So the most annoying thing about the Steam Sales last week was the number of people I saw on various message boards who wished that they could get these awesome Steam prices for games on their console. *sigh* Continue reading
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It’s always hard to know how much stock to put into market analysis of the games industry, especially because so many of the usual suspects are very, very bad at it. Still, this prediction that the XBox One will outship the Playstation 4 by a 3 to 1 margin is pretty eyebrow raising.
Despite losing the headline battle at E3, Microsoft‘s Xbox One appears to be regaining some momentum, in part due to the used and online policy tweaks. Importantly, our supply chain checks suggest Microsoft may have the benefit of a 2-3x unit advantage at launch compared to Sony’s PS4.
On the flip side, the same article suggests that Microsoft is contemplating reducing their price point of $500 bucks, seeing as Sony has announced a price point of $400. Not exactly the hallmark of a confident leader, but given that I honestly believe that the winner of the console wars will be the one that comes out of the gate the strongest, and therefore becomes the ‘default’ household console for all of the non-exclusive titles, probably a good call nonetheless.
As an aside, I’ve been replaying my Playstation 3 lately in order to play The Last Of Us, and I can say that the net experience with the console affirmed my XBox love. I’m now an XBox One preorderer. I don’t know if I got a bad PS3, but I still hate that machine.
Jordi Brandts and colleagues got a group of students to predict a sequence of five coin tosses, and then selected the best and the worst predictor. They then asked other subjects to bet on whether the best and worst predictor could predict another five coin tosses. The subjects were told that they would bet on the worst predictor from the first round, unless they paid to switch to the best predictor.
82% of subjects paid to make the switch….These people weren’t just idiots plucked from the street. They were fourth year finance undergraduates at one of the best universities in Spain.
The human brain is terrible with the concept of randomness. We desperately want to assign mental patterns to this, which is of course, a game pattern that game designers abuse endlessly.
Congratulations to Rock Paper Scissors for uncovering and confirming that Blizzard may be looking at dipping their toe into the microtransactions pool in some territories. As someone who has gone through the transition myself, I am completely welcoming and want to tell them from the outset that the water is fine. That being said, it would be nice if we could get observers and the press to stop equating with evil (‘dark… alchemy’) and ‘panic’. Continue reading
This was forwarded to me not too long ago.
Game developers often release PVE content that is like a Coral Reef, i.e. it’s relevant for a period of time (e.g. for some part of an expansion), but eventually with vertical progression (levels and/or gear), players outgrow that content and it’s essentially dead. By the next expansion, the previous expansion’s zones are ghost towns and only visited by those people leveling new characters through them. Over time, what you have is a world where 80% of the zones are no longer relevant, and only 20% is. That is, you have PVE content that evolves like a Coral Reef, and this is primarily due to the unsustainable nature of vertical scaling.
A lot of talk has been given to the radically quick collapse of the Facebook gaming universe, including Zynga’s recent troubles and jump to the online gambling space. Left unsaid is that, if you’re a social network other than Facebook, things are probably a lot worse.
Which in a platform that’s supposed to encourage some level of virality, pretty telling. Whether its telling about Google+’s viability as a game platform, or its viability overall, is hard to tell.
It’s hard for me to diagnose whether my general preference for the XBox One over PS4’s announcement is built upon fact, or upon the general idea that I am, apparently, a Microsoft fan boy. Or more appropriately, a Sony hater.
In my household, my 360 sees usage nearly daily, although much of that is as a Netflix provider. The PS3 is probably one of my most hated game-related purchases of all time, and if it weren’t for the fact that it also doubles as my Blu-Ray player, I’m not sure I would have turned it on in the last 6 months. I don’t think I’ve ever turned it on without it having a compatibility update. The controllers seem to run out of battery life in 24 hours, even when they and the console are off. The blu-ray player was constantly having compatibility problems. For God’s sake, they pursued a proprietary remote control technology so that you would be forced to buy one of their shitty remotes instead of being able to use a universal remote. Continue reading
Buried in the article describing how, rather than being sad about being laid off, most of Zynga New York (formerly OMGPOP) descended into deliriously happy bacchanalia, is this stray observation:
It was hard for the New York office not to take Zynga’s layoffs personally. Mark Pincus said in a company-wide memo that the cuts would aid Zynga’s mobile-first strategy… But hardly any of the desktop-first Farmville 2 team, comprised of former Facebookers, had been let go. “We thought, ‘You just laid off your most talented mobile team,'” the former employee says. “We were totally under-utilized.”
OMGPOP is, of course, the company most famous for perhaps Zynga’s most famous mobile game, Draw Something. That being said, scuttlebutt is that OMGPOP did the web version and contracted out the mobile version to a contract studio, and then refused to let that team advertise that fact. Which, if true, is interesting in the karma department.
The primary problem with the concept of Permadeath in MMOs has always been in a vast disparity between the emotional connection that different kinds of players have towards their characters. For hardcore roleplayers, their characters are a work of art and passion, personas built over hours, days or months of collaborative playtime with their peers. For the type of cold-blooded murderer who likes to bathe in the pixellated blood of noobs, though, their avatars aren’t very important. They are a tools, a means to an end, a hammer in the toolbox used to bash in the hopes and dreams of the innocent. PK them? OK, we’ll just make another. Continue reading
Looked at in a vacuum, the Zynga layoffs may seem like just another game developer having standard game developer trouble, similar to the layoffs that Bioware, Blizzard, Rockstar, Midway, and countless other developers have had over the years. Continue reading
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