Blog Archives
Ouya Monetization “Better Than Expected” Despite 73% of Users Not Buying a Game
In a recent interview with The Verge, Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman said that, “Monetization on Ouya is so far better than we expected.”
The problem with that statement is that is makes no sense by almost every objective metric. In the first month following the $99 console’s release, only 27% of owners have paid for a game. That leaves three-quarters of consoles sticking with the free games and trials currently available.
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Activision Buys Out Vivendi For $5.83 Billion
Last week, we reported that Activision’s parent company (and majority owner) Vivendi was going to make the publisher pay out a massive dividend that would nearly tap all of Activision’s cash reserves.
Just days later, Activision decided that it wasn’t going to pay the dividend and indicated such by buying back Vivendi’s majority stake in the company in a deal with $5.83 billion.
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Reports Say Vivendi to Take $2 Billion From Activision
It looks like Activision Blizzard’s plan to whether any unexpected costs for the upcoming console launches and possible sales shortfalls as a result of economic uncertainty by leveraging a mountain of money may require a rethink.
A report in the Wall Street Journal suggests that Activision’s parent company Vivendi is planning to take a $2 billion cash dividend from the publisher to pay down its own debt.
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Microsoft Uses Change from Points to Money to Raise UK Prices
The exciting change from the mythical Microsoft Points system (which, according to a friend in marketing, was designed to make people think they were paying less than they actually were) to real world currency might not be all that it’s cracked up to be for gamers in the UK.
Reports from Xbox Live users in the UK say that Microsoft has used the conversion from Microsoft Points to real money as an opportunity to raise prices by upwards of 34%.
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Indian Gamers Protest Big EA Price Hikes
Just when you thought that EA had turned a corner and was making amends for past transgressions, they turn around and piss off PC gamers in India. EA has changed their launch pricing for some of the most popular PC games that are due out in the fall. The result has seen the prices of some of EA’s biggest fall 2013 PC releases increase by 66% to 133% from prices last year.
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Building a Successful Call of Duty Clone in Three Steps
The most successful video game on the market right now is the Call of Duty series. Say what you will about the game’s lack of innovation and utter disregard for the single-player campaign, this is the most commercially successful game on the market. The last couple of years have seen gross sales of over $1 billion and units sold well in excess of 10 million.
As such, you could understand why everybody is looking to CoD for cues for their upcoming efforts. Just look at the new all-brown colour palette and gritty art style of Dead Rising 3 and EA turning Battlefield into an annual franchise. The thing is that Call of Duty’s success isn’t about how it looks or how often it comes out. It may come as a shock but there’s a simple but largely undiscovered formula that makes CoD a massive success.
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Microsoft Has Lost the Console War Before It Started
The Microsoft keynote event at E3 is about to begin and it doesn’t really matter. Over the last few weeks, Microsoft has repeatedly shot itself in the foot when promoting their upcoming Xbox One. They think that they can do no wrong with their next-gen console but the reality is that the can do nothing right.
Microsoft is walking into E3 thinking that they’re Justin Bieber, they’re on top of the world and full of swagger. They are Justin Bieber but everyone sees them as Justin Bieber, self-important douche, with a bit of Amanda Bynes’ delusional separation from reality.
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Console Wars: The Xbox One’s Failure to Launch is a Marketing Problem
Having had a few days to digest the two very different launch events for Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One, I’ve come to a realization. As much as people don’t seem to like the Xbox launch, it wasn’t a failure in and of itself. In fact, I believe that Microsoft successfully accomplished what it set out to do.
The Xbox One and PlayStation Four both play video games. However, if you were to watch the two launch events, I’d understand if you were a little confused by that statement. While the PlayStation 4’s launch emphasised how it plays games and how it augments that with the social networking and sharing features, the Xbox spent comparatively little time talking about the games.
The difference in the launches was an example of how the console manufacturers are positioning their next-gen consoles in the market.
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The Dollars and Cents of BioShock Infinite
At the beginning of January, I wrote up a detailed breakdown of how much a publisher actually makes for each new copy of a game they sold. With today’s release of BioShock Infinite, I thought it would be a good time to apply these numbers to a practical example to show how profitable games actually are.
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