The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer
Ethan Albright is a 12-year veteran for the Washington Redskins. He specializes in long snaps, which explains why his career is so long, and why you probably haven’t heard of him.
Ethan is also the lowest-ranked player in Madden 2007. This resulted in this hilarious (and yes, satirical) letter to Madden.Warning: not for the timid of lexicon. A tamer quote: Continue reading
When reading this news story, it’s hard not to keep in mind that this was paid for by the company that shut down my project and laid off everyone. Perspective, and all that.
Ubisoft is giving $500 to anyone who beats the Frag Dolls (a team of girl gamers) at Rainbow Six Vegas. What could go wrong?
Well so far: 6 matches, 5 Frag Doll losses, 4 winners per match, 3 hours, 20 lucky gamers, and $10,000. In English: Last night the Frag Dolls lost ten thousand dollars in three hours to twenty gamers. Ouch!
1. The Red vs. Blue team makes a commercial for Madden, which shows a digitized Dallas Clark, tight end for the Indianapolis Colts, getting decleated repeatedly, and in slow motion.
2. Dallas Clark reports to the local media that it’s humiliating, and that guys in the locker room are razzing him for it.
3. The Red vs. Blue team apologizes and offers a Director’s Cut, in which Dallas Clark is portrayed as a minor god.
I swear, I love living in the digital age.
(Update: thanks to J for pointing me to links that weren’t terminally farked)
SlashDot has an article about Gamestop basically saying they won’t have enough units to fill all the preorders. By chance, I was at Gamestop to get a new Guitar Hero II disk (a friend rocked a bit too hard this weekend), and I asked about it. The Gamestop employee said that North America PS3 shipments are being cut from their original 400K number by 60%.
If true, is this now officially the most botched hardware launch ever?
The company that made the ultimate stat-oriented MMO is apparently set to acquire the company that made pretentious gothness cool among the gamer set. I didn’t see this coming, but I’m actually quite excited. I’ve been trying to convince people for years that World of Darkness is perfect fodder for an online world.
Seriously: read my AGC presentation and tell me it doesn’t fit pretty well. Maybe now it will actually happen.
How well the two companies will merge is interesting. At their face, the ultimate spreadsheet-like game merging with a company fanatically devoted to roleplaying seems like a stretch. One thing that both companies does share is a laser focus on owning their own niche, and being as true as possible to the original vision, which I think has led to success for both companies (and WW’s more catastrophic failures can be seen as examples of them diverging from that). It will be interesting if the marriage here is a good one.
There are two ways to treat a license, once you find yourself holding one that is loved and respected.
One is to treat it like it’s gold, only release quality product, to ensure that the brand continues to hold it’s value. Licenses like Doom, Unreal, and Mario are licenses about which bad games are rarely, if ever, made. Because why on earth would you kill the goose that lays the golden egg? Continue reading
Am I the only person who has stopped buying DVDs altogether? I read an article recently that mentioned that DVD sales have slowed. The studios seem to think it’s because people have finished filling their libraries.
Has it occurred to anyone that there are probably a whole bunch of people who don’t want to buy more DVDs until we know whether or not to pursue HDDVDs or Blu-Rays?
Anyway, until someone wins, I’m just Netflixing everything.
One hidden aspect to Nintendo’s strategy for world domination is the rather unique idea of actually having enough product on the shelves. EA estimates that there will be 900K to 1.4 million Wii sold in North America by the end of the year, which contrasts sharply with the PS3 numbers, which look to be half that.
Sony has been trying to spin this as a way of creating a sense of demand, and that this will be the ‘hot product’. How well that will work when mom can turn around and buy a Wii or a 360 instead remains to be seen. And don’t be fooled – consoles are Christmas gifts in North America – having more boxes under trees dramatically increases Nintendo’s odds of hitting critical mass. Shipping substandard numbers in North America for Christmas is going to mean a lot of kids who currently only live off allowances will have to wait a year to get their hands on the box (especially considering PS3’s substantial price tag). Continue reading
Rumor has it that the Blu-Ray is a core reason why PS3 is running late – you don’t want to run half-assed into a major tech war against a heavily funded opponent. They aren’t apologetic – they are, in fact, trying to spin it as a major boon to developers.
There’s this sort of misunderstanding that the Blu-ray disc player for movies is somehow burdening the console with unnecessary cost. That is completely not true. We put our Blu-ray disc functionality in the console purely from a game design point of view. Once we had that storage capacity on Blu-ray disc, adding the movie playback functionality was extremely cost-effective, [the cost] is actually non-existent.
With Microsoft cornering the online console space, and Nintendo going for the unique control scheme, it seems that Sony has found it’s own niche in the console space: directly trying to corner the ‘What the Fuck’ market.
This can be the only possible explanation for some of the ads coming out of Sony in the last week. Most notably, this refers to the Creepy Ass Chucky Ad that played last night during the World Series: Kotaku has the vid there, as well as the commentary. Continue reading
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