May the 4th has become a day of celebration among Star Wars fans, but the gatherings of Jedi wannabes does not please the Emperor. To that end, he’s released this attack ad to get the “truth” out about Jedi and the Rebellion.
Check out the suave side of executioner Mondo Zappa by meeting the “Mondo Girls” Natalia, Scarlett, Koharu. Mondo also goes to the moon; Killer is Dead is quickly shaping up to be a mix of James Bond and every anime trope ever.
En Masse Entertainment is celebrating the first anniversary of TERA, which has seen over 1.5 million registered users during the past 12 months. Along with various celebrations in-game, including fan-art submissions, special raffle items and in-game mystery boxes, En Masse also released an infographic of the game’s various statistics.
Google has hired Noah Falstein as the company’s Chief Game Designer. His experience with gaming includes being a project engineer at Milton Bradley, working as a project lead at Williams making arcade games and many years at LucasArts as a project leader.
Falstein recently ran his own consulting firm called The Inspiracy consulting for clients including Disney, Dreamworks, and Microsoft. It is thought that he has been brought on to lead Google’s internal design studio and might be concentrating on serious games.
Source: TechCrunch.com
Niko Partners says that the Chinese online PC market will see $11.9 billion in sales this year. They note that the Chinese PC online gaming market has grown from $10 million in 2001 to more than $9 billion by 2012.
The growth of the PC market in China is expected to slow, but is expected to still add more than $2 billion to its revenue total in each of the next five years. Shooters and free-to-play hardcore games like League of Legends have become more popular in China and have helped put life into the Internet cafe sector.
Box of Awesome announced that it has acquired Swapit. The combination of the physical discovery platform for kids with the kids digital and trading network in the U.K. will be known as SuperAwesome.
“With a combined audience of over 7.3M 6-16yr olds, we are now by far the leading discovery platform for kids and teens in the UK. The 6-16 generation is extremely hard to reach, being highly fragmented across multiple channels and multiple platforms. It needs a discovery platform to match. Our reach now extends across physical (Box of Awesome, Box of OMG, Swapit), digital (our display and mobile ad networks) and research (our accolade-winning Youthscape reports),” said Dylan Collins, founder of Box of Awesome and CEO SuperAwesome. “We’ve gotten to know the superb Swapit team over a number of months and we’ve clearly got a shared vision about where the future of kids discovery is going. It’s a privilege to be able to work with them to take the SuperAwesome group to the next level.”
“With SuperAwesome we’ve created the biggest kids and teens discovery platform in the UK which is safe, compliant and effective,” said Tom Impallomeni, CEO Swapit. “I think our awesome customers, who include the likes of Warner Bros, Topps, Activision and Random House (amongst many others) are testament to this. For many brands, we are already a required part of their marketing mix.”
Trion Worlds announced that Defiance has reached 1 million registrations since releasing one month ago. The company further announced that players have killed over 500 million hellbugs, driven 50 million virtual miles on the game’s ATVs and battled across 1 million fallen alien artifact treasure troves known as Arkfalls.
“We’re incredibly proud that after five years of development, we are bringing this ambitious project to life,” said Trion’s Nathan Richardsson. “The game launch is just the beginning of a truly unique entertainment experience.”
Defiance is a cross media tie-in with the Syfy TV show of the same name. The first episode of Defiance was the network’s most-watched scripted premiere since 2006.
Nielsen has announced a pilot effort for TV/video “program” content on the Internet. Called Nielsen Digital Program Ratings, this will run from May until July.
The networks that have signed on include A&E, ABC, AOL, CBS, The CW, Discovery Communications, Fox, NBC and Univision. Nielsen says this will provide similar overnight audience data, including unique audience, stream counts and reach by age and gender for TV programming viewed online as Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings.
Nielsen Digital Program Ratings and Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings will have a “holistic” view of the online and TV audience for both programming and advertising content. If all goes well, Nielsen Digital Program Ratings will launch later this year when the “weighting” of video and reporting of TV-comparable ratings is finished.
“As a companion product to Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings, Nielsen Digital Program Ratings will enable clients to better understand the online audience for their programming by harnessing the same methodology Nielsen already uses to measure the audience for related advertising,” stated Eric Solomon, senior vice president for global digital audience measurement at Nielsen.
Source: MediaPost.com
Prof Tim Berners-Lee developed the first ever web page while working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) in the 1990s. Now, he’s recreating the archival web page for to allow people to better understand the hardware and software that made the first browsing experience possible.
“I want my children to be able to understand the significance of this point in time: the web is already so ubiquitous – so, well, normal – that one risks failing to see how fundamentally it has changed,” said Dan Noyes, the web manager for Cern’s communication group. “We are in a unique moment where we can still switch on the first web server and experience it. We want to document and preserve that.”
The overall aim of the project hosted at info.CERN.ch by Cern is to preserve all the digital assets associated with the inception of the web, with a searchable archive for those using the Internet in the future who will take it for granted. April 30 is the day the world wide web entered the public domain for the first time.
Source: Telegraph.co.uk
The NPD Group is reporting that 72 percent of U.S. gamers report gaming online, 5 percent more than last year. Their Online Gaming 2013 report also says that the amount of time gaming in general was up 9 percent, and for gaming online was up 6 percent.
“Besides the size of the gaming audience and sales performance, one of the key metrics for the industry to watch is the time gamers spend playing games,” said Liam Callahan, industry analyst, The NPD Group. “This study found that the overall amount of time spent gaming, and time spent gaming online increased across virtually every type of device, and notably so, versus 2012.”
PC is the favored platform for online gaming, with 68 percent reporting that they use a PC for online gaming, though mobile devices are catching up and saw a 12 percent point increase since last year. Despite these trends, 62 percent of online gamers said they prefer to acquire games in a physical format when they can rather than digital.
“While many gamers prefer games in the physical format, the increased availability of digital content paired with a greater amount of connected devices has driven an increase in the number of consumers going online to access the content they want,” said Callahan.
