Virgin Press Conference Summary
by Daniel Share-Strom, posted on 15 June 2010 / 491 Views
Virgin, the only company that owns both airline and mobile phone divisions, today held a press conference to reintroduce themselves to the gaming world. However, the biggest surprise was that they will not be returning to publishing games, as they did with huge hits like Resident Evil in the 1996, but rather providing an innovative service dedicated to streamlining tournaments held online through consoles.
Called Game Validator, the new service is being developed in collaboration with Microsoft and Sony to make it easy to play games on Xbox 360 and PS3 competitively.
They opened the show by describing their past experiences with console-based tournaments. They regaled us with memories of spending hours finding the place and registering, spending hard-earned money, and then promptly getting stomped in the first round. Then they went on to describe how online tournaments are very confusing to organize, with forums inundated with posts like ¨such and such just beat such and such¨ with no real way to verify this. That got them thinking about how to streamline online tournaments.
Through their website, they organize tournaments for the most popular Xbox and Playstation games, such as Halo, Gears, or Call of Duty. Once registered on the site, users can track the tournament stats of their Xbox Live Gamertag or their Playstation Network ID and engage in these Virgin-run tournaments (the system does not support cross-platform stats or leaderboards). We asked whether or not gamers could access their stats via Xbox Live or PSN, but were told that users must log in to the website to view their stats.
In order to keep the experience fun for everyone, each player will earn his own level based on his skill. This way, they will be able to enter tournaments for, for instance, levels 1-5 or 6-10. Almost everyone is a winner, too, as winning one round in a $10 tournament wins, on average, $11.80.
The Game Validator service looks to be a huge boon to competitive online gamers, and it is hitting the ground running today. They will be giving away $100,000 in prizes by the end of the summer, and it will be available across 100 countries.
Taking the story full circle, when asked to give advice to others aspiring to enter the game industry, Virgin ended the conference with the following: ¨When your parents ground you for 80 percent of your childhood, keep playing video games. If you really believe in something, never give up.¨
