The Midagedgamer report for March 15, 2013
This week:
Ea apologizes for SimCity but no refunds!, New Borderlands 2
character coming, What's an OUYA? and more!
The big news out of EA this week? If you found yourself looking at a blank
dialog box instead of playing SimCity, EA's got a consolation prize for
you. They're going to offer you one of
their downloadable games for free. Watch
your email March 18th for details on how and what you'll be getting for the
frustration you suffered last week.
SimCity developer Maxis' GM Lucy Bradshaw was quoted last
Friday (March 8th) as saying the reason for the outage was.."a lot more
people logged on than we expected. More
people played and played in ways we never saw in beta....OK, we agree that was
dumb but we are committed to fixing it."
That's all very well and nice and it's refreshing to hear an EA developer admitting the inadequacies of
their beta programs. But only time will
tell if they've learned from their mistakes.
Time will also tell if the "free game" is salve for the wound
or just a burnt offering. Didn't see
anything about a refund in there BTW.
The following
comments come from the referenced EA article...
"Why do I want another game to play on your obviously
buggy and unreliable Origin service? Giving me another game that has a good
chance of not working due to your servers isn't going to make me happy. Givi ng
me an offline version of SimCity will
"Maybe you should think about NOT having this stupid
Always Online DRM crap? Yeah? Might solve the problem of bad design and bad
decisions on your part. "
These are DLC only, however, and not available to premium
subscription members which makes me wonder what the point is of having it if I
have to keep buying extra stuff? I
wonder if Gearbox is looking at Borderlands 2 like EA looks at Battlefield
3. You know, a money machine? If so it doesn't bode well for Borderlands
3...
Ah well, wait a year and you'll get it all for $60 on a Steam
sale....
So are you one of those people looking to break out of the
shackles of traditional console gaming with their high prices, subscription
models and closed ecosystems? Then OUYA
may have your alternative. OUYA is an
Android based gaming console that will go for around $100 when it officially
launches in June. Funded by a successful
Kickstarter project started by Julie Uhrman and Yves Behar back in August 2012 the
project managed to attract 8.5 Million US. That was 8 times their target by the
way.
The news this week was the announcement that Kickstarter backers
can expect to see their new OUYA boxes show up by March 28th.
What's significant about OUYA isn't just the migration of
android based games from mobile devices to your HD TV. It's the freedom afforded to developers to
develop without the restrictions that come from other platforms like Xbox and
Playstation. OUYA claims that, "Anyone can make a game, every OUYA console
is a developer kit. No need to purchase
a license or an expensive SDK.."
The platform is more of a boon for indie game developers
than even Valve's Steam can
offer. The question remains whether this
will be the functional alternative to mainstream consoles or end up a hobbyist
platform for the true believer. If it
becomes the Linux equivalent to Windows in the console gaming world the result
will likely be less than revolutionary.
The other issue to consider is that with a few exceptions,
Android based games are made for mobile devices with 4" screens. That may not translate well to your 50"
HDTV. That is, unless you're ok with
the bulk of your gaming looking like something from the original Sony
Playstation. Of course that can change
with time but developers will need to ramp up their efforts if OUYA has any
chance of being a force in the console market.
In the end if OUYA serves no other purpose than to soften
the draconian licensing and development practices of the Sony and Microsoft's
of the world that's a good thing.
If you've been wondering why Nvidia's been shut out of the
next generation consoles your answer may finally be here. In a nutshell, Sony and Microsoft are cheap
and AMD is too. Apparently Nvidia passed
on the opportunity to be in the next generation of consoles because the big 2
weren't offering enough scratch for the effort.
" (They) didn't
want to do the business at the price those guys were willing to pay",
Tony Tomasi Nvidia SVP of content
AMD came in cheaper so they got the gig. Sony claims it wasn't about the technology
just the price. That's really all there
is to it.
I guess it had something to do with the "support
offline group play" feature that got a new phone from Samsung on the
gaming news radar this week. Yes the
highly anticipated Samsung S4 has been officially announced. It's a phone that lets you do things by
waving your fingers at it. It's set for
release at the end of April. Must be a
slow news week...
That's it for this week.
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