Call of Duty: Modern Warefare 3 Trailer

Activision along with Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games have just released a trailer for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 – a game when judged by the trailer will surely give Battlefield 3 a run for its money.

“Call of Duty doesn’t have cut scenes, every second of that was taken from playable moments in the game. #MW3″ – Robert Bowling, Creative Strategist at Infinity Ward

Don’t want to view the trailer on YouTube? You can grab the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Trailer from the 3FL Mirror.

Modern Warfare 3 will be released for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on November 8th, 2011.

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Black Ops: Escalation Hitting PC On June 2nd

Activision has just announced that the latest in downloadable content for Call of Duty: Black Ops will be available on PC June 2nd – a month after its Xbox 360 exclusivity.

Escalation will bring 5 additional multiplayer maps to Call of Duty: Black Ops – four of which will be your standard maps, whilst the fifth map will be an all new zombie map which sees Robert Englund, George Romero, and Sarah Michelle Gellar make an appearance.

Activision has said that it will be making an announcement in regards to the PlayStation 3 version of this downloadable content “soon”.

More information on Escalation can be found over on the Steam Store – where they are currently taking 10% off when you pre-order.

Source: Steam Store

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World of Warcraft Experiences Subscription Drop

Cataclysm might have sold 4.7 million copies within the first month of its release, but during yesterdays Investor Conference Call, Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime announced that the game had fallen from the 12 million active subscriptions down to 11.4 million active subscriptions, a loss of 600,000 players.

Although these numbers might be due to the game being out for just over 5 months and the content has been consumed by a good portion of the player base, or that the players who have left could have been lured away by new games such as RIFT.

Either way 600,000 subscribers isn’t really going to hurt Blizzard in the long run, especially with Patch 4.2 coming out shortly which will be adding new daily quests and raid content, plus the recently released 4.1 patch which saw the Zalandri dungeons return as 5-man heroics.

Source: Activision Blizzard

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Activision Blizzard – Q1 2011 Results

Activision Blizzard released their First Quarter 2011 Financial Results today, announcing that it had made $1.4 billion in revenue, an increase of $100 million from the year before that. The net income for Activision Blizzard also saw an increase going from $381 million in Q1 2010 to $503 million in Q1 2011.

During the first quarter of 2011 Activision Blizzard held three of the top-10 PC titles, with Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft: Cataclysm and Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty, and Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Activision Blizzard also mentions that Call of Duty: Black Ops had a increase of more than 33% unique gamers playing online within the first five months than Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and since the release of the First Strike DLC back in February 1 the average time a player spends online playing per day has risen to an average 58 minutes – more than the 55 minutes an average user spends on Facebook per day.

Source: Activision Blizzard

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Possible New CoD: Black Ops DLC Coming

The first information on the latest DLC Addition to Call of Duty: Black ops was accidentally leaked by GAME Australia’s Website Last Night (The website has now been removed however).

The multiplayer DLC will include 4 new maps, “Zoo”, “Hotel”, “Convoy”, and “Stockpile”, it will also bring a new Zombie Map titled “Call of the Dead”.

From the information that was gathered the DLC is set to be released on May 3rd, 2011 – however there is no official word from Treyarch or Activision on whether the DLC is real.

Source: Kotaku

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Activision Suspends Development On Guitar Hero

Activision announced today in a earnings report that due to the decline of the music genre, development of all future Guitar Hero games have been suspended.

Another game which was on the chopping block today was True Crime: Hong Kong – considering this game was pretty far along in development Activision will be taking quite a loss in canceling it.

True Crime: Hong Kong was originally due to be released on the 6th of August 2010 but announced that the game would be pushed back until 2011 to allow for more development time, with the game being canceled so late in development it does make you wonder how bad it must have looked for Activision to pull the plug.

Whilst there is no official statement if the DJ Hero series will continue Activision have made major cuts in the DJ Hero development team.

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Infinity Ward delayed MW2 DLC for EA

Activision’s latest addition to the stoush now alleges that the former IW heads were colluding with EA to delay the launch of the Stimulus Pack map pack for Modern Warfare 2 until after the launch of EA’s competing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 title that was released earlier last year.

In a move that was going to no doubt incense Activision, after their departure from IW, West and Zampella started their own new games development house aptly called Respawn Entertainment.  Purportedly a large number of staff from IW who worked on the Modern Warfare 2 title coming across to their new venture with them signing an exclusive deal with EA to publish any game titles that they produce.

No doubt this will take some time to be sorted out in the courts.  In the meantime, until Activision rebuilds Infinity Ward then Treyarch remains as the only other to-date developer of games in the Call of Duty franchise.

Via:  Gamasutra

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Call of Duty: Black Ops – $1 Billion in Revenue

Last week Activision announced that the Treyarch produced hit shooter “Call of Duty: Black Ops” had hit the $1 Billion dollar revenue milestone in less than 2 months, totaling more than 600 million hours played since its November 9 release.

In the first 24 hours of release it had sold 5.6 million copies earning around $360 million in sales, and within its first week it had reached $650 million – $100 million more than Modern Warfare 2′s profits a year ago.

According to Activision the only other producer to break this milestone so quickly in all other forms of entertainment was James Cameron’s film Avatar.

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Call of Duty 7, aka Black Ops

At the moment details are thin on the ground, with the only hint as to what the gameplay is all about being the teaser trailer that was released late last week that you can grab here.  Most rumours pointed to the game being set in the Vietnam War period, which would be somewhat of a relief from World War II that Call of Duty seemed to get stuck on for quite a few games (there really is only so many WWII based games you can play).

As to whether we’ll see a dedicated servers or not for multiplayer  is yet to be seen and is something that PC gamers will be eager to find out.  Treyarch did at least goto the trouble of doing it for World at War, but then again Infinity Ward might have set the precedent now with their last contribution to the series – Modern Warfare 2 – that lacked dedicated servers.

Via:  Shacknews

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Activision seeking another Call of Duty developer

The franchise started off with Infinity Ward, with development house Treyarch brought in to produce alternate releases of games within the franchise.  The latest game in the series, Modern Warfare 2 (aka Call of Duty 6) was developed by Infinity Ward, with the last game being Call of Duty 5: World At War being developed by Treyarch.

The general consensus from most gamers is that they have preferred the Infinity Ward developed releases over the Treyarch ones, but if Activision brings in a third development house to work on a title from the franchise, it could be interesting to see where this goes.

As always I’m a skeptic, and I think its probably more an effort by Activision to try and milk the Call of Duty franchise harder than anything else.  Be interesting nonetheless to see what eventuates.

Via:  Shacknews

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