Legendary and Gaikai Sold

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 7 July, 2012

Legendary's okay. It gives you fantasy elements like castles and flocks of griffons.



By contrast, it also gives you subway stations full of dead people.



I do not recommend it. But for for an investment of $1.69 and five hours, I got to shoot some monsters.


Seriously, though. It's July. Where's the Steam summer sale?

[goes to Google]

Ah. The bundles that will be in the sale apparently leaked to the internet at large Friday night. regular / indie

---

Cloud gaming isn't great for me. I like action games and they're laggy on cloud services. That could improve significantly if developers started targeting the cloud specifically, but even with the lag there are many games that work fine on the cloud. And the fact that users can instantly start playing without messing with a disc or waiting for a download is very convenient and increases impulse buys.

To my knowledge, OnLive and Gaikai were the only serious contenders in this space, and Sony just bought Gaikai. If someone else buys OnLive, there may be enough patents between them to keep cloud gaming locked up for twenty years.

Regardless, Sony develops and publishes a broad range of content and can distribute it digitally to every place users could want it. Theoretically this puts them in a strong position moving forward, but I don't know enough about Sony's internals to predict whether they'll be able to capitalize.

Of course with many ISPs and countries having individual data caps that make prolonged HD streaming infeasible, it may be that Sony's at the starting line a day before the race.

We live in interesting times.

Nintendo Press Conference

written by Blain Newport on Tuesday, 5 June, 2012

Nintendo's press conference is hard for me to judge, as I'm not their target demographic. Sure, they showed some stuff for core gamers. And I guess you could say they did as well as Sony in that regard. They didn't have as many interesting games, but factor in the novelty of Wii U controls, and it's about equal.

They showed a zombie game from Ubisoft which could turn out gimmicky or delightful, depending on how much polish they can give it. (concept video)

I'll be curious to read the reviews of Batman: Arkham City for the Wii U. (concept video) Most of the "additions" look pretty dubious, but I'll reserve judgement.

Depending how these games turn out, I might eventually be interested in owning a Wii U.

But, again, I'm not the target. The question is if this new system will have the same mass market appeal as the Wii. I checked the New York Times, Reuters, the Associated Press, USA Today, and the LA Times (which didn't even have an article).

Nobody knows. The New York Times columnist (Seth Schiesel) gave a tentative thumbs up, but everyone else either had no guess or asked the opinions of enthusiast press people who are the wrong demographic.

Addendum (3:30pm): There's a well loved horror franchise called Fatal Frame where you have to survive in a haunted environment with only a camera to defend yourself. If there's no Wii U sequel / homage to Fatal Frame, the gaming industry as a whole has failed.

Sony Press Conference

written by Blain Newport on Tuesday, 5 June, 2012

I'll be brief. Sony showed some games. Some of them looked good. They gave even less lip service to the Vita than I thought they would.

For me personally, it was slightly better than Microsoft's press conference because they weren't pushing MS Smart Glass.

Microsoft Press Conference

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 4 June, 2012

Better With Kinect

To demonstrate Kinect voice commands, a player speaks to make a character in an action game call in an air strike. Audibles are called in sports games. These are not bad things, but it only takes some simple math to prove they aren't worthwhile.

Publishers believe that the money Microsoft pays them to make voice commands for Kinect only is more than the extra copies they would sell (across all platforms) if they gave everyone with a headset access to this "amazing new feature".

---

Live Anywhere 2

Announcing MS Smart Glass! Yep, Microsoft's cross device initiative that died on the vine in 2006 is back and so withered it's hardly recognizable.

In 2006 Microsoft was talking about the future of games. Buy once, play on any device. Edit your race cars on your PC and phone, then race them on the Xbox. Play multiplayer games across all supported platforms. It was ambitious and cool.

If the 2012 edition succeeds in every way, it will be a dismal failure by 2006's standards. Microsoft's lead feature was being able to pick up watching a movie on your TV from where you left off watching it on your mobile device. They'll save you the two seconds it took to read and remember the time index and the three seconds it takes you to skip ahead on your TV.

The rest of the features (supplementary info during video viewing and gaming, using the tablet as a controller, web browsing) were also uninteresting.

Maybe they think a little tablet integration will make people ignore the Wii U, but that's wasted effort. The Wii U will sink or swim based on software designed for it's unique abilities.

As far as I'm concerned, Microsoft had nothing to show this year.

It's E3 Time Again

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 2 June, 2012

The industry trade and press show known as E3 will be starting soon.

Nintendo

Their new console, the Wii U, was announced at E3 last year. It's roughly as powerful as a 360 or PS3, but in addition to supporting Wii motion controls, it has a dual stick controller with a large touch screen on it.



The performance bump is nice for developers because it becomes easier to create a game that will run on all three consoles. But the Wii U isn't going to succeed because it can play the same games as everyone else. Nintendo needs to show consumers and retailers the software that will distinguish the Wii U.

---

Sony

The number of of Sony's game announcements that were leaked ahead of their E3 2011 press conference became comical. Outside of Naughty Dog's latest (and the slim possibility of an appearance by The Last Guardian), there doesn't seem to be any game the press are universally hyped about. Hopefully this just means Sony improved their security.

Sony's trying to get traction with Vita, their new portable system. According to gamesindustry.biz Sony will be bringing PS1 and PS2 games to the PS3 and possibly Vita using the Gaikai cloud gaming platform. That could put a lot of good, cheap games on the Vita for people with reliable mobile internet connections who don't mind a bit of lag.

---

Microsoft

Microsoft claims to have a number of world exclusive game announcements at their press conference. I'm betting more than half of them are Kinect titles.

Microsoft will lie about how much they care about Windows gaming, as they always do when they roll out a new OS. Just remember that over the last two years (2010 and 2011) Microsoft published four games for the PC and sixteen games for the Xbox. (source)

And they will apparently be making another push for Live Anywhere, the cross device connectivity initiative that, to my knowledge, hasn't moved the needle since it was announced at E3 2006.

---

Also everyone will probably announce new / enhanced music, video, and social media features / partnerships. I said it before, and I'll say it again: this overpriced generation was about conquering the living room (except for Nintendo). The question at this point is whether Smart TVs (with OnLive and Netflix integration, for example) can eventually cut the consoles out of the equation.

---

You may recall that I predicted MS and Sony console announcements at E3 this year. Barring a miracle, I was wrong. Sony almost certainly isn't announcing anything, and according to Arthur Gies of Rebel FM, Microsoft was planning an early announcement to steal a bit of Nintendo's thunder but had to call it off for some reason. Hey, if it means Microsoft's new hardware won't require over a billion dollars of repair work, I say delay it two years. :P

Everybody Loves Pirates

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 2 December, 2011

CD Projekt Red recently talked with PC Gamer about piracy. I normally tune out piracy talk, but CDPR is the only triple A developer not using DRM, so I thought their CEO, Marcin Iwinski, might have an interesting perspective. He really didn't. He walked through a very rough calculation of how many people pirated the game and talked about how educating consumers and offering extras like soundtracks, making-of videos, and books are the only way you can compete with pirates.

You can imagine how disappointed I was when Joystiq and GamesIndustry.biz chose to run his off the cuff piracy figure as their main headline.

Then GamesIndustry.biz ran an editorial on the subject. It was very strange to see an editorial criticizing "the media [for] breathlessly reporting the results of his paper napkin calculations as cold, hard fact", when that site was one of the offenders. Plus the editorial ignored how CD Projekt had beaten the pirates, which seems like what its audience would want. But the editorial was trying to point towards getting better numbers so that we can finally have a proper discussion instead of mindless hand waving.

---

(You can skip this bit.)

Then the comments were a bunch of mindless hand waving. (Aren't they always?) GamesIndustry is a British business site. Consumers aren't, to my knowledge, even allowed to comment. And the amount of ignorance coming from industry people, especially Chief Marketing Officer Bruce Everiss, was amazing. First he claimed that piracy was the reason publishers stopped working with certain companies. He basically said Commodore and Atari died out due to piracy. There wasn't piracy on the IBM-PC!? This has to be a joke.

This is from a man who worked for Codemasters, a company that moved on from Commodore and Atari computers to the NES, then built a lock-out chip bypass so that they could cheat Nintendo out of licensing fees! So they love piracy when it lines their pockets. Not only that, but he goes on to state that "20% of the workforce were made redundant because of PlayStation 1 piracy".

While I'm sure piracy played a part and layoffs are never cool, isn't it more likely that it was simply easier for management to scapegoat nebulous pirates than to be truthful about their own mistakes? Codemasters created zero intellectual property on the PS1 that I can find. Everything was licensed: sports, toys, even a clothing license, so they were always splitting profits. Plus Codemasters had dumped the budget titles that earned them their success, so they were a budget brand selling full price products.

But that's the real key here. Piracy is a bogeyman. While it is a bad thing for sales, it's a fabulous godsend as a lie.

---

Publishers have to make PC versions of their games. Shareholders see how much money World of Warcraft and The Sims and Starcraft 2 and little indie games like Minecraft are making on the PC. Publishers have to tell shareholders they have a plan to get that big money, even if they don't. And when they don't, they blame the pirates.

The GI editorial is trying to call out for better information about how much of piracy is really lost sales. It's a nice idea, but why would a publisher pay money for a study that could evaporate their best excuse?

Everybody loves pirates.

General Disinterest

Yeah. I finished GTA: San Andreas, again. I'm still playing Titan Quest. I played an AI skirmish in Company of Heroes to see if that caught my interest. I'm in a slump.

Also, I haven't talked about the state of the industry in forever, mostly because I don't really care. Wii still sells. The 360 got a price cut and is supposedly destroying the PS3. The 360 started with a one year advantage and continues to increase the gap because the PS3 is too expensive for most people. I also heard (from Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter on the latest Bonus Round) that there are ten million people buying stuff online on the 360 with only one million buying stuff on the PlayStation Network.

Essentially, it's a non-competitive environment. Sure, Sony is denying 360 users the ability to stream Sony movies over Netflix, so there's still some kicking and screaming, but who cares?

People have been speculating about the next generation of consoles publicly for months. Wii HD is being posited for 2010. But I don't care. My Wii is collecting dust. Mad World, No More Heroes 2, and House of the Dead: Overkill are the only announced games I'm interested in. I might pick up Mario Strikers for some co-op if I could find it for $20 or less.

Four freaking games. I have already bought that many 360 games without even having the console. (One of them got canceled because Target promised more than they could deliver, but still.)

I have Far Cry 2 on order for PC. Amazon had a great deal. But I'm bored with it, and I haven't even played it yet. I've heard so much about how it does many things poorly and a few interesting things. It's like I'm playing it for school. Sigh.

One More Thing on the New DS

So the new DS information was made official. It turns out the thing only plays AAC files, not MP3s, making that "feature" pretty useless, from my point of view. And the camera only takes 0.3 megapixel shots, so it's definitely just a toy. So what are the real changes?

1) No Game Boy Advance slot. Backwards compatibility is going away.

2) New SD slot for downloadable games.

Most people look at this and see themselves being charged to buy their GBA games again.

I see something far more valuable: permanent rerelease of out of print games. The main problem with the cartridge format is that games often go out of print and never come back. When I was thinking of getting a friend a DS last Christmas, there were no new copies of Advance Wars DS available. It's the third highest rated DS game of all time, and you can't buy it anymore. The same goes for the first Phoenix Wright game, and probably many other DS classics. To me, that's the potential of the new DS. It will not be fully met as legal issues will make it impossible to rerelease certain games, but it will help.

New DS Information / Speculation

Wired ran an article today (yesterday, technically).

Nikkei Net, the online arm of Japan's foremost economic newspaper, reports that the new model [of the Nintendo DS] will launch this year in Japan and include a camera and music playback.

This makes sense for Japan, train commuter capital of the world. Take your upskirt photos and listen to music. And the fact that this would indicate some form of storage on the DS (possibly an SD slot) could be good. Games and applications (mostly applications) could take advantage of that. And if the article is right, this DS will only cost $30 more. So why don't I care?

I guess it has to do with all the things I'm still not seeing from Nintendo.

Nintendo is not connected. They have no community like Steam, Xbox Live, or PSN. They're not putting VoIP on the DS. The DS web browser is long out of print. What would people want from a portable device more than the ability to remain connected?

They have no intention of being middlemen for the entertainment industry, with music marketplaces, video on demand, and suchnot. Music is nice, but it's pretty old news, now. Plus if it's like previous DS mp3 players, it will require purchasing an SD card, purchasing an SD card reader, and moving over mp3 files manually from a PC. If you're law abiding, add in the lengthy process of ripping your CDs to that PC. If you're not, add in download time. Yawn.

But I'm looking at this from an adult perspective. What about the kid that's too young for a cell phone, but just the right age for a DS? Kids are savvy. They've got enough time on their hands to rip CDs (or torrent, more likely). They want cameras. Maybe this is a relatively cheap way for parents to give their kids a bunch of toys at once?

Meh. What's a core gamer trying to do figuring out what Nintendo's up to in the first place? :P