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As part of a massive management reorganization months ago, game publisher Electronic Arts created a division to focus solely on a class of games that fit into a category called “casual gaming.”  The classification is meant to include games, whether console, mobile or PC in origin, that are widely accessible, do not have a steep learning curve and can be played incrementally in small blocks of time.

Kathy Vrabel, the former president of Activision was hired to run the division.   Today, her Casual Gaming Division at Electronic Arts announced their first major deal.   EA and traditional game/toy maker Hasbro have signed an exclusive multi-year licensing deal.

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With onboard Internet connections, large hard drives and extremely powerful CPU and graphics processors, today’s gaming consoles like the Xbox 360, or PS3 (and to a lesser degree the Nintendo Wii which emphasizes game play over game technology) house immense computing power.    The Xbox 360, for example, runs a custom designed IBM PowerPC triple core 3.2ghz CPU chip.  Put in perspective, a high end 2006 configuration of Apple’s Power Mac G5 used dual core  PowerPC processors running 2.5ghz.   In plain English, that’s some serious horsepower.

The most obvious benefit of this power consolidation is the quality of the graphics.  (3d image processing is power and memory hungry. The bigger the box, the better the potential images.)  But as important as graphics may be to the quality of the experience, for gamer’s the ultimate payoff may lie somewhere else; it may lie not in visual renderings but instead  in the potential for a new kind of gaming, the potential for: “Dynamic Games.” 

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With nice weather and incentive to be outside and active, the summer quarter is a cyclic weak point for gaming companies. Wednesday, after the close of markets, Game publisher Electronic Arts (EA)  (NASDAQ: ERTS), reported their fiscal first quarter earnings (for the period ended June 30th). The loss for the quarter, and other results were appropriate to the season, they also easily beat Wall Street analysts expectations, (though expectations were far from lofty.) Click to Read More

A plethora of ordinary people with extraordinary powers? A shadowy organization tracking them down?  A mentally disturbed villain? A world in need of saving?  That’s the world of Heroes, NBC’s runaway TV hit and it sure sounds like the stuff of comic books, and of video games.  For gaming – superheroes, villains, saving the world – it’s a perfect fit, but until yesterday, there was no game, at least for console based video gaming.

Thursday, French video game publisher Ubisoft announced it had secured a licensing deal with Universal Pictures Digital Platforms Group to bring Heroes to video gamers.  The game will aim for a holiday 2008 release and the TV series writers will supervise and consult on the game designs and storyline.  

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In 1983 Anheuser Busch paid Midway Games to make all the beers served in their popular game, Tapper, be labeled Budweiser’s.  Fast forward a few decades and now that curious sponsorship has become the forefather to one of the hottest segments in marketing: In Game Advertising.

A lot has changed in the decades since Midway’s Tapper.  Today, gaming consoles have internet connections and ads placed in the games, thanks to powerful graphics chips, need not be static or two dimensional.  Today, instead of a fixed poster in the background, or a product label on a beer bottle, a billboard in the background of a game can come alive with video and sound.    Today, the labels on a virtual NASCAR racing car can be sold to marketers for sponsorship just as they might have been on a real life race car.  Today, a three dimensional soda can is able to provide a virtual facsimile in the game of what exists in reality.

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The NPD Group released its monthly hardware sales data for June yesterday. As was also the case for May and April, sales for both consoles and software were strong showing month to month, as well as annual year over year, gains.

For hardware, sales was up 34% to $399m. Besting strong May numbers, Nintendo, with its attention to the user experience and effort to reach out to new gamers, again dominated both full–size and portable hardware categories. In June, Nintendo sold 562k DS units (compared to 423k in May) and 381.8k Wii’s (compared to 338k in May). The numbers for the Wii are especially impressive given the scarcity of supply and difficulty that still remains in obtaining one of the consoles.

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Just last week Peter Moore, the former president and COO of Sega America and current VP of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment business (responsible for the Xbox),  was sitting down with the press and talking about present problems and plans for  future of the Xbox 360 gaming platform.  Now it appears in September, Mr. Moore will be talking about Electronic Arts and Madden 2008 instead. 

It was announced yesterday that Moore resigned his post at Microsoft to return to the San Francisco Bay area.   He won’t have time to be idle.  He’ll take on new challenges  at Redwood City based Electronic Arts as head of their highly regarded EA Sports division; home to game franchises like Madden Football and Tiger Woods golf.

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