This week’s episode features a Gaming Flashback about… nothing. The week before the PC Gaming Show and PlayStation 5 show is kinda slow, but there was some chatter in the industry.
The news topics feature:
Let us know what you think.
When you’ve had a bit too much to drink, there are two choices: move on to tequila shots or… Mario Party for the Wii! Mario Party is amazingly fun when you’ve had a few too many drinks while sober it’s mearly “meh.”
Now, Ubisoft is trying to capture the drinking demographic, or more appropriately, the party crowd. The goal is to create a mini-game set created for partying and having fun with your Nintendo console. Enter, Play Zone, a new mini-game collection for the Wii.
Do we need yet more mini-game collections for the Wii?
“With our new Play Zone party titles, the Wii gamers who like to spend time with friends and family will have fun with the Wii through innovative and involving mini-games,” said John Parkes, Ubisoft’s EMEA marketing director. (next-gen)
Again, more “innovative mini-games” in our future? Ubisoft knows how to make a quick buck on casual games, no doubt, with their Petz franchise doing a killing for very simplistic games (which my daughter finds extremely fun).
The idea of more mini-games is slightly cringing but we do so enjoy a drunk game of Mario Party… maybe this is a good move.
Now that Activision has merged up with Blizzard all under Vivendi it’s time to consider what to do with all the additional overhead, management, internal studios and sheer amount of people working on projects within their organization. In other words, it’s time to trim the fat and get leaned out for the long haul.
This isn’t unexpected news, the only way to grow more effective as a large company is to remove some of the access baggage that can slow you down and let your competitors take control. This is a sad job which nobody takes pride in (most normal people anyway) but it could mean the difference between rising to the top and sinking like a brick.
“We are focused on improving efficiency across the combined organization and are concentrating on businesses where we have leadership positions that are aligned with Activision Publishing’s long-term corporate objectives,” Activision Publishing CEO Mike Griffith said in a statement. (gamespot)
It’s important to be aggressive as a large company, just like you would be as a startup company. There is a reason startup companies grow into powerful competitors that win, grow and eventually become (or be purcahsed by) larger companies.
As part of this move some staff will be migrated to new projects, persumably reporposed into other divisions or allowed to find new jobs somewhere else. This is called “realignment” by those in the management organization, and currently those up for realignment are:
These realignments along with other organizational changes will effect a few working game titles:
At this point we’re not sure which, if any, will continue to be developed under Activision and which will be sold off to other companies or retired. Surely, those money making titles will be sold off if Activision has no plans to finish them.
Again, it’s hard to consider this a bad decision. This is a decision of growth over having too many “Cooks in the kitchen” making soup. It’s better to have rock solid titles of epic proportions than a large pool of mediocre titles with minimal sales and bad reputations, and that’s why they spend a lot of time in the office working on this and having a type of office chair for long hours on a computer is really helpful in this area.
It’s not that the titles they’re questioning are necessarily bad, but are not the leading titles in their space and are should be either given a stronger team to work on them or retire them entirely. To build a stronger team with passion and direction it might be best to sell the franchise(s) to other organizations so they can do it right with time and attention to detail.
(Thanks, gamespot)
This week we’re covering a few stories fresh in 2011 or at least our reactions are fresh! We’re hitting up some community comments, as the usual, and doing a flash back of River City Ransom, last covered in episode 4–don’t go find the old one, listen to the new one (we only had 3 listeners back then!). The stories of the week:
This weeks question of the week: What game did or do you love that no one else seems to have ever heard of?
