Everyone keeps saying Zynga is crashing and burning, uh, is this a new development? I thought Farmville was worth like, $TEXAS.
The short version: they spent $Texas picking up, literally, 18 or so different studios. Yet, at best, all their new games just keep the same amount of people from their old games, which lose subscribers. And I believe their overall subscriber base is going down. Plus they spent an insane amount of money on Draw Something, and promptly made a bunch of changes that drove people off.
On top of that, their stock is plunging, there's accusations of insider trading, and now EA is finally taking them to task for their plagiarism with a platoon of lawyers.
So yeah, things are rough for them.
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
I don't know that the changes Zynga made to Draw Something drove people away so much as Draw Something's flash-in-the-pan success ended pretty naturally right after Zynga picked it up.
Everyone keeps saying Zynga is crashing and burning, uh, is this a new development? I thought Farmville was worth like, $TEXAS.
The company's stock is under value, the CEO and CO both bailed out on the stock (and now investigation of insider trading has started), and the company's acquisitions have been situations of paying lots of money and getting little to no return.
Edit - Oh, cloudeagle beat me on it.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
I don't care about the jobs lost if Zynga goes under
it is a bad company
That's the thing. I'm not seeing any creative force within the company. It's a bad company and environment to learn the video game industry, in that it's not what the video game industry is at all. Not even Activision and EA are that bad when they're directly competing products against each other (war FPS games). The only lost jobs from a Zynga shut-down that would be unfortunate are the acquired small-timers, but those people proved themselves to some extent and they can get work elsewhere or start up again. But all the higher-ups at the Zynga core? Fuck them, they're parasites in the business world. I know that this is kinda cruelly stated and assuming, but obviously if there are well-meaning people, they are exempt from my commentary.
Seriously? Army of Two was never all that big of a thing last I remember. Time to see yet another IP crash and burn because it didn't sell 500 trillion copies in under two hours.
Re: Zynga
Did anybody see the short tweets between Nimbit and EA? I can't copy them directly right now but they went roughly like this: @Nimblebit: @EA - You'll have our sword. @EA: @Nimblebit - You'll have our shield.
+2 brownie points for EA.
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
edited August 2012
I played Army of Two with my brother after picking it up on the cheap. Have to say it was a fun way to spend an afternoon.
Probably won't get the new one at full price but I would get it might get it around 20-30.
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NocrenLt Futz, Back in ActionNorth CarolinaRegistered Userregular
I'm wonder if it's because of the console generation is kinda shuffling along. Part of a "Don't wanna try anything new this late, but we have to release something" mentality.
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
More than likely.
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NocrenLt Futz, Back in ActionNorth CarolinaRegistered Userregular
I wonder what kind of reaction it's gonna get since you're not playing as Salem and Rios this time (which is a nice way to side step the ending of 40th Day) and the Dead Space guys are behind this one instead of the usual team.
What I hate about Army of Two is that they keep trying to make them more and more serious. I had fun with a friend playing 40th Day despite the "darker and edgier" tone the game had, and the series continuing to go that way is turning me off more and more.
I don't care about the jobs lost if Zynga goes under
it is a bad company
Yeah, I mean you generally don't want to see business go under because of people losing their jobs and what have you.
But there comes a point where if you're working for a company that is a horrible plagiarism manufacturing line with self destructive business practices, you should have gotten the fuck out of that ship before the leaks everyone knew were there started springing.
Zynga as a company is a terrible, destructive influence in the industry and they deserve to go out of business, and their upper management deserves legal repercussions for the insider trading shenanigans, and if it's somehow decided that they are free of blame in that I will be honest to god seriously depressed because they are criminals and you could not possibly convince me that timing was coincidence.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
Seriously? Army of Two was never all that big of a thing last I remember. Time to see yet another IP crash and burn because it didn't sell 500 trillion copies in under two hours.
Re: Zynga
Did anybody see the short tweets between Nimbit and EA? I can't copy them directly right now but they went roughly like this: @Nimbit: @EA - You'll have our sword. @EA: @Nimbit - You'll have our shield.
+2 brownie points for EA.
EA's PR people can be pretty funny sometimes, like their response to Activision taking legal action against West and Zamp. This is one of them.
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Dac VinS-s-screw you! I only listen to DOUBLE MUSIC!Registered Userregular
I wonder what kind of reaction it's gonna get since you're not playing as Salem and Rios this time (which is a nice way to side step the ending of 40th Day) and the Dead Space guys are behind this one instead of the usual team.
It is the usual team actually. This Army of Two is developed by Visceral's Montreal division, which in a way is a rebranded EA Montreal responsible for the first two games.
UK games retailers made £8.4m from software sales last week, the lowest since records began.
The market has been teetering at this level for a few weeks now as new releases dry up. 394,688 games were sold in total for the week, with Sega's official Olympics game the No.1 seller.
This is according to data from UKIE/GfK Chart-Track
The UK games retail sector has been suffering severe difficulties this year, a combination of economic woes, the end of the console cycle, the rise of digital and downloadable content, while some analysts suggest that the various events - including the Queen's Jubilee, the European Championships and now the Olympics – have been turning customers off from the High Street.
However, there's high hopes that Christmas could still be a strong selling period, with a number of blockbusters scheduled for release. MCV recently detailed the 20 games that retailers expect to generate some £320m over Q4. You can read about them in the latest issue of MCV.
Obviously these figures don't factor in the sales of digital download games, or the money generated from MMOs, free-to-play games or streaming services.
The diverse Japanese company posted total sales of ¥108.6 billion, a 23% year-on-year increase from the ¥88.2 billion of a year ago. This resulted in net income of ¥10.2 billion, a whopping 214% up from 2011′s ¥3.2 billion.
The group’s Content division, into which gaming falls, produced higher sales than any other, with ¥59.9 billion – a 160% increase. Within the broader division, arcade and network content both outperformed traditional software sales, which came in at ¥13.8 billion yen.
In Japan, the company shifted 270,000 home console titles, and 711,000 portable titles. In the US, it managed 2 million home console sales and 500,000 portable sales. Europe lagged behind with 395,000 console sales and 150,000 portable sales.
Namco Bandai released five new PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 titles with sales of 1.3 million and 948,000 respectively; six PSP titles with 549,000 sales; two DS titles with 270,000 sales; four 3DS titles with 322,000 sales; and one Wii game which shifted 386,000 units.
Soul Calibur V shifted 680,000 units during the quarter, pushing it to 1.3 million sales life to date, and making it the publisher’s strongest offering.
Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm Generations followed with 440,000 sales, and then PSP effort Toriko Gourmet Survival 2 with 100,000 sales.
UK games retailers made £8.4m from software sales last week, the lowest since records began.
The market has been teetering at this level for a few weeks now as new releases dry up. 394,688 games were sold in total for the week, with Sega's official Olympics game the No.1 seller.
This is according to data from UKIE/GfK Chart-Track
The UK games retail sector has been suffering severe difficulties this year, a combination of economic woes, the end of the console cycle, the rise of digital and downloadable content, while some analysts suggest that the various events - including the Queen's Jubilee, the European Championships and now the Olympics – have been turning customers off from the High Street.
However, there's high hopes that Christmas could still be a strong selling period, with a number of blockbusters scheduled for release. MCV recently detailed the 20 games that retailers expect to generate some £320m over Q4. You can read about them in the latest issue of MCV.
Obviously these figures don't factor in the sales of digital download games, or the money generated from MMOs, free-to-play games or streaming services.
This generation went on way too long.
While I agree, the economy is pretty fucked still and it may not be the best time right now to release a several hundred dollar console.
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
How did Microsoft's phone pricing work with the 360? I remember reading about the 360 costing 99$ startup with additional payments afterwards, a new pricing plan similar to contracts with phones.
Was there any word on how successful that was? Do you think that's how Microsoft will release the next console to make it seem cheaper?
The diverse Japanese company posted total sales of ¥108.6 billion, a 23% year-on-year increase from the ¥88.2 billion of a year ago. This resulted in net income of ¥10.2 billion, a whopping 214% up from 2011′s ¥3.2 billion.
The group’s Content division, into which gaming falls, produced higher sales than any other, with ¥59.9 billion – a 160% increase. Within the broader division, arcade and network content both outperformed traditional software sales, which came in at ¥13.8 billion yen.
In Japan, the company shifted 270,000 home console titles, and 711,000 portable titles. In the US, it managed 2 million home console sales and 500,000 portable sales. Europe lagged behind with 395,000 console sales and 150,000 portable sales.
Namco Bandai released five new PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 titles with sales of 1.3 million and 948,000 respectively; six PSP titles with 549,000 sales; two DS titles with 270,000 sales; four 3DS titles with 322,000 sales; and one Wii game which shifted 386,000 units.
Soul Calibur V shifted 680,000 units during the quarter, pushing it to 1.3 million sales life to date, and making it the publisher’s strongest offering.
Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm Generations followed with 440,000 sales, and then PSP effort Toriko Gourmet Survival 2 with 100,000 sales.
I glanced over it quickly on Neogaf, but I don't think anyone brought it up here.
But see, here's something I'm wondering about... Look at the games they sold. Not a single game pulled much more than a million in sales, most of them in fact sit rather comfortably roughly at or even under half that milestone. And, if I'm not missing something, they're still making good money! I don't know if it's anything other publishers could learn a lesson from, but apparently Namco must be doing something right to earn good munmuns without AAA projects - or perhaps rather, without spending AAA dough on even their high profile projects. The cool mill' seems to have been more than enough to cover the bill for SCV.
Alright and in this next scene all the animals have AIDS.
I got a little excited when I saw your ship.
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
Well. Namco is a mid-tier company so they don't have as much overhead as the bigger companies. Not to mention they mostly work in fighters which while being much cheaper to make than most other genres can also generate addition revenue from arcades(ala Tekken).
That being said I think it has a lot of to do with what kind of company you're trying to be. With more and more smaller game companies popping up we can see that there is still a place for them but you have to plan around being in that spot. Which most companies don't because they want to be huge.
Videogame maker Activision Blizzard may see its share price rise significantly, helped by the impending release of a new game and a recent business partnership in China, financial newsweekly Barron's reported in its August 6 edition.
Activision shares, which are down about 10 percent this year and are currently trading at about $11.25, could rise as much as 50 percent due to new products and improved cost-cutting, with one analyst at BMO Capital Markets predicting the stock to hit $17, Barron's said.
Activision, which is debt-free and repurchased shares in the first half of 2012, recently formed a partnership with Tencent Holdings, China's largest Internet provider, to make its popular "Call of Duty" game available online.
Like its competitors, the Santa Monica-based company's share price has fallen due to a slowdown in demand for packaged videogames used with traditional game consoles, challenged by the growing popularity of cheaper products played on smartphones and tablets, Barron's reported.
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While some Wii owners have all but abandoned the platform, others (in Japan) just bought an MMO for the thing this week. Luckily for those new Dragon Quest X owners, Square Enix has pledged longterm support.
Square Enix told Nikkei that it plans to release "version up" patches every ten weeks. More significantly, the developer's plan calls for additional downloadable content to be created for ten years.
The game is currently only out on Wii, but a Wii U version is also planned. It supports USB keyboards, which we note only to point out the official one.
It's been a long, slow walk, but the zombies have finally made it onto Android. Call of Duty: Black Ops Zombies originally launched on iOS back in December. Today it comes to Android as a $6.99 download, exclusive to Xperia hardware for its first 30 days.
Newsbrief: Star Wars house LucasArts has lost yet another president, making that the third president to step down from the company in just over four years.
Paul Meegan, who was originally Epic Games China CEO, is the latest president to cut ties with the publisher. He joined LucasArts back in 2010, taking over from previous president Darrell Rodriguez. Before Rodriguez, Jim Ward had been president for four years, before resigning in 2008.
Meegan was overseeing the recently announced Star Wars 1313 before he left the company earlier this month. He's not the only high-profile name to leave the company this year either, as creative director Clint Hocking resigned in June. LucasArts did not name a replacement for Meegan.
Star Wars is the only reason that LucasArts hasn't been taken out behind the barn.
Newsbrief: Star Wars house LucasArts has lost yet another president, making that the third president to step down from the company in just over four years.
Paul Meegan, who was originally Epic Games China CEO, is the latest president to cut ties with the publisher. He joined LucasArts back in 2010, taking over from previous president Darrell Rodriguez. Before Rodriguez, Jim Ward had been president for four years, before resigning in 2008.
Meegan was overseeing the recently announced Star Wars 1313 before he left the company earlier this month. He's not the only high-profile name to leave the company this year either, as creative director Clint Hocking resigned in June. LucasArts did not name a replacement for Meegan.
Star Wars is the only reason that LucasArts hasn't been taken out behind the barn.
Cripes, another one? Every time a president leaves Lucasarts and a new one's appointed, the new guy tends to outright kill their gaming division, only for the next guy in the revolving door of LA higher-ups to revive it.
It's like the Sonic Cycle, only even more cynical.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
Hey so, Idle Thumbs did a livecast at Quake-Con. And I'm bringing it up because the episode was riddled with discussion about industry-wide things, rather than just individual game discussion. They're presented with and asked about a scenario of DLC destroying video game consoles, they talk about Windows 8 and the implications it has and will NOT have, that sorta thing. It's a good listen.
I thought SCV bombed really hard. Good news if it actually did good though.
I thought that was the case too. There was plenty of criticism of the decisions made versus those in SCIV, and it was frequently valid. A friend bought me a copy, and for my interest in the series, there wasn't a lot of reason to keep it, so I tried eBaying it for $19.99. No luck.
Still, if it's selling, it's selling.
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
edited August 2012
Most of the complaints made about SCV were about the single player content. Which...I'll will admit was pretty lacking.
But as far as gameplay goes it is arguably the best in the series.
Posts
I'm pretty sure they'll be giving some fucks now that EA is suing.
Copying EA of all companies was such a stupid move it's mindboggling.
It's the CASE development method
Copy Anything, Steal Everything
The short version: they spent $Texas picking up, literally, 18 or so different studios. Yet, at best, all their new games just keep the same amount of people from their old games, which lose subscribers. And I believe their overall subscriber base is going down. Plus they spent an insane amount of money on Draw Something, and promptly made a bunch of changes that drove people off.
On top of that, their stock is plunging, there's accusations of insider trading, and now EA is finally taking them to task for their plagiarism with a platoon of lawyers.
So yeah, things are rough for them.
it is a bad company
http://www.gamespot.com/news/ea-is-playing-with-fire-in-zynga-suit-says-legal-expert-6390218
And another loooooong analysis on the No Doubt vs. Activision/Band Hero thing:
http://www.gamespot.com/news/no-doubt-attorney-speaks-out-against-activision-in-band-hero-suit-6390094
It's on the EDGE of insanity :winky:
The company's stock is under value, the CEO and CO both bailed out on the stock (and now investigation of insider trading has started), and the company's acquisitions have been situations of paying lots of money and getting little to no return.
Edit - Oh, cloudeagle beat me on it.
That's the thing. I'm not seeing any creative force within the company. It's a bad company and environment to learn the video game industry, in that it's not what the video game industry is at all. Not even Activision and EA are that bad when they're directly competing products against each other (war FPS games). The only lost jobs from a Zynga shut-down that would be unfortunate are the acquired small-timers, but those people proved themselves to some extent and they can get work elsewhere or start up again. But all the higher-ups at the Zynga core? Fuck them, they're parasites in the business world. I know that this is kinda cruelly stated and assuming, but obviously if there are well-meaning people, they are exempt from my commentary.
Seriously guys?
...
Seriously? Army of Two was never all that big of a thing last I remember. Time to see yet another IP crash and burn because it didn't sell 500 trillion copies in under two hours.
Re: Zynga
Did anybody see the short tweets between Nimbit and EA? I can't copy them directly right now but they went roughly like this:
@Nimblebit: @EA - You'll have our sword.
@EA: @Nimblebit - You'll have our shield.
+2 brownie points for EA.
Probably won't get the new one at full price but I would get it might get it around 20-30.
Twitter
Yeah, I mean you generally don't want to see business go under because of people losing their jobs and what have you.
But there comes a point where if you're working for a company that is a horrible plagiarism manufacturing line with self destructive business practices, you should have gotten the fuck out of that ship before the leaks everyone knew were there started springing.
Zynga as a company is a terrible, destructive influence in the industry and they deserve to go out of business, and their upper management deserves legal repercussions for the insider trading shenanigans, and if it's somehow decided that they are free of blame in that I will be honest to god seriously depressed because they are criminals and you could not possibly convince me that timing was coincidence.
EA's PR people can be pretty funny sometimes, like their response to Activision taking legal action against West and Zamp. This is one of them.
It is the usual team actually. This Army of Two is developed by Visceral's Montreal division, which in a way is a rebranded EA Montreal responsible for the first two games.
Army of Two meets 50 cent blood on the sand.
I would buy this game.
It's Olympic excitement, I guess. The "official" Olympics game on iOS hit the top of those charts last week.
http://www.vg247.com/2012/08/03/namco-bandai-q1-soul-calibur-v-sales-hit-1-million-profits-ups/
While I agree, the economy is pretty fucked still and it may not be the best time right now to release a several hundred dollar console.
Was there any word on how successful that was? Do you think that's how Microsoft will release the next console to make it seem cheaper?
I glanced over it quickly on Neogaf, but I don't think anyone brought it up here.
But see, here's something I'm wondering about... Look at the games they sold. Not a single game pulled much more than a million in sales, most of them in fact sit rather comfortably roughly at or even under half that milestone. And, if I'm not missing something, they're still making good money! I don't know if it's anything other publishers could learn a lesson from, but apparently Namco must be doing something right to earn good munmuns without AAA projects - or perhaps rather, without spending AAA dough on even their high profile projects. The cool mill' seems to have been more than enough to cover the bill for SCV.
I got a little excited when I saw your ship.
That being said I think it has a lot of to do with what kind of company you're trying to be. With more and more smaller game companies popping up we can see that there is still a place for them but you have to plan around being in that spot. Which most companies don't because they want to be huge.
Switch (JeffConser): SW-3353-5433-5137 Wii U: Skeldare - 3DS: 1848-1663-9345
PM Me if you add me!
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/08/04/dragon-quest-x-to-offer-ten-years-of-dlc/
And apparently mobile games can get moneyhats.
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/08/03/call-of-duty-black-ops-zombies-sinks-its-teeth-into-android-ex/
Not entirely sure how effective that short moneyhat will be, but hey.
Well, Sony calls pretty much every smartphone/tablet they release Xperias. So there's a lot of them.
But based on Sony's low position in smartphone/tablet sales ranked by company, I'd say "not really."
Cripes, another one? Every time a president leaves Lucasarts and a new one's appointed, the new guy tends to outright kill their gaming division, only for the next guy in the revolving door of LA higher-ups to revive it.
It's like the Sonic Cycle, only even more cynical.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
I thought that was the case too. There was plenty of criticism of the decisions made versus those in SCIV, and it was frequently valid. A friend bought me a copy, and for my interest in the series, there wasn't a lot of reason to keep it, so I tried eBaying it for $19.99. No luck.
Still, if it's selling, it's selling.
But as far as gameplay goes it is arguably the best in the series.