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 Claims Female Leads don't Sell Titles
- NBA Jam Coming to 360/PS3...with a catch
- XFire Purchased, Team let go
Activision Claims Female Leads Don't Sell Titles
In an interesting story at Gamasutra, sources from Activision developers have claimed that games that previously contained a female leading role were changed and or cut to have a male counterpart put in instead. Furthermore, the story goes on to proport that Activision actually altered focusing testing groups to make it appear as if the testing for games with female leads never works out. With franchises like Tomb Raider, Mirror's Edge, and even Metroid - it's hard to see Activision's point of view. When asked to comment on the story Activision denied everything.
Source: Gamasutra
NBA Jam Coming to 360/PS3, With a Catch
While NBA Jam was previously announced for the Wii as an exclusive, the cat's out of the bag on the 360/PS3 versions. Sadly you won't be able to download the remake of the classic game, instead, you'll need to pony up $60 for EA Sports' NBA Elite, the new basketball title, and NBA Jam will be included as a code for a download. According to EA they will not be selling the game on Xbox Live or PlayStation Network. My guess? In 2 months or so after Elite's release the game will be available for sale, right now they are just trying to push copies of Elite.
Source: Kotaku
Xfire Purchased, Team Let Go
XFire is one of the longest standing matchmaking and social network utilities for PC gamers. Sadly the core team that created it has been let go as the service was purchased by company Titan Gaming. Good luck to everyone from the team - you guys set a standard for sites and services like Steam, Raptr and others.
Source: Joystiq