activision-blizzard posts

Activision Blizzard announced its latest financial numbers for its last fiscal quarter that ended on December 31 2010. Revenues came in at $1.43 billion for the quarter, slightly below the company's numbers of $1.56 billion for the same period a year ago. For the entire 2010 calendar year the publisher brought in $4.45 billion in revenue, slightly higher than the $4.28 billion in revenue that it brought back in 2009.

In the press release, which also announced the cancellation of True Crime Hong Kong and the shut down of the company's Guitar Hero business, Activision Blizzard announced that next week during Toy Fair it would announced a new franchise that it claims will "bring the world of toys, video games and the Internet together in an unprecedented way."

True Crime Hong Kong, the planned revival of Activision's open world crime action series, has been canceled by the publisher. The news of the cancellation hit a few hours ago on other gaming web sites and was confirmed by Activision Blizzard in their quarterly financial press release issued just a few minutes ago.

True Crime Hong Kong was first announced in December 2009 by the publisher as a revival of the series that it had started in the early 2000s. Developer United Front Studios was the team behind the new True Crime Hong Kong but the game itself had never been demoed to the press and Activision had only released a teaser trailer and some screenshots before today's announcement. There's no word yet on how much this will affect the developer in terms of layoffs.

Activision also announced that it would shut down its console-based Guitar Hero business as well. In its press release, the publisher states, "These decisions are based on the desire to focus on the greatest opportunities that the company currently has to create the world's best interactive entertainment experiences."

Update: During Activision Blizzard's quarterly conference call with investors, execs stated that they felt that True Crime Hong Hong would just not be good enough to compete against other open world action games.

Today developer Treyarch and publisher Activision released some new screenshots from First Strike, the upcoming map pack for its hit first person shooter Call of Duty Black Ops. Among the new screenshots that show off the five new maps for the game, the team threw in something kind of cool.

The folks at Treyarch apparently love the kind of "grindhouse" movie posters that Valve used to promote its various Left 4 Dead campaigns. So they came up with one of their own for the zombie-themed map in First Strike, Ascension. You can check out the full poster after the jump. The map pack is due out on February 1 for the Xbox 360 console and should be released for the PC version a month after that.

In April 2009 we reported on a web site called Sarien.net which offered users free versions of classic Sierra Online adventure games to play via a web browser. The site also allowed people to see and chat with other players while they played the game. At the time we wondered if Activision Blizzard, who now own the rights to these games, would shut the site down.

Well it took longer than we thought, but this week, the operators of Sarien.net got the dreaded letter from Activision Blizzard's lawyers, asking them to "immediately cease any further distribution or exploitation of the Sierra Games on your Website". While the company has in the past allowed some of these kinds of free fan projects to go forward (The Silver Lining continuation of the King's Quest game series comes to mind) not every project will get the owner's seal of approval.

While Call of Duty Black Ops remains one of the most popular games on Valve's Steam service, the PC port of Treyarch's recent first person shooter has come under attacks by a UK-based gamer consumer group called Gamers' Voice. Last December the group issued a open letter to the game's publisher Activision, stating that in its opinion there were numerous issues with both the PC and PS3 versions of the game. The letter states, "You have pushed out a game that is broken to the point of it not fulfilling its function as a piece of entertainment."

The group waited one month for Activision to reply but apparently the publisher issued no response. Now Gamers' Voice states on their web site that it will submit a more formal statement "to the relevant government agencies that protect consumer rights in the UK." The group continues to claim that "entire sections of the PS3 and PC gaming community are apparently being used as game testers for an extended period after a game's release, yet being asked to pay for the privilege."

[Via VG247.com]

It's been over a month since the last patch was released for the PC version of Call of Duty Black Ops. However late tonight the Steam service offered up the latest bug update for the PC port of developer Treyarch's hit first person shooter.

The new patch is mainly for fixing issues in the game such as closing up some exploits, improving the game's stability and fixing an issue where the audio in multiplayer was stuttering on some PC systems. It does add some new private match server settings (Team Change, Team-Up Period, and Keep Balanced Teams) and your friends on your team will now show up as blue on the game's mini-map.

Activision's biggest game franchise by far is the Call of Duty franchise and everyone expects a new game in the series to be released by November of 2011. Now a report from the Los Angeles Times claims that the next game in the shooter series will indeed be Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 and that three development teams are working on it.

According to the report, which does not name its sources, the game's main developer Infinity Ward is getting help on the single player campaign from another in-house developer Sledgehammer Games. Infinity Ward apparently needed the help since much of the team left the studio in 2010 following the firing of the studio's founders by Activision. In addition, the article claims that another developer, Raven Software, is handling the multiplayer portions of Modern Warfare 3. The downside? A Call of Duty spin-off game from Sledgehammer Games is now on hold while the team helps Infinity Ward.

In related news, our sister site Joystiq has all of the new and gory details of the current legal battle between Activision and Infinity Ward's former heads Vince Zampella and Jason West. In short, the court has now officially added Electronic Arts as a defendant in Activision's lawsuit against the duo.

The UK-based game developer Bizarre Creations seems to have run out of options and time. After its owner Activision revealed last November it was considering selling or shutting down the studio, Develop reports that the publisher has now recommended that the studio be closed.

According to the report, Activision said it had " a lot of leads but no interested parties" who wanted to purchase the studio which was formed in 1994. Activision bought the studio in 2007 and in 2010 it finally released its first games for the publisher; the racing title Blur and the movie-based action game James Bond 007 Blood Stone. Neither game sold well, however. The shut down of Bizarre, barring a last minute sale, means that about 200 people will lose their jobs.

Activision's Spider-Man game license has been a solid one for the game publisher and last year's release of Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions from Activision's in-house game developer Beenox got a lot of good critical notices (the PC version was released as a Wal-Mart exclusive last November).

Activision was apparently happy enough with Beenox's work on the game that today they announced that Beenox will now be the primary developer for Activision's upcoming and unannounced games featuring Marvel Comics' favorite web slinger. There's no word yet on what the next Spider-man game will be about nor when will it be released.

It's "lawsuit day" today in gaming news as word has gotten out on a new lawsuit filed against Activision Blizzard and the social networking game publisher Zynga. TechCrunch reports that the lawsuit was filed by Walker Digital, a so-called "invention company." In its lawsuit Walker Digital claims both publisher have infringed on one of Walker Digital's US patents, 6,425,828, that was first filed in 2002.

Walker Digital claims that Activision Blizzard and Zynga are infringing on the patent which is for "a method and a system for a distributed electronic tournament system ..." Walker Digital says that a number of games released by both publishers, including Call of Duty Modern Warfare 1 and 2, World of Warcraft and others infringe on its patent. The company is seeking an unspecified amount for compensation and damages. So far Activision Blizzard and Zynga have yet to respond to the lawsuit.