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Posts Tagged ‘Game Publisher’

Mobile game powerhouse Gameloft will make iPad games (video)

French mobile game publisher Gameloft has scaled back its investments in Google Android games. But the company is very excited about making games for the new iPad tablet computer from Apple. Michel Guillemot, chief executive of Gameloft, said he believes in the iPad because it has a great design and Apple has a strong ecosystem. Apple showed off Gameloft’s Nova first-person shooter game, optimized for the iPad, on stage today. Check out our video interview with Guillemot.

Michel Guillemot of Gameloft wants to make iPad games from Dean Takahashi on Vimeo.

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SGN promotes president to CEO role

SGN, one of the top game publishers on the iPhone, has given its chief executive title to No. 2 executive Randy Breen.

Founder Shervin Pishevar remains at the company as executive chairman at the company. Breen is a former Electronic Arts and LucasArts game veteran who joined the company in the middle of last year as chief operating officer. The company has made its name doing unique games for the iPhone that take advantage of its touchscreen and tilt controls. Among its hits are the flight combat games F.A.S.T. and Skies of Glory, both of which push 3-D graphics to the limit on the iPhone.

SGN started out as a Facebook game publisher, but shifted much of its focus on the iPhone in 2008 But it has fallen far behind others such Zynga, Playfish and Crowdstar on Facebook and bet heavily that the iPhone will soon become as lucrative a platform.SGN has already had 15 million downloads on the iPhone and iPod Touch, putting its games on one of every three mobile devices that apple makes.

SGN is planning to expand to the Android and tablet computer markets this year, Pishevar said. SGN raised $15 million in a round of funding from Greylock Partners and others. SGN has expanded to more than 100 employees in Palo Alto, Calif., China and Argentina.

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EA to lay off 1500 workers, close some facilities

Filed under: Gaming, Software

Large-scale layoffs have been hitting everywhere in the past year, and Electronic Arts is now no different: according to Gamasutra, the game publisher announced today that it will lay off 1,500 workers by April 2010, after posting a year-to-year decrease in revenue and a net loss of $391 million.

About 1,300 of the freshly unemployed individuals will result from the full closure of some of EA’s facilities. This will cost EA money at the outset, but they estimate that by dropping the facilities they stand to save about $100 million annually. According to EA CEO John Riccitello, the cuts are happening in “targeted areas,” so the company can focus up on its bigger, more lucrative games.

EA has kept up well with the iPhone platform and has released some of its most popular titles to the App Store, such as The Sims 3, Rock Band, and Spore. Consumers still pay a premium price for them, however. For example, Rock Band costs $9.99 and comes with only 20 songs, and charges 50 cents for each additional song. Still, Rock Band ended up selling well, so maybe we’ll be seeing more of EA in the App Store in the coming fiscal quarters.

EA also announced today its acquisition of Playfish, whose primary business is Facebook games, for $300 million. Hopefully out of the layoff ashes rises some brutally addictive social-based game for the iPhone.

TUAWEA to lay off 1500 workers, close some facilities originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Outspark snares former Electronic Arts executive as CEO

The brain drain from the old guard to the new continues in the video game business. Online game publisher Outspark is announcing it has hired former Electronic Arts executive Owen Mahoney as its chief executive today.

The hiring is yet another example of console video game company veterans moving into the hot online games sector, which is gathering momentum thanks to a fresh business model. San Francisco-based Outspark publishes free-to-play games, where you can start playing for free and pay only when you want to upgrade to better weapons or decorate your character. Outspark specializes in “casual massively multiplayer online games,” which aren’t as time consuming as hardcore games but offer a persistent community, social fun, and ongoing plot to lure gamers back.

Mahoney was senior vice president of business development at the mothership of the game industry, EA, until March, when he left to join former EA studio chief Paul Lee at a new venture firm.

But he was lured to the new job by Susan Choe, founding CEO of Outspark. She will now be chairman and continue to focus on developing ties to Asian game companies and others that can provide games for Outspark’s online game portal. Outspark has 60 employees, while EA has more than 9,500. Choe felt she needed to bring in someone who had experience with operations in a big company, Mahoney said.

Korean and Chinese game companies have adopted the free-to-play business model in a big way. It is only now catching on in the U.S. Outspark has five games, most of them imported under license from Asian game companies, in the U.S. and European markets. It has more than 5.4 million unique visitors a month. Most of those gamers play for free, but the ones who pay spend an average of $50 per month.

In an interview, Mahoney said his goal is to expand Outspark’s business on a worldwide basis. He has more than 15 years of digital media experience, including nine years at EA where he led acquisitions, equity investments and strategic partnerships.

“I spent a lot of time at EA moving into the online business and considered how business models are changing in North America,” Mahoney said. “I noticed my own playing habits changing as I moved almost purely offline play to online. I spent time in Asia where the innovation is in the business models.”

Mahoney said he has no doubt that the free-to-play model will catch on in the U.S., partly because of the change in attitude among gamers in the recession. While console game sales have fallen for five consecutive months compared to year ago numbers, online games are growing fast. Sony Online Entertainment has almost 5 million players for its Free Realms game, a free-to-play game launched in April. Outspark’s goal is to make the transition from offline to online as “frictionless” as possible for gamers, Mahoney said.

Can the traditional game companies adapt to this new way of doing business, or will startups rule? EA itself is experimenting with free-to-play and other businesses with games such as Battlefield Heroes. But Mahoney said, “The large companies have to deliver for their shareholders and it’s hard for them to move fast. As a free-to-play online game company, you have to respond to the users and move quickly the revise your games. It’s a different cadence.”

Mahoney will still have ties to EA. Last week, Outspark announced it will publish an online dancing and shopping game from J2M, a game studio in South Korea that EA recently acquired. That unnamed title will launch later this year and it represents Outspark’s attempt to bring other game companies into its publishing realm.

Beyond the traditional companies, Outspark’s rivals include Asian companies such as Nexon, which has expanded into the U.S. market. Outspark raised $8.3 million in venture funding during the dry month of July and has now raised $20 million to date. Investors include DCM, Syncom Venture Partners, SBI Investment, Mille Plateau, Tencent and Altos Ventures.

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Hackers create robots, er, “helpers,” to automate play in World of Warcraft

Hacking World of Warcraft is like a national pastime among game-oriented hackers. So its no surprise that hackers have figured out a new way to circumvent the rules of the online role-playing fantasy game.

At the Defcon security conference in Las Vegas on Friday, a pair of hackers showed they could create automated robot characters who could walk around the game world doing the bidding of their masters. Such characters are usually considered unfair violations of the terms of service for the game and accounts are deleted whenever they are discovered. It remains to be seen if the hackers built their automated characters in a way that is legally protected.

James Luedke and Christopher Mooney, working in their spare time, said they coded the “enhancement API,” or an applications programming interface that lets people change the user interface of World of Warcraft. You can use the API to change the look and feel of the client. By itself, that isn’t a violation of service rules, as game publisher Blizzard Entertainment makes it easy to do this.

But Blizzard has frowned upon the creation of automated characters who can cast spells and level up quickly. Normally, players have to “grind” their way to more powerful characters. That means they have to tediously wander around the world, fulfill various kinds of missions, and thereby earn their rewards. In past patches, Blizzard has disabled the ability to do tasks in an automated way in the name of making sure the game is balanced for all.

Luedke and Mooney said they tried to avoid a direct violation of terms of service. It remains to be seen how Blizzard will react to it. While Blizzard prevailed in a Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaint against WoW bot Glilder, Luedke and Mooney said they restricted their code to certain programming techniques that use Blizzard’s own WoW API. They are also careful to call the automated characters “helpers” rather than “robots,” though they let the “robot” word slip a number of times in their talk.

Yet they are still able to do a variety of things automatically, like getting a character to cast spells, select targets, and move around. The behavior looks just like a regular player fighting with a group of characters, but it’s all automated. The hackers say they also programmed their helpers to give automated responses under questioning by Gamemasters, who are Blizzard staffers that police the online world.

The hacker’s tool is available at this site and more information is available here.

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