Welcome to Beyond Co-Op, a weekly piece that talks about industry stories that may or may not be related to co-op gaming.
The stories for this week:
- Kojima Working on Metal Gear Solid 5
- Metal Gear Solid: Rising Gets New Production Head
- Happy 10th Birthday Xbox and GameCube
- First Week Sales Comparison of Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3
- Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, WWE 12 and Serious Sam 3 This Week and Get Ready to for Black Friday
Kojima Working on Metal Gear Solid 5
On the cover of the upcoming Official Playstation Magazine UK they have an interview with Konami’s Hideo Kojima who supposedly announces that he is working on Metal Gear Solid 5. I really love this series and this gets me excited, although I wonder when it is going to take place. Solid Snake was pretty old in the fantastic Metal Gear Solid 4, but then again so is Ezio in the recently released Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. Will be exciting to hear some things and I wonder if there will be any shots of the game when the magazine releases later this month.
Source: Official Playstation Magazine UK
Metal Gear Solid: Rising Gets New Production Head
In advance of supposed updated information on the very noticeably absent for a long period Metal Gear Solid: Rising coming to the Video Game Awards in early December, it was announced that there has now been a third change in who is overseeing the game. The new head is Yuri Korekado who is also overseeing Zone of the Enders HD. It will be very interesting to see the game at the VGAs and hopefully we’ll have a better idea of what it looks like and maybe when it is coming out.
Source: Andriasang via a Japanese Twitter post
Happy 10th Birthday Xbox and GameCube
Although I didn’t own an Xbox right from the beginning (didn’t have the money and wasn’t sure it would be a success), I did get a GameCube on release day. It is funny how years later it would be the Xbox that would win out in systems sold, mostly because the GameCube never really had a strong software lineup outside of Nintendo’s titles (kind of what they face this generation as well, they just had a revolutionary system everyone wanted from the beginning) and the Xbox thrived with third party games much like the PS2. Happy 10th birthday to both, they were both the forebears to what each company brought out in the current generation.
Source: me
First Week Sales Comparison of Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3
This has been a pet project of mine that I’ve been running on my own website (link below). I started off by doing an analysis of what I thought would happen with sales of the two games and whether Battlefield 3 would affect the sales of Modern Warfare 3 at all. I wrote that piece about a month before the release of BF3.
This week we got some numbers and I created a second piece that showed the pie percentages, increases in sales for both series (last year’s Medal of Honor was put in for BF3, DICE did work on the multiplayer for it). The big news was that Battlefield 3 sold about 5 million copies worldwide in its first week and Modern Warfare 3 sold $775 million worth of the game in the first week, translating to over 12 million sold. Also it sold 6.5 million in just one day, eclipsing the records set last year by Black Ops.
Feel free to check out the two stories below and I’ll be updating it again at some point as we move into more long-term sales numbers.
Source: BF3 vs. MW3 Sales Battle and BF3 vs. MW3 Sales Battle - First Week
Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, WWE 12 and Serious Sam 3 This Week and Get Ready to for Black Friday
Outside of Mario Kart 7 on December 4 and Star Wars: The Old Republic on December 20, this is the last big release week of the year. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is probably the biggest release this week and is probably as good a reason as any to blow off the dust on your Wii if it’s been sitting dormant for a while. THQ’s yearly WWE 12 and Serious Sam 3 which is set before the first game also release this week.
For those out there that celebrate it, have a good Thanksgiving on Thursday and, if you’re nuts, have fun in line for Black Friday at your local store. Be sure to check out all the Black Friday ads via this link. That’s the site I’ve been checking out as things get closer to next Friday. I won’t stand in line, but there are a lot of good deals plus who knows what might be available online both on Black Friday (like Amazon who usually does deals) and on the following Monday, dubbed Cyber Monday.
Source: me