2012 in news: October hosts Dishonored and Doritos
October marked the proper start of 2012's release season, while Wii U and Halo 4 geared for launch. And there was something about Doritos. Get the tenth part of our retrospective of last year's news below.
The machinations of how the press interfaces with publishers were hung, drawn and quartered, and we ended with rules, tears and angry wanking before bedtime.
For every month in our 2012 retrospective, hit this.
October marked the start proper of 2012's release season. While September's big-hitters bedded in - FIFA 13 quickly moved over 4.5 million units, while Mists of Pandaria showed serious declension over previous expansions with 2.7 million units sold in the first week - Resident Evil 6, Pokémon Black and White 2, The Walking Dead Episode 4, Dishonored, The Unfinished Swan, WRC 3, Hotline Miami, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Assassin's Creed 3, Assassin's Creed 3: Liberation, Medal of Honor: Warfighter and Forza Horizon all made their way to retail. Busy, busy.
Aside from the games we could actually play, one title was being talked about more than any other in October. Microsoft was in full marketing mode for November's Halo 4 launch, holding a spectacular Liechtenstein PR effort and pumping out both in-game and live action video. While promo teams were effortlessly chucking out headlines related to Halo's 46 million unit total sales, the subject of the piracy formed a sizable part of the lead-in to release, with perma-bans dished out to offenders. In press circles, though, it was a Doritos and Mountain Dew Halo 4 promotion which stole the limelight.
A Eurogamer article lambasting Spike's Geoff Keighley after he was pictured with some bags of "chips," a few bottles of drinks and a dour expression caused one of the most impressively stupid episodes in video game journalism history, with the GMAs and a few luckless UK writers being muddied for good measure. The machinations of how the press interfaces with publishers were hung, drawn and quartered, and we ended with rules, tears and angry wanking before bedtime. Thinking about all this still makes my brain bleed, so I'll leave it to my words at the time to spell out our stance.
October wasn't done with its bleeding heart. Eurogamer Expo head Rupert Loman banned booth babes from the show and I got all liberal over the issue's ass, if that's at all appropriate.
Sandy Citizen
Apart from all the lefty angst, October's console news trundled on as normal. Microsoft did a quick 360 cut in the US but ruled out anything similar in Britain, while Sony left PS3 where it was and refused to budge on Vita. Microsoft breached the 70 million milestone with 360 and claimed it had the best-selling console of 2012.
Unperturbed, Sony relaunched the PS Store and said it has sold 5 million PS3s in the UK.
The big Kickstarter news of the month was Star Citizen. Wing Commander's Chris Roberts sailed through his initial $500,000 target and eventually pulled in over $2 million.
Generally, October was already signalling a slow-down for news. Xbox 360 got its major annual update, including the addition of Internet Explorer; Polygon went live; some ArmA 3 developers got arrested in Greece; iPad Mini got announced for a November ship; and British game dev pioneer Mike Singleton sadly passed away.
Next-gen rumours were as prevalent as ever. Security surrounding 720 was said to be massive, and Microsoft hinted that its subs business would likely be implemented in its next tech (dur). The main next-gen noise, however, was for Wii U. People started queuing to buy the console in Manhattan weeks before it launched (only to be dispersed by hurricane Sandy), while Michael Pachter had a little moan about third-parties being unlikely to succeed with the machine. The UK launch allocation was said to be small, but at least Pikmin 3 was confirmed as arriving in the spring.
We announced that VG247 had broken 1 million unique users in September. We actually did 1.3 million in October, but whatever.
Next: November. For every month in our 2012 retrospective, hit this.