changes mean.

Users are being allowed to sign up and test the new News Feed. Facebook says it plans on rolling out for everyone in the next couple of weeks.

Source: Facebook

Exclusive: The Problem With App Stores

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Digital game evangelist Oscar Clark was among game industry experts who gathered in New York in January to talk about trends in mobile games.  Among topics discussed were discoverability issues and how most mobile games are having a far harder time than they should finding players.

Moderating the panel “Create Fans, Not Users,” Clark turned attention to how Apple’s App Store and Google Play Store aren’t necessarily like traditional retail storefronts.  He said Apple and Google are more concerned about the experience people have once they adopt their operating system, in Apple’s case adopting their hardware along with it, than with promoting software in their app stores.

Sitting across a panel with Appy Entertainment and Funtactix, both game developers heavily invested in iOS, Clark set the tone early on.

“It’s not Apple’s job to sell every game a developer makes,” he told them.

In this interview after the panel, Clark discusses how developers can overcome not having their products promoted once it’s in the app store, focusing on using their own content along with tactics and tools that get players to share their experience with their games.

 

Later this month, [a]list summit turns its attention to content marketing beyond mobile and tablet games, looking at how even big publishers are adjusting to shifting gaming habits and scattered audiences.  Dubbed “The New Rules of Engagement,” the event takes place in San Francicso the same week as the Game Developers Conference, with a full day of sessions on Monday, March 25 at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel.Space is limited but registration is still open.  [a]list summit attendees also get access to the Game Connection Marketing Awards on Monday evening as well as all Game Connection America sessions on Tuesday, March 26.  For registration information, visit the [a]list summit San Francisco web site.

Adobe — Measuring Online For Real

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Adobe’s trying to push their new Marketing Cloud as a way to measure how people interact with content online. It’s pretty clever, even how they send up animal ads WITH an animal ad.

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