activision-blizzard posts

It's February 2010 and we thought we would be well into playing in the multiplayer beta for StarCraft II by now As it is, developer Blizzard is still keeping the many millions of people who want to get their hands on the sci-fi RTS sequel waiting, and waiting and waiting even more.

However the game's official web site is still being updates with some lore-related content. This week the site has added a bio of one of the game's characters. Matt Horner who is one of the main allies of one of StarCraft's main characters Jim Raynor. In the meantime, publisher Activision Blizzard is expected to give a status report on StarCraft II's progress as part of its quarterly financial results which will be revealed on Wednesday.

There are quite a few PC game download services to choose from but none of them are quite like GoG.com. For over a year now the service, started by The Witcher creators CD Projekt, have offered gamers a way to buy some of the best PC games ever made in a DRM-free environment and with pricing that makes them extremely easy to afford. Over the past year the service has added more and more games and publishers to the mix and even added games that no other download site can (legally) offer to consumers.

As we first reported earlier this morning CD Projekt has has officially announced that GoG.com will begin to offer older PC games from Activision's library of titles. Those titles now include games from Activision's merger with Vivendi Games to form Activision Blizzard. Before today's announcement, Big Download got a chance to ask some questions to CD Projekt's co-founder Marcin Iwinski about this development and GoG.com's future. We even managed to sneak in a question about CD Projekt's next big game project, The Witcher 2.

For the past week, the folks at GoG.com, owned by CD Projekt, have had a countdown clock on their site. Usually such a clock means that a major annoncement is coming up. Now the clock has expired and the truth can be revealed. GoG.com has now confirmed it has secured a deal with publisher Activision to offer a number of their older PC games for download in GoG.com's DRM-free format.

The deal also includes offering older games from the now defunct Vivendi Games. Activision acquired the rights to a number of these games when the company merged with Vivendi Games to formed Activision Blizzard a couple of years ago. The first two games that GoG.com is schedled add to their library of titles from this new publishing deal today are the classic Gabriel Knight adventure game and Arcanum, the steampunk RPG from the now defunct Trokia Software. Both are priced at $5.99 each.

For more info on this deal Big Download got a chance to chat with Marcin Iwinski, the co-founder of CD Projekt. Look for that interview to be posted up later this morning.

Next month's DICE Summit is already looking like it will be an interesting one and this week the show's organizers announced that one of the summit's keynote speeches will be conducted by Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision Blizzard. Kotick has been something of a polarizing presence in the game industry. While the publisher has been highly successful even in the face of the current economic recession Kotick has been accused by some of being more interested in making money than publishing good games.

So it's somewhat ironic that the DICE Summit organizers state that Kotick's keynote speech will "talk about how creative talent drives the video game industry." Hmmmm. It won't be about driving franchises into the ground? How odd. The DICE Summit is still scheduled to be held in Las Vegas with Kotick's speech scheduled for February 17.


[Via email press release]

Steam has delivered yet another automatic patch update to Modern Warfare 2, bringing with it some more bug fixes and changes for the Infinity Ward first person shooter. There's also been some cheats and hacks that have been dealt with in this latest update.

Some of the changes in this latest patch include normalising the sprint speed for the Care Package, Emergency Airdrop, and Sentry Gun marker grenades. They have also improved the placement of sentry guns and also fixed some player collision issues. The patch has also put in some tweaks to improve the mouse latency in the game. All in all it's a fairly minor update.

The Entertainment Software Ratings Board has been the buffer the game industry has used to keep itself from being regulated by the US government. Now a new survey has shown that the vast majority of parent in the US not only are aware of the ESRB ratings but use them when they purchase a game.

The survey, which was conducted by publisher Activision and The Harrison Group, states that 82 percent of parents who play games are aware of the ratings and 70 percent of them use the ratings when purchasing games. 62 percent of parents do some research before purchasing games for kids. The results are based on online interviews with 1,201 game players and their parents.

PC gamers have been waiting for a while to get an update to the PC port of Modern Warfare 2 and late on Wednesday the Steam site provided that automatic update to the Infinity Ward-developed first person shooter. The patch is mostly dealing with fixing bugs and closing some hacks in the title.

Some of the fixes include keeping people with pirated copies of the game from matchmaking with folks who own a legitimate copy of Modern Warfare 2. There are also some textures hacks that have been fixed and a glitch that let players out of a game's playable area has been dealt with.

Activision's hit shooter Modern Warfare 2 reportedly brought in over $500 million worldwide in just its first five days. Now the Infinity Ward-developed game has generated over $ billion in sell-through revenue worldwide since its launch just over two months ago.

The numbers, which come from internal estimates from the publisher, show that the game has truly achieved mainstream popularity. In fact, games like Mass Effect 2, an RPG, are aiming to go after the big Modern Warfare 2 crowd by improving the in-game shooting combat features. Kotaku quotes BioWare's Casey Hudson as saying, "We need to put Mass Effect 2 combat against the very best that is out there. And say this is absolutely state of the art shooting. I think in combat moments they will feel it is the same sort of game."

We had a feeling this might happen since Activision hasn't been promoting this game at all for the past several months but today the GameStop web site changed the release date for Singularity, the temporal-themed first person shooter from developer Raven Software.

Activision's last mention of Singularity was that it was delaying the game from a fall 2009 release to a first quarter 2010 schedule. At the time the publisher said the move was not about giving the game more development time but that they didn't want to put their untested FPS against their 800 pound Modern Warfare 2 title. Now GameStop is showing a June 1, 2010 ship date for the game. We've emailed Activision's PR to see if they have any official word on a new Singularity release date.

Update: Activision sent over this statement: "Activision does not comment on rumor and/or speculation. We have not announced a launch date for Singularity."

When you have one of the biggest game launches in 2009, everyone wants to know what the team behind it wants to do next. On Thursday, rumors hit that Infinity Ward would not be making the next game in Activision's Modern Warfare series. Now comes word via Destructoid that Infinity Ward's next game could in fact be an MMO title.

As usual, the article cites unnamed sources for its info saying that the developer has been hiring people away from major MMO developer Sony Online Entertainment. The article also claims there's some kind of collaboration with Blizzard (both developers are owned by Activision Blizzard) on this project. The article claims not to know exactly what the MMO will be all about although Activision execs have mentioned the possibility of a Call of Duty-based MMO in the past.