Activision is pressuring Sony from releasing a patch that would allow Guitar Hero III controllers to work with EA’s Rock Band for PS3.

The average consumer isn’t going to understand why two controllers for the same system, with the same button layout, dont work with two games that have them functioning in the exact same way. Activision is essentially forcing people to buy two of their guitars to play the game instead of allowing people to buy both the GH III bundle and Rock Band bundles, giving them a total of two guitars. Supposedly Activision offered to work with EA to come to an aggreement, aka. “pay us money,” to which EA declined.

In the end the only one that suffers is the consumer.

Chufmoney

[via 1up]

According to the latest NPD data, Activision has overtaken EA in 2007 sales. Activision has done $387.8 million in sales while EA has done $365.7 million. This is attributed to the continued success of Activision’s Guitar Hero, as well as the decent sales of movie license titles and Call of Duty games.

While it isn’t really news in the sense that you should care that Activision is making a whole lot of money, it is interesting to see that this is the only time in the last decade that EA isn’t the largest third party publisher. However, before we decide that EA is slipping, it should be known that they have yet to release Madden NFL 08, let alone titles like Boogie for the Wii. I think that this very well may be a temporary deal.

How long do you suppose it is before Activision, EA, and Ubisoft all unite to own your fucking soul?

Chufmoney

[via Gamasutra]

So the interwebs were awash with the good news Activision doled out yesterday in regards to Guitar Hero 3, which would be a list of new songs. While by no means final, so far we’re seeing some great new tunes, including what appear to be master tracks from Weezer, the Beastie Boys, the Smashing Pumpkins, and it would appear there’s even some master track lovin’ from the Rolling Stones. Which is awesome. I was worried about Harmonix’s departure from the Guitar Hero series because of their heritage as musicians. This background led to varied, well thought out set lists for their games and they managed to get bands to contribute that otherwise likely never would have. Neversoft thus far seems to be doing a pretty good job at convincing artists to give up the goods. They’ve even thrown in some Muse.

What I don’t see people mentioning much is this little gem located in Activision’s press release:

(more…)

I refuse to write another technical dissertation on the memory constraints and properties of the various next gen consoles so soon after the last one, so this is going to take it easy in that regard. Anyway. Activision, the publisher with the rights to games based on the Spiderman property (both film and comic, I believe), handed the development duties for their film tie-in Spiderman 3 to Treyarch, their most competent team. They’re responsible for the Tony Hawk series, Gun, and Call of Duty 3.

Stop laughing.

Now, this would have been a good choice, as Treyarch has as much experience as (if not more than) anyone in doing multiplatform games during the current console generation, as the last Tony Hawk game and Call of Duty game can attest to. Unfortunately, it would seem that someone was asleep at the wheel during the title’s development cycle. The 360 was serving as the lead development platform, which makes sense, given it’s install base advantage, and unfortunately, those console differences I talked about yesterday slipped someone important’s mind:

The initial intention of Activision was to have the Spider-Man 3 movie tie-in game out a month ahead of the movie’s release, evidently. But when it turned out that, one month before ship date, the game was still gobbling up RAM as though every console was an Xbox 360, the company panicked. According to the Conference Fonz’s inside source, Activision had to halt all other publisher-side Q/A work in order to get this turd ready for market before the movie arrives tomorrow.
Thus, nothing else could get through the company’s Q/A department in April.

Ouch. I don’t know that Activision had anything else big coming out last month, but I’m thinking that’s the kind of mistake that might get the project lead (I think) into some deep doodoo. Unemployment line standing doodoo, as a matter of fact. Anyway, let that be a lesson to everyone that storage space and a hard drive aren’t the only things developers have to worry about this gen.

-Aegies