Gabe's prophecies, Shield Real? Warfighter no more & EA weighs in

5% Off $100 or more

The Midagedgamer Report for 2-1-2013

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.