The video game publishing giant’s share price reached an all-time high recently of just above $26 a share–and some experts are optimistic about the company’s potential to grow even further.
Another video game company whose share price reached an all-time high recently was Electronic Arts, whose stock value doubled in the past twelve months.
It won’t be long until we learn more about Activision Blizzard’s financial performance, as the company will report earnings for its latest financial quarter on August 4.
Jade Raymond Joins EA to Work on Star Wars: That’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. Electronic Arts announced this week that the veteran Ubisoft producer Jade Raymond had joined the company to establish a new studio called Motive Studios. Her first task is a big one: working on Visceral’s new Star Wars project.
THE OTHER STUFF:
How does Daniel Radcliffe feel about playing Sam Houser in the BBC’s upcoming Grand Theft Auto movie? Hint: he enjoyed it. Read this interview at IGN to find out.
Would you ever get a gaming tattoo? These people would. Check out this massive gallery of Gears of War-themed tattoos.
Some Star Citizen backers want refunds. That’s the short summary of this deep dive feature by PC Gamer about the Kickstarter success story and some of the concerns being raised by backers. The full story has a few angles and is very deep; read it all here.
“We were all on Adderall,” a competitive gamer says as part of this wide-ranging Daily Dot feature about professional Counter-Strike and more.
The Last Guardian co-developer Gen Design has updated its website with a bunch of beautiful-looking concept art. Really, it’s awesome. Check it out here.
Here’s something nice. Bethesda has announced plans to support a handful of charity efforts at QuakeCon later this summer, including the Red Cross, Extra Life, Take This, and others. Together, it amounts to the largest charity initiative in QuakeCon history. Right on! Get all the details here.
Gaijin Entertainment has shared some new backstory details for its upcoming Mad Max-style free-to-play vehicular combat PC game Crossout. Here’s the story so far: “In 2021 a mysterious viral epidemic known as the Crossout epidemic swept the planet Crossout triggered a human extinction event. Entire populations disappeared almost overnight.
“Those who didn’t die immediately were plagued by hallucinations and headaches. Many people went mad. Some looked to suicide to escape their degenerative state. The source of the disease was unknown, but its effects were everywhere. Cities that were once vibrant social and economic beacons of humanity were left ravaged and deserted.”
Wow. Wow. Wow. This Destiny cosplay is simply stunning. Check out the awesome images over at MTV, where you’ll also find some amazing Mass Effect cosplay from Comic-Con.
What game does Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance director Kenji Saito want to make next? According to recent comments, he would love to dive into a new Kill La Kill or Berserk game. Get the full story here.
Earthbound director Shigesato Itoi has written a moving post about Satoru Iwata, his longtime friend and colleague who died earlier this week. “You always put yourself last, after you’d finished helping everyone else. You were so generous as a friend…”
Here’s a cool trailer for an exciting-looking social god game called Crest. The video is inspired by Frank Herbert’s “Golden Path” theory from the Dune universe. Check it out below. You can also buy an Early Access version of the game today for $5.
GamesIndustry International has an excellent, wide-ranging interview with Ubisoft exec Alain Corre that covers topics such as emerging markets, virtual reality, and more. Read it here.
Sony will hold a press conference in China on July 29 to talk about plans for the PlayStation 4 (and other systems) in the country. China, with its countless millions of gamers, is a potentially lucrative market. But censorship concerns still linger.
Uh-oh. Due to concerns raised by the New Zealand governement about salaries, DayZ creator Dean “Rocket” Hall may have to close or relocate his office in Dunedin. Get the full story here. You can also read an in-depth interview with Hall here.
Wow, this Bloodborne statue is really, really nice-looking. Check out a full gallery of images over at Polygon. It’s well worth it.
The new Hitman movie, Agent 47, doesn’t arrive until August, but you can learn lots more about it right now directly from the actors. Watch this interview at IGN to get the full scoop.
Release dates for Kickstarter games frequently turn out to be inaccurate. Keeping that in mind, Ys Net is currently aiming for a December 2017 launch. Due to exceeding $2 million, a number of stretch goals have been met that will expand the game’s scope to include skill tree and rapport system, as well as additional quests and expanded areas.
Developer Double Fine’s latest adventure game, Broken Age, had a very successful Kickstarter campaign, raising over $3.3 million. But the game quickly became more expensive than that during development, and Double Fine had to put a lot more money into it.
Now, a couple months after Broken Age Act 2’s release, the studio has revealed that the game is on track to just barely make back that money.
In the final installment of the Broken Age development documentary (which you can watch above), studio head Tim Schafer explained that the cost to make the game far exceeded the amount that the Kickstarter brought in. This resulted in Schafer and his team having to shift his expectations and predict that the game wouldn’t turn a profit.
“My expectation with Broken Age in the end was just to break even,” he said in the video. “With Kickstarter, the risk is gone of losing money on it, so you know you’ve broken even if you just make the game to that amount of money. But we made it [for], like, twice as much almost as we got in. Or more. So we will just about make that back.”
But even though Broken Age won’t be a huge financial success, Schafer said that crowdfunding was a good experience and it allowed Double Fine to make games without turning to publishers. “The biggest change is that we don’t need the publishers anymore,” he explained. “It used to be [that there was] no money in the world outside of publishers, and I think crowdfunding is here to stay, I think it’s hopefully going to grow. In my dream world it would be big enough to fund AAA games and it would be the way we fund all games going forward.”
Broken Age Act 2 launched in April, more than a year after the first act. The studio split the game into two parts and sold the first half to help fund development of the second. You can read our review of Act 1 here and Act 2 here.
With just under two months still to go before he takes over The Late Show from David Letterman, Stephen Colbert apparently doesn’t have much to do with his time. So, perhaps taking a cue from the current Humble Bundle, he decided to make a game.
Not to be outdone by other games with long titles, Colbert’s is called The Late Show With Stephen Colbert: Escape From the Man-Sized Cabinet. It’s a text-based adventure game where, as the title might possibly suggest, Colbert attempts to escape from a cabinet he gets locked inside of. It would ruin things to spoil any of the jokes or story beyond that, but suffice it to say it’s worth at least a few minutes of your time. You can play it right in your browser at The Late Show‘s website.
The game runs on the open-source Twine engine, which, as we’ve covered in the past, is an easy-to-use tool that lets almost anyone create a game. How much of a hand Colbert himself had in actually crafting the game is unclear, though he’s happy to take credit for it on Twitter.
Colbert’s iteration of The Late Show makes its debut on CBS on September 8.
Full disclosure: CBS is the parent company of GameSpot.
The PS3 has around 40 games on sale, including BioShock Infinite for only $8 (80 percent off), Crysis 2 for $5 (75 percent off), and Mass Effect 3 for $6 (70 percent off). You can also pick up Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and its DLC for only $7.50, a discount of 75 percent.
It’s not the first Destiny music drum cover we’ve seen, but enthusiast Andrew Fleming’s new version of “Sepiks Prime” off the game’s soundtrack is definitely impressive. It’s an orchestra-heavy track to begin with, so you might not think it lends itself well to this kind of remix, but it actually works really well.
The video has some nice production values as well with multiple camera angles and good quality overall. Take a look at the video below and keep reading for a quick interview with Fleming about it.
As you might have guessed, Fleming is a hardcore Destiny player. Other members of his Destiny clan knew he was a drummer and said he should do a drum cover. Fleming liked the idea and ran with it.
But how did he decide on the song “Sepiks Prime?”
“So I was going through the Destiny soundtrack and Sepiks Prime is just catchy and seemed well known since it’s the first Strike most people play,” Fleming explained.
Shenmue 3 has broken a Kickstarter record to become highest crowdfunded video game on the platform.
At the time of writing, the Shenmue 3 campaign has generated $5,553,470, beating the $5,545,991 that Castlevania: Symphony of the Night designer Koji Igarashi accrued for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.
When placed alongside all Kickstarter projects, Shenmue 3 is the eighth most funded project, behind The Veronica Mars Movie Project ($5,702,153), Ouya ($8,596,474), and Exploding Kittens ($8,782,571).
The top three most funded projects are Pebble, at No.3 with $10,266,845, the Coolest Cooler at No.2 with $13,285,226, and Pebble Time at $20,338,986.
Shenmue series creator, Yu Suzuki, is set to host a live event to mark the ending of the Kickstarter campaign at 4 PM PST today (12 AM UK time). He will be joined by various key members of the development team.
Xbox executive Aaron Greenberg writes on Twitter that the Xbox One actually outsold the PS4 during the week of E3 2015. Xbox One sales rose a healthy 79 percent compared to the week of E3 2014.
For June overall, Xbox One sales in 2015 jumped 51 percent compared to 2014.
In other Xbox-related news, Microsoft has announced active global Xbox Live users (Xbox One and Xbox 360) rose 22 percent during June.
Meanwhile, Xbox One backwards compatibility is off to a quick start. Since it launched to Preview Program members on June 15, users have spent more than 30 million minutes playing Xbox 360 games on Xbox One, Microsoft said. Xbox One backwards compatibility will roll out for all users this fall, at which time there will be “hundreds” of supported games beyond the initial lineup.
Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 10 features built-in support for the company’s Siri-like, Halo-inspired digital assistant called Cortana. So what happens when you ask Cortana what she thinks of Halo?
