Today on Headline
RePLAY: The makers of Draw Something gets
picked up by Zynga, a Mass Effect 3
cupcake campaign and the Navy wants to obtain user information from videogame
consoles.
Before Draw Something came along, Omgpop wasn’t
doing so well: the company only had $17 million from investors and 35 games
made—all of which brought little revenue. Omgpop was on the fast track of
running financially dry by May if it wasn’t for Draw Something’s wild success. That very success led the company to
be bought out by Zynga for $180 million.
“I had $1,700 in my
bank account yesterday,” said Charles Forman, the founder of the New York-based
studio, “and now I have a whole lot more.”
Initially, Draw Something only drew 30,000
downloads on release, but 10 days later, the downloads quickly approached and
surpassed one million. When players posted their sketches on Twitter and
Facebook and topped the Apple App Store charts the game started to generate
hundreds of thousands of dollars per day.
“It never slowed
down,” said Dan Porter, Omgpop’s chief executive. “The bigger it got, the
bigger it got.”
Once Zynga caught wind
of Omgpop’s success, the San Francisco-based company wasted no time cooking up
propositions. A deal was announced Wednesday, and by Thursday all of Omgpop’s
employees started working for Zynga.
*Source: New York Times
What better way to protest
Mass Effect 3’s ending than sending
hundreds of cupcakes to BioWare’s front door at Edmonton, Canada?
Enter the “RetakeME3 –
Cupcake Campaign,” the latest movement to get BioWare to change the endings for
Mass Effect 3 but to also “let
BioWare know, that we trust them, and have faith in them.”
LoganKey, the campaign’s
organizer, explains:
We are currently
trying to organize the delivery of a mass of cupcakes to Bioware's studio in
Edmonton. All the cupcakes will be divided into equal parts Red, Blue and Green
colors... but they will all taste exactly the same. If you'd like to
participate, please check out the thread below and let us know.
This coming week, we
should send Bioware boxes upon boxes of a dozen cupcakes. We are taking ideas
as to what sort of notes we should have attached on each box. Some
possibilities include:
- “No matter what color you choose, they all taste the same”;
- “No matter what color you choose, it’s all
vanilla ;-D”
- “We rage because we love”
The campaign already
exceeded its modest $1,005 goal at $1,131 and is ready to green light Fuss
Cupcakes to start baking; the bakery will deliver the 400 cupcakes to BioWare.
Hide your files, hide
your videogame consoles, ‘cause the Department of the Navy has contracted a
company aptly called Obscure Technologies to obtain information from overseas,
pre-owned consoles.
The almost $200,000 project
aims to collect “sensitive and significant information from previous owners” by
developing hardware and software tools that can be used for “extracting data
from videogame systems.”
Obscure Technologies
was chosen for the project because of their “substantial experience” working
with videogame consoles’ “hardware of embedded systems” that contain “anti-tampering
technology.” Notably, their lead scientist even reverse engineered a Xbox.
The project is prohibited
from targeting any “U.S. persons.”
*Source: FedBizOpps.Gov
via Kotaku
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