After more delays than most fans would care to count, Gran Turismo 5 now finally has a new official release date. Polyphony Digital have confirmed the PS3 exclusive will be released on November 24, 2010 in both the United States and Europe.
The trend at all the online game stores is to start their weekend sales a bit early, which is why we posted our Weekend Sales report at 4:00 on a Thursday. Steam is getting the weekend off to an early (And lackluster) start with a 33% sale on F1 2010, a racing game which normally goes for $39.99, but you can now get it for $26.79. Steam is also cutting 50% off the price of Risen, and RPG by developer Piranha Bytes. Because all of these new sales are coming so early, Steam is still honoring their Midweek sale on Day of Defeat Source at the time of this writing.
Call of Duty: Black-Ops developer Treyarch has been criticized by being the team that makes “the other Call of Duty game.” Treyarch may have the last laugh; however, as Black-Ops has officially broken the record for most first day sales of any game. The game, which sold 5.6 million on launch day, beats out the old number one title Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 by almost a million copies. Just the titles that were sold on launch day have already amounted to $360 million in revenue, cemented Treyarch as the staple developer in the Call of Duty franchise.
Last night, Electronic Arts revealed a new partnership with a Canadian developer called Trapdoor who will create a new sci-fi game for XBox Live Arcade, PSN and PC. Little is known about the new development team aside from the fact that they are based in Montreal and that it is headed by Ken Schachter, formerly of Gameloft Montreal, and who is credited with working on the XBox arcade title Prince of Persia Classic a few years ago.
After being shuffled around by Microsoft, Xbox Live Indie Games have been returned to the Games & Demos section of the Xbox Marketplace, reports gameindustry.biz.
The re-re-categorizing follows last week’s update to the Xbox dashboard, which placed the indie games in the “Specialty Shops” section alongside clothes for Xbox Avatars. Furthermore, the indie games no longer showed up in Marketplace search results.
Though Microsoft said that the move was meant to make Xbox Live Indie Games easier to find, many indie developers saw their work as being marginalized by Microsoft. A gameindustry.biz article from last week quotes Xbox indie developer Michael C. Neel as saying, “We [are] now beside the walking dead Game Room…The list of Specialty Shops is almost a ‘VH1 Where are they now?’ episode.”
The release line up this week is dominated by what is likely to be one of the best selling games of the year. But other than Black Ops there are a couple of smaller titles worth looking at. The Fight: Lights Out is the latest MOVE compatible release, and the up-dated PS2 games in The Sly Collection still play well. There is only one Playstation Network game out for PS3 this week, which is Crescent Pale Mist.
Beginning November 16th, Best Buy will be offering 3D dunking and dribbling to adopters of 2K’s NBA 2K11. The 3D enhancements will be exclusive to Best Buy and the Playstation 3, and will come in the form of a DLC voucher. If you already own the game, it will be possible to score a free download of the DLC from the Playstation Network in January 2011, but who wants to wait?
