Publishers are doing their virtual E3 announcements, such as Ubisoft Forward and ID@Xbox’s Indie Showcase. There’s other wild news going on, and some not even in the official news items below.
Said news items include:
Let us know what you think.
Once upon a time, Activision Blizzards CEO Bobby Kotick kicked a few franchises to the curb: Riddick and Ghostbusters. No doubt, this was a result of the Activision and Blizzard merger requiring some resources to the merged together while others were cut from the lineup. Phil Harrison, the new big suit at Atari/Infogrames has raised these little birds from the ashes with a dream to build them into 100-million dollar franchises.
While Bobby Kotick said the titles, “don’t have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million dollar franchises,” Phil Harrision sees it as a personal challenge to prove him wrong.
“What Bobby, perhaps unhelpfully said, was that those games were franchises which wouldn’t make $100m of revenue and generate sequels. If that’s his benchmark, then fine — and we’d love to aspire to the same benchmarks. But you know what? I would love to turn Ghostbusters into a $100m franchise, just to prove him wrong.” (1up)
In many ways, this is the difference in attitudes from a large firm compared to a smaller firm with strong goals and a vision for success. Activision Blizzard is big now, perhaps the biggest publisher in the industry, they can’t be bothered with minuscule 80-million dollar franchises. Others, like Atari, strive to take a title from nothing to something of greatness. Granted, Atari’s failed in a lot of franchises, but with their new ex-Sony executive behind the helm things could turn around and this might be the first step.
Most of the best game franchises in existance today started from nothing but a dream. Big publishers don’t have time to dream, they’re too busy making money off the fanboys of their current franchises.
The podcast is back this week after being knocked out by Hurricane Sandy hitting New York City hard. As the Kickstarter continues to struggle to find donors, Jordan discusses his hands-on experience with the new Microsoft tablet, the Surface, in lieu of a Gaming Flashback.
This week’s news items include:
All that and Reader Feedback. This week’s Question of the Week, “What do you do for fun when you can’t access the internet?”
Help the TD Gaming Podcast with its Kickstarter fundraising.
This week’s gaming podcast brings back the old game Lemmings in our flashback while covering the history of DMA Designs. We’re also going to explain to you why we’d never make an FPS clan. This weeks news includes:
This week’s question of the week, would you rather have the “Swiss army knife” of gaming hand-held systems that does it all, but features must be turned off to conserve battery life or a more focused hand-held platform that does just what’s needed with no additional bells and whistles?
