Pikmin 3 Boosts Japanese Wii U Sales

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Though the Wii U has struggled in the past, the console saw an unusually strong week in Japan thanks to the release of Pikmin 3. The Wii U’s weekly sales rose to 22,199 consoles sold last week, marking the first time the Wii U has risen above 10,000 units sold since early May. This more than doubled the sales from the previous week, which was around 8,000 units sold. The console was unable to unseat the current weekly champion, as Nintendo’s 3DS sold 29,594 units.

This sudden boom was thanks to the release of Nintendo’s heavily advertised Pikmin 3, which sold 97,720 units in its release week, bringing it to the top of the Japanese sales charts. The game’s sales were still relatively low when compared to Animal Crossing New Leaf which sold 600,000 units in its opening week. This can be partially attributed to the Wii U’s low installed base, which has now increased thanks to Pikmin‘s success.

It seems that Nintendo is moving in the right direction now, finally beginning to release a stable of games to make the new console worth owning. Nintendo will have to keep the momentum going into the next several months in order to turn their stumbling console into a success.

Source: GamesIndustry International

Diablo III May Try To Kill You In Your Sleep

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According to a new teaser trailer for the PS3 version of Diablo III, your PS3 may attempt to kill you in your sleep with the power of Diablo III. In this “trailer” a young man sleeps on the couch as an evil aura takes over the screen and tries to murder him. Spoiler alert: Thankfully, it’s stopped by a phone. Diablo III will be available on PS3 this September.  Check out the trailer below, and sleep soundly tonight!

 

Free Year Of Xbox Live For Office 365 Owners

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Microsoft has announced a new promotion aimed at moving more copies of Microsoft Office 365 and building buzz for the Xbox One. In select territories, users who purchase a one year subscription to Office 365 before September 28th will also receive a one year subscription to Xbox Live.

After subscribing to Office 365, users will receive a code which grants them a year of Xbox Live. The code must be entered before October 31st on either the Xbox website or on an Xbox 360 console to be eligible. The promotion is available to a number of countries in South America, Europe, Asia and Australia, but it is not available in the U.S.

Source: Polygon

EA’s College Football Games Will Play On

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Yesterday, the NCAA announced that it would not be renewing its license with EA to make college football games. Despite the end of their contract with the NCAA, EA has announced that they will continue making college football games, due to both a continuing relationship with the Collegiate Licensing Company, and the ability to talk to individual schools about using their likenesses and logos.

In a press release, EA Sports said: “EA Sports will continue to develop and publish college football games, but we will no longer include the NCAA names and marks. Our relationship with the Collegiate Licensing Company is strong and we are already working on a new game for next generation consoles which will launch next year and feature the college teams, conferences and all the innovation fans expect from EA Sports.”

The only change that can be expected from the game is the loss of “NCAA” from the cover of the game. EA can now add playoffs and get licensing for individual bowl games and schools. According to Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter, the bulk of EA’s licensing payments went to the Collegiate Licensing Company, not the NCAA. EA’s partnership with college football will continue, probably without an effect on sales. ” In our view, the letters NCAA add little to the game experience, and we do not expect the game to sell materially fewer units when the letters are removed,” said Pachter in an analyst’s note.

Source: Fansided

Wonderful 101 Unites For Wii U

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One of the games on which Nintendo is pinning its future Wii U hopes is Platinum Games’ The Wonderful 101. The newest trailer from yesterday’s Nintendo Direct shows players commanding the super hero force, and highlights their motives and just some of the powers they can utilize in the game. Check it out!

 

PlayStation User Hacks His Way To ‘Greatness’

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Sony’s Bid for Greatness campaign started yesterday to much fanfare, allowing users to bid their virtual trophies on gaming relics. Not one full day into the campaign and PSN user Redsoxfan95 has been accused of cheating his way to greatness. The user won a real-life version of the Black Hand Outfit from the game Killzone Shadow Fall by betting 1,050 gold trophies.

Following the auction, trophy tracking site PSN Profiles tweeted that Redsoxfan95’s profile seemed suspicious. PlayStation Lifestyle then looked at the user’s account and saw that he had gone from 6500 trophies to 14,000 trophies in one day, and had also earned 8000 trophies between November 2012 and January of this year.

Sony hasn’t taken any official action against Redsoxfan95, but PlayStation community manager Morgan Haro has said he will “look into this with the teams and we’ll examine.” The player is innocent until proven guilty, but evidence is starting to mount against him. Even more foreboding is the fact that if one player is able to break the system, more may follow. Sony will have to start monitoring the players who bid to make sure problems like this do not arise again.

Source: Polygon

Capcom’s Classic Strider Series Returns

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Today at the San Diego Comic Con, Capcom officially announced the return of one of its most requested franchises: Strider. The newest entry will be made by Double Helix studios and overseen by Strider‘s original creators. Strider will be out early next year on Steam, PS3 and 4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.

CBS Interactive ‘Playing Aggressively’ In eSports

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CBS Interactive, the corporate force behind GameSpot, has announced the hiring of Kim Rom as vice-president of eSports. The move signals the increasing importance of eSports to CBS Interactive as well as the growing impact of video. GameSpot has been using more video on its site, leveraging the native expertise with video that CBS Interactive derives from its connection with CBS. GameSpot is the creator and host of the weekly reality web series, GameCrib which follows the drama of pro-gaming eSports team TSM Snapdragon, who live together in a house in the San Francisco Bay Area.

CBSi VP of eSports Kim Rom

Danish native Kim Rom was previously chief marketing officer for SteelSeries, the Danish manufacturer of gaming peripherals and accessories. Rom’s immersion in eSports also includes several team management positions including the world-champion Counter-Strike teams and the Electronic Sports League in Denmark. He also organized the WorldCyberGames, Electronic Sports World Cup, Cyberathlete Professional League, Danish Esports League and Electronic Sports League events in Denmark.

The [a]list daily talked with CBS Interactive senior vice president and general manager of the games division David Rice and vice president of eSports Kim Rom about the move and what it means.

“eSports is the fastest growing media area in games,” said Rice. “It’s not just an opportunity, it’s a must presence for my division to be playing aggressively in eSports.” Rice sees eSports as a major growth area for CBS Interactive. “You can see some of the things we’ve done over the last six to twelve months, from hosting events with EA Sports to launching GameCrib.” GameSpot has been part of the tremendous growth in eSports popularity over the last few years, and looks to expand thatparticipation with Rom’s hire.

“I want to build on the strengths CBS Interactive already has, which are discoverability and accessibility,” said Rom. He feels that eSports has been very slowly growing for many years, but now it’s really begun to talk off with the popularity of streaming. Working with the enormous audience that GameSpot already draws will make it even easier to bring in new eSports fans, Rom believes, and it’s not just in North America.

“The global reach of eSports is due to the very nature of what it is,” Rom said. “The digital culture and gaming are global.” Rice explained more about the nature of the global eSport audience. “The competitions can be global,” said Rice. “It’s not like FIFA in Europe or the NFL in the US, where you physically have to be present to watch them.” Because most of the audience is online, it lends itself to a global. You can watch your favorite athlete whether he’s in Chile or Taiwan, Rice noted.

Shows like GameCrib are a natural part of eSports, Rice feels. “It’s mirroring the evolution of sports in general,” Rice said. “Sports at the very beginning you had to watch in a stadium, then came broadcast television. You started creating stories because video is the richest medium out there. Look at ESPN, the majority of the programming there is around the sport rather than the sport itself. There are great stories behind all of these teams.” GameCrib has drawn a large audience, and the second season is under way. “It’s expanding this amazing passion that people have, not for game play but for game competition,” Rice said.

Expanding the eSports audience requires that people understand what’s going on in the game, especially when the game is complex like League of Legends. “Absolutely,” said Rom. “We will be focusing on making it accessible and easy to digest, making it entertaining. The games are becoming much more accessible. I think you’re going to see games like League of Legends become easier to understand.” Developers have an incentive to make it easier to understand what’s happening in the game for people watching. That’s already been happening with games like Call of Duty, according to Rice, and we’ll likely see more it given the growing importance of eSports.

The impact of next-gen consoles is more as a new media outlet for streaming video than as a source for competitions. Rice points out that eSports are mostly PC-based, not console-based. But next-gen consoles are pushing media, and Rice sees them as a great place for gamers to watch eSports and programming like GameCrib. “Kim understands the eSports audience and can take advantage of the CBS strengths around premium programming and bring that to the new consoles when they get launched,” Rice said. “You’ll be seeing us working very closely with Sony and Microsoft in terms of getting programming for those new platforms.”

The explosive growth of eSports over the last few years is not over, according to Rice. “I think we’re going to see continued growth,” said Rice. “New consoles are going to offer a whole bunch of new distribution possibilities. A year or two ago it didn’t make economic sense for folks like me to create the human interest stories. Now that you’ve got an audience in the millions and millions, and the views in the hundreds of millions of streams, it makes it viable to be creating all this premium programming like GameCrib. In my mind we’re creating an entertainment genre that will be on the same scale as movies or sports. You’ll see the time spent on game play and game-related programming rival the time spent on watching sports.”

Where are the advertisers Will they be looking at reaching these massive audiences “The 18-34 year old male is the most difficult audience to target for advertisers,” said Rice. “The number one way to target them is gamers. In a lot of our shows what you’ll see from a monetization perspective is brand integration. The brands don’t just want to be at the front of the pre-roll, they want to be integrated into the content itself.”

GameSpot will continue to push forward into video programming with eSports, premium programming and more content on the site. The growth of video game content looks to continue at the same rapid pace for some time to come, and in the process it is transforming consumer and business sites alike.

Women Driving The Comic Con Conversation

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A recent study administered by Networked Insights shows that women are driving the majority of social media conversation about this week’s Comic Con. While it’s often perceived that comic book fans are predominantly male (remember The Big Bang Theory episode about women in a comic book shop), the study seems to show a shift in industry standards, as well as how the fan convention has evolved over the years.

For the company’s study, Networked Insights analyzed more than 3.5 million conversations on social media, using their marketing analytical platform SocialSense.

The noteworthy takeaways from the study show that there has been a definite shift in audience for the wildly popular entertainment event. In total, there have been more than 3.5 million conversations surrounding Comic Con on social in the past month, 54 percent of those conversations are from women, while 46 percent are from men.

SDCC topics with strong female engagement include,The X-Files, Marvel’s S.H.I.E.L.D., and The Walking Dead. Most Comic Con fans are most excited about Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Divergent and the Veronica Mars movie.

There is a split between movies driven by strong social followings versus marketing pushes by the studios. Popular titles driven by significant organic social conversation are Catching Fire, Ender’s Game, The LEGO Movie, 300:  Rise of an Empire, The World’s End and the Veronica Mars movie. Titles being driven primarily by studio marketing include: Captain America: The Winter Soldier and The Amazing Spider Man 2.

What are you most looking forward to at Comic Con Share in the comments below! 

Source: Comicbook.com

 

‘Puppeteer’ Brings Theater To Life

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Sony Japan Studio’s Puppeteer is a game with a lot of charm. With a handmade aesthetic and armed with scissors, a daring puppet takes part in a 2D platforming adventure led by the player as the puppeteer. Puppeteer will be released for the PS3 this September.