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:
- Gran Turismo 5 Out November 24
- Harmonix on the Sales Block, RB 3 DLC Will Not Work on RB1/RB2
- Call of Duty: Black Ops Makes $360 Million in One Day
- EA Overtaking All Publishing Duties on Star Wars: The Old Republic
- Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit This Week
Gran Turismo 5 Out November 24
Sony announced that the long in development, and delayed from its original November 2 release, that Gran Turismo 5 will finally see release the Tuesday before Thanksgiving in both North America and Japan. It will be really interesting to see how sales are for this game considering this is the first full release on the current generation of systems. I’ll pick it up, but probably not right away. I don’t have a wheel for my PS3 and I feel that is pretty important for a game like this.
Source: Colony of Gamers
Harmonix on the Sales Block, RB 3 DLC Will Not Work on RB1/RB2
A lot of people were surprised by this, but not me. Viacom announced they lost a lot of money and pinned it mostly on Harmonix and the Rock Band games which have not performed as hoped. Harmonix also announced that all RB3 DLC will not work with previous iterations. Word is sales of RB3 is not that great, much like Activision experienced with Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock. I floated the idea that a company like Microsoft might want to pick Harmonix up considering how well Dance Central has sold for the Kinect (over 130k in one week supposedly). Why not have them come in and develop more Kinect-only software that could appeal to everyone?
Source: Colony of Gamers
Call of Duty: Black Ops Makes $360 Million in One Day
According to Activision, Call of Duty: Black Ops sold $360 million worth of copies, making it the largest one day sale of any media product ever, including eclipsing last year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. That is a massive amount of money.
Source: Joystiq
EA Overtaking All Publishing Duties on Star Wars: The Old Republic
The news itself isn’t surprising, but I think there is a deeper meaning here. Over the years LucasArts has been moving away from publishing things or has drastically reduced the amount of things they publish and/or develop. I think LucasArts is going to bow out of developing and publishing pretty soon and will probably become just a licensing wing where other publishers will pay for the Star Wars license and make games themselves. That’s just my guess though.
Source: Gamespot
Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit This Week
Wallet threat level could be at red for many out there this week. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and Criterion’s Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit come out this week. Both are pretty high on the hype list and I personally can’t wait to continue Ezio’s story in the new game and I hope it is as long or longer than Assassin’s Creed II’s storyline. Not too excited about the multiplayer, for that NFS: Hot Pursuit would be a better option.
Source: me