Month: March 2006

Free to play online games sounds like such a good deal…after all, it’s free, right? “Free to play” MMORPGs aren’t actually free (yes, it is false advertising when they say “100% free”). The publishers and developers make their money primarily by generating revenues from in-game advertising, and micro-purchases of in-game items and other perks. [Yes, I know there are exceptions, but I’m talking about MMOs in general]

Games in Asia have long been based on a “pay to play” model where gamers usually buy time cards at a cyber café, gas station, or something similar, which they redeem for time in a game. These are usually hourly or daily options. So, going from “pay to play” to “free to play” seems like a logical next step. One of the reasons that the monthly subscription model hasn’t been as popular in the East is the lack of market penetration of credit cards.

Continue reading The Folly of Free to Play

I’m sure you remember this commercial…Avery Brooks (AKA Captain Benjamin Sisko, Deep Space Nine) is complaining that we were promised flying cars by the next millennium, blah blah. If you enjoy reading a lot of science fiction (the older good stuff!), then by all rights we should have flying cars by now as well as a lot of other cool things. At least the PC is pretty powerful and we have the lovely Internet.

But not only are we missing the flying cars, we don’t have a kick ass Lunar base, man hasn’t set foot on Mars yet, and we certainly can’t teleport ourselves around. The virtual reality craze of the real early 90s was too soon, and fizzled out before computers and VR hardware had matured to a point to really be useful for much beyond making people motion sick and giving them eye strain.

Continue reading We were promised flying cars!

Well, not really.

So a few guys that worked on World of Warcraft left Blizzard and started their own studio, Red 5, last summer. One was a team lead, another was an art director, and I don’t remember anything about the rest of the guys. I should say here right at the start, that I wish these guys the best and I hope they come up with some really cool stuff. The thing that gets me excited about these guys is the fact that no one knows anything about what they are working on yet. That means there is a chance, albeit however small, that they might come out with something really cool and innovative.

However what I don’t understand is why the hype around these guys is so big, and getting bigger (they announced a worldwide exclusive distribution deal with Asian MMO giant WebZen yesterday)…

Continue reading Ex-Blizzard Receptionist scores MMO Funding Deal!

I don’t know about you, but I have always considered “slow” to be a fairly sub-optimal power. Of all the things I can do to my enemy, slowing him down a bit seemed like the least useful. Some of this must come from starting in Asheron’s Call, where there were no slow powers (or any crowd control to speak of, when I played). Mostly, it comes from most enemies’ living only a few seconds. In the time that I could slow him down, I could blow him up.

Lately, though, I have been seeing a lot of value in it.

Continue reading Getting Up to Speed on Slow