VGTribune

Yesterday EA revealed their Q1 results in which they reported a net income of $96 Million, which is up on last years (Q1) $234 Million net loss.

This improvement is due in part to the improved sales in digital and packaged goods, although interestingly sales of EA partner games were down. Suggesting both Green Day: Rock Band and APB didn’t do as well as EA wanted considering they were listed as key titles for the Q1 period.

It’s not all doom and gloom however as EA had some pretty impressive highlights in their Q1 period such as being the No# 1 publisher on high def consoles with a 22% market share.

[EA Investor Site]

Visionary director, Guillermo Del Toro, is working on a number of games with a “big game company.”

“We’re going to do games that are going to be technically and narratively very interesting,” Del Toro told MTV news. Coming from the man behind Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone, that “narratively” part just got a whole lot more interesting.

Especially considering del Toro said, “in the next 10 years, there will be an earthshaking Citizen Kane of games.” Considering how genius his films are, we can make a safe assumption that del Toro will be the one to direct that game and it will be one hell of a game.

http://www.develop-online.net/news/35492/Big-company-game-deal-for-Pans-Labyrinth-director

Recently, Gamestop bought out casual game site, Kongregate. What does this mean for users?

http://www.kongregate.com/pages/kongregate-announcement

Well, I feel certain that you’re not concerned with most of it, but Gamestop is looking to reward users with high scores and achievements with their PowerUp Rewards. The reward can come in the form of a gift card or a free game or something along those lines. Basically, if XBL points went towards something.

This is pretty neat and as a Kongregate user, I can get behind it.

A video uploaded today by ‘PwnShop’ of the 360Junkies Forum shows evidence that Activision ‘might’ be charging a subscription for Call of Duty multiplayer access at some point in the future. The video in question shows a Microsoft Points based charge.

“I was trying to join a friend’s session on MW2 the other day and had this screen pop up. It clearly says at the top of this menu: “Modern Warfare 2 Membersh”, in which we can confidently assume that the last word is “Memberships”. If you’ll notice at the bottom is an option to “Add Microsoft Points”, clearly indicating that this was intended to be a menu for purchasing different levels of Membership, presumably memberships would have been offered in a variety of durations.”

With Xbox Live famously being a closed platform, what we are left wondering is what led Microsoft to allow Activision to implement this feature. (A certain CEO clearly got the Cheque Book out.)

At the end of the day what would you rather have. Call of Duty Subscriptions or Portal 2 with Steamworks support.

Recently Blizzard decided that as part of there big update to their forums and battle.net accounts that everyone would have there real name showing to anyone when they posted. This sparked up a massive amount of complaints and moaning from the community who would obviously like to troll without there names being known. As such Blizzard has now backed down on their idea and released a statement saying:

I’d like to take some time to speak with all of you regarding our desire to make the Blizzard forums a better place for players to discuss our games. We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.

We will still move forward with new forum features such as conversation threading, the ability to rate posts up or down, improved search functionality, and more. However, when we launch the new StarCraft II forums that include these new features, you will be posting by your StarCraft II Battle.net character name + character code, not your real name.

Since the rebranding of Microsoft project natal at E3 this year a lot of gamners have been arguing which of its two names sound better. As such the senior director of global marketing, Albert Penello has stepped in to convey how Microsoft sees things. He also cliams that the name Kinect won by a “Landslide”.

Industry gamers asked Albert Penello:

During the Emergency Budget of the new UK coalition Government today, Chancellor George Osborne announced that the Government would NOT be introducing a Tax break to the UK Video Games Production industry.

Mr. Osborne called the plans outlined by the previous Government “‘poorly targeted” in his Emergency Budget speech, which also brought to light a number of other cuts and tweaks to the UK economy including an increase in VAT to 20% as well as a cut to the Corporation Tax.

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2009 proved with Ghostbusters: The Video Game and Batman Arkham Asylum that licensed games can not only be enjoyable, but some of the best games released in a year. The devs behind the upcoming Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions have acknowledged that and are up to the task of matching Batman Arkaham Asylum’s level of polish.

“Arkham is a fantastic game,” Associate Producer of Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions Kevin Ubricht told Develop, “and it did raise the bar of comic-book games, it elevates the genre and it steps your game up.  . . . With Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions we can pull from 50 years of comics, thousands of storylines and thousands of characters – we can craft the story that we want to, so there’s definitely more freedom.”

Although some of us here at VGTribune may be fans of Batman more so than we are of Spider-Man, it looks like Spider-Man Shattered Dimension could turn out to be another great example of a licensed video game.

While former Sony executive Phil Harrison is stepping down from Atari’s board of directors, its founder Nolan Bushnell is coming back on board. Harrison joined Atari’s board of directors as president in an effort to steer Atari back on course financially and in terms of overall strategy, but resigned today as his tenure as president came to an end.

“The company and its iconic brands have always been important to me, and I look forward to further guiding them at the board level,” Bushnell said today.

What does Nolan Bushenll’s return to Atari mean? More than likely, nothing significant. The nature of a board position allows for only so much direct influence and will likely mean a better revenue generating strategies for Atari and not much for gamers. Do you think Nolan will have enough clout on the board to take Atari in a completely new direction? Let us know in the comments!

The ELAN Awards (awards for excellence in Electronic and Animation arts, for those not in the know) have announced today that they’re doing away with the submission fees to add a little accessibility to who can be considered for the awards.  The award show takes place at San Diego in July, and the deadline for submissions is Friday, May 14th.
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