Today on Headline
RePLAY: the latest entry in the Pokémon series is announced, good intentions
may be illegal for winners of an early copy of Mass Effect 3 and Facebook’s gaming market could be on the decline.
Junichi Masuda, the
director of Pokémon Black and White, surprised fans last weekend on
the TV show “Pokémon Smash” by announcing the first numbered sequel to the Pokémon
series— Pokémon Black and White 2. It was rumored the new Pokémon
entry would’ve been a “Pokémon Gray”,
which would’ve followed GameFreak’s M.O. of releasing two versions and a “combined”
version a year or two later.
This is relatively
unknown territory on whether the numbered distinction carries gameplay changes
or if it’s just an update of the originals. Anything is possible as we hear
more news in the coming months all the way up to Pokémon Black and White 2’s
North American fall release.
*Source: Pokémon
In what could only be
described as an inevitable result in contests like EA’s Mass Effect 3 space giveaway, two men that won an early copy may be
in legal trouble by the state of Nevada for trying to raffle the game away.
Michael Davis and
Miguel Droz discovered one of the Mass
Effect 3 copies that were launched into space via weather balloons in the
Arizona desert. On Sunday the pair organized a lottery where interested parties
could pay $5 for a ticket and a chance to get the winning number. Davis and
Droz planned on sending 30 percent of the proceeds to Child’s Play, a charity
organization, and the remainder to a video game company they wanted to open.
Except, in the state
of Nevada where the Davis and Droz are based, lotteries are only legal if all
funds go to charity. It is also a federal issue, since the pair was accepting entries
across state lines, attorney Mark Methenitis said.
“You can pretty much
never rely on a charitable gaming exemption unless 100 percent of the money
goes to a charity (though you can often use part of the funds to cover event
costs, i.e. dealers at a charity casino night),” Methenitis told Kotaku.
“Diverting the funds here is about as clear cut as you can get; they're using
the funds for personal gain.”
“In short, they're
running an illegal lottery which subjects them to potential criminal penalties,”
Methenitis continued. "I would imagine that Child's Play, if they knew
what was going on, would not want to be involved. I won't even get into the
issues with the IRS that could come up here.”
“It's often a felony,
which usually means something like 1-10 years in prison and/or a fine (usually
in the thousands to tens of thousands range).”
Since then, Droz
notified Kotaku that they were cancelling the lottery after initially trying to
give all the donations to Child’s Play. “So as of now we are officially
cancelling this entire thing, and refunding everyone’s money through PayPal,”
said Droz in a statement.
“Sorry about that, we
should have done our homework first, but in the rush to get this done,
hopefully do something cool for charity and get ourselves a kickstart to start
our company, we just didn’t do due diligence. Again, we super apologize for
wasting anyone’s time.”
*Source: Kotaku
Analysts and pundits
have long predicted that social media games were the way of the future, but a
new study from analyst firm IHS suggests that the gaming market on Facebook may
be on the decline.
According to the
report via Gamasutra, the number of users playing games has “stagnated” over
the last several months due to “increased competition” making it more difficult
for developers to attract new users despite the dramatic growth during 2009 and
2010. No hard numbers were presented in the report, but the percentage of users
playing games on Facebook dropped to 25 percent in 2011, down from 50 percent
at the end of 2010.
In light of the
decline, IHS recommends that Facebook developers “need to be more cautious” in
the upcoming months and they should focus on games that encourage “long-term
engagement” (i.e. skill or commitment) from their audiences.
*Source: Gamasutra
