News Archive

Certain Redbox kiosks in the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin will serve as test runs to see how the addition of video games to the popular US Redbox machines will turn out. Redbox has decided to add Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360 games to these kiosks as an experiment. According to analysts, there are many video games that are considered throwaway games, that is, games with short single player campaigns. Many times, consumers take these games back to retailers such as GameStop or it’s counterpart, EB Games, to trade back in, usually at a small fraction of the original price of the game which is usually right around sixty dollars. While these consumers are able to get in store credit, or even cash in some stores, they will still inevitably lose money.

This is where renting video games comes in. Reports show that most consumers welcome the chance to try out a video game for a few nights before buying it. This eliminates the problem of having to trade a game back in after the player has finished it, if it has a short campaign, or in other cases, if it just was not what the player was expecting. Redbox has announced that some of the first few titles that will be available in specific kiosks in the Milwaukee area include Halo: Reach for the 360, Dead Rising 2 for both the 360 and Playstation 3, and for sports fans, NBA 2011, also available for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. One of the Wii titles they also announced was New Carnival Games.

The video game, “Pirates of the Caribbean: Armada of the Damned”, has been stopped in the middle of production, by Disney. Experts are saying that due to the serious decline in video and computer game sales in the past six months, as well as poor projected sales on the video game itself, caused Disney to halt production after already spending millions on the development. The Vice President of Communication for Disney Interactive Studios confirmed this cancellation of the game that was scheduled to be released in 2011. Many people saw this game as the accompaniment to the fourth movie of Pirates of the Caribbean, which was scheduled to be out in the second quarter of the year.

With the sales industry wide in the video game world dropping 8 percent since last year, this cancellation comes as no surprise, according to experts. With this cancellation however, some 100 employees of Propaganda Games have been laid off by Disney. The remaining employees are finishing an accompaniment to the “Tron: Legacy” release in theaters, which is called “Tron: Evolution”. Reports have also stated that Disney is going to be moving away from games solely based on consoles and investing in online virtual worlds, which have become increasingly popular as of late. Many people are choosing the latter type of gaming instead of the former, with a few exceptions for traditional style games, such as the Halo franchise from Microsoft which sold over 3 million copies, making it one of the few shining stars in video game sales for the console systems.

Electronic Arts has definitely brought the quality level of the pro boxing games up quite a few notches with its Fight Night franchise popular on both the Sony Play Station and Microsoft Xbox gaming systems over a few generations, but things are really looking to heat up with their latest new title Fight Night Champion. EA Canada is developing this latest addition to the franchise and it is expected to be released for the Xbox 360 and Play Station 3 in 2011. Since Fight Night: Round 4 did not see good sales, the publishers have gone back to the drawing board to see what they could do in order to entice more players to give the title a shot. It turns out that what they came up with was a simple, 2 word phrase: more blood. This latest version of the game will feature far more graphic violence and true body horror than many other games of its type and this is bound to get the title a lot more attention in the game press where shock is a coveted factor.

Reviewers have already begun to report that for some of them it is a bit too much, but this is a relatively small portion of reviewers most of whom are hard core sports games fans more used to the tamer imagery of that genre. Champion is set to show the darker side of the sport of boxing and bring players into the drama of the ring and everything it takes to make a match happen.

A federal court in the nation of Australia has recently ruled to force retailers of electronics within the country to cease sales and distribution of a dongle known as the PS Jailbreak. The documents released in the press show that the injunction will stay in place until an upcoming hearing that will determine what is to be done about the mod chip in Australia. Experts say that this could have a ripple effect that reaches other countries, too. One retailer in the country, Quantronics, is a respondent in the documents from the court that Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and Sony Computer Entertainment Australia filed together. The retailer says that it does not have the mod chip in stock at present, but continues to list product details along with a $170 price tag. The dongle is intended for use with the Play Station 3 from Sony and was designed to allow users to use their USB port to put games they have borrowed onto the PS3 hard drive. Quantronics had been offering the dongle as a pre-sale item, but according to a statement on the retailer’s site, they are no longer importing, distributing, selling or dealing with the Jailbreak in any way.

Despite the pause in the selling of the product right now, retailers do intend to sell it if the injunction proves not to be permanent, but for now the court is forcing a pause. Oz Mod Chips and Mod Supplier are the other companies who offer the product in Australia and were named in the court case there.

Video games by mail is becoming big business as yet another company emerges to try and take on that market in the United States. New easing of regulations at the nations Postal Service are helping to stimulate more mail order business and the video games by mail model has worked out very well for Gamefly which as come out in a big way to deliver games by postal mail to video game fans across the US. With the DVD by mail business that Blockbuster Inc. already enjoys, it has been able to sidle up next to Netflix, Inc. as a major competitor, but by leveraging the power of its brick and mortar business, Blockbuster may be able to muscle in on Gamefly, industry insiders have told the press. The mail subscription platform will be called Total Access and since the $20 billion a year video game market is so competitive, Blockbuster will need to clearly define its offering for consumers, experts say. Blockbuster, which is based in Dallas, Texas, has formed a partnership with Comcast Corp. a major US provider of cable TV services and plans to offer its Total Access game packages at a $3 discount for Comcast customers.

Comcast believes that by partnering with Blockbuster they will be able to offer more entertainment choices that will appeal to families with children in the US and that they will be able to build their business by teaming up to be part of the $8.99 per month DVD service. If successful, this will give fans more choices when they consider renting video games.

It has been quite some time since the world heard from Atari, Inc. and it appears that the video game company, which has recently set itself up in new corporate offices in the West Los Angeles area of California, is intent on making a come back to regain its glory days back when it dominated the home video game console market. The Atari brand is well known all across the globe these days, but the company is having to start over after decades of pure chaos, say experts, as well as a number of big financial losses that have really devastated its business. The majority of gamers will remember that Atari helped to create the early video game industry in the 1970′s by way of titles like Asteroids, Pong and other massively popular titles that were a first for those who loved arcade games and wanted to be able to play them in their own home. Then, the game market crashed midway into the next decade and since then it has been a rough ride for Atari as it went through one big corporate issue after another and has been sold to a variety of larger companies such as Hasbro and Warner Communications. Over the past 5 years, the France based Infogrames has owned the company and it has lost nearly a billion dollars in that time period over the course of 4 different chief executives.

The new Atari team in LA has been trying to fix things for the company and are headed up by Jeff Lapin who is well known in the game industry for his ability to help troubled companies turn around and earn once again. The digital based business is where Atari is headed now and if things go well they will be unveiling a large variety of titles for smart phones and social networks like Facebook in the coming years.

A recent study of young children by scientists and sociologists has shown that those kids who watch TV and play video games for many hours per day may be doubling their risk for developing problems similar to Attention Deficient Hyperactivity Disorder, more commonly known as ADHD, a leading cause of learning issues in school situations. As children get used to the rapid action that goes along with the way video games are edited and the flashing screens where the action goes down, chances are good that they will end up struggling to pay attention in a traditional classroom setting where things a lot slower and there is far less visual stimulation for them to focus on. The study showed that since the pacing of TV shows has sped up so dramatically since the 1980′s our brains have had to adjust for the faster editing style and try to capture images as they pass. According to an Associate Professor of Psychology, Douglas Gentile, this style of entertainment has caused the human brain to be retrained to deal with the influx of stimulus and try to rework thinking patterns and made it tougher for more calm pursuits to interest those who are not as familiar with them.

As expected, critics have not been kind to the study and have pointed out that children with proper parenting would not face this large of a diet of entertainment of any kind, but the classic struggle between the pro and anti gaming camps is bound to carry on for many years to come say experts in both child development.