TV makers look to Web games

Hammered by ever-slimming profit margins, TV makers are turning online to videogames as another way to incorporate Web-delivered entertainment, says Wall Street Journal.

At this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, many television manufacturers touted videogames as an important entertainment category for Internet-connected televisions. Many are forming partnerships to play videogames on the TV without the need for a dedicated game console, and many are courting developers to create apps for the TV.

LG Electronics unveiled a range of smart, or Internet-connected, televisions while showing off a new motion-sensing remote control. The new remote only has six buttons and is similar to Nintendo's Wii game.

Social game publisher, Glu Mobile, will partner with visual computing technologies developer Nvidia to create a series of new Android smartphone and tablet titles, writes Fierce Mobile Content.

According to Glu, the new games will leverage Nvidia's Tegra 2 mobile superchip, which employs a dual-core central processing unit to deliver faster mobile Web browsing, hardware-accelerated Flash and console-quality gaming with an ultra-low power GeForce graphics processing unit.

Glu Mobile has already introduced close to 24 Android games. In November 2010, the firm posted Q3 revenues of $15.5 million, compared to $19.6 million the previous year, while reporting losses of $1.6 million, an improvement from $4 million in Q3 2009.

The film industry is rapidly being eclipsed by the computer gaming business, reports The National.

The video game 'Call of Duty: Black Ops' crossed the US$1 billion sales mark just six weeks after its November release in the US and the UK. Call of Duty: Black Ops, published by Activision, broke the $550 million record set by 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2' last year.

It also broke the first-day sales world record for any film, book or game. Over the first 24 hours of its release across the US and the UK, it generated $360 million. It then broke the five-day sales record, pulling in $650 million.