Microsoft’s 
appearance at next month’s Consumer Electronics Show will be its last.
The tech giant has announced, via its corporate blog, that it will no longer host a booth or deliver the show’s annual keynote speech after 2012.
Category Archives: Variety (Print)
‘Modern Warfare 3’ tops $1 bil in 16 days
Activision’s “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3″ has joined the billion dollar club — after just 16 days on store shelves, setting yet another entertainment industry record.
James Cameron’s “Avatar” was the previous record holder for a property to hit the $1 billion sales mark. It took a day longer than the action/shooter video game to achieve that, however. (“Black Ops,” the previous game in the “Call of Duty” series, took six weeks to hit the number.)
Dealmakers Impact Report: Joe Minton
Minton co-founded 
DDM in 2005 to help represent vidgame development studios and to act as a strategic adviser for Hollywood licensors.
The company has clients in the U.S. and Europe and is in the midst of helping Red Stallion set up a development studio in Qatar. Lately, Minton has been working with Hollywood directors who want to retain the videogame rights to their films, allowing them to continue to grow the properties in a new medium.
Building a better app
For pros in 
the scripted entertainment world, the jump to making an interactive app can be a jarring one. Confusion about appropriate budgets and how to tailor the content can result in something that does more harm than good to the property it’s trying to promote.
If you’re tapped with overseeing or signing off on an app for an entertainment property (or even just giving notes on one), there are a few basic elements you should be looking for to ensuring its success.
Holiday gadget gift guide
Spending on consumer 
electronics will account for one-third of all holiday gift-shopping this year, according to the Consumer Electronics Assn. — but finding the right gift for the gadget-hound on your list won’t be easy, or cheap. While overall electronics prices are falling in some categories, like TVs, items on the cutting edge tend to carry a premium pricetag. They’re also often hard to get since they may not be carried by big-box stores and thus not be on the radar of most shoppers.
To help out, Variety has put together its annual list of items that are bound to please even the most discriminating techie.
‘Modern Warfare 3’ breaks entertainment biz records
For the third year in a row, the “Call of Duty” video game franchise has set entertainment industry records, once again claiming the crown for the biggest product launch of all time.
Activision reports “Modern Warfare 3” sold 6.5 million copies in the U.S. and U.K. in its first 24 hours on shelves, earning $400 million. That tops last year’s $360 million haul from the series’ “Black Ops” installment and the $310 million earned by 2009’s “Modern Warfare 2.”
‘Payne 3’ ready to load
There aren’t a 
lot of surprises in the entertainment world these days — particularly when it comes to tentpole events.
Whether it’s a quick-cut trailer, the interview circuit or an online spoiler site, audiences generally have a pretty solid idea of what they’re going to experience — with movies, TV shows and videogames.
But that’s rarely, if ever, the case with new releases from Rockstar Games. The vidgame developer tightly controls the flow of information before a title’s ship date and seldom emerges from the studio to talk about its products. The reason, says Dan Houser, the veep and co-founder of creative at Rockstar, is pretty simple: Letting people peek behind the curtain spoils the fun.
‘Battlefield 3’ storms sales charts
Electronic Arts has snatched away bragging rights for the year’s biggest video game launch as the company’s much anticipated ”Battlefield 3” has sold more than 5 million units in its first week, making it the fastest-selling game in the company’s history.
The big bow unseats Microsoft’s ”Gears of War 3,” which boasted first week sales of 3 million copies in September — but it’s likely to be a short-lived victory. The launch of ”Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3” is expected to set entertainment industry launch records, as the series has done for the past two years.
Start your engines, GTA V is coming
Ending months 
of speculation, Take-Two Interactive Software and Rockstar Games have finally confirmed that ”Grand Theft Auto V” is on the way.
The developer teased the game on its website Tuesday, announcing it would release a trailer for the game on Nov. 2.
Apple misses on earnings, shares tumble
For the first time since 2004, Apple has fallen short of Wall Street’s earnings expectations.
The company reported earnings of $7.05 per share in its fourth fiscal quarter. While that represented a 54 percent gain in net income, it was still notably less than the $7.39 analysts had expected of the company. Shares fell roughly 6 percent in after-hours trading.
Chris Morris: Journalist 