Despite what it might sounds like, PopCap World
is not an amusement park – although it probably would be a really cool one.
Instead, PopCap Games is partnering with NCsoft to create an online multiplayer social game service in Korea. The service will offer 13 free-to-play games with optional paid elements in the queue for the coming months.
The holiday season kicks off tonight for gamers. At 12:01am
, “Halo Reach,” the first blockbuster of the fall/winter goes on sale. It will lead the charge of a densely packed 3.5-month period of major game releases that will determine how 2010 turns out for the video game industry.
Now, normally, you wait for sales numbers before calling a release a blockbuster – but when you’re dealing with a new action-based “Halo” game, you can skip the formality. The franchise has sold over 34 million copies and consumed 3.3 billion hours of gameplay (that’s over 376,000 years, if you’re keeping score at home) since its launch with the original Xbox.
3D TV is being pushed hard by television manufacturers,
and while pick-up has been better than expected, it’s still not something the mass audience is clamoring for. Why not?
A new study by Nielsen offers some insight – but you can probably guess the two biggest culprits. The survey finds that the high costs of the sets and being forced to wear 3D glasses are the two key reasons people aren’t rushing out to buy the sets. The news gets worse for manufacturers, though.
The gaming world is exploding today with news that Zenimax 
Media, the parent company of id Software and Bethesda Softworks, has filed a trademark for “Oblivion”. Specifically, that trademark is meant for use in “motion picture film production; entertainment services, namely, providing motion picture theatrical films in the field of fantasy games.”
Inevitably, that has led to speculation that a film adaptation of the most recent “Elder Scrolls” game may be in the works. Don’t hold your breath.
No one had real high expectations for last month’s 
video game sales. And that’s probably a good thing, since it turned out to be the worst August in three years.
Software sales fell 14 percent last month to $403.5 million, according to The NPD Group – more than twice as much as some Wall St. analysts were expecting. Hardware sales, meanwhile, were 5 percent below 2009’s level, at $282.9 million – and the Wii had its worst sales month since the system’s launch.
Fifteen years ago – on Sept. 9, 1995 – Sony changed
the course of the video game world.
This sounds like hyperbole – and maybe even the first line of a press release from the company – but it’s actually the spot-on truth. It has now been 15 years since the PlayStation hit retail shelves and the changes it brought were monumental.
The Emmy Awards may be over for this year, 
but the door is already opening for 2011.
The International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences today began accepting entries for the 2011 International Digital Emmy Awards. These are awards meant to recognize excellence in content that is created on non-traditional platforms, such as the Internet, mobile products and interactive TV. The content must originate outside of the U.S.
Microsoft’s Zune media player may not be 
making any noticeable impact on Apple’s dominance of the personal media player space, but it does have at least one corporate fan: United Airlines.
The Redmond-based tech giant and United are extending the Zune partnership they kicked off a couple months ago. On the Zune Insider podcast, product evangelist Dave McLauchlan noted that the airline will be providing Zune HDs to passengers on flights to Hong Kong and Australia as part of the expanded test.
Who needs modern day street thugs when you’ve got old west 
outlaws?
Not Take-Two Interactive Software, it seems. “Red Dead Redemption” continues to be a retail bonanza for the publisher and is doing so much better than expected that the company is now forecasting it will turn a profit this year. That’s the first time in recent memory that it has done so in a year that didn’t have a “Grand Theft Auto” release.
Chris Morris: Journalist 