By John Walker on January 6th, 2011.
Patents, eh? Aren’t they great! In a pretty spectacular act of what looks an awful lot like patent trolling, but we’re sure couldn’t possibly be, Walker Digital (no relation) are suing Zynga and Activision Blizzard for creating games that use what they claim to be their distributed electronic tournaments patent. Gamasutra and TechCrunch report that the numbers they want to claim in damages are so high they haven’t thought of them yet, but say they’ll have finished counting by the trial.
By Jim Rossignol on November 12th, 2010.
A slide from a recent financial conference revealed Activision’s big prospects for the coming years, and it heavily implicates the PC. We know there’s another Blizzard MMO on the way, of course, but there’s also Bungie, who Microsoft relied on to prop up the Xbox with exclusive titles over the past few years. There seems little doubt that Activision will be wanting a similar blockbuster from the studio, only this time Activision know – thanks to the money-printing monster that is Call of Duty – that they might as well bring it out on all platforms. Whether or not you give a damn about Halo, it’s worth remembering how ambitious the game looked when it was still a PC title. If Bungie still have those kinds of aspirations in them, things could get really interesting. This could be the biggest announcement in quite some time, when it happens. Any bets on it being the big reveal for E3 next year?
By John Walker on August 18th, 2010.
There’s a peculiar bit of news for all those Realtime Worlds employees who have found themselves out of a job in the last week. As an anonymous insider told us, “It’s a shame… as Dundee can’t absorb the level of game dev redundancies that are about to hit, which means the Dundee scene gets that little bit smaller.” It seems that Activision is attempting to absorb at least some of them, by launching a recruitment drive of ex-RTWers in the city tomorrow afternoon.
By Jim Rossignol on April 17th, 2009.
2009 is looking pretty healthy as far as games based on super-dudes go. Batman is looking reasonably solid and Wolverine has The Blob in it. In fairness there does seem to be a rather staid formula to how these third-person action games are rolled out, but Wolverine’s clawing is pretty enough that it might not matter. Still, I think he’d look much better in that old yellow and blue X-Men outfit. Whatever happened to those? I digress: below is a lovely trailer via Joystiq, and the game is out May 1st.
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By Jim Rossignol on September 16th, 2008.
Call of Duty 4 was top notch because it was developed by series originators Infinity Ward, so it’s pleasing to know that it’ll be returning to them in 2009 for its sixth installment. This was confirmed by Activision Publishing CEO Mike Griffith at yesterday’s Activision Blizzard Analyst Day. No other details yet, although the rumour-mill suggests that the theme might be sci-fi war. I’m not so sure this has anything to do with the COD series: why break a winning formula? I think there’s a whole lot left in the contemporary combat theme.
That exciting-sounding Acti-Blizz Analyst Day was covered in detail over on VG247.
