Month: July 2009

Valve’s Gabe Newell got an interesting blog-bite about players funding games to be developed.  Reminds me of buying pork belly stock.  MMOs that follow subscription models are already halfway there.  Subscribers are not just paying for the ability to play on the MMO.  They are also expecting new patches, new content, new technology upgrades, and so on.  Even with over 5,000,000 subscribers-worth of revenue Blizzard cannot churn out content fast enough for World of Warcraft.  The game then becomes a hopeful chat room community of investors.

This just does not go for subscription MMOs, but they are the most representative.  Players expect the MMO to be a living thing whether it follows Guild Wars or Wizard 101’s business model.  Once the game begins to feel stagnant and hopes begin to die, players will flag to another ship.  It would be nice to make developer decisions like a publicly-traded shareholders meeting, but we would probably make the wrong ones anyway.

The one other “hint” of MMO investment might be in the beta stage.  This is two-pronged with one being realistic (for now).  The first prong comes from pre-orders and getting pre-release access to the game.  While the gamer usually pays the same amount for the game whether he or she pre-ordered or not, the developer/publisher gets a read on future sales.  They can use this data to further excite vendors, newssites, and fans thereby generating more sales and money.  The unrealistic prong could be asking the gamer to pay extra to get in to the testing phase.  I saw plenty of gamers that would do this without question for Warhammer Online.  Could this small amount of money help final development more than hurt future sales?  Currently the answer seems to be “no” because I haven’t seen anyone willing to use this risky business model.

I know that Newell was approaching things from a more early development standpoint.  Would you be willing to buy Blizzard’s next MMO now even if you wouldn’t get it until 2012 when you might be funding it right now by merely playing World of Warcraft?  Fool me twice…

–Ravious
either way a sale is made

I’ve always liked to spectate people playing video games, ever since the ability was added in online games.  Guild Wars World Championships were to me what the World Series was to a baseball fan.  I would watch and chat with other players in observer mode  focusing on the intense Guild Versus Guild battles between the best players in the world.  Or there was that one time Nihilum did a live Sunwell Plateau (World of Warcraft) raid from four different vantage points.  Even a quick break in Team Fortress 2 to spectate a spy taking down five cart pushers can be entertaining while I chew down some air-travelled White Castles. 

I had an all-time high (or low) this weekend amassing hours of video game voyeurism via X-Fire’s live video streams.  A gamer with a good connection and computer can stream in real-time the game he or she is playing, while a chat room is created so that viewers can chat with the player and create a running peanut gallery.  This past weekend I vicariously “played” Prototype, Mass Effect, and even Darkfall.  I have never experienced any of these games, but I am already planning to buy Mass Effect.  I also have a much better feel for Darkfall watching a live stream than any “professional” reviewer can give me.  The streaming gamer is a personal performer, demoer, and spokesperson for the game.  Developers couldn’t ask for better advertising.

There was one small hitch.  The most popular and most numerous live streams seem to be World of Warcraft arena PvP.  I don’t understand this because the information to noise ratio is pitifully low when watching World of Warcraft PvP via the lowered-resolution stream.  I can only surmise that the live streams become some sort of PvP community in and of themselves.  This is not necessarily the hitch.  The hitch is I did want to see some World of Warcraft raid or dungeon, but I had to pull up each World of Warcraft stream in order to figure out what the player was showing.  Requiring a little description for each gamer’s stream would help greatly (e.g., Mass Effect just starting, WoW arenakekeke, L4D noob watch me suck).

The service is still in beta for X-Fire users, but I expect that whole communities and services could occur around this feature.  Instead of game companies performing demos at E3 for journalists, the developers could bypass and give a demo straight to the masses.  New guildies could be tutored on a raid.  Personal vendettas could be resolved.  The list is endless.  I am pretty excited about this, and maybe I will find something worthwhile to stream in the future.

–Ravious
on the arm of a blind man

“Why would we care about that? It’s not like you ninja’d his raid loot or something, right?”

: Zubon

EG’s re-review of Darkfall is here.

Very good review, in my opinion. Just talking about the review in itself, that’s all. Enjoyable and informative, as reviews should be. This is why a second review was needed, and EG did the right thing on this one. People will say it doesn’t change anything; the faithful will keep playing it, the loathers will continue to loathe. But this is missing the point. The second review (and a good one like this one, at that) was needed because there’s tons of people that could -still- be looking for information about the game and could -still- use a good review of it. It changes exactly what needed to be changed; the replacement of a poor review with one of much better quality.

Does it change things about the game? To me? No. When reading the first poor review, with its errors (factual or not) notwithstanding, I knew the game wasn’t as bad as it was painted, but I also know the picture the review was attempting to present wasn’t that far off either. I don’t like using scores myself, and never liked it as a reviewer, but I can say that while I knew the game couldn’t possibly be a 2/10, I also knew it couldn’t possibly be 7/10 or higher either. The original review, terrible as it was in almost every metric you could apply to a review, was essentially not wrong in spirit. Unfortunately that spirit was buried under piles and piles of garbage. It was a bad review, but essentially not as wrong as the faithful claimed.

I wonder what happens now. Do people still care?