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Monday, February 1, 2010

Games Oh, For God's Sake, Activision

Posted by The Stranger Testing Department on Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 9:18 AM

We love DJ Hero, maybe too much. It's a solid, well-designed game featuring some great mixes—but it didn't sell well. It cost $120 at a time when quite a few people had stopped buying things they couldn't eat or use to stoke their hobo fires, and sometimes life is just sad and totally unfair. Sales didn't meet (drastically lowered) projections, but Activision just fronted an awesome press release claiming that "DJ Hero was the #1 new intellectual property by revenue in the U.S. and Europe for calendar 2009, according to The NPD Group." Well parsed! To clarify: A game that costs twice as much as nearly every other console game only needs half the sales to generate the same amount of revenue, and the tiny number of big games featuring new intellectual property is an ongoing industry joke. If they'd narrowed their criteria even further, they may have found a way to be the best-selling game of all time.

We're not sure what to make of the DJ Hero 2 rumors quite yet, but this seems to suggest that Activision thinks they can pull it off—or wants someone else to think so.

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.

Comments (10) RSS

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Stop playing video games and get a life.

Posted by balmonter on February 1, 2010 at 9:35 AM

Activision will never top "Kaboom!"

Posted by g on February 1, 2010 at 9:40 AM

DJ Hero is got to be one of the lamest games yet. A testament to how stupid our culture has become.

Posted by joe420 on February 1, 2010 at 9:57 AM

When is Playstation Hero coming out? Where you have a fake Playstation controller and control a video game avatar playing video games?

Posted by tiktok on February 1, 2010 at 10:04 AM

@1 Stop posting on Slog and get a life.

Posted by Kettle on February 1, 2010 at 10:35 AM

Living in London in my twenties, every young single male was a wannabee DJ. I knew one guy in college who could play guitar a litte. He was a death metal fan. There's always one ...

Of my Seattle friends, just about everybody my age can play guitar, has tried to play guitar, or at least knows how to hold a guitar. There are no DJs.

Do you dislike Guitar Hero so much? DJ Hero was never meant for North America. Your instinctive dislike is purely cultural. You just don't know it :p

Posted by Stowe on February 1, 2010 at 10:40 AM

DJ Hero rules. But it's a little too hip-hop-centric for me. Where's the D&B? The dubstep? There isn't even a lot of house on there, for Christ's sake.

Maybe they should have Carl Cox play the Grandmaster Flash role on the sequel.

Posted by schmacky on February 1, 2010 at 11:02 AM

This is how Microsoft can claim to have OS, database (along with Oracle), and server dominance: to use their products you pay an arm and a leg, whereas we have entire labs that run on Linux or BSD with MySql database servers handling terabytes of data - but the entire setup probably runs us maybe $10,000 for some training and a few supported computers, compared to what would cost us easily $750,000 for even the low end version in the "commercial" world.

PR departments live on spin - they're like political campaigns on crack.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on February 1, 2010 at 11:17 AM

...or wants some else to think so.

"Some else," eh? Did Dan write this post?

Posted by Matt from Denver on February 1, 2010 at 11:34 AM

@9 Oh, for God's sake, Stranger Testing Department! Thanks, the post is now more or less in English. (And Dan can't compete with our cybernetically enhanced imbecility.)

Posted by The Stranger Testing Department on February 1, 2010 at 6:52 PM