The Xbox 360 port of Minecraft was the most popular XBLA game during the one week period beginning May 7, according to Major Nelson. Minecraft also pulled into a respectable third on the overall list of most-played 360 games last week, behind only the ludicrously popular Activision FPS duo of Call of Duty: Black Ops and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.
Originally released on the PC by Swedish developer Mojang in alpha form way back in 2009 before having the full version become available in November of last year, the world-building title was brought over to Arcade by 4J Studios with the help of its original developer and Microsoft. The port eclipsed the one million sold mark on May 14, at which point players had sunk in excess of 5.2 million hours into the game.
Source: Major Nelson
It has become commonplace in the video game industry for everyone with a platform for conveying opinions to announce the imminent death of one thing the moment anything that is competitive gains any real measure of popularity. Read the headlines any given week and you’re likely to hear about how a certain platform or company — or any other “thing” imaginable, for that matter — has been placed on the endangered species list by a party that is a position to directly benefit from its eventual extinction.
Nintendo says cheap smartphone games are strip mining the industry dry. Rovio counters that console makers are dead men, er, companies, walking. Some obscure developer of cheap phone games rips the Vita here. A creator of social or browser games says the traditional big-budget game development community that once scorned him is now a crumbling empire there. And round and round it goes. Where it stops, nobody knows. But it’s certainly not at the retail versus digital argument.
That’s why current Electronic Arts President and COO and former Microsoft Interactive Entertainment Business CVP Peter Moore’s words at last week’s Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2012 Global Technology Conference felt somewhat out of the ordinary. Moore was more than happy to boast of EA’s $1.2 billion in digital revenues for fiscal year ending March 2012 that buoyed the company to a record total revenue of $4.2 billion in revenues.
Joy Ride Turbo will release on May 23 for 800 MSP, according to Major Nelson. Developed by Vancouver-based Big Park Studios, the kart racer is a follow-up to 2010′s Kinect Joy Ride. Unlike the original, the forced-induction sequel is played with a traditional controller. More details on the racer can be found here.
Source: Major Nelson
When the Xbox 360 launched in November of 2005, the console wars were largely viewed as a two-horse race. Nintendo’s Wii was an afterthought in the minds of most industry analysts and executives — a belief that would be proven correct in terms of relevance among the traditional gamer audience, but so very wrong on the sales front, as it marched on to over 95 million units sold worldwide as of March. Rather, both popular and informed opinion said the battle would be fought between Sony and Microsoft.
Sony had spent the past 10 years decimating Nintendo and Sega’s positions as dominant forces in the industry by appealing to an older consumer and making the PlayStation 2 the best-selling home console of all time with more than 150 million consoles sold as of the end of last year. After having replaced the name “Nintendo” with “PlayStation” as a synonym for video games, the Tokyo, Japan-based electronics empire was feeling as invincible as Superman. With Nintendo having done its damnedest to torpedo its relationships with third-party developers and the software behemoth in Washington looking like the proverbial babe in the woods when it came the console biz, Sony could see no kryptonite in sight. Of course, few outsiders did either at the time.
Had it not allowed the pride that success brought to convince it that sinking so much of its PS and PS2 profits into the foolhardy enterprise of out-muscling the Xbox 360 with the PlayStation 3, however, it might have foreseen that it was on a path to learn the same hard and humbling lesson it had itself taught Nintendo. Instead, it produced an expensively priced machine that arrived a year late to the party and quickly built a reputation, fair or not, of being notoriously difficult to develop for. Geekwire reports that when he spoke to the Northwest Entrepreneur Network last week, Robbie Bach, former president of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, highlighted how Sony’s miscalculations and mismanaged generational shift opened the door for the 360 to become the hugely profitable success that it is today.
“When you’re doing a startup, you need friends. It’s just the way life works,” Bach said. “It turned out we were able to convince retailers and publishers like Activision, Electronic Arts and others, that it was a good thing for Microsoft to be successful, because if we were not successful, the only game in town was Sony. Being dependent on somebody else was bad for them, and so they supported us disproportionately to what they should have, mathematically.”
Update: Polytron, following up on Mojang’s reporting of Minecraft figures based off of Xbox Live leaderboards, tapped Microsoft on the shoulder and questioned them as to whether or not the leaderboards are a legitimate gauge for sales numbers. As it turns out, just as the Fez developer had earlier alleged, they are not. “Hey so, Microsoft got back to us about sale[s] figures,” the studio tweeted. “Turns out the leaderboards ARE inaccurate!”
Quickly following that news was another statement by the dev elucidating that Microsoft showed no favoritism towards Mojang in terms of handing out sales data. But that doesn’t mean the studio believes the entire playing field is even. Earlier, Polytron expressed its discontent over Minecraft being granted the ability to receive free post-release content. Sticking to its guns, Polytron stated that favoritism was shown by the publisher in the way of “the free updates.”
Still, Poly, in a tweet directed at the media, called upon caps lock to underscore its belief that Microsoft’s actions were “NOT A SCANDAL.” It should also be noted that Polytron extended public congratulations to Markus Persson for having a successful launch on XBLA. Further details can be found in the primary story below.
Original Story: An hour was all it took. Within 60 minutes of Swedish developer Mojang’s XBLA port of its mega-popular PC world-building title Minecraft releasing yesterday, a profit had been turned. Studio owner Markus “Notch” Persson relayed the news over Twitter earlier today: “Well then. Saw the official sales numbers for the first 24 hours of Minecraft Xbox 360, and it’s very, very good. Profitable in an hour.”
After selling in excess of five million copies to date over on the PC, according to IGN, Minecraft managed to smash “all previous digital sales records” on the Xbox 360, Microsoft revealed in a statement that surfaced shortly after Persson’s tweet. Microsoft, who published the Arcade version of the game, said that no other release in the history of the platform had garnered as many sales as Mojang’s debut effort did in its first 24 hours of availability. The publisher declined, however, to identify just how many individual sales that record equated to.
Yet not everyone was silent on that matter. After having some public discussion over Microsoft’s policies regarding the divulging of precise sales numbers to developers with Fez developer Polytron, Persson gave a ballpark figure. “It seems it sold over 400k copies in 24 [hours],” he tweeted. The creative brain behind Minecraft apparently had to rely on leaderboard participation in order to extrapolate that number, a method which he admitted “might be off.” If his calculations are correct, that would mean the port, developed in part by 4J Studios, has already brought in more than $8 million USD in revenue.
Nearly one year ago Stainless Games announced that it was reviving the vehicular-combat Carmageddon franchise it created back in the late 1990s with the Square Enix-published Carmageddon: Reincarnation. Then nothing happened for a while. Well, not publicly it didn’t, at least.
In reality, a lot was happening behind the scenes at the Isle of Wight-based developer. After dropping “well over a third of a million dollars getting the rights back,” Stainless began prototype and design work on the revival. The hundreds of thousands the dev spent on the investment reportedly “rerepresents all of [its] profits from our other work,” but the team thinks it’s “worth it.” Yet it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough, actually. And so the studio has announced its intentions to have the public fund the remaining $400,000 USD or more through Kickstarter. As of this writing, over $135,000 USD has already been funneled into Stainless’ coffers by nearly 4,000 individuals who want to see the Reincarnation completed and released.
“We want to spend the money doing what we do best: making video games,” says Stainless Executive Director Neil Barnden in a new promotional video that could pass as a low-budget version of a late ’90s video-game commercial.
Microsoft today launched a “pilot program” at its chain of 16 stores in the United States that will “test a new pricing model for the Xbox 360.” The console maker will exclusively carry the 4GB version of the Xbox 360 complete with a Kinect sensor for $99 up front at Microsoft stores. Buyers will be required to enter into a two-year Xbox Live Gold membership contract at a monthly cost of $15. Since this is a pilot program, the offer on the Microsoft store website notes that it may be terminated at any point in time.
It was rumored last week that the bundle’s XBLG membership would include “some additional streaming content from cable providers or sports package providers,” but Microsoft has apparently informed Joystiq that it will not be so. The membership is apparently just standard one.
All told, the purchase will cost gamers $459 after the two-year contract is over and done with. Normally an Xbox 360 with Kinect and two 12-month subscription cards would carry an MSRP of about $100 less, which makes the pricing structure seem a bit baffling. Of course, it does offer those consumers who cannot put together three bills up front for an Xbox a chance to own one without leaning on their credit cards.
If an IGN source is to believed, then production has officially begun on Microsoft’s next-generation video-game console. The insider reports that Flextronics International, manufacturer of the both the original Xbox and the Xbox 360, just recently fired up the production line for the console believed to be codenamed Durango at its Austin, TX plant. Flextronics declined IGN’s requests for comment on the story.
Before reaching this stage in the process, Singapore-based Flextronics is said to have formed an internal division solely concerned with testing the Xbox 360′s successor. IGN claims that said division, operating autonomously from the rest of the company, focused its efforts on “comprehensive marketing, software, and hardware tests” of the device it is said to be producing. With those efforts behind them, the time to build is now.
It appears that Tribes: Ascend‘s chances of getting ported over to consoles are all but dead. Speaking in an interview with Gamasutra, Todd Harris, CEO of Hi-Rez Studios, stated that the developer is not currently planning on bringing the free-to-play FPS to either XBLA or PSN. Though no official announcement of a console version(s) had ever been made, Harris stated last year that “an eventual XBLA version, and even [a] PSN version, is not out of the question.”
Yesterday, however, the CEO sang a somewhat different song. “We do not have any plans for Tribes on console at this time,” he said. “…The way it went is that we wanted to do the free-to-play model, and there wasn’t a clear path to that on consoles early on. Based on that, we optimized the game around the strengths of the PC, and specifically a keyboard and mouse control.”
Microsoft will release a $99 version of its 4GB Xbox 360 video-game console complete with a forced $15 monthly subscription fee as soon as next week, reports The Verge and Xbox Kinect Fans. The Verge’s sources claim the monthly charges will grant buyers access to an Xbox Live Gold membership for a couple years and could potentially net them “some additional streaming content from cable providers or sports package providers.” Consoles sold as part of the bundle will also be covered under an included warranty.
Those who wish to break free of the subscription prior to the expiration of the 2-year agreement will face penalty fees, not unlike mobile phone users who desire to prematurely free themselves of service contracts.
Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft has worked tirelessly since the launch of the Xbox 360 in November of 2005 to make the platform the main hub for all of its users’ home entertainment needs; this latest rumor is being viewed as the next stage of the company’s long campaign to occupy consumers’ living rooms. In March, it was revealed that 360 owners had finally transitioned to using the machine more for “other types of entertainment” than online gaming.
The new SKU will supposedly be Microsoft’s way of fighting off competition from Apple TV, PlayStation 3 and Roku. Its budget pricing and Kinect sensor could also make the package a potential threat to Nintendo’s forthcoming Wii U console, which will hit the market at some point during holiday 2012.
Source: The Verge
