Call of Duty Black Ops to Get Another Map Pack!

Image from shockblastmedia.

It has been less than two months since the  Call of Duty Black Ops map pack has come out. As you may recall the map pack that was released for PlayStation3 on Mach 1 of this year is to be followed up with a release of another map pack on May 3 this year. As you might recall from my March 17 blog about online content video game creators are always looking for new and innovative ways to keep players interested in their games.

The video below does a really nice job of explaining just what game players will get if they buy this new map pack. The highlights, for those of you that will not watch this video, are five new maps including four online multiplayer maps and one new zombie map.

 

Official trailer of new map pack Escalation.

 

According to an April 29 article from The Daily Blam,

Since launching last November, Black Ops has single-handedly swept the entire gaming industry, becoming the best selling game in U.S. history only four months after hitting store shelves. While gamers wait in anticipation for the next Call of Duty game, arriving this fall, Activision has announced the second DLC for Black Ops, titled Escalation.

The game that is referenced in the above quote is Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2.  This will be the eighth installment in the Call of Duty line. There is no official release date as of yet, but it is rumored to come out in the fall of 2011, many fans believe sometime in November. Unlike most other franchise games that release a game every two or three years Call of Duty  will be releasing another game only a year after the release of Call of Duty Black Ops. 

The release of this new map pack for Call of Duty Black Ops just shows how important new downloadable content is to the gaming industry. I could not find information on how many of the first map packs were sold, however I did find that more than 20 million map packs were sold, for Call of Duty Modern Warfare2, making Activision about $300 million in sales.

So you may ask, what draws players into these new maps? First off the new maps only cost players $14.99 to download. Second the new maps are more interactive and new. In the first map pack that was released for Black Ops players could use zip lines in one of the maps. In the new map pack that is coming out soon, players can open and close garage doors something that was not possible in the original version of the game. 

Video of a player using the zip line mentioned above.

 

This is the same video as my first one but if you focus on the time between 1:35 to 1:50 you will see the usable doors I mentioned above. 

PlayStation Network Down and Out!

Picture from NewsToday article of PlayStation employee
working on network problem.

Anyone that plays videos games online, myself included, looks forward to turning on their video game counsel to play there favorite game online. After a long stressful day at school or work I look forward to coming home to play Call of Duty Black Ops online. Over the last three days however PlayStation users have not been able to play games online.

According to an April 24th article from newsgater.com by Matt Clark, the Sony PlayStation network has been down for three consecutive days. According to the article the network being down does not only effect those who want to play games online but also those who use the PlayStation network to stream video.

In a CNETNews.com article this is not the first time the PlayStation network has had an outage. At about the same time last year testing the patience of many users, but this problem was resolved in only day.  

To make matters worse, there is no clear timetable as to when the service will be back online, which is causing great frustration in the gamer community. The timing couldn't be any worse as the weekend approaches.

CNETNews also released a poll to find out PlayStation network users feel should be done to compensate for the long network outage (you can see the pole on the CNET site on the left side of the page). The poll has had 7,255 votes and 37% of users that voted said they deserve a free game from Sony. On the other hand 20%, including myself responded "Nothing! Outages happen." to the same poll. 

In a PCMAG.com article by David Murphy the shortage was on day four when Patrick Seybold, senior director of corporate communications and social media of Sony, wrote in his blog that Sony is taking this unexpected time to rebuild the PlayStation network infrastructure even better than before. The article goes on to later explain that even though there is no official time frame to have the network back up and running a source speaking to PlayStation Universe expects he network to be up in the U.S. on Tuesday.

With this weekend being Easter weekend I did not have many chances to play PlayStation so this outage did not affect me too much. If this outage had happened during the week however I would have gone crazy without being able to play online whenever I wanted. From time to time there are outages in the network and those can be annoying even though they last only a short period of time. It is hard to believe that in today's day in age that there can be an outage that lasts as long as this one has. I do like that PlayStation is taking this very long outage to correct and improve upon the current network that is in place.

Next Stop 3rd Dimension!

Sony warns that 3D my have side
effects to players. PS3Vault

This week I had a hard time coming up with a topic to blog about but that may be because I was simply thinking too hard. If someone were to ask me today what the next big thing in the entertainment industry is going to be I would answer 3D. One does not have to look too far to see all of the new 3D products popping up all around us. The most obvious industries jumping on the 3D bandwagon are the movie and TV industries, but where does the video game industry stand on this transformation?


 In a March 31, 2011 Wall Street Journal blog post Ryan Kuo explains that he got to play a section of SOCOM 4 in 3D, at the recent Sony showcase in New York, and was quickly enveloped in the world although the 3D glasses made the screen quite a bit darker. After reading Kuo's blog post he seems to be torn between 3D and 2D games. According to Kuo the best 3D game showcased at the event was Virtua Tennis 4. He accredits this success to the fact that already translates well into a video game. On the other hand Kuo says,

Then there were games like Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception and Mortal Kombat, where the inclusion of 3D is like gluing twigs and wood chips to a painting of a forest. Mortal Kombat is a lovely 2D fighting game that doesn’t exactly make room for 3-D. And a prerecorded video of Uncharted 3′s gameplay looked decidedly better without 3-D glasses—blur and all.

 

This video explains what PS3 owners will need to do to be able to play 3D games and watch 3D movies.

The only problem I see right now in 3D games is the fact that gamers are required to wear glasses when playing. After reading Kuo's post he did not seem to mind the fact that the player has to wear glasses to play the games. I on the other hand am still on the fence on this aspect of 3D gaming.

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Not all 3D gaming requires glasses however! Nintendo recently released the Nintendo 3DS on March 27. The Nintendo 3DS is a glasses free hand held gaming device. The Nintendo 3DS retails for $250 and currently has about 20 games, which retail for about $40 each, that can be played on the device. Aside from playing games on the Nintendo 3DS owners can also access the internet, take 3D videos and even watch 3D movies.

 

This is the virtual tour of the Nintendo 3DS found on the Nintendo website. The part of this video that applies best to the post starts at the 4 minute mark.

 If you happen to be in the same boat as me and feel like the 3D glasses would be an inconvenience when playing games then the Nintendo 3DS is clearly your best option. As of right now I am interested in 3D gaming but I think I will hold out until it becomes cheaper and 3D glasses free. No matter how you feel about this next step in gaming one cannot deny that 3D is here to stay.

Video Game Consoles and Downloadable Content

The PS3 and XBox 360 from gamingbolt.com

As promised here is my post about what video game consoles are doing to combat the shift that is happening in the video game industry. ThePlayStation 3 and XBox 360 will be 5 and 6 years old this year respectively. At this time neither of the companies are talking about new systems.

According to the US Today article "Social media, mobile devices help video games grow", the PlayStation 3 and XBox 360 have added functionality to their consoles. For example you can stream Netflix videos over the internet. Both the PlayStation and XBox have added new motion controllers to the systems. The PlayStation introduced the PlayStation Move and XBox introduced the Kinect. Both of these additions have helped to increase user interactivity in these two consoles.

Alan Miller, the co-founder of Activision, had this to say about the video game industry;

 is undergoing its greatest rate of change in the last 25 years, fundamentally generated by this transition from retail distribution to electronic distribution.

Last year Activision released a map pack for the very popular Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. The map pack sold for $15 and gave players 5 new maps for online game play. In 2010 Activision made $1.5 billion in revenue from the map packs and digital sales of World of Warcraft. Even though Activision is made a lot of money from down-loadable content they have had to cut ties with some games, Guitar Hero and Tony Hawk, two big name games.

This video explains everything about the new map pack for Call of Duty Black Ops.

Activison is not the only big name company reaping the benefits of down-loadable content. EA is also getting in on the action by making down-loadable content for games such as Mass Effect. EA has also started to convert their heavy hitters, Madden NFL and FIFA, into Facebook games. Many of the top iPhone games are created by EA and as a result EA made more than $700 million in digital sales last year.

According to EA CEO John Riccitiello,

 I don't think it replaces console gaming, he says. Big blockbusters are still part of the movie industry. At the same time, you can watch a cat video on YouTube. I guarantee you, a decade from now, there will be blockbuster games, and there will be our equivalent of cat videos. We are going to run the full spectrum. The more interesting thing is that all games are social from this point.

 I believe that video game consoles will be around for a long time. I think that down-loadable content makes video games much better. I play Call of Duty online and just recently bought the map pack that Activison came out with and the new maps make the game more fun and keep the game changing. The addition of down-loadable content is great for video game companies because it is a great way for these companies to take advantage of a very digital move in technology in general, video games included.

Growth of Social Media = Growth of Video Games

Facebook has made it possible for a
new generation of gamer.

We have all been on Facebook getting our fix for the day (or the hour) and seen that one our friends need our help on their farm in Farmville. Chances are after we see this news pop up on our news feed we will bring up the game and help our friend out. The new trend in video games is not only on Facebook, but also smartphones and other mobile devices.

More people are playing more games on more platforms than ever before. This may seem like a good thing, but sales of the Nintendo Wii declined from $21.4 billion in 2008 to $18.7 billion in 2010. Another scary trend that is emerging in the video game industry is new and strictly social-game based publishers quickly becoming worth more than well established video game publishers. For example Zynga the company behind many of the games on Facebook is worth an estimated $9.3 billion which is more than the value of Electronic Arts (EA) publisher of Madden NFL and The Sims.

This image shows the expected growth
of video games in the next 3 years.

According to Meggan Scavio event director of Game Developers Conference (GDC); 

"What smartphones and social games is showing us is that you don't need a year or two-year development cycle anymore to make a profitable game, but those consoles are not going to go away."

According to the THE NDP Group, a market researcher, as many as two thirds of Americans play games and as many as a half of American households have a video game counsel. Meanwhile one out of five Americans age 6 and up have played games on social networks such as Facebook. To me this fact from The NDP shows that people are still playing games on traditional counsels, such as the Wii or the Play Station 3, but there is a shift in mobile gaming because almost everyone has access to mobile games.

Steve Jobs with the newest and
greatest iPhone4.

 The shift to mobile gaming can be accredited to Apple's introduction of the iPhone in 2007. In the same year Zynga launched Texas Hold'em Poker on Facebook. Since 2007 Apple has sold over 73 million iPhones and sold over 10 billion apps, as many as half of those being games. Facebook and smartphone games have done what the industry had not been able to do for seven or eight years before that, and that is to bring millions of new people into the gaming world.  Dave Roberts CEO of PopCap Games gives the example; If one were to ask a 50 year-old women 10 years ago if she played video games she would have looked at you like you were from another planet. Now she is likely to play Farmville or Bejewled on her iPhone.

The video above shows an iPod Touch, but it is powered by the same app store as the iPhone and shows a few different games you can play on an iPod or iPhone.  

This video shows all of the new and interesting changes Apple made on the iPhone4. This video does not have much to do with games on the iPhone but I found it very interesting. Watch if you have some time to spare.

Stay tuned for next week when I look at what producers of the major counsels are doing to combat this move to mobile gaming.

EA Sports vs. Former NCAA Player

Once again the video game industry is coming under fire. This time the sport game giant EA Sports finds itself locked in a lawsuit with former NCAA football player Sam Keller. This lawsuit is over compensation that Keller believes he should have received for being featured in "NCAA Football 08".

EA Sports shares undisclosed royalties with the NCAA for use of college stadiums, team names and uniforms and the players' image. EA Sports protects the college players by not using their names in the games. Instead of names EA Sports simply uses the players numbers to differentiate the players from one another. The players used in these games do not receive any money because they are considered amateurs and to maintain amateur status one cannot receive money for playing. Keller believes that him and many other former players should receive a large amount of money for the use of their images in these games. In an interview about the lawsuit Keller said;

"When you are playing, you are kind of naive to the idea that you are being taken advantage of because you are so caught up in playing college football," Keller also said "They are making billions off of our images."

 This case gained power when the court ruled against EA Sports saying that the company did not do a good enough job of transforming the players image. Judge Wilken said that EA's argument that the players name was removed was not good enough. She explained that removing the players name was not enough because it was still obvious who the nameless player was. EA Sports and the NCAA are now teamed up with the Hollywood Studios and have appealed this ruling. (Here is a link to the story Appeals court hears argument,,,)

I understand Wilken's decision to rule against EA Sports and the NCAA but I do not agree with the ruling. EA Sports has the rights to use the player's images and should not have to change anything about these players. I also believe that Keller has no right to be suing EA Sports and the NCAA for them using his image while he was still in school because EA Sports has the an agreement with the NCAA that says they can use the images of players. I do understand that he is not receiving any money and that may seem unfair, but he was in college at the time and cannot receive any money based on his performance when he is playing for the NCAA.

I also do not understand why Keller has just now decided to file a lawsuit. The game he is suing over was released three years ago. If the ruling goes in favor of Keller the consequences will be felt throughout the entertainment world from Hollywood to the video game industry. I think if Keller wins this case EA Sports will no longer make games based on NCAA sports and that will be a huge hit to the profit of the company.

Games Going Too Far?

Once again video games are in the center of a very heated debate. Ubisoft's new game "Call of Juarez, The Cartel" is now under the microscope and under fire for basing the game on a current, very sensitive subject. The game is described by the game's website as a "bloody road trip from Los Angeles to Juarez, Mexico."  It is important to keep in mind that this game will not hit stores until the summer of 2011 and very little is known about this game at this point.All that is really known is that the game will be based off of the ongoing drug battle between Los Angeles and Mexico.
 
In a story released by Fox News Latino the game is under heavy fire. Dr. Kathleen Staudt is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas at El Paso and was interviewed in this story. Dr. Staudt is a researcher on topics including violence, immigration and the border. Here are a few quotes from Dr. Stuadt in the story for Fox News Latino:

“I think this should be taken very seriously considering the large scale demonization of Mexico and the Mexican people.” and also, “People who don’t understand the border and don’t know the border are now going to view it in a caricature game.” “The whole picture of the border is one in which people are suffering tragedies but also it’s about the resilience of the people.”

In response to Dr. Struadt's comments an Ubisoft spokesmen responded by saying,

“While 'Call of Juarez: The Cartel' touches on subjects relevant to current events in Juarez it does so in a fictional manner that makes the gaming experience feel more like being immersed in an action movie than in a real life situation.”

Screenshot from "Call of Juarez, The Cartel".

If the current trends in gaming continue, people will be constantly demanding new and more realistic plots. Even though "Call of Juarez, The Cartel" is third game in this series, I had never heard of any of the games until I wrote this post. As I researched "Call of Juarez," I found that the other two games are based in Western times which show that companies realize most people want to play games based in new settings.

Here is a link to a video that confirms the switch from Western to Modern!

To answer the question of are games going too far, I would say no. I answer no because I think that in order for companies to make money on gaming they will need to keep up with current events just live the movie industry does. I think that people just need to remember that video games are for entertainment and are not real.