gamecock-media-group posts

The original Section 8 was a solid sci-fi multiplayer-oriented first person shooter that appealed to the Tribes fan in all of us. However developer TimeGate Studios was apparently unhappy with how its publisher Southpeak Games handled the release of the title back in 2009 and last December sued the publisher over claims of unpaid royalties.

While there's no word on the outcome of that lawsuit that isn't stopping Timegate from its announcement today of Section 8: Prejudice, the next game in the shooter series. There's no word yet on specific features for the game but GameTrailers.com has a pretty action-packed gameplay trailer that shows off a lot of new environments and other features. The game is due out sometime in early 2011. You can check out the trailer after the jump:

Mike Wilson has had a long history in the game business. He has been the "biz guy" at id Software, was one of the co-founders of Gathering of Developers and Gamecock and currently is the head of Devolver Digital, who has helped to publish Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter and the upcoming The Second Encounter.

Now Wilson can add another credit to his resume: film producer. The Austin American-Statesmen web site reports that Wilson is financing the upcoming low budget comedy Austin High. Filming is scheduled to begin in June on the movie. The movies plot has a stoned-out principal of a fictional Austin, Texas high school dealing with a more straight-laced vice principal who tries to "reform the school into a strict, by-the-book institution." Not surprisingly, the real Austin school district declined to allow the filmmakers the use of any of their facilities.

Last fall, the promising game publisher Gamecock Media Group sold off its assets to Southpeak Games, thanks mostly to one of Gamecock's rich investors pulling out after the financial crisis hit. Now our sister site Joystiq is reporting that many of the people and vendors who were owed money by working on Gamecock's games are still waiting for Southpeak to pay up. Some have even filed lawsuits against Southpeak.

The report, which cites a number of sources that wanted to remain anonymous, claims that Southpeak has told several of the people who are owed money that "Gamecock's upper management simply took the money and ran". Not true, according to Gamecock co-founder Mike Wilson, who was interviewed for the story. He states, "We got absolutely nothing for the small amount of equity that we owned," and added that they "got a reduced severance in order to be able to start working on our new company (Devolver Digital)". Southpeak Games' only official comment on the story? "SouthPeak continues to diligently work through the outstanding details related to the acquisition of Gamecock Media Group. We cannot comment on any pending litigation other than those cited in our public filings."

Gamecock's purchase by Southpeak Games last fall resulted in several of Gamecock's upcoming games being brought into the Southpeak publishing line up. One former Gamecock game that hasn't been heard from lately is Dungeon Hero, the fantasy action-RPG from UK based Firefly Studios.

This week the developer's official web site finally posted up an update on the title admitting that the shutdown of Gamecock "created a number of challenges for us over the past weeks and months". Originally set for release sometime this spring, Dungeon Hero's release has now been delayed. The update didn't provide a new release date and failed to state if the game has found a publisher. It did state that Firefly has "a couple of exciting projects built around the Dungeon Hero universe that we will be talking about soon".

And for those of you waiting for an revival of Firefly's multi-million selling RTS game series Stronghold, there's good news as well. The update states, " . . . we are moving up a gear on the production of the next game in the Stronghold series."

[Via Joystiq]

Southpeak Games is the latest publicly traded game publisher to issue financial results for the past quarter. The company's latest numbers for the three months that ended Sept. 30 show revenues of $8.4 million compared to revenues of $18.3 million for the same period a year ago. The company had a loss of $1.3 million for the quarter compared to a profit of $3.4 million for the same period a year ago.

Despite the bad news financially, Southpeak's press release on the results was very optimistic, saying that they have high hopes for the current fiscal quarter and their line-up of games, including two, Legendary and Mushroom Men, that they acquired with the purchase last month of Gamecock.

There's more news today of game developers losing their jobs. Today the word got out that the Spokane-based developed Cyan Worlds, best known for their Myst series of adventure games, laid off nearly 50 workers in its QA division. Cyan Worlds had been testing games for Gamecock Media but with their recent acquisition by Southpeak Games apparently also meant that those games would no longer be tested at Cyan.

Cyan has already had issues this year as its MMO Myst Online was shut down by its online publisher Gametap. According to the article at the Spokane-based Spokesman Review, Cyan is trying to make deals with individual game developers to test their games as a way to keep revenues going. They also have a new game concept of their own that they are shopping around to various publishers.

[Via Gamasutra]

Back in June the first of two planned downloadable episodes for the action-adventure game Insecticide was released. Developed by Crackpot Entertainment and published by Gamecock, the full game was released on the Nintendo DS console, yet PC gamers are still waiting for the second and final PC episode of the game to be released. The game's official web site claims episode 2 is out there but none of the vendors mentioned (Steam, Direct2Drive and Trymedia) actually have the episode available to download and purchase.

Since Gamecock was recently acquired by Southpeak Games we contacted their PR folks to get an update on when or even if the second Insecticide PC episode would be released. We were told that there are no updates at all on the release, with the rep saying, "It seems to be TBD at this point." Big Download also contacted Crackpot Entertainment for comment but at the time of this post we had not heard back from them. At the moment it doesn't look like folks who bought the first episode will be getting the final one anytime soon.

The status of Velvet Assassin's publisher is a little up in the air thanks to the purchase of the game's former publisher, Gamecock, by Southpeak Games earlier this month. That isn't stopping the marketing of the upcoming stealth action game. Today we got some new screenshots that show off the titles heroine doing what she does best.

And you know what she does best, of course: KILLIN' NAZIS! Yep, this new trio of shots show off some of the game's impressive lighting effects and terrific art design but we know what we want in this title. HOT CHICKS KILLIN' NAZIS!. We don't think Velvet Assassin can be release soon enough.

0Earlier this week it was announced that Southpeak Games would buy out the wild-and-wacky Gamecock Media Group. While our interview with Southpeak CEO Melanie Mroz didn't give us much info on what will happen to the Gamecock brand and its team members our sister site Game Daily has some more info on how much the deal cost Southpeak.

Basically Southpeak gets 7 percent of all the revenue from Gamecock's future games as well as a warrent for Gamecock to purchase 700,000 shares of Southpeak's stock. In fact, as the article states, the actual deal is far more complicated but it does suggest that Gamecock was looking for any kind of deal. It should be interesting to see if Southpeak plans to release any of Gamecock's announced titles beyond Legendary, Mushroom Men and Velvet Assassin.

After founding the almost legendary Gathering of Developers and then seeing that publishing company sold off to Take Two Interactive, Mike Wilson and a number of other members of that original team reformed in early 2007 (with help from some still unnamed investors) to form Gamecock Media Group. As with the original Gathering, Gamecock was a publisher that concentrated mostly on original and sometimes innovative game titles and also staged some weird marketing moves, including holding a "funeral" for E3 and Wilson running a mock campaign president of the video game trade group the Entertainment Software Association.

However their first games got mixed results in sales and in reviews which is perhaps the reason why it was announced this week that another publisher, Southpeak Games, would be buying out Gamecock and ending the Austin, Texas based team's second major bid to be an alternative publisher.

Big Download managed to get Southpeak Games' CEO Melanie Mroz to answer a few questions about the new Southpeak-Gamecock deal and but as you can see there's still some unknowns that have yet to be addressed, including whether or not the Gamecock brand you see above will survive.