PlayTeeVee Launches Free Tivo Gaming Service
An old friend of mine from my EA days today launched an innovative service called PlayTeeVee.com that allows Tivo users to play games for free on their sets. Right now it's primarily family / casual games, but I know he has plans for deeper games in the near future. I can't reveal exactly what, but it's cool stuff.
If you have Tivo Series 2, definitely check it out. It's free to play, after all.
Full PlayTeeVee press release after the jump.
EA’s First Original Free to Play Game: EA Sports Game Show
Just announced today, "Game Show" seems to be a free to play, ad-supported sports trivia game with daily streaming video content updates. But it's more than just a game as the game features a live host and prizes for the winners. Game Show launches this fall.
EA SPORTS GameShow allows participants from around the country to compete head to head, answering a series of multiple choice questions related to the world of sports. The live game show host will facilitate each session, streamed over the Internet in real-time. Questions will be presented through a variety of media, including text, audio and video. Players will also be able to track their performance instantly, with prize incentives. The online sports trivia game will also feature customizable avatars and leader boards, with call outs to regional and national winners.
For more, check out the full press release or the last paragraph of this Peter Moore interview for more details.
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The Five Most Popular Game Communities
Actiontrip has just posted a 2 pager on what it believes are the five most popular game communities, presumably in the world. Although the list isn't ranked and doesn't include any of the bigger Asian success stories, it has some interesting numbers.
Here are some highlights.
On CounterStrike:
Last we checked, the CS community had just over 174,665 active servers, with approximately 276,552 gamers playing online at the time we did our research (so just over 2 players per server, eh? - Ed). If the statistics on Steam are to be believed, this should translate into roughly 9.423 billion (yes, that's the correct amount) minutes of play time per month.
On Runescape:
Recent research indicated that 13.1% of all PC gamers have played Runescape at some point throughout June 2007, with the average RuneScape player spending 673 minutes per week within the game. After this RuneScape became the 5th most played PC game just behind Blizzard's World of Warcraft and games like Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2 and, of course, The Sims.
On Halo:
The most recent update showed that almost 12,706 players were online in Halo 2 at the time when we checked. Also, around 261,820 unique players were registered, with 688,136 matches logged (data from the last 24 Hours).
The lack of Asian representation likely stems from the all-North American sources used for the article: NPD, Steam, Bungie.net, Google Trends and Nielsen Media Research.
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