“I just made $12 million while you were laughing at this picture.”

Modern Warfare 3 to ship with a subscription service called Call of Duty: Elite. Well, then.

This is so industry-asploding money-printing what-were-movies-again big that some news sources you don’t expect to see linked to on my silly little blog dedicated to amusing EA executives commented on this. Such as, oh:

Wall Street Journal:

First of all, it’s important to keep something in mind: People don’t like to give up more of their money. This is just a general rule.

But in addition to the expected “gaming companies are greedy” comments, there is a lot of confusion about exactly what the new service will involve – and just what people will get for their money.

That disconnect is coming in large part because “Call of Duty” maker Activision doesn’t seem to have ironed out all the details yet. Activision executives told The Wall Street Journal’s Nick Wingfield that they haven’t yet figured out how much to charge for the service – although the Journal reports that it will likely be $7.99 or less. They have said parts of the service will be free, but there are conflicting reports about what exactly those free parts will include.

Forbes:

…like yet another company trying to overcapitalize on social networking BS, as I can speak for the majority of Call of Duty players when I say I don’t give a shit about the interests of the people I’m virtually shooting. And how can portions of a monthly paid subscription service be free? That sentence doesn’t even make sense.

The Guardian:

The driving force behind Elite is clear – the desire to gain revenue from the vast numbers of gamers who regularly play Call of Duty titles online for free. According to Activision, 20 million people play Call of Duty online every month – more than seven million every day.

This number represents a vast source of untapped income – and in an era of declining retail sales for games, identifying new streams of digital revenue is becoming vitally important. The problem is, attempting to install a subscription charge on online multiplayer activity would meet with massive resistance from gamers, who have always enjoyed free access to online functionality with shooter games.

Gamasutra (ok, I link to them all the time but it’s a good instanalysis):

While he’s something of a lightning rod among gamers, it’s worth noting that Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter was the first to forecast this service last year. And while he says he’s still sussing out the particulars, he doesn’t expect Activision to shove Elite down players’ throats out of the gate.

“I think Activision hopes to get up to 1 million subscribers this year,” says Pachter. “From there, they hope to get it up to 3 million next year, then up to 5 million. Over time, they’d like to migrate everyone over to it.”

One million subscribers isn’t exactly pocket change, but with a player base of 7 million users, it’s achievable – and it’s something that would be more than a blip on the company’s earnings.

“I think they’re in this for the long run,” he says. “For their next [fiscal] year, 1 million subscribers [to Elite] is about an added 3 cents per share. It’s meaningful, but who knows ultimately if they’ll end up with 1 million or 10 million.”

If those numbers do start to increase, look for the company to expand the Elite model to other notable franchises. And the most obvious places to do so are StarCraft and Bungie’s upcoming title.

So while the mainstream media ties itself up in knots over OMG WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN, those of us who have followed the game industry follies for a while, including Activision treating the people who actually made Call of Duty a billion-dollar franchise with all the gratitude due the indentured servants they clearly believe them to be, this isn’t exactly a surprise. After all, here’s Bobby Kotick from a few years ago:

[The games we passed on] don’t have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million dollar franchises. … I think, generally, our strategy has been to focus… on the products that have those attributes and characteristics, the products that we know [that] if we release them today, we’ll be working on them 10 years from now.

How do you exploit people playing your game online for free? Well, charge them, duh.

Read more from the original source:
Call Of Booty: We’re So Money

Cryptic acquired by Chinese MMO developer Perfect World for $50m. Atari originally purchased Cryptic for $28m plus $48m in bonuses.

In other news, I bet I just broke everyone’s RSS feed!

Read more from the original source:
隐秘

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play has been missing a killer app, that one game that makes the phone more exciting than competing handsets. That has changed with the news that the Android version of the ultra-popular Minecraft will be coming to that handset first, as reported by Gamasutra, complete with an optimized experience for the hardware’s PlayStation-style buttons.

Read the comments on this post

Originally posted here:
Xperia Play gets killer app: Minecraft is a timed exclusive

Originally posted here:
Social Games: not actually social at all, and probably past their peak.

Lord British, last seen in Ultima Online 3,647 days ago.

Do you have $3.8 million lying about? Richard Garriott wants to talk to YOU.

Lord British’s New Britannia (working title) will be a social networking game built around Garriott’s famous alter ego, which he wholly owns – as opposed to the Ultima universe, which Electronic Arts has the rights to.

Any actual description of “what a social networking game built around a guy who was in those Ultima games” entails was left as an exercise for someone (possibly the person(s) who get stuck with actually making Lord British’s New Britannia once the all important “Getting rights to the name”, “Getting $3.8 million in funding”, and “Turning my castle into a spaceship that can orbit the greater Austin area and rain down holy fire upon the just and the unjust” steps have been completed). However, Garriott had this solitary tidbit:

…the virtual world game is not just an ultra-light MMO shopped on social media. I think that would be a failure.

So, you know, it’ll have a lot of depth. He said so. Right there. Or it’ll be a failure. It’ll be one of those.

Meanwhile, nothing has been heard of a related project, SEE Entertainment’s Planet: Michael.

View original post here:
Lord British To Return To His Long Absent Throne, Possibly Look Around, Then Leave Again

Jack Emmert to take over as CEO of Cryptic.

…of our days, and our nights…

As a colleague, I am sad to see John go, but our vision remains clear,” says Emmert. “Cryptic continues to develop great gaming experiences while ensuring the success of its current projects, Champions Online: Free for All, Star Trek Online and Neverwinter.

Of course, most gamers already thought Emmert was in charge, since ever since Bill Roper’s departure he was by far Cryptic’s most visible employee – but he has moved swiftly in the space of a year from Creative Director to COO to CEO. Next stop – orbital mind control lasers.

Some of Emmert’s greatest hits:

“After the first month, you lose two-thirds of your players, but the ones who stay – you can’t get rid of them.”

“No nerf ever caused a statistical drop in user base.”

“You’re seeing an absolutely catastrophic evolution in the MMO industry, and as a fan, you should be terrified.”

See the original post here:
Emmert In Charge

For some reason, this image comes up in Google Image Search for “Bill Roper”.

Bill Roper, of Blizzard/Flagship/Cryptic/his living room fame, gives a wide ranging interview to Gamasutra about what it was like to go from Diablo to a game considerably less successful.

But the backlash, honestly, was staggering. And I think it was, to me, the level and the depth of the backlash. It wasn’t just like, “Hey, I played this game, and I didn’t like it. It sucked. I hate this game. This game is the worst thing ever.” Okay, you didn’t like the game and all that. But it got to the point where there were personal attacks on developers.It seems like the layers, one is like, “Did you like the game or not?” You could say, “I think this game is horrible.” Perfectly fine. “Hey, I think your company is crap because it makes bad games.” Okay, you know, whatever.

But then I started to get… It got to this level where at one point, on our forums, at the same time… Kind of the backend of this all happening is I was actually going through a divorce at the same time, and somebody found that out and posted on the forums, you know, “Well, I’m sure that his wife is leaving him because he lied about the size of his penis like he lied to us.” I’m like, “Oh my… Really? Really? This is where we’ve come.”

The Internet, folks, we’ll be here all week.

Discuss: And imagine the ‘fan’ reaction if Roper’s first name was Susan.

Go here to see the original:
Bill Roper Needs Work

There is an upcoming book called Farmville for Dummies. Let’s all sit back for a moment and bask in the fact we live in a world where such a work exists.

The book may seem like an easy punchline to a joke no one is telling, but coauthor Kyle Orland has been writing about games for a long time, for publications such as Joystiq, NPR, and now Gamasutra. We asked him to justify the existence of the book and, surprisingly, he has some compelling arguments.

Read the comments on this post

Go here to see the original:
Farmville for Dummies? Coming soon to a bookstore near you

EA CFO Eric Brown, in a conference call to investors, said EA CFO Eric Brown didn’t know what he was talking about when he said Old Republic was EA’s largest project ever.

“At half a million subscribers, the game is substantially profitable, but it’s not the kind of thing we would write home about,” EA CFO Eric Brown said in a Gamasutra-attended conference call accompanying EA’s third quarter fiscal earnings report today. “Anything north of a million subscribers, it’s a very profitable business.”

Brown stressed to investors that the costs being incurred now would “essentially turn on a dime” to profits the day the title ships, a date still targeted for sometime after March but before the end of calendar 2012

This, of course, contradicts reports from respected analysts and somewhat less respected bloggers that Old Republic would require 1m subscribers for a profit and 2m to be truly successful. Brown’s response: don’t believe a word those crazy Interweb people say!

“There’s been a fair amount of talk on various blogs describing [Old Republic development] spends that are vastly higher than anything we’ve ever put in place,” he said.

“Don’t read gamer blogs as having any substance. They bring a chuckle, but they also bring a frustration for those that are being responsible with the management of EA’s R&D dollars.”

We at Broken Toys take a simple joy in the fact that we can bring substance-free humor to the desktops of EA executives everywhere.

Discuss: And by we, I mean myself, the lint in my pocket, and people on my IM list.

Read the original, in all its glory, right here:
EA CFO Scales Back Old Republic Expectations, Thinks Gamer Blogs Are Funny