The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer
I suppose I should stop writing bad things about EA. I admit, I’d have to stop and ponder in cosmic wonder the notion of Wolfpack replacing Origin as EA’s Austin presence.
What a pleasant way to start off my Christmas vacation!
As a followup to the big borg news, Midway has announced that they didn’t want those pesky rights anyway.
“No longer bound to the NFL license, there will be no league restrictions on content and gamers will finally experience what makes playing a football video game really fun: off-field controversies, dirty hits, excessive celebrations and much more,” Midway marketing chief Steve Allison said in a statement.
The president could have been caught beating a puppy to death while wearing lingerie, and still all anyone in the industry would want to talk about is The Deal, specifically the one where they get exclusive rights to the NFL player names, team names and likenesses. So let’s take a look at it with completely uninformed speculation, complete with a crazy conspiracy theory! Continue reading
I try not to talk too much about games that I haven’t played yet (which is why I haven’t, for example, talked about Everquest 2 much – haven’t had time to try it). But I’ll make an exception for Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, solely because I loved the prequel so much. Once I get my copy in the mail, I’ll offer my own thoughts.
What do you do if you have a wildly fun game that constantly gets good reviews, but doesn’t fly off the shelves? Marketing’s answer: go darker. And sexier. I loved the first one, but huge parts of the reason I loved it – the storybook feel and the cocky yet idealistic prince – looked to be swept under the rug. Penny Arcade pretty much confirms my fears, as if the Godsmack soundtrack in the TV commercials did not.
More about those EA screenshots that I pointed out earlier – how much harder is it going to become to create content on the next generation of boxes? Can our industry survive going to the next level?
I remember at a game conference 4 years ago listening to someone from 3D Realms (it may have been Scott Miller) mention that it took a day to make a Wolf 3D level, a week to make a Duke Nukem 3D or Doom level, and at the time it took a month to make a Next Gen title like Duke Nukem Forever (which may explain why its not still out). This may also explain why many games went from being 40 hours long 5 years ago to being about 10 hours long nowadays. Continue reading
Suspiciously on the same day that an EA memo about allegedly crappy working conditions was released, Idle Thumbs has dug up some screenshots released by EA, showing how amazing EA titles will look in the future. Look up here! Look at the sock monkey!
Looking at the screenshots, two thoughts come to mind. 1) These look freakin’ amazing, and 2) We still can’t get skin to look right.
On the heels of our discussion here about the Uncanny Valley, it seems that Terranova has discovered that WoW looks amazing, even while its technology lags behind. A lot of that is because of the amazing consistency of their art, but again, don’t discount the fact that they chose stylized over realistic for their looks. Or put it another way: NFL Blitz 2005 will age a hell of a lot better than Madden 2005.
How stupid is this? If you had any hope of staying in the games market, why would you sell one of the true golden geese? Either Infogrames is really desperate, or the offer was unbelievably good.
I sure hope whoever has it still respects it in the morning.
Between the initial EA Spouse blog post, the lawsuits, the academic studies and the calls to unionize, almost everyone has felt the urge to dogpile on EA. For some, the takeaway is that crunch is evil, and that it should never, ever happen. It’s not an uncommon takeaway – I’ve interviewed with several companies that have said, “We don’t believe in crunch, and we will never force you to.”
I always turn those companies down.
The article everyone’s talking about.
Scott (who is suing me for this blogpost title) offers this viewpoint:
Suing an MMO developer for the copyright violations of players on its servers is more than mildly troubling.
I’d go farther than that. I think it’s a non-starter. When I was working at my startup, we were working on a game that centered around the ability to make movies with the in-game engine (i.e. “Machinima”). Obviously, the notion that people could recreate movie scenes that mimicked a sue-happy license owner such as Fox or Lucas crossed our minds. Continue reading
Too much politics. Let’s talk games. The eggheads at Terranova (Hi, Guys!) have been discussing this Forbes article about City of Heroes, which Forbes terms an ‘out of nowhere hit’. Fair enough. The most interesting part of the article, at least to me, was this:
Lewis spent $2.5 million of his own money, plus loans of $4.5 million from his distributor, the U.S. arm of South Korea game company NCsoft, to create City of Heroes. NCsoft is spending another $18 million a year to market and operate the game and provide customer support.
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