Star Trek Online, Lord of Ultima, Dungeons and Dragons
online and The simpsons What's the common thread? You can play them but if you
want to see the closing credits you're going to need to peel off some green.
It's become a very lucrative space with $25 million made by EA in the last quarter of 2012 just on their Simpsons
mobile game alone. EA and other large publishers like
Activision have been actively exploring new revenue models to offset declines in traditional boxed sales.
It's a trend that's gradually finding its way into the
traditional gaming space of PC's and consoles.
Subscriptions, upgrades and DLC
have become more commonplace but game publishers see an opportunity to
push the model even further.
The typical triple-A game title now averages $60. DLC is usually around $15 with upgrades
usually a fraction of that. If you were
to take advantage of all the extra content you could essentially pay for the game twice when you
were done.
Of course you don't have to purchase the extra content but
your experience will be diminished compared to those that do. EA's Blake J. Jorgensen thinks that's where the money is.
"The next and
much bigger piece is micro transactions within games... we’re building into all of our games the
ability to pay for things along the way, either to get to a higher level to buy
a new character, to buy a truck, a gun, whatever... and consumers are enjoying
and embracing that way of the business"
I'm not so sure consumers are "enjoying
"micro-transactions as much as they're just tolerating them at this
point. The model can work if your upfront investment is minimal
but the future may not be so certain if we're still paying triple-A prices.
It's not unlike going to a movie, paying your $15 admission
and upon arriving in the theater finding very few seats all
of them occupied. You inquire of the
management and find that your ticket only entitles you to see the movie not to
sit down unless you pay an additional charge.
Thus starts a chain of events that eventually ends in your $15 movie
costing $40. That doesn't even include
the popcorn!
It's not as farfetched as it seems. EA's own Battlefield 3 already employs such a
model that disenfranchises those who don't purchase a "premium"
subscription or additional DLC. Even
franchises like Need For Speed aren't immune with Most Wanted getting paid DLC in the next few weeks.
It seems the trend of "micro-transactions" is at
least a part of the immediate future.
Time will tell if gamers will tolerate all the extra tolls along the
way.
Back in October 2011 most of the reviews
of Battlefield 3 were like this...
Reviewer:
" When you are running
full tilt down an alley, literally hopping over obstacles with your legs
swinging, it feels so life like you say to yourself, wow, is this cool."
Me:
Bulls**t, what is
this guy, 12?
I've never tripped over so many non-existent rocks or felt so
out of contact with the terrain in a game since the PC version of
Battlezone. Yeah, Frostbite 2 is pretty
but it's not the second coming.
Collision detection is about as good as Borderlands 2 and moving around
the maps is only slightly better. I
can't count how many times I've spent in vain trying just to run up a flight of
stairs.
Reviewer:
"I have played
most of the maps more than a few times, and never once did I feel like I was
trapped by prone snipers."
Me:
Again, I repeat, Bulls**t. We've all
had the experience of the A-hole camped out on a hill overlooking the enemy base
racking up spawn kills. Or maybe it's the Jet aces who can take out
opposing aircraft before they even get off the ground. Don't even get me started with the aimbot
hacks.
Look, at this point the novelty has definitely worn off and all EA cares
about is milking the franchise with DLC, paid perks (shortcut kits) and
"Premium" memberships that keep the more frugal amongst us relegated
to second class status.
What follows is my list of "I'm tired(s)"
I'm tired of being kicked off of servers because of
issues outside of my control like say a version incompatibility with PUNKBUSTER. I mean c'mon, PUNKBUSTER? That creaky POS didn't work on anything but
the most moronic of hacks in the 90's why do they still use it?
I'm tired of losing points, bonuses, medals and ribbons
because a server hiccup drops me off a server.
I'm tired of not getting credit for a kill when I'm the
only person who shot at the enemy.
I'm tired of unloading an entire clip of an assault rifle
at point blank range into an enemy player and getting taken out with one shot
of their pistol.
I'm tired of knife attacks being almost completely
indefensible unless they come straight at you.
Don't give me that crap about hearing them sneak up either, that's Bulls**t.
I'm tired of EA's insistence on using a web browser as
the front end of its game.
I'm tired of having to go online just to play cooperative
mode. Even Borderlands 2 has a LAN mode!
I'm tired of ever fewer servers available to non-Premium
players.
I'm tired of stat lags taking up to 24 hours to resolve.
I'm tired of server lag on connections with less than a
50ms ping.
I'm tired of being bounced off of servers halfway through
a game because a private server's "VIP member" joined the game.
I'm tired of issues on the tiny number of "official"
EA servers (which rarely show up in
browse lists) causing the rest of the servers to develop ridiculous lag
times.
I'm tired of Dice's constant fiddling with game
mechanics just to wrench the latest DLC
into the rest of the game or satisfy a bunch of whiners.
I'm tired of surprise maintenance windows and hours long multi-gigabyte
downloads to satisfy DLC that I'LL NEVER BUY!
I'm tired of half of the servers that I CAN get on being
populated by hackers that EA/Dice either can't or won't address.
I'm tired of map bugs and glitches in a game that's going
on 2 years old still not being addressed.
I'm tired of the auto balance system in general. I've yet to see it create an evenly matched
set of teams. It's only data points are
length of time on the server and how many players are on each side. If you've got 20 level 50 colonels against 30
level 20 "whatever's" who do you think is going to win? Auto balance won't help you there.
I'm tired of stupid administrative options on ranked
servers that allow restrictions on weapons or have 4 figure ticket counts. Ever get bounced for using a sniper rifle? I
have. How about 1500 ticket conquest
maps or 2000 point death matches? Those
are just endurance contests and no fun unless you like sticking pins in your
eyeballs.
I'm tired of Bulls**t stats that ding me for quitting a
server that I got disconnected from by no fault of my own.
Finally, I'm just sick of wasting my time and not enjoying the game
anymore. It used to be out of 10 games
at least half would be worth playing.
Now it's less than 1. I've
invested over 200 hours in Battlefield 3 and managed to make it to a 1 star
colonel. All without hacks or a "Premium"
membership.
That's not bad for someone without a
"sh*t bucket" (Battlefield Friendsreference BTW). The game is
all about EA's money machine, Rambo wannabe's and hacks. It really hasn't been fun in
months.
Perhaps that's the lesson of video games.
After a year, regardless of DLC, most of them run their course and
you're looking toward the next chapter of the story. I play games to have fun not to stroke my ego
or massage any dark sociopathic tendencies.
Outside of the hacks that's all you'll find on the ranked servers now.
Which is exactly why I'm against subscription models and paid DLC. The reality is that after 6 months there's
nothing new under the sun. DLC just
gives you new maps that tend to fall out of favor in a few weeks. Weapon upgrades and new game modes are just
variants on what's already there. You're
literally beating a dead horse.
Which is why I'm done. I've
officially uninstalled Battlefield 3 from all my PC's preserving only my saved
games and player status for any bonuses it affords me when Battlefield 4 comes
out. Which I'm sure I'll have had quite
enough of about a year after ITS release as well.
So long for now, Battlefield. The
first 6 months were fun...
Activision and EA Layoffs, PS4 is announced, kinda and not
much else.
Activision is dumping it's licensed property business and
with it about 30 employees. In case you
don't know, licensed properties come from other popular media like comic books
and movies. Activision's stable includes
James Bond, Spider-Man and Family guy.
Probably not a bad move since most licensed properties usually end up
being an embarrassment to the developer and the publisher. Superman anyone?
Activision is also laying off some of it's Treyarch (Black
ops 2) development studio in an effort to..
"...better align our development talent against the needs of DLC development... "
In other words to keep milking franchises with more DLC instead of producing new original titles. It's all about the cash flow guys.
Not to be outdone, EA has also confirmed layoffs in its
Montreal and Los Angeles Studios. Frank
Gibeau said in a statement on Thurdsay...
"Thousands of our existing employees have been
retrained and redeployed to work on the new platforms and initiatives. But when it is not possible to redeploy a
team, we soften the tough decisions with assistance." The "assistance" comes from...
"...outplacement services and severance packages to ease their transition
to a new job."
Hmm, I wish someone had eased my transition...
I'm wondering how many more reports of layoffs we're going
to hear about between now and the holiday season. With both major consoles moving to X86
architecture the need for programming skills on previous platforms will quickly
evaporate. Methinks EA better include
some free programming classes in its severance package.
Crysis 3 has officially launched. Check out Ryan Shrout's game stream video below. Warning, it was sponsored by AMD which means
most of it was like sitting through an AMD infomercial. Just turn down the sound and enjoy the
gameplay.
Bioshock Infinite is finally complete. 2K's development studio Irrational Games has
reported that the game has gone gold and will release on March 26th for
Xbox360, PC and Playstation. Amazing how
much life they can still get out of the Unreal 3 engine.
If you're like me and had nothing better to do then you
probably caught the online stream Wednesday of the Playstation 4
announcement. From over 2 hours of
coverage we've learned this much...It's officially going to be called the PS4,
the controller has a touchpad and a bunch of developers are making games for
it. The rest we already knew like it
will be based on X86 architecture and have 8GB of DDR5 RAM hooked to an 8 core
AMD processor with onboard GPU and a "massive" amount of storage.
So we pretty much learned nothing new outside of confirming
information leaked months ago to all the gaming websites. We didn't see what the console will look
like, what the media format will be nor what it will cost. Just that it will be out around Holiday 2013.
We've heard nothing from Microsoft about the upcoming XBOX by the way but if the rumors are anything like
the PS4 rumors then it'll be pretty much the same spiel. Which begs the question. If consoles will finally be based on PC
hardware then what's the point of having them?
Why would I want to limit myself to a locked up ecosystem when I could
do so much more on a PC? Especially when
newer operating systems like Windows 8 are designed to be more
interactive. Perhaps this is the
ultimate irony in that PC's will finally triumph over consoles by actually
"BEING" consoles!
Guess what, there's been another Origin update! Yes version 9.1.13.89 was released this week
and it contained......"miscellaneous bug fixes" Get yours today! Like you had a choice...
Goodbye physical media! Gamestop closing stores, the
ultimate irony and more!
The Internet is the future not to mention the past and
present. In fact it's all a gamer needs
If you agree with Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney. Sweeney believes that the way we get our
games now is inefficient. What with all
that advertising, packaging and retail channel stuff. From Sweeney,
"Once you have a game, it's available pervasively
online and your devices are all Internet-connected. Do you really need to run television ads to
get people to find it at the top of the App Store?"
The Epic games boss claims getting rid of all that pesky
marketing and physical copy stuff will allow more money to flow to
development. Again from Sweeney, "
I'm looking forward to our digital future.
Development budgets are going to be the dominant cost in the industry."
Really Tim? Why aren't they now? Considering the even mix of
physical and digital media the assertion rings hollow. If the prospect of waiting for multi-gigabyte
downloads and being forced to be connected to the Internet just to play a game are
attractive that rings true. Of course
recent history shows that's rarely the ideal situation, Diablo 3 anyone? This is just another example of a game
company trying to switch to a subscription model to milk a franchise. I don't believe for a second that going to an
all digital delivery system is beneficial to development teams. More likely it's just cheap CEO's looking to
pad their own fortunes.
In a related story the Epic Games boss says he's "more
enthusiastic now than ever" for next generation consoles. He thinks next gen consoles will reflect
gaming pc's now. I guess he doesn't
quite understand that next gen consoles could barely stand up to a mainstream
business PC right now when it comes to gaming.
Sweeney is likely more excited about the prospect of Microsoft and Sony
switching to more of an online than physical media focus. Sweeney's Digital future indeed.
If you thought Aliens: Colonial Marines looked good, hold
off. Seems everybody hates it, including
the developer. With the project bouncing
around multiple studios for the past 2 years it's no surprise the hype didn't
live up to the reality. Gearbox led the
way on the project but outsourced a large portion of it to Timegate who prompty
decided to toss most of the work including art and design. So much for outsourcing.
In Valve news a whole bunch of people got axed this
week. Gabe says it's no big deal and no
projects will be affected. CVG says that
nobody's criticizing the company from the inside, just the outside. Which makes me want to put on my captain
obvious shades.
GameStop did its own study and found that 60% of console
players won't buy anything from Sony or Microsoft that blocks used games. Bravo gamers! It's time the big boys
remembered whom is serving whom.
By the way, GameStop is going to be closing 250 stores this
year although they will be opening 60 to 70 new stores. It's likely a pre-emptive action to offset a
potential drop in sales from next gen console hostility to used games.
So if you've been breathlessly awaiting Steam for Linux to
exit "Beta" you can breathe now.
Valve has brought the platform to official status with great
fanfare. With 50 games cut up to 75%
till February 21st now's the time to get in on all that OpenGL goodness. Thing is, unless somebody convinces Microsoft
to make a port of DirectX to the open source community your selection of games
are going to be stuck in 90's. OpenGL
can do graphics but not much else.
Any serious gamer who's tried to make their game controller
or sound card work on a Linux platform knows that. Windows owes its continuing existence to two
factors; Business and gamers. That's
because it takes a lot less fiddling to make things happen on Windows these
days. The truth is that Linux on the
desktop is roughly at the level of Windows 95 and in some scenarios, Windows
3.1. Gabe Newell is well aware of that
so I wouldn't be surprised if he had something up his sleeve for his upcoming
Steam Box.
The guy who took out Osama Bin Laden offered to consult on
Medal of Honor: Warfighter but EA turned him down. He was told the production was "stacked
with consultants" Wow, considering
how bad the game was it couldn't have hurt to hire on someone who actually knew
about military tactics.
For some, there can be no greater betrayal than violating
the edict of honor among thieves. The Pirate bay is looking to sue a copycat
site for copyright infringement. Talk
about your pots calling kettles black!
Regardless of how you view their "mission" or copyright law
you can't escape the irony.
This stuff was just too good to wait a week for....
Ok, Seems Friday brought yet another update for the Origin
client. That's the third one in as many
weeks. Along with the now familiar
"miscellaneous bug fixes" in the revision notes comes support for Macs!
Yes, that's right, just like Steam, Origin has decided to
support Macs on EA's platform. The new
version is 9.1.12.73. There's around 50
games available for the Mac like Dragon Age 2 and the Sims. Another nice feature is platform
portability. So if you have a PC version
of a game you have access to the MAC version as well. Would be nice if console games worked that
way.
Speaking of Origin, I ran into another little atrocity last
night playing Battlefield 3. One of my
favorite servers issued a warning to me when I joined it. I was joining a map not part of any DLC pack,
specifically Kharg Island, and I received a notice that because I didn't have
the "Aftermath" DLC I ran the risk of being kicked off the server at
any time. I was allowed to join and play
but I found the experience no less offensive.
Why should I be kicked off a server if I don't have a DLC pack? It's a public server, hosting a standard map.
Yet another case of hostility toward "non-premium"
players. I'd have to say at this point
that when
Battlefield 4 launches later this year it would be wise to just buy
the premium package if you are an avid fan of the game. That will essentially cut out casual players
since the price of admission will be $120 or more for the game and the
subscription. I'm still on the fence but
leaning toward abandoning the franchise.
Honestly, we're already playing on a modern battlefield with BF3. Where else can they go?
Today brought great news about a sequel to one of the best
racing games ever produced in my opinion.
Grid 2 is due out May 28th and they've released a trailer. Sadly, it appears this new Grid game will be
afflicted with DLC disease at launch. If
you pre-order the Brands Hatch Edition you get codes for 2 DLC packs. They include car unlocks, new routes on the Brands
Hatch course and discounts for the online car upgrades store and an special
online event. See the link for more info.
Xbox, More like PS4 than we wanted, Are you stupid? Creative
con-fab..not and more!
Seems Microsoft wants to take a page out of Sony and
Blizzard's playbook. There's news that
the next XBOX will not only have a blu-ray player but require an Internet
connection to use it, that's the Blizzard part.
It also won't play used games, that's the Sony part.
That's fine, I say full steam ahead. If there's anything that will save PC gaming
this is it. At $60 or more per game plus
the requirement to have an Xbox account which will likely be useless without
the word "Gold" attached to it you can be sure that Both Microsoft
and Sony will price themselves out of the market. In case you still care, the new Xbox will
have an AMD 8 core CPU running at 1.6GHZ, 8 GB of DDR3 and a new version of
Kinect. The Code Name is Durango which
is meaningless except for something I heard Mary Jo Foley of
allaboutmicrosoft.com say on Windows
Weekly a few weeks back.
She was told
that Microsoft codenames that use cities are directly related to how close the
project is to completion. The closer the
city is to Microsoft HQ in Redmond the closer it is to final product. Durango is a town in Colorado so take from
that what you will.
By the way, I'm just going to say it straight. If you think
it's perfectly fine to be forced to be online and pay a subscription just to
play your games you're just stupid and should immediately send me all your
money. You obviously don't know how to
manage it.
Doubly so if you think it's perfectly ok to force a gamer to
pay full price for a game and not be able to resell it when he/she is done with
it. For decades game licenses have been
transferrable spawning a thriving secondary market and the chance to recoup at
least some of your investment. That runs
contrary to a business plan that counts on trapping gamers in a tightly
controlled ecosystem.
They'll justify your gaming prison with claims of enhanced
security and superior service and... it will be a lie. Dice games will still be hacked, Internet
connections will still be flaky and you'll have a heck of time getting your
money back when they do you wrong.
The reason for this "locked down and hooked up"
approach? What else, greed. You see
digital (as in online) sales were up compared to Physical (retail box)
sales. That stems from fewer retail
locations selling triple-A titles, online incentives from digital subscriptions
and pre-orders and an aging demographic that chose to feed their kids over
spending the better part of $100 for a game.
At the least, it's a misread of the gaming consumer. At its worst, it's blatant abuse of the DMCA
and if you think this kind of thing is going to stop with games you're
blind. Stand up against corporate greed
and protectionism! Boycott the
corporatocracy!, Boot up your PC, slap
in an indie title and game to your heart's content on Windows 7!
This is far from an idle threat if you take a look at recent
numbers from the NPD group show gaming revenues in general fell 9% from
2011. That's 14.8 billion down from
16.34 billion in a year that had an even worse economy. That's a shrinking market no matter how you get
your content and it's their greed that's making it that way. Make them fight for every one of your dollars
instead of sheepishly taking their abuse.
Since when does a market get dictated by sellers instead of buyers
anyway? Games aren't food, clothing or
medical care. We can take them or leave
them. You have the power to remind them
of that.
Well two of my least favorite people, Gabe Newell of Valve
and J.J. Abrams of the Star Trek reboot fame apparently had a pow-wow on stage,
in front of everybody, at the DICE summit.
There, they laid out their individual philosophies on games and
movies. In short JJ's got an idea for a
game that he'd like to partner with Valve to produce and Newell wants to see
about JJ doing a Portal or Half Life movie.
Why not? Half Life is a very
stylized game that would translate well to Abrams "Fashion Runway"
vision of Sci-Fi and Gabe needs a friend. Gabe and JJ
New numbers are out for Wow subscriptions and it looks like
Mists of Pandaria may have been a short lived bounce. Down from 10 million subscriber numbers have
dropped to 9.6 million. Still good
numbers for a game developed over half a decade ago but down nonetheless. I guess the LARP guys got a deal on used
panda costumes and let their subs lapse.
Finally, if you've recovered from the Facebook 404 hijack
this week you may want to check out the following article about a new Call of
Duty game due out this year. Not many
details but it's likely to come out around the time BF4 launches.
This Week, is kinda light but I managed to dig up...
Gabe's prophecies, Nvidia Shield, Warfighter will fight no
more and EA CEO weighs in on video games and gun violence link.
Probably the best story of the week is Gabe Newell's
continuing fixation on an Apple console that: Doesn't exist, hasn't been announced and probably
won't happen, at least not the way he thinks it will. While giving a speech at the University of
Texas, Newell prophesized that the next 12 months will see the battle for the
living room heating up. To that end he
sees Apple has his biggest competitor. Nothing
says it better than a quote, so here's two...
"The threat right now is that Apple has gained a huge amount of market
share, and has a relatively obvious pathway towards entering the living room
with their platform,"
"I think that there's a scenario where we see sort of a dumbing down
living room platform emerging - I think Apple rolls the console guys really
easily. The question is can we make enough progress in the PC space to
establish ourselves there, and also figure out better ways of addressing mobile
before Apple takes over the living room?"
Of course if he ends up being right, I guess it's time to take up golf, yeah,
I'm old enough for that...
So maybe I was wrong, looks like the most interesting announcement of CES,
the Nvidia Shield may be more than just an engineering exercise.
After a year of serious development it looks like it'll be a real
product. For whom I don't know but it's
an interesting response to being shut out of the innards of both the PS4 and
the Xbox.
Medal of Honor news!
Seems EA has finally let the axe fall on the "Warfighter" franchise.
It's been taken "Out of Rotation" meaning the one and only installment
is the last we'll hear about it. I say,
Took ya long enough!
EA's COO Peter Moore flipped the kill switch but blamed consumers for not
embracing its "authenticity" as well as a slow marketplace. Labels
President Frank Gibeau was a bit more realistic in saying, "We missed on Medal
of Honor"
Moore thought the critics got it wrong when they gave the game,
"Scores lower than deserved".
How about the bad game mechanics and stupid AI Peter? If you want realism play ARMA. EA doesn't do realism unless it has the word
"photo" in front of it.
In other EA news, EA CEO John Riccitiello weighed in on video games impact on violent crime.
The short of it is he said what we should all already know. Video games have nothing to do with gun
violence. Here's his quote.
"I could
give you long stories about how people in Denmark, or the UK, or Ireland or
Canada consume as much or more violent games and violent media as they do in
the United States, and yet they have an infinitely smaller incidence of gun
violence, but that's not really the point. The point is that direct studies
that have been
done, hundreds of millions of dollars of research that has been done has been
unable to find a linkage because there isn't one."
Finally, Check
out the trailers for the final BF3 DLC coming in March.
