Ex Rockstar North and EA Canada Burnby devs have confirmed a project called Wii Move, a game using the Wii Balance Board.

“Wii Move is the first Project from PheroseSoft, a small 7 man team, made up from past members of EA Canada Burnaby and Rockstar North”, a representative told website Balance Board Blog.

“The game looks to put an unexpected slant on the Wii Balance Board. Look for Wii Move to hit the download service in quarter four 08.”

PheroseSoft has released a teaser video for Wii Move. It actually doesn’t seem to have a whole lot to do with a video game. However, if you enjoy metallic female figures running and sauntering about in corsets, you might enjoy this video.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjXpWwJhong[/youtube]

via CVG

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise when you consider GTA didn’t have much time to sell in April, but it was a much closer contest for the top spots in May than you might have guessed. While the 360 version of GTA IV did take the top spot with 871.3k copies sold, Mario Kart was right on its heels with 784.4k and Wii Fit not too far behind at 687.7k. The PS3 version of GTA IV came in at number four with 442.9k and then there was a significant drop off to number five, Wii Play, which sold 294.6k copies.

Wii Play’s number is actually fairly low given the number of Wii systems that were sold in the month, but it’s quite possible that many of those Wiis were sold alongside a copy of Wii Fit, which isn’t a multiplayer-happy game like so many other games in the system’s library.

The DS and Wii also took four more spots in the top ten with Smash Bros., Guitar Hero III, and the two versions of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon coming in at numbers 6, 8, 9, and 10. Iron Man on the unkillable PlayStation 2 snuck in at number 7, no doubt thanks in large part to the movie’s great success.

May 2008 Software Sales:

1. Grand Theft Auto IV (360) – 871,300
2. Mario Kart Wii w/ wheel (Wii) – 787,400
3. Wii Fit w/ balance board (Wii) – 687,700
4. Grand Theft Auto IV (PS3) – 442,900
5. Wii Play w/ remote (Wii) – 294,600
6. Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii) – 171,100
7. Iron Man (PS2) – 130,600
8. Guitar Hero III (Wii) – 116,800
9. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness (DS) – 107,000
10. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time (DS) – 102,000

Metal Gear Solid 4 is sure to come in highly with the June NPDs, and it’ll be difficult to overcome both Grand Theft Auto and a continued stream of Wii Fit copies. It’s definitely got a good shot at outselling them, though, and with those hard-to-come-by MGS4 bundles selling like crazy, the PS3 will be sure to see a nice bump in the first month of summer.

Hope there’s enough for you to do in Grand Theft Auto IV as it stands — Take-Two announced today as part of its Q2 financial reports that the Xbox 360 exclusive DLC has been delayed until Q1 2009. It was originally planned for release later this year.

According to CEO Ben Feder, the delay has nothing to do with development, but rather about “portfolio balancing.” So does that mean they’ve got a lot coming out later this year, or that they’ve got nothing early next year? I’m better on the latter, as two new Carnival Games titles were announced for later this year during the conference call.

During the second quarter of 2008, a total of 78% of all Take-Two publishing revenue came from Grand Theft Auto IV and GTA catalog sales — that’s a pretty astonishing amount, but there wasn’t much from Take-Two to have stolen any percentage of their revenue.

With this delay, I wonder if owners of the PS3 version feel vindicated in their purchase at all. Fewer load times, less pop-up, and the same content until at least 2009 — doesn’t sound too shabby.

There was bound to be a long tail on a game like Grand Theft Auto IV and its impact on hardware sales. It’s already been a month since the game was released, and we’re beginning to see some of the post-launch numbers that we couldn’t get from the April NPDs. According to Chart-Track, the Xbox 360 has sold 18% more consoles than the PlayStation 3 in the UK since GTA’s launch, Eurogamer reports.

In addition, sales of the game are also higher on 360, with a 57% share of sales for the game in its first four weeks of availability. Approximately 1.3 million copies have been sold between the two consoles, which would place it as already having outsold last year’s best selling game, FIFA 08.

There’s a good point that Eurogamer made which is worth keeping in mind. You should take these numbers with a grain of salt because the PS3 already saw a boost in its sales from the release of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, so there was only so much more GTA IV could do. For the full year thus far, the PS3 has sold 10% more systems than the 360 has; prior to GTA’s release, it was twice that. So while the numbers may be a bit misleading, it does seem clear that GTA has been extremely helpful to the Xbox 360’s case in the UK.

You may have heard how some of the voice actors from GTA IV don’t feel they were compensated well enough for their work, most prominently Michael Hollick, the voice of Niko. Well, the voice of Roman, Jason Zumwalt, feels the same way; but he’s not sitting around doing nothing about it. No, he’s using his new celebrity to rent himself out to fans for some extra cash. And, well, also to pay off some of his debts it seems. “Oh! That is painful in real life!”

If you’ve played GTA IV, watched any trailers for the game, or even watched TV recently, odds are you’re already familiar with the voice of Michael Hollick. He’s the guy who lent his talents to bring the main character of Niko Bellic to life. So he should be pleased with how well the game is selling, right? Well, not really. It seem Hollick has received a total of around $100,000 for his 15 months of voice over and motion capture work, but that’s it. No royalties, no residuals; just the flat rate he and the other actors in the game received through the Screen Actors Guild. And while $100,000 for one and a quarter year’s worth of work isn’t bad, it’s a paltry sum when compared with GTA IV’s $600 million worth of sales; not to mention the fact that, were this almost any other form of recorded media, Hollick would be entitled to millions. Unfortunately, it seems the Guild has yet to work out agreements when it comes to video games and even the internet.

“Obviously I’m incredibly thankful to Rockstar for the opportunity to be in this game when I was just a nobody, an unknown quantity,” Mr. Hollick, 35, said last week over dinner in Willamsburg, Brooklyn, shortly after performing in the aerial theater show “Fuerzabruta” in Union Square. “But it’s tough, when you see Grand Theft Auto IV out there as the biggest thing going right now, when they’re making hundreds of millions of dollars, and we don’t see any of it. I don’t blame Rockstar. I blame our union for not having the agreements in place to protect the creative people who drive the sales of these games. Yes, the technology is important, but it’s the human performances within them that people really connect to, and I hope actors will get more respect for the work they do within those technologies.”

Of course, while it’s easy to say that an actor making such a large contribution to a game should be compensated as such, Hollywood has a different view on the matter:

“What drives video games is not Tracy and Hepburn; what drives it is the conception of the creative director,” said Ezra J. Doner, a former Hollywood executive who represents entertainment companies as a lawyer at Herrick, Feinstein in Brooklyn, N.Y. “The actor whose appearance or voice is used is more analogous to a session music for a band. The session musicians don’t get residuals on the sales of the CD. They get paid a session fee. It’s not like the star quality of Tom Cruise that’s getting people to buy that video game.”

Admittedly, she’s got a point. Personally, I never knew who voiced Niko up until now, and I frankly didn’t care. It’s certainly an unfair situation, but the popularity of a video game really is driven by a slew of factors; and the actors behind the voice work just aren’t one of them. Really, the only time I think I’ve ever known who was doing a voice in a video game was when it was a performer who had already been established in Hollywood (like Ray Liotta as Tommy Vercetti in GTA: Vice City).

Via New York Times

As if to confirm my suspicions that nothing will be worked out between EA and Take-Two by the new deadline of of June 16, Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick and CEO Ben Feder have made a statement which claims the deal “undervalues” Take-Two.

Prepare to get your quote on.

“This is the same highly conditional proposal that EA offered Take-Two stockholders on March 13, 2008, which our board of directors thoroughly reviewed and unanimously determined to be inadequate and contrary to the best interests of Take-Two’s stockholders.

“As such, the recommendation of our board of directors that stockholders not tender their shares to EA remains unchanged… We are confident in the significant growth potential of Take-Two and in the unique value of our business given our strong position in this growing and dynamic industry,” said Zelnick.

Feder also chimed in, stating, “EA’s highly conditional offer fails to compensate our stockholders for our exceptional portfolio of intellectual property, world-class creative resources, and our successful revitalisation initiatives.”

“In the last several weeks, our strategy and Take-Two’s value have been vividly demonstrated by two notable events. The record-breaking sales performance of Grand Theft Auto IV in its first week of release confirmed its status as the most successful videogame launch of all time and as a blockbuster on a par with any entertainment product ever released.

“We have also just announced an agreement with Universal Pictures to make BioShock, the universally acclaimed hit videogame, into a feature film, demonstrating how Take-Two is delivering value from our powerful and wholly-owned intellectual property. The small number of shares tendered into EA’s offer to date demonstrates that our stockholders agree with what our board has maintained from the beginning: EA’s proposal undervalues our company.”

I’m not going to claim to be any sort of financial genius, but while the two make a compelling argument, I think they’re wrong. At what point in time could Take-Two’s stock value be any higher than in the midst of a GTA launch and potential acquisition?

We’ll have more on this story as it continues to develop.

via GamesIndustry.biz

The concept of a looming deadline for Electronic Arts’ offer to acquire Take-Two has become a complete joke, as time and again that “deadline” has come and gone, only to be met with nothing more than an extension. That’s the case once again, as Electronic Arts has extended its offer until June 16, but as I said, you’re better off expecting nothing more than yet another extension.

“Extending our offer will allow the FTC review process to continue,” said EA exec Owen Mahoney.

“EA’s offer price remains unchanged at USD 25.74 per share and our offer is still subject to conditions that include regulatory approval. As stated earlier, we retain the right to terminate the offer if the conditions are not satisfied.”

The latest deadline had expired this past Friday with nothing of significance to be reported on. As of this past Friday, more than six million shares of Take-Two had been tendered according to GI.biz, which remains a fairly negligible amount when considering the size of the company.

And so the saga drags on. The shortsighted part of me is happy for this, because all I want at this point is to end up with NBA 2K9 later this year, not NBA Live 2K9.

As it turns out, GameStop’s claim that 64% of all copies of GTA IV sold were on Xbox 360 was spot on — 64.9% is the exact number if you do the math with NPD’s numbers for the month of April. Between the 360 and PS3 versions of the game, GTA IV managed to sell 2.85 million even though it was released on April 29 — not too shabby.

Mario Kart Wii, meanwhile, sold more than a million copies. That’s a million plastic wheels out there in the wild, imparing people’s ability to control the game properly. And of course, with the number of Wii systems that sold in April, you know you’re going to see a lot of Wii Play sales, and that we did. Smash Bros. had a big drop off, from 2.7 million in March down to 326k in April. Not that Nintendo should be complaining, with five of their games in the top ten, with six of the top ten on Nintendo platforms.

April 2008 Software Sales

GTA IV (360) – 1.85M
Mario Kart Wii w/ wheel (Wii) – 1.12M
GTA IV (PS3) – 1.00M
Wii Play (Wii) – 360,000
Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii) – 326,000
Gran Turismo 5: Prologue (PS3) – 224,000
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness (DS) – 202,000
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time (DS) – 202,000
Guitar Hero III (Wii) – 152,000
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (360) – 141,000

Call of Duty 4 on 360 continues to do its best Mustafa impression, as it just refuses to be kicked out of the top ten. Could next month finally see it kicked out? I’m going to go ahead and predict a bold “no.”

According to at least one business news source the CBS buyout of CNet is part of growing trend involving companies trying to reach gamers. It’s all about demographics.

In the case of CBS-Cnet, the so-called synergies lie in core demographics. By the very nature of Cnet’s tech focus, its audience features the increasingly hard-to-reach 18-to-34-year-old men who prefer ”Grand Theft Auto IV” and ”Indiana Jones” to TV viewing — unless there’s a ball game on, of course.

The article mentions the recent Blockbuster offer to Circuit City and Microsoft’s attempted hostile take over Yahoo! as well. The common theme is the growing influence of gamers on the economic market. Yes gamers we shall rule the world! It’s only a matter of time.

via The Deal.com