With the appeal of first-person shooters fading, I can finally climb to the top of the ranks in the now-empty Bad Company 2 leaderboards! Oh, wait….
News Blips:
First-person shooters are losing their luster, according to a recent survey. Casual game company Blockdot queried 500 users of its Kewlbox.com website on gaming trends and behaviors. Predictably, the results indicated that the typical notion "of a teenage boy glued to a game console has been blown away by the mass-market casual online game player," while also revealing that "first-person shooter games, once very strong with males, are now losing appeal. 20 percent decline in positive intent to play and 70 percent increase in negative intent." Am I led to believe that casual gamers avoid playing FPS games? You don't say….
Digital PC game purchases are nearly even with retail sales. New data from research company NPD Group shows that digital downloads for 2009 peaked at 21.3 million within the U.S., only slightly trailing behind box sales of 23.5 million. With such a radical shift in numbers, digital downloads accounted for 48 percent of unit sales last year, signifying a steep change in buying habits for PC gamers. That reminds me; I'm due for another shopping binge over at the Steampowered store. [Gamasutra]
Even though the Netherlands met defeat in the World Cup, at least it holds the world record for the longest gaming session. At a video game store in Rotterdam, gamers embarked on a 50 hour marathon of Red Dead Redemption, supervised by officials from Guiness World Records. The new record surpassed Chirantan Patnaik's achievement of 40 hours and 20 minutes. Now that's a lot of cow herding! [VideoGamesBlogger]
Square Enix announces an updated version of Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together for the PSP. Pivotal members of the original development team have re-joined to enhance the game's visuals, effects, and music, while adding a new "Wheel of Fortune" system that aims to bring even more replayability to the wildly popular tactical role-playing game. Popular or not, I don't want to swap hugs with an ogre.
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