The Common Sense Gamer Putting some sense in the insane world of gaming.

Fro those that are dipping their toes into the SC2 multiplayer ladders, I highly recommend taking a look here.

What we’ve got there is a huge amount of SC2 replays with analysis from a gent named Day9. He really seems to know his stuff and I’ve learned a tonne just watching these things. Funny enough, I find myself watching these more than actually playing SC2….how weird is that.

I find the multiplayer aspect of SC2 fascinating. Even though it’s not really a complicated game mechanically, this lends itself to a real “chess-like” feeling when you’re talking about the whole strategy of playing a game. Right now, I’m having a very hard time pressing that multiplayer button because of some kind of anxiety of doing so…but watching these replays is really encouraging because apparently, other players do too.

Anyway…enjoy watching them.

D out.

I found this interesting, if not a bit cynical (full story needs registration…):

Q: How has the rising cost of making triple-A games changed production at Ubisoft?

Alain Corre: The games that are not triple-A are not profitable anymore. And that’s changed in the last 18 months. When you have a triple-A blockbuster it costs more money to develop, but at the end of the day there’s also the chance of a good return on it because there’s a concentration at the top of the charts. To a certain extent it becomes less risky to invest more in a single game or franchise than spreading your investment between three or four games. Because if those three or four games are not at the right quality level, you are sure to lose money. So the business model has changed and we’re changing our way of making hardcore games. With hardcore games that we’re not sure are reaching the right level, we stop work on them. And that’s why we concentrate more on key franchises, because that’s what the market wants – something new with huge quality production behind it. The market is not supporting the full range of product that it used to anymore.

What I find interesting about statement like that is it tells me that the mainstream gaming companies are now officially risk adverse. Take Two said the same thing about 11 months ago:

“The demand for top-tier products is okay. The demand for lower-tier products is not so clear,” Zelnick (pictured) said during an analyst conference call attended by Gamasutra today. “The safest place to be is in triple-A.”

Part of that is because triple-A games targeted at dedicated gamers can retain value, while lower-end games or titles targeted at less hardcore audiences are more likely to be devalued as retailers institute promotions.

This is the main reason why I’m really interested in what the indie studios are doing these days. The small guys who somehow seem to still be able to create great games that are a) profitable, and b) imaginative. The bigger studios, IMHO, have completely lost the reason why they make games…it’s become totally about the bottom line, which is the wrong place to be looking.

Making Triple A..what the hell does that really mean anyway? For them, it seems to be just a function of how much money you dump into the development of a product, because whenever Triple A is mentioned, the words “profit” and “revenue” are not far behind. Really? This is what great games are all a function of? Throw money at the game and that makes it AAA? Or is it the other way around, spend less on them so that your profits are higher?

Another thing that lends to this shift of “no risk” is the statement that they are starting to concentrate more on “key franchises”. In other words, the EA model of countless sequels with only minor iterations separating them. Apparently, this is what we want. “The market”, i.e. us, don’t want these gaming companies to take risk and create something new and exciting…no…we want them to develop the same thing over and over again. Why do we want this again?? I don’t know about you, but when I play a game I’m really not thinking whether it’s a triple A title or not…and I certainly do not think about how much money they spend on it.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at cynical crap like this. I just hope it’s a phase that these guys are going through. I think they are making a huge mistake with this mindset, but this will have to be something they need to learn with a couple of really hard failure lessons.

D out.

P.S. Thanks to the GWJ forum crew for bringing this to my attention.

…sorry…someone has to counter this BS:

Stardock is often cited as making games without copy protection, having even drafted a gamer’s bill of rights. But then of course not every game is equally likely to get pirated in the first place, and with their rather complex strategy games Stardock isn’t exactly the most exposed. Nevertheless they are used to quite positive reporting about them, and when they announced Elemental: War of Magic, a “4X” turn-based fantasy strategy / rpg game in the tradition of Master of Magic, a lot of people were interested, including me.

Then PC Gamer published the first review of Elemental, and it was titled: Elemental’s disastrous launch: Stay well away!. Definitely not the kind of review Stardock CEO Brad Wardell was hoping to get. So he went all Derek Smart and said on a forum: “Also, to anyone, like you Ben, saying the game is like an “early beta” then well, please stay away from our games in the future. I consider it ready for release and if others disagree, don’t buy our games.” Then of course he had to backpedal later and apologized.

How does one read the last paragraph…I ask you? Well…I read it as a series of events. Brad Wardell saw a review he didn’t like and then went onto a forum and went all “Derek Smart”. “Brad saw X SO he did Y”. Great print…will make a great made for TV movie, but unfortunately it’s complete sensationalist spin.

Fact of the matter is the review was written AFTER the forum post in question. Look at the review..date is Aug 25. Look at the forum post, date is August 23rd. Add to that, Brad was addressing a friend of his named Ben and the reviewer’s name is Tom…so Brad couldn’t be addressing the review directly anyway even if he has some super time travelling ability.

This drives me nuts. Sensationalist bullshit from someone who has all the facts but either refuses to tell the right story or is incapable at doing so. He linked two separate and independent events and made them into one string of events. Not cool.

Word of warning. I’m a huge Stardock fan. I love they way the do business and I love their games…so take all of this with that in mind. I usually defend their beta practices regardless, but this post was just wrong and makes it seem like Brad is a complete dick/nutcase…he’s not…he’s just slightly imbalanced (…in a good and healthy way…) .

D out.

P.S. review of Elemental coming soon.

Found a couple interesting stories this morning…and no, they do not involve that little turd Justin Bieber (…who was in Ottawa yesterday…).

The first one is fascinating look at how Steam helped save a small indie developer, Introversion, from closing it’s doors:

A couple of weeks rolled by and I found myself unable to accept the end. Chris too wasn’t actually ready to jack it in. We put together a rescue plan involving creating Steam achievements for DEFCON so we could convince Valve to run a promotion with it. We’ve flogged Darwinia to death over the years, but we thought that DEFCON would benefit from some spit and polish. Chris was working every afternoon on Subversion and every morning on DEFCON. It was as if that small amount of Subversion work was refuelling him. I didn’t need to keep justifying a project that I had been pushing for four years and could start being a lot more collaborative and analytical about the business decisions that we could make. It was like a weight was lifting.

Valve okayed the promotion and even though it didn’t focus on DEFCON we were happy that we had achieved our core objective. This was the game-changer. When we started Introversion we’d had a string of successes and believed we were undefeatable, but it was a long time since we’d had a victory and we really needed one. Right on cue, Valve delivered. The promo exceeded all of our expectations and when combined with our low burn rate (no office or staff now) we had gone from being fearful about paying our mortgages to having a year’s operating capital in the bank. This was good, but paled in comparison to the fact that we were working together as a team again. Just like the old days. Just me Chris, TJ and Johnny – laptops, bedrooms and plans for global domination. The difference this time was we have a lot more knowledge and experience about what works and what doesn’t. On the face of it we are less capable than we were six months ago, but personally I believe that we are ready to rebuild the company bigger and stronger in a different mould.
Subversion is our most ambitious and epic projects so far. It’s a complete return to our roots. It’s as immersive as Uplink with the production values of Darwinia+ and it’s affordable when I run my three year cashflow (you wont find Chris talking about that in his blogs anywhere!). We’re also really hoping to have the opportunity to release DEFCON on the PSN and we should know about that in a couple of months.

Awesome. I was one of those who bought the Introversion package during that sale and I’m really at a loss as to why Darwinia and DEFCON did not live up to expectations. DEFCON is just insanely good for multiplayer and Darwinia has a really great concept behind it and plays really well. Both of these titles should have become cult or niche hits…at the very least, I would have never thought that they were not good enough to keep an indie studio floating while they worked on other titles. I’ve seen triple A studios publish a lot worse and still keep on trucking. Grats to the guys at Introversion!

Runic Games CEO, Max Schaefer, believes that they will have Torchlight 3 out the door before Diablo 3:

Schaefer told us, “[Blizzard has] an impossible task. Blizzard can not get away with doing a Torchlight 1. If they put out a single player game, an RPG that’s kinda stripped down for $20, people would say, ‘What the hell happened to Blizzard?’ They don’t have that luxury. Everything has to be super epic. More epic than anything that’s come before, more epic than World of Warcraft. They have to do that. It puts them in a really tough spot, I don’t envy them. It has to be perfect.”

True. What he failed to mention is that Diablo 3 will probably make three times as much as Torchlight 3 will. He’s thinking all wrong…Blizzard can totally afford to take the time to make Diablo 3 epic whereas Runic can only afford to make Torchlight engaging at most. Actually, I bet Blizzard could totally make a stripped down, $20 version of Diablo and still outperform Runic in most areas…cause that’s what they’re good at. The advantage that Blizzard has always had over the other studios since the launch of WoW has been that they now control their own destiny. When I see quotes from other studios that are framed in the same way as Schaefer’s, all it says to me is that they wish they had the same control over their own destinies as well.

D out.

Justin Biebz may be a self righteous, manufactured little twat, but wow….slowed down by 800% makes him sound like a bloody musical genius.

D out