Com2Us this week posted its third quarter revenue for 2018 and the results are positive.
Third quarter sales amounted to $106.7 million USD with $33.8 million in profits, beating out the previous record of $26.5 million. Overseas sales accounted for 83% of revenue with North America and Europe accounting for 50% of those sales.
For the future, Com2US is looking to expand its popular Summoners War title from the mobile gaming scene and into cartoons, comics, and other merchandise. They have also opened up pre-registration for Skylanders Ring of Heroes on mobile devices.
Nexon this week announced a new update and event for Maplestory 2.
Beginning now and running through December 6, the Turkey Terror event is available to all players level 10+. In the event, players can take on a daily quest to defeat the wild turkey and complete it to earn the dashing turkey mount. There will also be a maple harvest event along the same time frame which will hand out maple leaf coins to purchase items from NPC Bobby’s shop.
In addition to the turkey themed events, Maplestory 2 has also been granted a number of quality of life improvements including a dismantle function, wardrobe function, piano roll, house size reduction, and more. Players can also join in on chaos raids in two dungeons; shadow altar and moonlight fortress.
More information on Maplestory can be found on the official website.
Earlier this year the Belgian government gave a clear warning to game developers: Fall into line with your gambling mechanics or face potential criminal charges including fines and even jail sentences. Over the last seven months, we’ve seen the industry take the threat very seriously (for the most part). Companies like Blizzard and Valve have simply stopped allowing players within Belgium to purchase loot boxes, while Electronic Arts stood its ground and is now facing a criminal investigation.
Companies like Square Enix, meanwhile, are just pulling out of the country entirely. Square announced that at least four of its titles will no longer be accessible from Belgium as of December. Those titles include Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius, Mobius Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts Union X, and Dissidia FInal Fantasy Opera Omina. All four games will no longer be accessible in Belgium over the next month, although it isn’t clear if people will be able to circumvent the block with a VPN or if Square Enix will go as far as to disable existing accounts that have been operated from within Belgium.
Daybreak Game Company today announced that they have raised over $40,000 USD for Rady’s Children’s Hospital in San Diego, California. The money was raised during the developer’s first participation in Extra LIfe, a charity aimed at raising money for hospitals in the Children’s Miracle Network.
Extra Life began in 2008 and has ballooned in popularity as streaming has become more common. In 2017, the charity raised more than $11 million with more than 50,000 participants.
Nexon this week announced that Frame Arms Girl, the anime series from Kotobukiya Corporation, will be joining the cast of Master of Eternity in an event kicking off later this month on iOS and Android. The crossover event starts on November 15, but there are events going on in the game throughout the month that pit Frame Arm Girls against MOE pixies.
Novice and veteran players alike will find much to do in this event. More information can be found on the official Facebook page.
Weekly Character Unveilings – Players will engage in battle with various characters from the Frame Arms Girl series, boasting unique classes, skills and more. Playable characters will be released weekly throughout the crossover event, including:
Week One: Gourai
Week Two: Stylet
Week Three: Baselard and Jinrai
Exclusive Collaboration Celebration – Players can participate in the Master of Eternity x Frame Arms Girl Crossover News Share Event until Wednesday, Nov. 14. Prizes include:
500,000 credits for over 100 shares
5 Enhancement Tickets and 5 AP Tickets for over 200 shares
Two guaranteed Grade S3 Tickets and Four Collaboration Mini-minis for over 500 shares
More Events – The ‘Guess Whose Skill is This’ Event from Thursday, Nov. 8 to Wednesday, Nov. 14 offers players the chance to win either 300 Gems or 500 Gems.
Frostkeep Studios this week announced the debut of two new game modes for Rend on the public test realm.
The two game modes are called Classic and Exploration while the original game mode will be renamed Faction War. In classic mode, players will battle for supremacy by sieging each others’ bases, waging war, capturing territory, and collecting bounties. Exploration, meanwhile, is an entirely PvE mode that does not allow for player vs player combat. Both modes allow for players to join up in clans, however progression is per-character and there is no reputation system.
In addition to these two new modes, ascension points are seeing a change from per-server to globally tied to player accounts. AP gained from any activity will count for all servers.
For more details on upcoming Rend updates, check out the roadmap.
Funcom yesterday posted its third quarter earnings for 2018, and the results are rather positive. Third quarter earnings amounted to $7.5 million, a 25% increase over last year, with earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization amounted to $4.6 million. The developer happily notes that not only has cash flow beaten the full year’s numbers for last year, which was the highest in Funcom histroy, but that the company is now free of interest-bearing debt for the first time since 2009 and holds a cash balance of $20.9 million.
On the road ahead, Funcom has six titles in its lineup including Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, Petroglyph’s Conan game set for the second quarter 2019, Rock Pocket’s Funcom IP game set for Halloween 2019, a cooperative shooter from Funcom North Carolina, a single-player Conan game from Funcom Oslo, and an open-world multiplayer game also from Funcom Oslo. It appears that Petroglyph’s Conan game will release on PC while Rock Pocket’s title is set for PC, Xbox, and Playstation. Funcom NC’s title utilizes a premium business model while both of Funcom Oslo’s titles are in pre-production stages.
Conan Exiles continues to be a strong seller for Funcom.
The internet has had a few days to cool down from the announcement of Diablo Immortal, the mobile game announced and BlizzCon and rather negatively received by Blizzard’s community within and without the convention center. But while certain parties may be eager to paint the negative reaction as entitlement from spoiled gamers, Blizzard isn’t one of them.
In an interview with Kotaku, co-founder Allen Adham admitted that Blizzard expected a negative reaction to the mobile Diablo game, but perhaps not as vocal as the one following their announcement last week. Adham refused to call the reaction entitlement, instead noting the community’s passion.
“They love what they love and want what they want,” he said of the fans raging at BlizzCon and across the internet. “That passion, it’s actually what drives us, and we feel it too. It’s why we make games and why we’ve made games for almost three decades now—and why our community is so passionate about our franchises. I understand their feeling and wish we could share more about all the amazing things we’re doing, not just with the Diablo franchise but across the company as a whole.”
Diablo 3 recently launched on the Switch and while Diablo 4 is still on the horizon, the game is an inevitability.
The above infographic was sent over to us by Enlightened Digital, and contains some fun facts about Red Dead Redemption 2. Rockstar decided to integrate a more advanced artificial intelligence into RDR2, one that responds to the player based on a number of context clues, allowing every interaction to be unique from the next.
This post is not sponsored and is purely for infotainment purposes.
The next Diablo game has been announced and this is only the second time that Blizzard is playing damage control. Yesterday at BlizzCon, Blizzard announced Diablo Immortal, a mobile spinoff set in the franchise universe between Diablo 2 and Diablo 3. The game will be coming to Android and iOS devices, with pre-registration already open as of this article’s publishing.
Needless to say, the crowd was not amused after Blizzard revealed the title, and it looks like the developer was caught heavily off guard by the overwhelmingly negative response. The BlizzCon announcement was met with heavy booing from the crowd, several sarcastic questions during the Q&A (“Is this an April Fool’s joke?”), with Blizzard’s reps eventually shouting at the crowd. The Youtube videos have been heavily downvoted with the cinematic trailer sitting at 227k downvotes to 7.6k upvotes, and Blizzard went as far as to reupload the trailer in an apparent effort to reset the like/dislike ratio.
But this wouldn’t be a Bad Press article without examining how certain members of the games media have used this as an excuse to show their contempt for gamers, like Gamespot’s Mike Mahardy who in response to the April Fool’s joke stated:
“Savagery” aka “entitled assholery” aka no one owes you anything bud https://t.co/NplnqeMfNu
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Don’t be too harsh on Mike, his company has bills to pay and the Blizzard advertising coffers are enormous. Madeleine Rose over at J!nx, where you can buy hundreds of Blizzard-branded products at a fantastic markup ($70 for a Diablo III hoodie), was astonished and grossed by the “entitlement” of the community.
IGN’s Sean Finnegan went on the offensive, calling gamers the “most cynical, toxic, and entitled fandom in all of entertainment.” Sean fights for the users, just not the ones who don’t like the products made by the guys who advertise for the website he gets a paycheck from.
If you’ve ever questioned that gamers are the most cynical, toxic, and entitled fandom in all of entertainment, just look at the #Diablo Immortal announcement at #BlizzCon. So called “fans” going on mic to shit on devs hard work just because it isn’t what they wanted is atrocious
Over at Mashable, the website for superfans and not for the casually curious, Adam Rosenberg penned the Op-Ed “Diablo Immortal controversy is really just entitled gamers shouting,” where he proceeds to call gamers assholes for not responding positively to the announcement. (Archived link to article)
“A segment of the Blizzard fan community is mad because of some stupid bullshit they’ve manufactured entirely out of their own ignorance. That “April Fool’s joke” guy was an asshole for asking that question. And if you’re holding that guy up as some kind of a hero, or even just attacking Blizzard for making something you’re not into, you’re an asshole too.”
Mashable’s Kellen Beck responded to a self-described tantrum by throwing a tantrum with an op-ed titled “Diablo Immortal is actually fun, you entitled babies.”
“From what I saw and played, Diablo Immortal is a fun, quality Diablo game that retains that special something that makes the franchise so special. You don’t have to play it, but whining online makes you sound like a literal infant.”
Professional public relations account director Will Powers (formerly DeepSilver and Playstation)
Exactly. Seriously, fuck this dude. I would have kicked him out of the show.
Thankfully there are plenty of members of the press taking a level headed approach and actually discussing the game itself. Polygon’s Ryan Gilliam wrote “Diablo: Immortal feels like a Diablo game, just not one that’s for me.” Owen S. Good of the same Polygon wrote a piece noting concern that the game is being developed by NetEase and looks a lot like a reskin of another one of NetEase’s mobile titles. James over at IGN posted a hands-on noting that the controls are intuitive, the dungeons are impressive with more complicated bosses, however characters do not show armor changes in this development build and there is no resource pool.
A number of photos have circulated of the Diablo: Immortal booth at BlizzCon being virtually disregarded with hardly anyone in line or using the demo units.
Be sure to get into the line for Diablo: Immortal on mobile early tomorrow at Blizzcon the lines have been crazy! pic.twitter.com/OZUFeRLlKb
Of course, this is just a small snippet of what can be found on the web. It’s always good to have a reminder of how quickly some people in the press get angry when customers don’t just shut up and get excited about products.
