Disney Infinity to the Rescue?

JAN. 15, 2013 • With two hit installments in its own Skylanders franchise, Activision Blizzard has proven there is gold in games that interact with companion toy lines, and Disney Interactive is entering the same space by June. Disney Infinity will launch with an initial 17 interactive character figures that tie in with the companion video game available on the PC, PlayStation 3, Wii, Wii U, and Xbox 360. Disney also announced there will be an accompanying mobil.....

DFC Intelligence: Research You Can Trust

DEC. 22, 2012 • DFC Intelligence was founded in 1994 with a stated goal to provide strategic data research that would better enable companies to understand the growing video game industry and the emergence of what people back then were calling by such quaintly antiquated terms as Multimedia and Information Super Highway. The philosophy driving DFC then, as now, was distinguishing between what was real, what was hype, and from .....

Call of Duty: Black Ops II Reaches $1 Billion

DEC. 5, 2012 • Call of Duty: Black Ops II is keeping up with past installments in the franchise. Activision Blizzard reports that the action title took in $1 billion in worldwide revenue within 15 days. It took Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 a total of 16 days to accomplish the same milestone last year. By comparison, Call of Duty: Black Ops took 42 days to reach $1 billion in sales in 2010, while Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) needed 64 days. .....

InnoGames’ Worldwide Strategy

SEPT. 26, 2012 • Europe is a strong market for the kind of enthusiast gamer-friendly online games that are starting to catch on via social networks.  The recent DFC report The Market for Browser and Social Network Games discusses how these games have done better in Europe than the U.S.  DFC Intelligence forecasts that the market for these games in Europe will reach $2.6 billion in 2016. There also is a higher proportion of core-themed strategy titles available.....

[a]list Summit: Did theSocial Bubble Just Burst?

SEPT. 05, 2012 • At the [a]list summit in February, keynote speaker Michael Pachter took exception with an observation by DFC Intelligence president and principal analyst David Cole. Cole’s statement that there is a “bubble” in social games, which was used in the summit’s opening address, presented by your co-author of this piece Steve Fowler. “I think David Cole said something that’s wrong,” Pachter, researc.....

Tribes: Ascend Tests Action Free-to-Play Business

MAY 15, 2012 ● After two weeks, Hi-Rez Studios reports that more than 800,000 users have registered to play Tribes: Ascend, the Unreal 3 engined reboot of the action online franchise that originally launched in 1998. The Atlanta-based studio took the series free-to-play, and intends to release the new game in other languages in addition to English as soon as possible to help the title attract players worldwide. .....