According to NPD group retail sales data for February, the industry grew by 3 percent in overall sales. But the big story coming out of last month's numbers is that Call of Duty: Black Ops is the best selling game in U.S. history. This is great news for Treyarch, who for many years has stood in the long shadow of Infinity Ward. It finally proves that the company can create a Call of Duty game that is on the same level of quality as anything its sister studio can produce.

Overall, consumers spent around $1.36 billion on games and consoles during the month, up from 1.33 billion in the same period last year. Console sales were up 10 percent during the month, even though spending on games was down five percent compared to last year. Console accessories were up 22 percent over the same period a year ago, mostly due to Kinect.

The recent layoffs at LEGO Universe make a little more sense today as studio owner Gazillion announces that it has sold the rights to the game and the Louisville, Colorado studio developing it. The majority of LEGO Universe development team members, formerly part of Gazillion's NetDevil subsidiary, have been offered employment by the LEGO Group, who will continue game development and operations from the current Louisville, Colorado studio.

"We're excited about the launch of LEGO Universe, and are happy to have the developers officially join the LEGO team," said Jesper Vilstrup, Vice President at the LEGO Group. "This acquisition demonstrates our commitment both to the ongoing success of LEGO Universe and to an overall strategy to expand our brand online."

EA's Visceral Games studio has to be happy right now. According to EA's internal numbers, Dead Space 2 is outselling the original game by a two-to-one margin. Speaking in a conference call to discuss third-quarter results, EA Chief operating officer John Schappert said that nearly two million units of Dead Space 2 have shipped to retail in its first week of release. Of course "shipped" doesn't mean "sold to consumers" but it does mean that retailers are keen to stock the game for consumers to snap up. The original game took around eight months to make it past the one million units sales mark.

Developed by Visceral Games, Dead Space 2 continues to chronicle the horrific journey of Isaac Clarke, an engineer that managed to survive the challenges of the first game. Clarke finds himself in a more open environment called the Sprawl this time - a massive space station attached to one of Saturn's moons.

Responding to an earlier Gamasutra report related to ex-Harmonix shareholders suing parent-company Viacom, the company at the heart of the legal battle fired back with some allegations of its own.

Viacom claims that the allegations in the lawsuit are the result of the poor decisions of shareholders' representatives, and not from any wrongdoing on its part.

"Viacom fulfilled its contractual obligations and our actions were completely appropriate and consistent with the terms of our agreement with Harmonix shareholders and the interests of our shareholders," a representative for Viacom told Gamasutra.

Activision is suing Electronic Arts, adding the company to an existing lawsuit against former Infinity Ward co-founders. The amendment to the lawsuit filed in court this week claims that EA induced Jason West and Vince Zampella to break their contracts with Activision during the development of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. This, the company says, was done so that the duo would be free to establish its new studio, Respawn, and sign with the EA Partners program.

According to the filing obtained by GameSpot, "starting as early as July 30, 2009, Electronic Arts and [West and Zampella]--with full knowledge that the executives were under contract and legally committed to Activision for more than two additional years--conspired to set up an independent company."

Former Harmonix shareholders filed a lawsuit against Viacom last week, accusing the company of trying to find a slick way to get out of paying performance-based bonuses. According to a lengthy Gamasutra report, the group includes Harmonix founders Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, as well as other early funders of the Boston-based developer. The group claims that Viacom is manipulating costs after the initial success of Rock Band to avoid a potentially giant earn-out payment.

While Blizzard was launching its biggest product of the year, behind the scenes it was having some serious problems with a data leak in China, according to a report on VentureBeat. According to that report, citing several news stories from MMOGameSite, Blizzard's release schedule and subscriber numbers were leaked from its China offices, and the general manager of the studio, Ye Weilun, was subsequently fired for it - allegedly.

Angry Birds developer Rovio tells TechCrunch that it expects to make over $1 million in monthly revenues from the free-to-play version of its popular bird-catapulting game.

"By end of year, we project earnings of over $1 million per month with the ad-supported version of Angry Birds," Rovio CEO Peter Vesterbacka told TechCrunch.

The iPhone version of the game costs money, but the Android version is self-published and free. The game makes money off ads it serves up to the user. The Android version of the game has been downloaded over five million times from the Android Market. Vesterbacka also told TechCrunch that the Angry Birds series has an 80 percent retention rate, based on the number of players that return to download updates.

Source: GI.Biz

For nearly a year GamePolitics has been tracking ATCA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

As we have reported, ACTA deals in large part with copyright issues and is being negotiated in secret by the U.S., Japan, Canada, the EU and other nations. Details of ACTA are largely a mystery to consumers despite the fact that dozens of corporate lobbyists have been clued in to parts of the treaty, including Stevan Mitchell, VP of IP Policy for game publishers trade group the Entertainment Software Association.

Sadly, consumer interests suffered a major blow last week as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge dropped a federal lawsuit seeking to cast a little sunshine on the ACTA negotiations. The EFF explained that a recent decision by the Obama Administration to claim a national security exemption for the ACTA talks made the lawsuit unwinnable; federal judges have  little leeway to overrule such claims. The move by the Obama White House extends a similar policy put in place by the Bush Administration.

Public Knowledge Deputy Legal Director Sherwin Siy commented on the decision:

Even though we have reluctantly dropped this lawsuit, we will continue to press the U.S. Trade Representative and the Obama Administration on the ACTA issues. The issues are too far-reaching and too important to allow this important agreement to be negotiated behind closed doors.

The worry, of course, is that the United States will emerge from ACTA with a done deal that favors Big IP in the fashion of the consumer-unfriendly DMCA. Hal Halpin, president of the Entertainment Consumers Association, expressed concerns about ACTA earlier this year:

Because ECA supports the balance that must exist between the rights of copyright owners and the right of copyrighted material consumers, we do not think it wise to include any portions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) currently being discussed...    

We are concerned that any DMCA language in ACTA may cause enormous, unforeseen negative implications in US law...

GP: As GamePolitics mentioned above, video game publishers lobbying group the ESA is privy to at least a portion of the secret ACTA negotiations while its industry's customers - video game consumers - are barred from knowing anything at all.

That makes us wonder - will the Video Game Voters Network, which is owned and operated by the ESA, commence a letter-writing campaign on behalf of its gamer-members demanding that the White House pull the curtain back on ACTA?

Somehow we doubt it.

FULL DISCLOSURE DEPT: The Entertainment Consumers Association is the parent company of GamePolitics.

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