XBLA Fans has done an exhaustive analysis of Xbox Live Arcade sales, Metacritic scores, and trends over the past few years in a four-part writeup. The most interesting finding in the article, in our estimation, is how the perception of rising prices squares with reality. Yes, there are more 1200 point ($15) games being released on the service as compared to previous years, but there are more 800 point ($10) games coming out as well, and there are more of those than $15 games. The average is rising overall, but it hasn’t yet reached the 1200 point mark, even if that price is being assigned to some of the more high profile (and high quality) games on the service.
The quality of the Summer of Arcade, on the other hand, is dropping overall, according to the average price and Metacritic score. In 2008, the first year the promotion existed, the games had an average Metacritic score of 84.8, with an average price of 960 points. This past year, however, the Metacritic score dropped to 78.8 (which still isn’t too bad), but the average price was at 1120. This is purely mathematical, remember: The games are probably more complex these days, which allows Microsoft to set a higher price, and reviews on any site are subjective.
Finally, XBLA Fans found 73% of titles on XBLA have gone on sale within their first year, though many of the games on XBLA were only on sale for a day or so. That means that patient XBLA buyers can save a lot of money, if they pay attention and move quickly. There are a few other interesting conclusions in the analysis as a whole, and lots of insight on how Microsoft’s Arcade has developed over the past few years.Report: XBLA prices rising (slowly), Summer of Arcade review scores dropping originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 04 Feb 2012 10:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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That first-run copy of Mass Effect: Deception you picked up may just be turning into an odd collector’s item. Bioware has issued a statement on the slew of errors fans have found in the novel, stating that all will be fixed in future editions of Deception.
“The teams at Del Rey and BioWare would like to extend our sincerest apologies to the Mass Effect fans for any errors and oversights made in the recent novel Mass Effect: Deception,” the apology post on Bioware’s forums reads. “We are currently working on a number of changes that will appear in future editions of the novel.”
Currently, there’s no word on when the revised edition will be available.Bioware fixing Mass Effect: Deception novel mistakes in future editions originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 04 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Blizzard has announced that 100,000 more Diablo 3 beta invites have been sent out in North America, so if you opted in to beta access with your Battle.net account, you should log in and see if you’ve gotten a notification. Blizzard warns that phishing activity may increase with this new wave of invites, so take care.
If you weren’t one of the lucky one hundred thousand, don’t fret: Blizzard promises to send out more invites eventually. You can go back to rolling classes now!PSA: 100,000 more Diablo 3 beta invites sent out originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 04 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Breathe in, breathe out, and everything’s zen, because next week’s Rock Band DLC is a three-pack from alt rockers Bush. All the tracks are off the band’s hit 1994 debut album “Sixteen Stone.”Continue reading Rock Band Weekly: BushRock Band Weekly: Bush originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 04 Feb 2012 04:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Deus Ex is leading the revenue revolution for Square Enix, whose digital entertainment — games — department in April-December 2011 grew 6.2 percent from the previous fiscal year, totaling $704.7 million in net sales. Games now comprise 56 percent of Square Enix’s total revenue, where in the same period of 2010 they made up just 52 percent.
The company’s operating profit rose 11.5 percent to $169.4 million and its net income ended at $65 million, up 175.2 percent from the previous period. Square Enix cited Deus Ex: Human Revolution and its online and social titles as the main factors behind its financial progress.Square Enix thanks games for 2011′s rise in revenue, profit originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 04 Feb 2012 02:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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We’re still a couple of months away from the end of fiscal 2012, but the first 9 months of the confusingly offset financial season have treated Konami extremely well: The company reports a 77.3 percent year-over-year increase in net income over fiscal 2011, earning profits of ¥17.05 billion ($224 million) for the period.
Most of that, however, was pushed by Konami’s social networking devision, which operates mobile/casual games in Japanese markets and posted revenues of $348 million, up from $127 million over the same period last year. The company’s “consumer games” segment fell year-over-year, from $698 million in fiscal 2011 to $465 million in fiscal 2012. Konami has also adjusted its predictions for the end fiscal 2012, anticipating overall revenue at $3.38 billion and net income at $298 million.Konami net income up 77 percent year-over-year originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Valve has finally put together its schedule of events for 2012, announcing the big things happening in Team Fortress 2 in the coming months. Most notably, Valve says its final character video, Meet the Pyro, will air in 2012 and it will feature “lots of blood pretty much all the way through.”
The TF2 team is also working on a secret project that isn’t a hat or a map, Valve reports. This leaves speculation open to new characters, a feature-length film, a live-action feature-length film, or a live-action feature-length film starring Brendan Gleeson, Jude Law and Emma Stone. These are the only options.
The Steam Workshop has a shiny new blog, and Valve says it plans to unveil another secret at the second annual Saxxy Awards. We’re pretty sure this secret will be the announcement of the TF2 movie’s sequel, starring Katherine Heigl as Brendan Gleeson and Brendan Fraser as everyone else.TF2 in 2012: ‘Meet the Pyro’ is coming, more secrets originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Reflecting the fact that last year’s Supreme Court decision, which reaffirmed videogames qualify for First Amendment protection in the United States, wasn’t quite clear enough for everyone, Oklahoma state representative William Fourkiller has introduced a new piece of legislation sure to draw the ire of gamers.
HB #2696, as reported by Gamasutra, would see an excise tax of one percent levied against the sale of any and all violent videogames in the state of Oklahoma. That immediately raises the question of what constitutes a violent videogame — Call of Duty is undeniably violent, but would a game where bears can punch each other count as violence? Fortunately the proposed bill provides specific criteria: a violent videogame is considered to be any game to have received a Teen, Mature, or Adult Only rating from the ESRB.
I love Half-Life, but somewhere around E3 2010 I resigned myself to the fact that Half-Life 3 won’t see the light of day anytime soon. Steam, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Dota 2, Counter-Strike, as well as some projects we’ve probably never heard of seem to keep Valve busy (and rich) enough for the time being. Not all fans are so patient. A Steam group named, A Call for Communication (CFC), is hosting an event called “A Red Letter Day” and asking players around the world to play Half-Life 2 this weekend at 2:00 P.M. Eastern, 11 P.M. Pacific, with the hope that Valve will take notice and begin to share more information about the future of the series.
Years of listening to forum-posters demand things of game makers with a remarkable sense of entitlement and lack of shame has led me to expect little constructive work to come fans, but CFC’s positive tone and earnest message managed to shake me of my cynical world view (if only for a few moments). The group even goes out of their way to encourage positive interaction between Valve and fans on their official site:
“The lack of communication between Valve and the Half-Life community has been a frustrating experience. While continued support for current and future products is greatly appreciated, fans of the Half-Life series have waited years for a word on when the franchise will return. So, Instead of focusing efforts in a negative and disrespectful way, we have decided to gain Valve’s attention by delivering a basic message:
Since being released for 3DS just over a month ago, 10 million notes have already been exchanged through Swapnote. Considering the size of the 3DS install base is still relatively small, it’s an impressive achievement. Swapnote is, however, hardly perfect, and a lot of that has to do with the limitations of the 3DS itself as Jeremy outlined last month. Namely, it’s impossible to share notes with strangers or anyone beyond the 100 people you’re limited to being friends with on 3DS. There were ways Nintendo could have worked around this, but the situation was almost far worse. As discussed at length in the latest edition of the roundtable Iwata Asks discussion series, Swapnote was originally developed for the DSi and was nearly ready for release at the end of 2009.
Even before the idea of a picture diary for DSi came up in late 2008 (as a response to the lack of downloadable software for the system), Daiji Imai of Nintendo’s Network Business Department had been interested in creating a maternity health record book. The idea was to keep a record of a child’s development that could then be shared with him or her once they were older. This morphed into an idea of a picture diary that was iterated on numerous times. One of the keys was that notes would not be typed; handwriting was deemed to be a warmer, more capable way of expressing one’s feelings. And while it can be hard to read people’s scribbled notes at times, that decision was without a doubt for the best.
