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Posts Tagged ‘games’

Earlier this year, Google landed a “landmark” deal with Global Cricket Ventures, the licensing partner to the Indian Premier League (IPL), which would give them the so rights to live stream cricket matches from the IPL on YouTube. This is a huge deal because the streaming of the 2010 IPL season (which starts on Friday and lasts for 45 days) is the first time a large-scale global sporting event will be streamed; with the reach expected to be at least a half-a-billion viewers. Now of of India’s largest gaming companies, Indiagames, has bought the official gaming rights to the IPL tournament to deliver games around the Indian cricket tournament.

Indiagames will be launching a series of web and mobile apps throughout the next 45 days. The first app, called IPL Indiagames T20 Fever, is an online game that uses Facebook Connect to allow users to create cricket teams consisting of both Facebook friends and IPL professional cricketers. The game will also include micro-transaction support, allowing users to users to virtually buy IPL players to improve their chances of becoming the IPL Champion.

A second, not yet released online game, called ‘IPL Indiagames 140Cricket’ will be based on a “Cricket Manager” concept and will target Twitter and Facebook users to construct and manage teams. The gaming company will also be rolling out a Facebook game as well. Indiagames partnered with Facebook to develop all three of the games.

While the IPL tournament will be streaming on YouTube, the fact that the official game will have a presence on Facebook will certainly draw Indian cricket fans to the social network. This should help give Facebook an edge over rival social network Orkut in India.

During the GamesBeat keynote at GDC today, OnLive CEO Steve Perlman took the stage to showcase the company’s game streaming technology, which allows gamers to play high quality 3D games without a console — OnLive does all of the intense rendering in the cloud, then streams it back to a lightweight client that will work on nearly any computer (it will work on TVs as well with an adapter). We’ve been hearing about the service for quite a while now (as well as its competitor, OTOY), but now OnLive finally has a solid release date: June 17, 2010. At launch, the service will be available in the 48 contiguous states.

The service will have a $14.95 per month base service fee, and then users will purchase games and rentals on an a la carte model on top of that. You’ll be able to purchase multiple months at a time to get a discount on the service. As a special for early users, OnLive is going to waive the service fee for three months for the first 25,000 users to pre-register at this page.

OnLive’s demos are always impressive. Today, Perlman showcased the service’s ability to play recent games like Crysis on a large TV, as well as on his mobile phone (because all the processing is done in the cloud, even an iPhone can handle it). He also showed off other features that OnLive will offer, like streaming movies and Xbox Live-like community features. It looks great, but OnLive still faces one very major hurdle: latency. Because gamers aren’t actually playing their games on a local machine, there’s a slight lag whenever they do anything. And in the case of ‘twitchy’ games like first person shooters, even 50 milliseconds of lag time can make the difference between a perfect kill and getting destroyed by your opponent. It’s unclear how much lag will be present once OnLive is deployed on a wide scale.

At launch OnLive will be available for PC and Mac only, and a MicroConsole TV adapter (which lets your TV hook up to the cloud service) will appear later this year. 1080p60 will be available in 2011 (Perlman says bandwidth available to consumers is what’s holding this back). International announcements are coming later this year.

Also be sure to check out our past coverage of OnLive competitor OTOY.

Platogo, the social games platform, has released its Platogo Wrapper that enables casual games developers to easily integrate their games with Facebook by inserting a few lines of code.

Essentially, it lets any casual game take advantages of the basic social features offered through Facebook, such as the ability for a user to invite and play with friends in their social graph and see how their scores compare, challenge each other, and display their gaming achievements on their Facebook wall.

Micropayments startup PlaySpan has another partnership to add to the list. The startup has signed deals with hi5, THQ and Nickelodeon, and most recently Adobe. Today, PlaySpan is partnering with Nonoba, which offers a Ning-like platform for game development.

Nonoba’s GameRise allows anyone to develop and manage customized gaming sites within a community. PlaySpan powers micro-payments across over 1,000 video games and virtual worlds and has virtual goods storefronts on Facebook, MySpace, within games and on its standalone site. With the new partnership, PlaySpan will offer Nonoba’s 4,000 Flash games to marketplace customers. PlaySpan’s microtransactions will also be offered to Nonoba’s developers to allow Flash game developers to monetize their games.

With all of the partnerships PlaySpan is racking up, the startup is fast securing its place as a player in the micrpayments space. In December, PlaySpan revealed some telling numbers about the strength of the virtual goods space, reporting that over $30 million was spent on virtual gifts over the holiday season. Last year, PlaySpan acquired micro-transaction app developer Spare Change, which powered micropayments across 700 social networking apps on Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo.

Video Games | Mafia II | Exclusive Boom Boom Boom Trailer XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii By a raise of hands, who thinks Mafia is the best game ever made? Everyone, good.

Here is the original:
Mafia II Boom Boom Boom Trailer

Last year we reported that MySpace founder and former CEO Chris DeWolfe was raising a big round of capital to start acquiring companies. He’s now closed on that round of capital and has made his first acquisition. He’s also “got the band back together” by bringing on a slew of former MySpace executives to help him with the new ventures.

His company, called Platform G, has acquired MindJolt, a San Francisco based social gaming platform founded by Richard Fields. Austin Ventures is backing him financially with an initial injection of capital that is rumored to be in excess of $20 million. Chris Pacitti and Tom Ball from Austin Ventures have joined the Platform G board of directors, and the company is now renamed MindJolt as well.

Joining DeWolfe is Chief Operating Officer Colin Digiaro (MySpace’s former head of Monetization and co-founder of SlingShot Labs), Chief Technology Officer Aber Whitcomb (MySpace’s former Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of MySpace), SVP of Business & Corporate Development Josh Yguado (Former VP of Business Development at Fox Networks Group). Richard Fields is also staying with the company and heading up strategy.

MindJolt has around 1,300 games from 1,000 third party developers. Those games are then distributed on Facebook and, more recently, MySpace. MindJolt makes revenue from advertising and splits it with those developers. But more importantly, those small developers get a huge platform for their games (19 million people a month play MindJolt games on Facebook alone). And usage is growing by as much as 7% per week. The company is profitable, although they won’t disclose revenues or other financial information.

In the future, MindJolt says they will add additional monetization features, including virtual goods, and tools to help game developers build games as well.

And the company is going to be making more acquisitions. From the beginning DeWolfe has said that he intends to execute a roll up strategy, and the company is clearly gearing up to buy more gaming companies. Austin Ventures is a good partner on this – the firm founded HomeAway, a rollup of home rental sites, and that company is worth well over $1 billion now.

The company will remain headquartered in San Francisco and will open an office in Los Angeles as well. They are “hiring like crazy,” they say.

Austin Ventures certainly isn’t being shy about dipping into the MySpace talent pool. Yesterday they backed a company that poached John Faith, until recently General Manager and Vice President of MySpace Mobile. I’m not sure there’s much talent left at MySpace people to steal, but more people will likely be heading for the exits shortly. Possibly to join DeWolfe at his shiny new startup.

Atari has announced Test Drive Unlimited 2, coming in the Fall to Xbox 360, PS3, and PC. While the first version of the game contained both online and offline modes, this new version “is ‘always live,’ with automatic updates and seamless online/offline integration.

More here:
Test Drive Unlimited 2 promises to seamlessly blend online and offline play

Greenpeace now officially hates Samsung .

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Add Samsung to Greenpeace’s hate list (for now)

This year’s Winter Olympic games have come to a close, and while we may have hated the way its broadcast was handled by NBC, that didn’t stop Americans (or people around the world) from turning to their computers to check out the latest news. Google has just posted some search trends it saw during the games, offering some insight into which events captivated each country the most. Google writes that percentage-wise, Canadians searched for Olympics-related queries twice as much as everyone else (no surprise there). The United States came in second. And, rounding out the top three was the Netherlands, even though they had fewer medals that many of the other countries at the Games.

Perhaps more interesting are the events that grabbed the most attention in each country. In the United States, by far the most searches were driven by the tragic death of luger Nodar Kumaritashvili. Other popular events in the States included the men’s hockey finals and the men’s free skate. Korea’s graph, on the other hand, is absolutely dominated by women’s figure skating, driven by the success of national sensation Kim Yu-Na.  You can find graphs from more countries in the Google blog post.

Will Spain repeat its Euro 2008 success? Greetings from lovely Seattle! I’m here on the West Coast for two reasons. One, Thursday was Adidas’ World Cup Media Day in Portland, and I was invited to check out all the hi-tech wonderment that the company has in store for this World Cup year

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The many hi-tech wonders of Adidas at this year’s World Cup