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:
- Activision Reorganizes, Divides Responsibilities
- Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions Announced for September
- Thief at PAX East Attempts to Steal Breach Code
- Major Nelson's Xbox Live Account Hacked
- Can We Just Do Away With April Fools Day?
Activision Reorganizes, Divides Responsibilities
Taking a page from heated rival Electronic Arts, Activision reorganized itself this week into four divisions. You may remember EA reorganizing into four camps a couple years ago with EA Games, EA Sims, EA Casual and EA Sports with one person at the head of each one accountable to the CEO. Activision is taking a similar approach with having one division be all about Call of Duty, one being for company owned IPs like Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero, one being for licensed games like Spider-Man and James Bond and the final one not being announced but everyone is guessing Blizzard is the fourth division by itself.
Should be interesting to see if this brings any sort of results or not. I’d argue that EA splitting their company up was a good thing given how much better their product seems to be now that each group becomes basically their own fiefdom.
Source: Colony of Gamers
Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions Announced for September
Some people feel that the Spider-Man game franchise hasn’t been good since Spider-Man 2: The Movie came out. I beg to differ since I really liked last year’s Web of Shadows done by the now defunct Shaba Games. It wasn’t a barnburner, but it was a pretty good game nonetheless. Now little known developer Beenox (who did some porting of Guitar Hero games and other things) is coming with Shattered Memories this year. Basically the story is the Tablet of Order and Chaos (yeah, I know, lame) has broken into four pieces and you play through four different Spider-Man universes. The first two shown are the regular Amazing version as well as the recently released Noir universe. People are guessing at the other two, but possibilities would include Ultimate, 1602, 2099, Spider-Girl, Zombie as well as many others I am probably forgetting.
Should be interesting and maybe this game and Transformers: War for Cybertron will be fresh and exciting games for us later this year. We can hope, right?
Source: Colony of Gamers
Thief at PAX East Attempts to Steal Breach Code
A young man was so excited about Breach, an upcoming multiplayer download only FPS, that he tried to copy the code to his computer so he could play it himself outside of PAX East in Boston. Well, he got caught, charged and jailed over it. Atomic Games valued the left at $6 million dollars. The story gets better though because the police confiscated a modded 360 and DS I believe from him. He also boasted in a meeting that he had Forza 3 early and had been banned by Microsoft over it. He asked the Xbox Live director if he could get unbanned.
Just wait though, the story gets better. He got out on bond and missed his arraignment because…he was busy playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 online somehow. He contacted the police and a new arraignment date has been set and he will see no further charges it seems. This young man is not the brightest bulb, although I am sure he will probably end up with a slap on the wrist considering this is his first offense.
Source: Colony of Gamers
Major Nelson's Xbox Live Account Hacked
Major Nelson (Larry Hyrb) is a well known web celebrity from Microsoft who updates us on game updates related to the Xbox and also has his own podcast and various other endeavors related to Microsoft. Well, this past week his Xbox Live account was hacked and the people or peoples that did it also put information on his profile talking about that they could hack anything for $60. It didn’t take long for Microsoft to regain control of the account for the Major, but the all too real experience in this day and age is something for all of us to take into consideration. Be sure you use a strong password not only on your console logins, but everywhere you log into. It seems the stories of ID theft and data compromising have gained steam lately, possibly because of the depressed economy (just one of many reasons I am sure).
Source: Colony of Gamers
Can We Just Do Away With April Fools Day?
With no real big releases this week that I know of, I had to end this with something. Are you like me and getting sick of April Fools Day in relation to websites related to gaming and for the most part gaming companies pulling pranks? I shudder whenever April 1 comes close because it becomes hard to disseminate between fake news (IGN sent out a PR statement about a big Halo unveiling happening and it turned into a Bollywood Halo thing) and real news that makes you wonder if it is fake. Why do we have to have this stupid day?
Some things were funny, like Cheap Ass Gamer’s news story once you logged in that you’ve been caught pirating stuff. Then there was the stupid stuff like Kotaku renaming itself Koticku because Activision “bought” them and they even had fake stories by Bobby Kotick announcing it and then later in the day announcing that they had pulled back on the purchase. I like sites like Joystiq that put in the title “April Fools” just so we don’t have to guess whether the news is real or not. I think that is the way to go, but why should website staff have to themselves disseminate between the real and fake news. Seriously, I got PR that day that honestly sounded real with no P.S. at the end or anything.
I’m just done with April Fools Day. It was cool when I was younger, but I never really got into the prank stuff anyway. Let’s just be done with it and call it a regular day. One of these years something very serious will probably happen (like it has in the past, one example is Gmail came out on April 1 and everyone thought it was a joke since Google always does a gag every year like naming the site Topeka this year).
Source: me