Blizzard’s intent is to expand into the free-to-play space whilst still developing subscription based games, Develop’s source didn’t offer any other details, though.

The studio is currently known to be working on Diablo 3 (including the console version), Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty, and the mysterious MMO “Project Titan”, though it certainly has the capacity for more projects.

Currently, players can reach level 20 in Blizzard’s very popular MMO, World of Warcraft, free of charge.

Blizzard have declined to comment.

[Source]

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That’s according to the latest issue of the Official Xbox Magazine, who reveal that, this time around, Warfighter is solely in the hands of Danger Close, the studio that handled the 2010 games’ single player. This time around there’s only one engine, too. DICE’s powerful Frostbite 2.0 engine, last seen in Battlefield 3, Need For Speed: The Run and BioWare’s CNC: Generals 2, is being used to power the game.

EA will have more to show at GDC in San Francisco early next month, but until then they’ve decided to show off the potential box art for the game, which (disappointingly) has significantly less beards than 2010′s model.

[Source]

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It had originally been scheduled for release in April, but Funcom delayed the title into June in order to provide some more polish.

“Allowing for even more time to polish the game really shows just how much faith Funcom as a company has in The Secret World and how committed we are to making it the best it can be,” commented creative director Ragnar Tørnquist.

“The additional time will also allow us to carry out even more quality beta testing, and soon we will also be announcing several public beta events where hundreds of thousands of gamers will get to test the game prior to launch.”

That beta is currently ongoing, and even managed to convince 750,000 people to register for a chance to enter – a “significantly higher” number than Age of Conan boasted at a similar time.

[Source]

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First up: a listing for Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2 appeared on Amazon’s French arm, and was spotted by Gameblog.fr before it’s removal. Now that’s obviously not much of a revelation, now is it?

What is news, though, is that shortly after posting a story about Black Ops 2′s sudden arrival on Amazon, Gameblog were contacted by Activision with a request to remove the article. Gameblog refused, and were subsequently notified to forget about attending a preview event for Transformers: Fall of Cybertron and has pulled advertisements from their site.

Activision has declined to comment.

A Black Ops sequel shouldn’t really come as a surprise, it’s still the best-selling game of all time on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.

[Source]

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Speaking to Kotaku, Todd Howard confirmed what we all knew; Bethesda are working on DLC. But don’t expect Fallout 3′s 5 sets of content, instead, Bethesda aims to deliver less packs, but with more content.

“For Fallout 3 we did five DLCs. That was a very aggressive path for us,” he explained.

“Our plan now is to take more time, to have more meat on them [for Skyrim]. They’ll feel closer to an expansion pack.

“With Fallout 3, it was, ‘Ten dollars is the sweet spot for us and we know we want to put out five of them. And we had overlapping teams. We were coming off Fallout 3 and right back in.”
That turned out to be “a real hardcore loop,” Howard added. “We just think we can do better content if we approach it a different way.”

Unfortunately this approach means that you’ll be waiting longer for the expansions, but Bethesda intends to soften the blow with smaller updates in the mean time, citing the recently released high resolution texture pack as one such effort.

“Because that gap is going to be bigger, we want to put little things out for free in between. We’ve already done that for PC with the high-res pack. We’re trying to figure out what those things are.”

Howard also mentioned that the recent sizzle reel of content shown at GDC was only around 60% of the studios creations. “The other 40 per cent doesn’t show as well in a video or we didn’t have good footage.”

[Source]

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Rayman: Origins has somehow turned out profitable for the studio, despite apparent low sales. Ubisoft didn’t exactly talk numbers, but it’s great to see such an old-school, beautiful game doing well.
Elsewhere, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations sold “slightly above expectations,” with seven million copies sold to retailers. The franchise itself generates roughly $200 million in sales on a yearly basis.
And with that, there’ll of course be a new Assassin’s Creed this year. What we didn’t know is that this year’s venture is straight up called Assassin’s Creed 3, and will release on October 30th. It’s been in development for 3 years, and will be the “biggest launch in Ubisoft history,”
Just Dance shipped 13 million units in 2011, with users making over 20 million videos using Just Dance apps on iOS, Android, and Facebook. Yeah, apparently you can do that.
Rocksmith also proved successful, making over $40 million in North America. Ubisoft confirmed that there will be more Rocksmith.
The success of Assassin’s Creed, Just Dance, and Rocksmith were more than enough to offset the poor sales of Rayman: Origins, The Adventures of Tintin and “non-dance” Kinect games.
Due to the Wii’s continued decline, Ubisoft intends to transition even more to high-definition consoles. There’s also going to be a focus on shooters, because, as Ubisoft notes, they account for over 30% of the market, compared to driving games, which account for 8%.
The company will have “more than six titles” for the Wii U around it’s launch, and said “the machine will bring some fresh air to the industry.” There’s no mention of specific games, but it will be a combination of core and casual games.

[Source]

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