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Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News

BEIJING (AP) — Dozens of workers assembling Xbox video game consoles climbed to a factory dormitory roof, and some threatened to jump to their deaths, in a dispute over job transfers that was defused but highlights growing labor unrest as China’s economy slows.

The dispute was set off after contract manufacturer Foxconn Technology Group announced it would close the assembly line for Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360 models at its plant in the central city of Wuhan and transfer the workers to other jobs, workers and Foxconn said Thursday.

Workers reached by telephone said Foxconn initially offered severance pay for those who wanted to leave rather than be transferred, but then reneged, angering the workers; Foxconn, in a statement, disputed that account, saying only transfers were offered, not severance.

The workers climbed to the top of the six-story dormitory on Jan. 3 and threatened to jump before Wuhan city officials persuaded them to desist and return to work, according to the workers and accounts online. The workers gave varying estimates of the numbers involved in the strike, from 80 to 200, and photos posted online showed dozens of people crowding the roof of the boxy concrete building.

“Actually none of them were going to jump. They were there for the compensation. But the government and the company officials were just as afraid, because if even one of them jumped, the consequences would be hard to imagine,” said Wang Jungang, an equipment engineer in the Xbox production line, who left the plant earlier this month.

The fracas is the latest labor trouble to hit Foxconn, a unit of Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. that makes iPads and iPhones for Apple Inc. as well as Xboxes and other gadgets, helping consumer electronics brands hold down costs. Its massive China plants are run with military-like discipline, which labor rights activists say contributed to spate of suicides in 2010.

Foxconn said that all workers on the Xbox line were offered transfers at their current pay but that 150 demanded severance and not all of them participated in the rooftop protest. “It is our understanding that certain individuals threatened to jump from the building if their demands were not met,” the statement said.

Strikes and other job actions have risen in recent months across China as factories cope with rising costs, scarce credit and declining orders from Europe, the United States and domestic companies. Complicating matters is the approaching Lunar New Year, a time when many of the migrant workers who man factories quit jobs to return home temporarily before looking for better paying employment.

Foxconn’s Wuhan plant employs 32,000 people. The site previously had a couple of suicides or attempted ones a couple years back, prompting the government to take over the operations of the dormitories, said Wang, the equipment engineer.

After the rooftop protest, Microsoft said in a statement that it investigated, finding that the dispute centered on Foxconn’s staffing and transfer policies, not working conditions. “After the protest, the majority of workers chose to return to work. A smaller portion of those employees elected to resign, the statement said.

Ultimately, Foxconn said, 45 of the employees resigned from the company while the rest chose to stay. It did not say whether the resigning workers were given compensation. Wang, the engineer, said he received $4,700 (30,000 yuan) in compensation but that was because he planned his departure early, telling his supervisor six months ago he would leave.

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Associated Press researcher Zhao Liang contributed to this report.

Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News

DESPERATE MEASURES: Dozens of Chinese workers assembling Xbox video game consoles climbed to a factory dormitory roof, and some threatened to jump to their deaths, in a dispute over jobs.

BROKEN PROMISES: Foxconn announced it would close the production line for the consoles and transfer some jobs elsewhere, and workers were angered when the contract manufacturer allegedly reneged on an offer to offer severance pay.

SAD HISTORY: The fracas is the latest labor trouble to hit Foxconn, whose massive China plants are run with military-like discipline, which labor rights activists say contributed to spate of suicides in 2010.

Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News

LOS ANGELES (AP) — U.S. retail sales of video game hardware, software and accessories fell 21 percent in December from a year ago to $3.99 billion as players bought fewer games for their aging consoles, according to market researcher NPD Group.

The results are “not entirely surprising given that we are at the back end of the current console lifecycle,” said NPD Group analyst Anita Frazier.

However, the tally was clearly a disappointment. Frazier said the month’s poor performance was unexpected given the quality of new games including “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3,” which was the top-seller, and “Just Dance 3,” which placed second.

Consoles are getting long in the tooth. Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360 will turn 7 years old this November — even though it replaced the Xbox when Microsoft’s first console was just 4 years old.

Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 3 will turn 6 in November, the same age the PlayStation 2 reached before it got an upgrade. Nintendo Corp.’s Wii is also turning 6, even though its GameCube reached only age 5 before being pushed aside.

Sony and Microsoft have not unveiled plans for a next-generation console, while Nintendo is expected to release its Wii U with a new touch-screen controller later this year.

Not only are consoles getting older, but the way games are delivered is undergoing change. Consumers are now expecting more content to be delivered over the Internet.

Sales of software — the video games themselves — fell 14 percent from a year ago to $2.04 billion.

That’s a bigger decline than the 5 percent drop expected by analyst Doug Creutz of research firm Cowen & Co. Creutz had expected a decline due largely to slower sales of Wii games and handheld games, which are normally big during the holidays.

Hardware sales fell 28 percent to $1.32 billion and accessories fell 27 percent to $629 million.

For the year, overall sales fell 8 percent to $17.02 billion. Hardware sales fell 11 percent to $5.58 billion, software sales fell 6 percent to $8.83 billion and accessories sales fell 11 percent to $2.61 billion.

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IT’S BIG: Nintendo Co.’s upcoming Wii U game console will come with a touch-screen controller almost as big as the game console itself.

WHAT THAT MEANS: At first glance, that seems like an obstacle to the kind of casual multiplayer gaming that made the first Wii console such a breakout hit. But the company says the Wii U will also work with the cheaper, stick-like Wii controllers.

AVAILABILITY: It will go on sale after the E3 gaming trade show in June. Nintendo hasn’t announced prices.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Online game maker Zynga Inc. has lured away an executive from rival Electronic Arts Inc.

The hiring of Barry Cottle, announced Thursday, underscores the escalating rivalry between rapidly growing Zynga and Electronic Arts, a video game stalwart.

Cottle, 50, had been overseeing Electronic Arts’ push into mobile and online gaming for the past four years. The diversification beyond packaged video games has paid off. In a memo sent to Electronic Arts’ employees Thursday, CEO John Riccitiello said the company’s digital revenue surpassed $1 billion for the first time last year.

Zynga has emerged as a major competitor with series of hit games such as “FarmVille” and “Mafia Wars,” that have primarily been played on Facebook’s social network.

In an effort to become less dependent on Facebook, Zynga is trying to expand its reach. It’s counting on Cottle to help it realize those ambitions as its executive vice president of business and corporate development.

The company didn’t disclose how much it’s paying Cottle to leave Electronic Arts.

Zynga is flush right now, having just raised $1 billion in an initial public offering of stock completed last month. It’s the most money raised by a U.S. Internet company since Google Inc. went public in 2004.

Investors so far aren’t embracing Zynga like they did Google, whose stock price has never dipped below its IPO price of $85 per share. Zynga’s shares, in contrast, still haven’t closed above their IPO price of $10. The stock finished Thursday at $8.45, up 12 cents.

Cottle will report to Zynga’s chief operating officer, John Schappert, and be based in the company’s Los Angeles office. Zynga is headquartered in San Francisco.

Before joining Electronic Arts in 2007, Cottle worked at Palm Computing and the Walt Disney Co.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, the American sentenced to death by the Iranian government, is linked to a small New York company specializing in video games that recreate real-life conflicts in the Middle East and beyond.

The company, Kuma Games, makes a series of “Kuma/War” games that come in short, 10- to 15-minute episodes. The scenarios are usually nabbed from the news, and like documentary films, they seek to be as accurate as possible in chronicling real-life situations. Players can simulate events such as the killing of Osama Bin Laden, Afghan air strikes or the death of Moammar Gadhafi. There’s also “Assault on Iran,” about the country’s nuclear ambitions.

“They are best known across academia, war hounds, people interested in war. Maybe soldiers or ex-soldiers,” said Lindsay Grace, a professor who studies video games at Miami University in Ohio.

They are not “living-room games” like “Call of Duty”, the popular shooter series by Activision Blizzard Inc., he said.

It’s not the first time that video games have stirred up international barbs. Cuba denounced the 2010 version of “Call of Duty,” in which U.S. special operations soldiers try to kill a young Fidel Castro. The country’s state-run media said the game will turn American children into sociopaths. THQ Inc.’s “Homefront,” meanwhile, had its cinematic opening scene changed in Japan, with references to North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il and the country itself removed and replaced with “Northern Leader” and “A country to the North,” respectively.

Iranian authorities accuse Hekmati of spying, but the U.S. —and Hekmati’s family— said the charges are false. This week, he became the first American sentenced to death in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, according to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.

The 28-year-old Hekmati was linked to the gaming company in December, when the former U.S. Marine interpreter was shown giving a purported confession in a video that was broadcast nationally in Iran.

In the video, Hekmati said he worked for New York-based Kuma Games, “a computer games company which received money from CIA to design and make special films and computer games to change the public opinion’s mindset in the Middle East and distribute them among Middle East residents free of charge. The goal of Kuma Games was to convince the people of the world and Iraq that what the U.S. does in Iraq and other countries is good and acceptable,” according to an account of his statements in the English-language Tehran Times.

Kuma did not respond to repeated email messages for comment this week, and a listed phone number for the New York-based company did not connect to anyone.

The website of the U.S. Small Business Innovation Research program lists an “Amir Hekmati” as the principal investigator for Kuma LLC with a Kuma email address, indicating that he worked for the company. The website says Kuma was awarded $95,920 for developing a second-language training program for the Department of Defense. The CIA was not listed among the agencies participating in the program, and it’s unclear whether it has any connections to Kuma. The CIA declined to comment.

It is not unusual for a video game company to do side projects for the military, said Stephen Totilo, editor-in-chief of video game blog Kotaku, who visited the company’s office in 2006 when he worked for MTV. Totilo said Kuma’s CEO told him at the time that Kuma has done some work developing training software for the U.S. Army as a side project.

The office, he added, looked much like any other small game studio, with “a bunch of young guys, some just out of college,” working with the same tools as creators of other shooter games.

Though many of Kuma’s games are based on recent events in the Middle East, the company also makes games such as “DinoHunters,” which lets players fight dinosaurs and “I, Predator,” based on the Animal Planet series.

But the war games are getting much of the attention.

Are they propaganda?

“Obviously, they are biased, like anything,” said Ian Bogost, a game designer and Georgia Tech professor who wrote about Kuma in his book, “Newsgames.” ”But I think it would be pretty bad Western propaganda if you took Kuma’s existing products and dropped them in Iran.”

Propaganda, he says, would be less subtle than Kuma’s games, which are “really quite modest. Let’s take this thing in the news and recreate it.”

That said, it’s hard to say how players in the Middle East would respond to games created in the West, he added — just as it’s hard to say how American players would react to games created from Iran’s perspective.

Kuma’s “Assault on Iran” episode seeks to offer players “the most plausible scenario to delaying or destroying Iran’s nuclear arms capabilities,” according to the company’s website. It was released in 2005. Two years later, Kuma’s CEO Keith Halper told video game blog Gamasutra that the game was downloaded “hundreds of thousands of times” in Iran.

“We put Iranian and American gamers face to face, playing and talking together in a virtual space in a way that still eludes our real-world politicians,” Gamasutra quoted him as saying in May 2007.

On its website, Kuma describes its war games as an “interactive chronicle of the war on terror” and says the company is “very sensitive and respectful of American and coalition soldiers and the sacrifices they are making every day.” It says it donates money to two veterans groups — the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund and the Vietnam Unit Memorial Monument fund.

“They want to sell you on the experience that you get to do the battle,” Kotaku’s Totilo said. “You get to be the soldier.”

He added that it would be easy to say that what Kuma is doing is “pro-U.S. military,” in the sense that anyone who is recreating conflicts and letting people play from the American perspective is taking America’s side.

“We have a whole host of movie directors and TV producers who, like Kuma, recreate real battles from an American perspective,” he said. “And I haven’t seen them as quickly accused of being a front for the CIA.”

Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News