Displaying items by tag: EA

In order to prepare even better for the upcoming launch of Origin on Macs, EA has launched an alpha test booked for several thousand users. The Mac version of Electronic Arts Origin will be available "soon" and EA has started sending invitations for alpha testing of the Mac version of the Origin client.

Electronic Arts has announced the upcoming open beta for Crysis 3 in a press release. The new beta will be available on all platforms (PC, PS3 and X360). The beta testing will last two weeks and will “ship” with two game modes that focus on team play. The Crash Site mode requires the player to provide a defense at a predetermined location on the map. The longer you maintain control over the point the more points your team will get and thus get closer to victory.

Military simulation games are nothing new, but their popularity has certainly increased with some of the recent press about US Special Operations Teams including the US Army Special Forces Delta Team and the Navy’s Elite SEALs Of the Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU); or as they are incorrectly called in the media SEAL Team 6. These groups are tasked with convert missions around the globe to execute US policy on a “personal” level. It was members of DEVGRU that put paid to Osama Bin Laden’s account. Medal of Honor Warfighter takes its story line from the exploits of these highly trained men. In fact EA actually consulted both Active Duty and Retired SEALs to finish the game. This cooperation got some of the SEALs in hot water as the Navy now claims they gave up classified information. Does Medal of Honor Warfighter have an edge to it realism that no other game has? We will be loading it up to see in our typical 30-45 minute test. Will it grab our interest, or will it end up on the shelf collecting dust?

Imagine how bad MOH Warfighter would be if they did not have valuable advice from a couple of U.S. Navy SEAL's during the game development. I cannot, but their superiors believe that the Navy would be better if they never contacted Electronic Arts. Specifically, the seven members, some of them ex, some still active members of the naval elite Special Forces were fined for revealing military secrets to the development studio that made MOH: Warfighter.

Basketball fans will have to wait until the next year before the new NBA Live game will reach their hands. This is an example that making games is not a simple job, especially big games like NBA Live. EA sports Executive VP Andrew Wilson stated on their official website “But making great games is not easy, and we're just not there yet on NBA LIVE 13. Having continued to look at the game over the past few days, it's clear that we won't be ready in October. And rather than launch midway through the season, we're going to sit out the full year and stay focused on making next year’s game great.“.

Only 4 days were needed for Fifa 13 to reach 875,000 copies preordered. Officially the preorders started on September 13th and now EA Sport's has come out with some impressive numbers. This is a pretty solid increase comparing to preorders from last year. It is a jump of 37% in Europe and 62% in North America. It looks like football (the real kind) is getting more and more attention in the US, both on video games and on the real pitch. EA also announced that the demo version released last week was downloaded 1.99 million times in first three days for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. This is an increase of 29% from last year.

Steam is having a sale this weekend on the entire Crysis chronicle knocking 75% off of the cost of the whole group. This means you can get a bundle containing the original Crysis, Crysis Warhead and Crysis 2 for about $17.50. If you do not need the others you can still grab them individually for $5, $5, and $10 respectively. The sale will be going on all weekend ending on Monday September 10th. c

A couple of days ago we covered some interesting news about EA and what appear to be steps to set themselves up for a buyout. In the original article we talked about the fact that they are buying back their own stock from investors as well as trimming down staff which puts them at a lower financial liability. At the same time they were doing all of this EA was talking up the future of mobile gaming especially in conjunction with the Windows 8 ecosystem. This happened in conjunction with OnLive selling to an unnamed company. Now we are hearing that EA owned mobile gaming company PopCap is cutting roughly 12% of the staff in North America.

Over the last week (and over the weekend) there were two significant rumors in the gaming industry that may be cause for concern. OnLive, a cloud gaming company, first showed indications that it was having financial trouble when reports surfaced that they had laid off all of their employees in a single movement. This move was enough for the tech world to speculate that OnLive was going under. However, it was later revealed that all of their employees were let go in order to pave the way for a buyout by an unnamed company

Quite a rumor is swirling around the tech world today. Supposedly EA is making preparatory efforts to sell their company. Furthermore, what adds credibility to this notion is that the “rumor” is being reported by the New York Post and not some random dime-a-dozen blog on the internet.