Mass Effect is looking so sweet! (RPG fans, find a 15 minute preview video here.)
EA gobbles up the exclusive worldwide rights to video games based on Hasbro products like Monopoly, Scrabble, Nerf, etc. And Hasbro will be able to make toys based on EA properties (not too many possibilities immediately spring to mind.)
The GameTap ‘Read’ section has launched, and features several high-profile journalists from GameSpot, IGN, Ziff Davis and more. SimonC points out that this makes GameTap one of the larger editorial sites out there.
Warhawk will be released simultaneously on the PlayStation Store for $40 and in retail for $60 (bundled with a manual and bluetooth headset.) Even with the headset bundle, I’m surprised that retailers are OK with this. I don’t intend this to be a snide comment, but: perhaps PSN penetration is so poor that retailers don’t currently consider it a threat?
EA’s stake in Ubisoft has doubled to 25% of voting shares. The Guillemot family owns less than EA, at 13.4% percent of the company, and 19.2% percent of its votes. Don’t know when EA will finally gobble up Ubi, but I’d be willing to bet that there’s also a few casual game companies on their radar (I’ll refrain from saying which). Wave of acquisitions, here we come.
This article is about a random ARG of little interest to me. What caught my attention was the sentence: “there have been several game-jacking and/or unofficial fan sites.” Not something I’ve thought about before. What happens when users attempt to inject their own content into an ongoing ARG? Do ARG creators call them out (and risk weakening the illusion of reality around their games?) Or do they attempt to absorb and incorporate the most creative “game-jacking” attempts (which would inevitably encourage more of them, and which might complicate or even destroy various major iniatives of the ARG makers themselves?)
If you’ve ever played Pokemon, this comic is hysterical. 🙂
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