It’s the battle of the fake plastic-guitar karaoke bands!
Viacom has dropped its lawsuit against Activision, having cowed the Santa Monica, California-based games publisher into negotiating out of court. Viacom owns Harmonix, creators of the first two Guitar Hero games and Rock Band.
Viacom’s claim is that Activision owes $14.5 million in royalties over technology used in Guitar Hero III. Continued…
As a very close follower of trends within the gaming media space, one particular interesting trend has stuck out to me over the past week: Kotaku, a property of the blog group Gawker Media, has gone out of their way to mention and include everything related to MTV. Now, it could be coincidence that MTV and its related media properties are particularly hot this week, but sometimes the phrase “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” comes out to actually be true.
Everyday this week there has been an increased focus on MTV and Viacom properties. With guest blogger and GameTrailers and Spike TV (both Viacom properties) correspondent Geoff Keighley taking guest editor duties all week, the co-branding is either a somewhat blatant advertising deal or an even bigger deal involving the potential sell of Gawker to Viacom — a company trying to increase its videogame presence more and more.
Internet broadcast station eSportsTV has teamed up with XFire to broadcast its online events.
The deal includes video on demand content available only to XFire. First up: The Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Siege of September tournament starting Sept. 21 (today) and running until Sept. 28.
For more info, you can head over to esportstv.com and xfire.com.
Xfire recently announced that it’s hit the 8 million user mark worldwide, with 40% of those users in North America and 60% in Europe.
The real eyebrow-raising statistic, though, is the fact that Xfire users who play World of Warcraft log 440,000 hours per gameplay every day. That’s 18,333 days /played, or enough time to level 1,833 characters to level 70 at a casual pace (which is technically impossible, but I’m throwing that out there to put things in perspective).
Call of Duty 2 logs a surprising 173,355 hours a day, while Counter-Strike: Source gets 158,714 hours. Guild Wars, the runner-up MMO, distracts people for 59,199 hours a day. Continued…
