04.23.13 |
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Ben Kuchera writing at The Penny Arcade Report about the state of video game journalism:
This system sucks, and many writers and editors involved with the system know it sucks. The writers who are often asked to create these stories know it sucks. You think you hate to read shit, imagine having to create shit that you know will do way more business than a well-researched and thought out story on a topic you’re passionate about. Now imagine making a pitiful amount of money for both stories. Is it any wonder so many talented writers leave the business?
We talked about talented, older developers leaving game development, but the same thing happens to reporters. Few sites have the money to offer writers a full-time position, and even fewer offer benefits. It’s incredibly hard to spend the years building up the contacts, expertise, and skill it takes to report a story well when there is no money in doing so, and it makes more business sense to simply re-write an existing story or go with that cosplay gallery.
It’s rare to get such a frank look at ad buys and the importance of clicks per article. It leaves you pretty cynical on the whole situation, which is why Ben’s suggestion of a business driven directly by reader subscriptions could make sense.
04.19.13 |
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Kotaku‘s Jason Schreier:
For one, people are gaming the system. On both sides of the aisle.
There’s the story of the mocked mock reviewer, for example. Some background: game publishers and developers often hire consultants or game critics to come into their offices, play early copies of games, and write up mock reviews that predict how those games will perform on Metacritic. Often, if possible, publishers and developers will make changes to their games based on what those mock reviews say. Mock reviewers are then ethically prohibited from writing consumer reviews of that game, as they have taken money from the publisher.
One developer–a high-ranking studio employee who we’ll call Ed–told me he hired someone to write a mock review, then threw that review in the shredder. Ed didn’t care what was inside. He just wanted to make sure the reviewer–a notoriously fickle scorer–couldn’t review his studio’s game. Ed knew that by eliminating at least that one potentially-negative review score from contention, he could skew the Metascore higher. Checkmate.
Metacritic is an invaluable resource to just casually get a first take opinion on a game. Yet it’s scary to see its effect here on the gaming industry.
04.10.13 |
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Nice photo work profiling the many coders, testers, artists and more that worked behind the scenes at the just closed LucasArts. Admittedly the gaming studio had little output in the last six years or so. Yet during the mid 90s, it was a unstoppable force for adventure gaming: the Monkey Island series, Grim Fandango, Sam & Max and much more. LucasArts and Sierra were the gaming giants that powered the majority of my gaming in the late 80s and early 90s; a bit sad to see them shutter like this.
04.05.13 |
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This extended chat over at the Giant Bomb headquarters post wrap up of the Game Developers Conference was really fun to watch. You get expected appearances from the GB crew (Patrick Klepick, Jeff Gerstmann) and lots of game industry veterans (Phil Fish of Fez, Robert Ashley). It’s a good balance between random humor and some actual serious discussion on game design and music.
03.28.13 |
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Gamasutra‘s Leigh Alexander:
We dispute and debate, whisper our private hypotheses about those early glimpses and how we think they might turn out, but in the end everyone publishes an obedient preview at the appointed embargo lift, cautiously optimistic.
Who do we serve? What’s the role of subjectivity? What do we owe the developer?
Excellent questions raised by Leigh here. It’s really reached the point where I’m aligned with Giant Bomb on this one: previews are effectively dead. Write up a news story that sticks mostly to the facts before a game is released and wait for a real review and discussion once it’s out.
03.26.13 |
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I enjoyed reading this extended interview with frequent Grantland contributor Tom Bissell, now a writer on the just released Gears of War: Judgement. Tom’s statement here on why first and third person shooters are so popular was especially interesting:
If combat has any positive attributes, it’s that, for a lot of people, it forms the most intense emotional relationships they will ever have with human beings for the rest of their lives. So I think a shooter, which is what Gears is, can awaken some of those borderline—I don’t want to say positive attributes of combat, but it does touch on some of the exhilaration of combat. I’m not the first person to suggest that, within the horror of combat, there is something beautiful and exhilarating. The reason shooters are so popular, I think, is that we all want to touch that fire. We want to put our hands in just far enough to feel the heat without actually burning ourselves.
03.19.13 |
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Polygon’s Tracey Lien:
[FTL creator] Davis says that in most video games, the player is always the pilot, never the commander, whereas in science fiction like Star Trek or Firefly, the fiction focuses on the commander. “It seemed strange that when people want to bring that world to life, they put you in the pilot’s shoes. We thought it would be fun to put players in the commander’s shoes for once.”
Davis and Ma wrote up a long list of one-paragraph game pitches to prototype. They would be small, manageable games that two people could complete on their own. The game they chose to go with would have to be finished within a year, because that was all they had budgeted for. Among the pitches inspired by board games, roguelikes and all the genres that excited them was a 2D, top-down management game called FTL.
A fun little indie game and a great success story.
03.13.13 |
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Ars Technica‘s Kyle Orland:
The actual PS4 casing, whatever it looks like, isn’t really going to be that important to the way you actually experience the console. Like every console that’s come before it, the PlayStation 4 is going to be a box that sits in your entertainment center. You’ll interact with it directly for maybe five seconds while you put in a disc and turn the system on (even less if you download games and use the power button on the controller). After that, you’ll be ignoring the casing for hours as you stare at the images on the TV screen—you know, the kind of images that Sony actually made the focus of its announcement last week.
There’s been many ‘why we should have/shouldn’t have seen the box’ arguments, but Kyle’s resonates the most with my viewpoint. Compared to so many other factors – price, game selection, UI, to name a few – the look of the box is pretty unimportant.
03.07.13 |
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Simon Parkin writing for Polygon:
After a noisy opening, the darkened bar lit by the cathode glow of its attendant squadron of machines, success was quick and consistent. “The popularity surprised me,” says [Barcade founder] Kermizian, “and [the fact] that it didn’t wear off, that it became a place where people came regularly. We were worried that this might be a lot of fun for people, but that they would only view it as a once-in-a-long-while thing. I was astounded at how many regulars we found right away, and how dedicated they became.”
Barcade was a great idea, and it’s awesome to see its popularity catch on, at least around here in New York.
03.06.13 |
Gaming |
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EA’s mobile driving game Real Racing 3 has gotten a lot of flak since its debut last week. The primary controversy surrounds the game’s free to play model that leverages artificial timers to generate revenue. Repair or upgrade a car and it’s unavailable to play for a set amount of time, anywhere from 5 to 25 minutes (in rare cases, far longer). Of course by spending real money you can end a timer early, and EA clearly hopes you will. Many tech and gaming journalists on my Twitter feed have called the practice “abominable” and refuse to play. Others have taken the exact opposite stance: it’s a free game on your phone, relax and wait a few minutes! I disagree with a one sided position on RR3; the right answer for me lies somewhere in the middle.
One aspect RR3‘s critics get decidedly wrong is the impact timers have on gameplay. Many make the mistake of judging RR3 from the perspective of a traditional console or PC game, not a mobile title. Console and PC games tend to be played in longer sessions of at least an hour; in that context a twenty minute repair timer would be catastrophic. In contrast, mobile games are usually played for far shorter intervals, which minimizes the impact of RR3’s timers. Furthermore, early on in the game (in my case, with less than an hour of gameplay) you start acquiring multiple cars. By just shuffling between cars that are not in repair, you can nullify a timer’s effect. Already I’m at four cars and timers are effectively a non issue.
The real problem with RR3‘s economic model is less about actual gameplay than principle. Traditional games charge for extra content, not to pay off an arbitrary delay timer. Normally games give you the full package for a set price, while the equivalent with RR3 (to unlock all tracks and cars) costs hundreds of hours or dollars. Overall RR3‘s timers are, as Alex Navarro over at Giant Bomb wrote, just plain invasive. It’s applying a Zenga or Farmville like min-max model on what should be a fun racing game.
While RR3 is a mobile game, it’s also an AAA game on all levels: polished graphics, depth, varied gameplay and a big budget. I want to hold the game to a similar standard as a full console title and expect a more traditional pricing model, or at least free to play with real enhancements, not repair timers.
But that didn’t happen, and the larger root problem here wasn’t EA or RR3. Instead we should direct more blame to the mobile app store market as a whole. Over the last few years, a race to the bottom price mentality has eliminated almost any iOS or Android game that’s more than $3, and the app store supervisors, most notably Apple, haven’t done a thing to slow or stop it. EA knows $1 or $2 purchases en masse couldn’t come close to matching their high budget; free to play was the only viable option. Even the “traditional” free to play (e.g. paying money for more cars and tracks) that we’re use to on mobile wouldn’t cut it. Only invasive timers, in EA’s mind, ensures profitability. In short, timers may be wrong on principle, but given the mobile app store climate, they are likely a sound economical bet for EA.
Overall RR3‘s strange free to play model is a clear signal that gaming is in a tricky, experimental and indeterminate state. Yet as gamers we can vote with our dollars. We should support games financially that are fun and worth the investment, from assorted free to play or cheap iOS diversions to $60 console games and everything in between. I’m conflicted over RR3, a solid game with a sketchy business model; I’ll continue to play but I’ll minimize how much I spend on it.