As World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria marches towards its fourth and final major update, Blizzard has composed a series of animated shorts detailing the legend of Emperor Shaohao. Find out how the last Emperor of Pandaria achieved enlightenment and separated Pandaria from the rest of Azeroth.
The San Paolo-based Brasil Game Show event has just signed on a few more attending companies, adding even more products that will be showcased when it takes place from October 25th through the 29th. The show expects to attract an impressive 150,000 consumers.
Along with the previously signed EA Mobile, Disney, Ubisoft, CD Projekt Red and Riot Games, the show will now host Sony, Activision and WB Games. Sony will no doubt be a huge draw with its forthcoming PlayStation 4 console, while Activision and WB Games will provide attendees a chance to check out its latest Call of Duty and Batman games.
More companies are expected to sign on before the show takes place, opening on October 25 to the games business community before opening to the public for consumers. Brazil is becoming an important market for game companies of all types, showing impressive sales gains in the last few years.
“Brazil is possibly the fastest growing games market in the world when it comes to total consumer spending. Its anticipated growth of 32 percent is way ahead of the global average of 7 percent,” said Peter Warman of Newzoo.
Source: GamesIndustry International
With several people lobbying against video game violence – particularly with Mature-rated efforts like the Call of Duty series – Activision Blizzard has decided to fight back. The publisher recently hired a lobbying group to tackle a Senate bill, one that calls on Congress to look into the effects of violent video games on children.
First introduced by West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller last year, the Violent Content Research Act was put together as a study following the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting that had taken place months before.
The group Activision hired, Akin Gump, will represent their interests through Congress, explaining the benefits of video games and how violence doesn’t have such a staggering effect in video games, whether realistic or fantasy-based.
Source: MCV
Wireless speeds are fairly good these days, but there’s always room to improve on the technology. That’s exactly what USB Implementers Forum – or USB-IF – intends to do with the introduction of a new spec project.
The company, known for maintaining USB specifications, has announced that it is developing a new wireless USB spec that will operate over Wi-Fi frequencies. As a result, it’ll be able to push multiple gigabits per second, with a huge increase in speed over standard USB.
Regarding the technology, USB-IF stated that it is “designed to allow wireless devices and docking stations to communicate over the USB protocol, without the need for a physical USB connection.” Imagine a phone or tablet or smartwatch connecting at very high speed without a cable, and you can see the utility.
The technology is still deep in development and is likely to take a year to get into fruition, with another year tacked on top to be implemented into products, but it sounds very promising.
Source: Ars Technica
Warner Bros. Games is going all out with its advertising for Batman: Arkham Origins, the latest video game tale for the Dark Knight. This week, a few lucky press outlets received the official press kit for the game — but it’s not your usual press kit.
Inside the massive, logo-embroidered box, you’ll find a silver Batarang with an LCD screen built into it. Upon activation, the screen shows the latest trailer for Batman: Arkham Origins, and in rather decent quality.
This Batarang isn’t likely to go on sale ever, but it’s great to see Warner Bros. go a different route with the game’s advertising rather than publish the game data onto a USB stick. Now if only they’d send out a few Bat hoods.
Batman: Arkham Origins releases October 25 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC and Wii U.
Source: Kotaku
Twitter, still looking for new ways to innovate with advertising without cluttering its social interface, has acquired yet another partner to help with its cause. The company has announced the acquisition of MoPub, a start-up company that specializes in assisting clients with monitoring mobile advertisements. Through this deal, a mobile advertising exchange will be available, which Twitter plans to use “to build real-time bidding into the Twitter ads platform,” according to a company rep.
This deal won’t intrude on users’ capability to contact their friends, and will instead use advertising in a subtle blending-in of sorts with the site. Said Kevin Well, VP of revenue and product, “We’ll maintain the same high quality standards that define our platform today. Our approach is to show an ad when we think it will be useful or interesting to a user, and that isn’t changing.”
Though exact financial numbers weren’t revealed, Twitter reportedly paid $350 million in stock to acquire the studio. As a result, MoPub CEO Jim Payne will join up with Twitter as the vice president of exchange.
Source: Mashable
Placecast has done rather well for itself as a mobile marketing company, with services that include launching geo-targeted ShopAlerts for subscribers through notifications. Now the company is taking another leap forward into advertising.
With the PlaceAd service, Placecast can utilize its location-based service and work with certain advertisers to deliver campaigns based on locations, such as recommending restaurants near those who use the program. Furthermore, the ad campaign will also divide into certain criteria for users, like gender, interest, operating system for the device, time of day, weather and even age.
Since mobile ad campaigns have gone through a $9 billion boost in analytics, Placecast hopes to get a rather big piece of that market.
The partnerships will include MoPub, PubMatic and Smaato to start, with publishers such as BET Networks, Flixster, MSNBC and Electronic Arts on board. Placecast’s existing advertisers will also play a huge part, including popular locations like Subway, Pizza Hut and Starbucks.
Source: TechCrunch
“Every working person’s part-time job needs to be building and maintaining their network whether they are working full-time, have a part-time position, or are unemployed.” Here’s how to get your foot in any door and climb the professional ladder.
This week’s [a]list jobs:
Activision Publishing, Manager, Global Media (Santa Monica, CA)
Cie Games, Marketing Coordinator (Greater Los Angeles Area)
Electronic Arts, Origin – Senior Campaign Marketing Manager (Redwood City, CA)
Disney Publishing Worldwide, Brand & Marketing Creative Manager (Greater Los Angeles Area)
[a]list daily is now your source for the hottest job openings for senior management and marketing in games, entertainment and social media. Check here every Wednesday for the latest openings. To see last week’s [a]list jobs click here.
It’s not easy mining for success stories among mid-size game publishers, not at the end of this console generation. That’s what makes Deep Silver’s ability to put out console hits noteworthy, and they just did it again with Saints Row IV. According to Deep Silver, marketing the game involved overcoming challenges and misconceptions set by a struggling THQ, which sold the IP to Deep Silver as it went into bankruptcy. Now Saints Row IV has topped the August charts in the UK, and it’s being pegged by analysts to do the same in the US once NPD sales figures are released. For its own part, Deep Silver recently announced that it sold-through a million units of the game.
Until Saints Row IV, Deep Silver’s claim to fame was mostly centered on its Dead Island franchise. The first-person zombie apocalypse game has built enough of a following to warrant a sequel and a free-to-play spinoff, the latter as a MOBA currently in the works called Dead Island Epidemic. Deep Silver has shown that it grasps what it takes to get a game to cut through a splintered and cluttered market, not to mention the average gamer’s scattered attention span. If they have a knack for one thing, it’s leveraging a game’s key asset — its universe — to generate awareness. Call it using owned media to own the media. The first Dead Island captivated the gaming world with a single unforgettable CG trailer. It got massive media play and gamer tongues wagging for the new IP. The rest of the industry got a reminder of how important that first impression can be.
When it came time to market Saints Row IV, the game had what Deep Silver’s other properties didn’t – notoriety. But it wasn’t exactly the ideal kind. Deep Silver’s Aubrey Norris, who heads up PR and marketing for the company, believes that while Saints Row has become a beloved franchise among gamers, what they knew about Saints Row IV wasn’t necessarily helpful.
“There were inherent challenges with Saints Row IV when we picked it up — all the turmoil from THQ’s demise and uncertainty around what was going to happen with it,” said Norris. “And then there was an expansion pack, Enter the Dominatrix, that THQ had announced before. There was a lot of confusion about whether or not Saints Row IV would be just an expansion pack, does it really justify a full price, does it really justify a full game “
Norris implied that Deep Silver knew all along that they had a full game on their hands when they were considering acquiring it. But as THQ struggled to bring in revenue, they may have been in a rush to get something to market and decided a Saints Row expansion might be the ticket.
THQ’s “Enter the Dominatrix” – it never made it outSaid Norris, “There is actually more content in Saints Row IV than there really has been in any other Saints Row game, but when you have an expansion that’s announced like that, and then sort of like difficult messaging where it sounds like THQ just took an expansion and decided to call it a game, you’re fighting against what has been done before, and you have to turn around that perception of what it is.”
“To be fair THQ actually announced that they were working on another [Saints Row],” she added “They said ok we’re working on this then shortly after that they said ok, we’re taking Enter the Dominatrix and making it into a full game, but they didn’t really announce what that was. That’s where the confusion stemmed from, and we could see that confusion kind of continuing.”
Once Deep Silver had announced the game, they set out to set peoples’ perception straight. Key to their strategy was showing rather than telling.
“It’s something that you have to prove to people,” Norris said. “It’s not something you can fix overnight. It takes time for people to see all of the stuff that you have. That requires laser focus to show people the scope of the game. We would show the game at a trade show, we’d take the mini-map and we’d unlock everything so people could see how many activities there were. We’d show the things that are new in the game, like superpowers, and really try to emphasize how different it was.”
Even there, Deep Silver had to balance showing enough without revealing so much that it would undermine their campaign.
“You can’t show everything that you have right away, otherwise what kind of marketing campaign would you have,” Norris said. “It was something that we had to overcome over time. The game very obviously is its own deal and very obviously a full game, so it wasn’t hard to overcome that, it was just a matter of time. You have to get to a certain point where you’ve shown enough.”
This is pretty crazy – a $129 Collector’s Edition with lit display caseDeep Silver faced another challenge in picking up the title. They acquired the game from THQ in January of this year, and shortly afterwards announced Saints Row IV would ship in August. It gave them eight months to run a campaign for what they hoped would be a triple-A blockbuster. According to Norris, the time they had to turn it around, from strategy and planning to execution, was about the time most publishers take to create key art.
“We did it in six weeks,” said Norris, adding, “We all put in an ungodly amount of time, sunup to sundown, every day.”
Norris said that Deep Silver also decided the game needed a slight tweak on positioning. Despite the success THQ had with it, including making the last installment Saints Row III the bestseller in the series, Deep Silver saw an opportunity to embellish on certain aspects of the franchise, especially just how over-the-top it had become.
“One thing that we noticed was that the way that Saints Row had been marketed before to a certain extent, it didn’t feel like it was playing up the things that people love about the game as much as it should have,” she said. “We wanted everything that we did to be just crazy. We wanted people to look at our key art and be like, ‘what the hell’. Everything should be fun, it should be funny, not take itself seriously.”
“I think we did a lot of things differently and we had a lot of fun with it. I’m glad that we did things our way.”
The [a]list daily had the chance to sit down with GameStop president Tony Bartel at the recent GameStop Expo in Las Vegas. The show brought together GameStop’s managers for days of training, and the highlight for the managers was hearing that they will be getting a free PlayStation 4 and a free Xbox One, along with plenty of games.
The excitement over new consoles doesn’t end with GameStop managers, though. Pre-orders have already been sold out. “We opened Xbox One for two days last week; that may happen between now and the launch date,” said Bartel. The demand has been tremendous. “The best way to think about it is we have 750,000 people on the Xbox One First To Know List, and 1.5 million on the PS4 First To Know List. Compared to supply right now, we have unlimited demand.”
Tony Bartel
Microsoft and Sony are wise to be cautious about promising consoles to retailers, and by extension, to gamers. The backlash if customers were to pre-order a new console and then not get it could be considerable. GameStop is working to get as many new consoles as it can, and there will be some units available in store as well as the pre-ordered consoles. Of course, those consoles that appear in stores will be disappearing fast. “We’ve chosen not to talk about our actual allocations because it would not be good from a competitive standpoint for us to do so,” Bartel added. “All we’ve said is it’s a significantly higher number than last launch.”
There are additional considerations with new consoles that Bartel pointed out. “The other thing that people aren’t thinking about at this point is the complexity of these devices,” Bartel said. “These are the most innovative consoles, the most innovative CE device that will be on the market this holiday season. The good news is GameStop thrives on complexity.” Bartel feels that the effort GameStop is putting in to train its associates on the new consoles will help sales.
Getting an Xbox One properly hooked up and configured for your home system isn’t as simple as older consoles. The Xbox One has HDMI in and out, and you have to configure an IR blaster to send signals to other equipment. Is this a service opportunity going forward for GameStop, assisting customers with installing these complicated new systems
“We’ve thought a lot about that” Bartel admitted. “You put together all of the multiplayer entertainment and Skype features . . . it’s not something we’ve talked about publicly, but you could easily see someone coming into the marketplace to fulfill that service.” The power and complexity of new consoles is a problem, but it is also an opportunity.
The retail environment is going to be key for successful sales of next-gen consoles. GameStop is preparing for that situation, and kiosks where you can play with an Xbox One or a PlayStation 4 are part of that. “We optimize our stores. In some stores you will have interactives that will play this, but not in every single one of our stores,” Bartel said. “Every single store will have people who have played these machines. Mainly we’re going to represent it with the knowledge of our people. You’re not going to understand the complexity by playing an interactive. To really understand exactly what you need you’re going to need to talk to someone. That’s why we’re dedicated to having the most educated team out there.”
A large part of that is GameStop TV, and Bartel explained how that makes a difference. “Every one of our stores has GameStop TV in it, which will run through trailers. We’ll have people from Sony, and Microsoft get on GameStop TV and talk,” Bartel noted. “We’ll go on there, publishers will go on there . . . we educate our associates on that. We really want to make the experience come down to that one on one relationship with the customer and our associate. That demand creation has occurred because of that relationship in the store. I will guarantee you that a lot of the initial reservations we get are from our own associates.”
On the software side of the business, midnight releases are very popular and GameStop sees that happening more often. More importantly, GameStop is optimizing that opportunity for sales. “Imagine a store that has 1,000 GTA V reservations. We’re going to be replicating that in 15 countries, where we have lines outside the stores — it’s an exciting event,” Bartel said. “Now what we’re doing is talking to every customer that comes to those midnight openings. We’ll take a sheet up and down the line and say, ‘Do you understand this comes with downloadable content This comes with a Season Pass from day one Did you know you could get this headset that’s designed with this If you like Call of Duty: Ghosts, here are all these cool characters, we can send them directly to your home for free. We want to make sure all our customers are fully informed.”
The big news from the GameStop Expo was Nintendo’s announcements of a $50 drop in the Wii U price for the Deluxe system, and the surprising unveiling of the 2DS. Bartel is excited about both of these things. “Consider the fact that the global announcement of that was done at the GameStop manager’s conference. That’s never been done in our history before, where someone’s done a global announcement of that magnitude,” Bartel pointed out. “Our managers were the first people to hear that in the entire world.”
As for Nintendo’s pricing move on the Wii U, as you’d expect Bartel is happy about it. “I think the price drop is a great idea,” Bartel agreed. It’s not just about the price move, though. “They’ve got content coming up. The Zelda bundle’s really cool, we’ll sell a lot of that in the stores. I think it’s the right thing to do. Anything to remove the barriers to purchase they can do.”
Bartel pointed out what the Wii U has to do now, which is all about software. “It’s no secret that Wii U came out of the gates very strong, exceeded our expectations, but it’s fallen off,” Bartel said. “Mainly due to the fact that there’s just not as much first-party content out there. They’ve said their big guns are coming — Kart is going to be out in 2014, and Super Smash will be coming. It’s exactly the right thing to do, and I think it’s smart planning on their part.”
Finally, Bartel was enthusiastic about Nintendo’s new 2DS. “The 2DS at $129, there was a big roar from our people when they said it. I put a lot of stock in that. I can see a lot of those going out with Pokémon.”
As for the manager’s show overall, Bartel summed it all up: “The energy level has been amazing. We have come up with one conclusion at this conference — free sells.”
