Biz

Gearbox Software's Randy Pitchford must be flying high on the critical and sales success of their first person shooter Borderlands. And he's not afraid to speak his mind on any number of subjects. A few weeks ago we reported that he made statements that were high critical of Valve, saying their ownership of the Steam download platform was a conflict of Interest and that smaller developers were being exploited. Smaller developers who have worked with Valve to get their games on Steam quickly defended Valve, saying their distribution terms were better than others.

Now Pitchford has reportedly taken a few more shots at Valve's expense. Industry Gamers reports that Pitchford, quoted in a new issue of the U.K.'s Official PlayStation Magazine, stated, "Valve think their own stuff is the only stuff that matters, to the point where they have their own distribution platform." While he does feel Steam itself is a good system he added, " . . . . at the same time they're reliant on the rest of the world. They had to do that [Left 4 Dead] deal with EA. When I see the L4D ad on the television I don't see a Valve logo, I see an EA logo, and when I bought it, I bought it at a store." It's pretty clear that Pitchford would like to see Steam be handled as a separate business with no connections to Valve.

Publisher Activision Blizzard has released its latest financial results for the quarter that ended on September 30 and as it turns out their revenues came in better than they had previously predicted. For the quarter the company brought in $703 million compared to their predictions of $680 million. However the revenues were still slightly lower than the $711 million that the company recorded for the same time period a year ago. Activision Blizzard recorded a profit of $15 million for the quarter compared to a loss of $105 million for the same period a year ago.

Activision's only new PC game product for their current quarter is, of course, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 which the publisher has high hopes that it will be one of the biggest game launches of all time. Their overall game line-up for 2010 includes the release of StarCraft II, World of Warcraft Cataclysm and a new Call of Duty game, among others. We are currently listening in on Activision's conference call to see if they will reveal any more info on their future game launches.

Yet another major publicly trade game publisher revealed their latest financial numbers today. THQ reported that for their fiscal year 2010 second quarter (which ended September 30) the company had $101.3 million in revenues compared to $164,8 million in the same time period a year ago. THQ recoded a net loss of $5.6 million for the quarter compared to a loss of $115.3 million for the same time period a year ago.

THQ admitted that it did not have any major game releases in its last quarter but still expects solid revenues in its current third quarter and the upcoming fourth quarter where two PC games (Metro 2033 and Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War II Chaos Rising) will be released. No mentions were made of the status of the long-in-development Warhammer 40,000 MMO game. However in a conference call following the financial result, THQ exec said the the first person shooter Homefront (announced back at E3) will be released sometime in their 2011 fiscal year.

It's "earnings season" on the stock market which means most of the game industry's publically traded companies are revealing their latest financial results. Earlier today Ubisoft announced that they had generated revenues of 83 million euros for their second quarter that ending September 30. Those revenues were down 52.8 percent compared to the same time period a year ago but were within Ubisoft's previously announced guidence.

Despite a slow first and second quarter for the company, Ubisoft hopes to make up for its with its third and fourth quarter games releases. PC gamers will get James Cameron's Avatar The Game in the current third quarter which is expected to bring in 540 million euros in revenues, up 6 percent from the same period a year ago. The fourth quarter (January-March 2010) will see the PC port of Assassin's Creed 2 released along with Splinter Cell Conviction and R.U.S.E.

There's a lot of poor writing in games. Most of the storylines and dialog are simplistic at best. So it's always interesting to learn that an acclaimed author is being brought in to help in the writing process for games. That's exactly what's happening with UK-based sci-fi author Richard K. Morgan.

In a new post on his web site, the author of novels like Altered Carbon has revealed he has been working with Electronic Arts as a writing consultant for three unannounced upcoming games. It's not likely that he's writing for The Sims or Madden. Indeed he says all of the games he is working on are sci-fi based. He seems very happy with the relationship and in terms of writing for games he says, "The field is open, the potential huge and, in story terms, only just beginning to be properly tapped."

[Via Kotaku]

Electronic Arts is getting a few weeks ahead of the annual Black Friday sales push by holding their own in-house sale at their online EA store. From now until Saturday all in stock games are on sale for 20 percent off their normal price. This sale doesn't apparently include the most recent EA release Dragon Age: Origins.

More mid-week sales include GoGamer.com which has a number of PC games on sale until 3 am Eastern Time Saturday. Sales price cuts include F.E.A.R. 2 Project Origin for $14.90, Borderlands for $36.90 and Overlord 2 for just $9.90. Finally Steam has taken 30 percent off the recent zombie shooter Nation Red.

So how many copies of Modern Warfare 2 will be sold after the first person shooter ship to stores on November 10. In GameTrailers.com's latest Bonus Round roundtable video chat, well know game financial analyst Michael Patcher believes the Infinity Ward-developed game will sell at least 10 million copies this quarter alone.

And that's on the low side. Patcher believes if Activision really goes nuts and moves on a major TV ad campaign, sales could be as high as 14 million copies. As we reported on Sunday, Amazon.com is showing that sales of the PC version of the game are about 8 percent of the total amount of copies of the standard edition. If those numbers are indicative of sales across the board for the PC port it still means the PC version will sell at least in the high six figures in terms of units sold.

People have wondered how much of a audience the PC version of Modern Warfare 2 will have compared to the console versions. Now Amazon.com gives us a bit of a clue with their percentages of the all-time sales of the Standard Edition of Infinity Ward's upcoming first person shooter.

As you can see the PC version is currently selling only 8 percent of the Standard Edition's total sales. The Xbox 360 version is by far the most popular port with 61 percent followed by the PS3 version with a mere 31 percent (the results don't take into account sales of the Hardened Edition and Prestige Edition of the game which is not available for PC owners).

Even though the percentage is low for the PC version, Modern Warfare 2 is still expected to sell millions of copies among all three versions. That means the PC port could sell hundreds of thousands of copies which is very high for any game, PC or not.

It's "earnings season" which means the vast majority of publically traded companies reveal how they did financially in the last quarter. In Capcom's case, the situation is excellent as the Japanese publisher announced a whopping 58.4 percent increase in its profits in the first half of its fiscal year. Higher-than-expected sales of its games were the main reason although much of that sales increase came from its home country. Sales in the US were not as strong due to the lower-than-expected sales of Bionic Commando and the delay of Dark Void from a fall 2009 to a January 2010 game.

In related news, Capcom is selling the downloadable PC version of their hit fighting game Street Fighter IV for just $19.95 in their online store. That's 50 percent off its normal price. The sale price last through Thursday.

Remember a few weeks ago when it seems like the two big acting unions had approved a new deal for voice acting in games? Yeah . . . never mind. Variety reports that the Screen Actors Guild membership has now voted to reject that contract which basically means going back to square one.

The deal would have given SAG members a 3 percent pay raise immediately for their game and voice work and then a 2.5 percent pay raise beginning on April 1, 2010. However, the SAG members who voted against the deal didn't like the new acting catagory called "atmospheric voices" that would have allowed game publishers to use actors in several minor roles in one session at a base rate.They felt such a move was a "a major reduction from the current pact." The other major acting union, the American Federation of Television & Radio Artists, is recommending that it's members vote to approve the contract

In a bit of a shocker, Gearbox Software's first person shooter Borderlands has taken the top stop in this week's list of the top 10 best selling PC games (based on revenue) on Steam. Left 4 Dead 2, Valve's own zombie shooter sequel, goes down to the number two position after spending the last few weeks in the number one slot.

BioWare's fantasy RPG Dragon Age Origins takes on the third spot this week (for the digital deluxe edition) as well as the fourth spot (for the regular edition). Despite tons of controversy surrounding the PC version in the past week, Modern Warfare 2 managed to debut on the list this week in the number five spot.

1. Borderlands - Gearbox Software/2K Games
2. Left 4 Dead 2 - Valve
3. Dragon Age Origins Digital Deluxe Edition - BioWare/EA
4. Dragon Age Origins - BioWare/EA
5. Modern Warfare 2 - Infinity Ward/Activision
6. ArmA II - Bohemia Interactive
7. Aion - NCsoft
8. Tropico 3 - Kalypso Media
9. Assassin's Creed - Ubisoft
10. Killing Floor - Tripwire Interactive

The Witcher's owners can now be bought . . .at least on the stock market. As previously planned, Poland-based CD Projekt has now become a publicly traded company via its holding company CDP Investment being bought by another Poland-based business Optimus. The owners of CDP Investment still retain control of their company while also holding onto 50 percent of the shares of the publicly traded Optimus.

In addition to CD Projekt RED, which is currently developing The Witcher 2, CDP Investment also owns the GoG.com classic PC gaming download site. It also owns Metropolis Software which is working on a still mysterious game. The company also distributes games in Poland and other countries.

Last June at E3, the MMO game company Trion World Network broke their cone of silence and gave members of the press a first glimpse of gameplay of their first title Heroes of Telera. Since then, well, there's been nothing. No updates, no new footage or screenhots, not much of anything from the company about the game.

However this week they did announce a couple of new people they have added to their executive team. One is David Reid who takes over as the company's senior vice president of publishing. He previously was the president of NCSoft West. In addition Scott Hartsman has been hired as Trion's chief creative officer and general manager of their Redwood Shores dev studios. He was previously an exec at Sony Online Entertainment.

June's E3 appearance remains the press's only public demo of Heroes of Telera, three years after the company announced its formation. It also has a sci-fi MMO project that is a co-production with the cable TV network SyFy as well as an RTS MMO that's being developed by Petroglyph.

We haven't heard much from Epic Games lately. But is there a big announcement coming from the Unreal-Unreal Tournament-Gears of War developer? On Thursday, people who checked out Epic Games' forums saw this image above. However that image was taken down pretty quickly and it seems message threads about said image have been deleted from the message board.

What is it? Is it an announcement of a new Unreal game that got leaked before it should have? Perhaps an all new Epic Games project? Maybe even someone hacking into the forums and posting an image that means nothing? Even a news post about this image on the fan site Beyond Unreal was taken down (although the message board post is still there). We've emailed Epic to try to get a comment on just what might be going on.

Update: Our sister site Joystiq claims through their unnamed sources that the big announcement that might be tied into this image could be a version of Unreal Engine 3 priced so that regular consumers can purchase and use it. Meanwhile BeyondUnreal has now deleted the message board post where we got this image.

Last August, the game-themed retailer Gamestop announced it had hired a person to fill the new executive role of their Digital Media division. The idea that a brick-and-mortar themed retail company is getting more and more into the digital download industry is certainly interesting.

Now IndustryGamers is reporting that GameStop wants to move more into that space. In a recent analyst meeting, company execs said that not only do they plan to expand their current digital download stores for PC games they also plan to "make a strategic investment or acquire an aggregator of online games." Does this mean we could see GameStop buy an already existing PC game download service like Steam or Direct2Drive? That seems unlikely but if GameStop wants to become a player in this market it needs to make a bigger push than what have they have in the past.