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☰ Windows 8 a catastrophe for Games?

Interesting article by Tom Phillips interviewing developers about Windows 8 and it’s closed Windows Store, with this gem of a quote from Introversions’ Chris Delay:

“I really don’t want to see the PC becoming a closed platform. Microsoft is not a company that’s able to benignly oversee that process. They will f*** it up. We’ll all be doing Kinect support and 16 language versions, we’ll all be supporting a Microsoft Office plug-in. It’s my own worst nightmare.

[...] “The PC continues to be as relevant as it was ten years ago, despite consoles coming and going, because it is an open platform. If that changed it would be terrible.”

It’s interesting times for the gaming industry, indeed.

☰ Silicon Knights: “used games are cannibalising the industry”

Silicon Knights boss Denis Dyack talks about used games effect on development budgets:

“I don’t think as an industry we can afford $300 million budgets. Some games can, don’t get me wrong – for a game like Call of Duty, if they had a $100 million budget, or whatever their budget is, they can afford it. That’s not the industry, that’s sort of a one-off.

Perhaps there is a point after which it makes little sense to spend more money as you simply cannot recoup it in the market. I’m guessing this limit is probably closer to $0 than $300 million.

source Gamesindustry International.

☰ On Free to Play games

Many gamers now look at the listing of a game in the store, and if there is an inapp purchases link and they see 100 of x, 200 of x, 300 of x where x is energy, credits, bux, dollars, street cred, or whatever just skip the game – even though it might have interesting mechanics. Just be brave and proud and ask for a subscription instead of hoovering money out of my pockets. It’s a black mark on the state of gaming in my opinion.

It’s a clear indication that the game is not made to have the most fun with, but to make the most money out of you by artifical limiting the experience. Where a subscription allows the same steady income without affecting the game experience. Just say no.

The fact that f2p iap titles sell well just proves my argument that “the game is not made to have the most fun with, but to make the most money out of you by artifical limiting the experience”. I didn’t say these games are not financially successful, because they are.

If the free2play games are so much fun to play, you’d expect to see a lot of sequels in the charts to build on previous success. In the top grossing list (which favour inapp free2play titles) there are no f2p sequels as opposed to 2-4 paid sequels.

So it seems the only way to get people to play your f2p iap title is to make it appear like a new experience by reframing the theme, from restaurant to club to bakery – or from vampire to gangster to army.

Is this because people get jaded from the f2p model?

☰ Star Wars: The Greedy Republic

Buying the game today for  £50-£65 from Origin will not only give you a holographic dancer (!) and allow you to change the color of your lightsaber (!), but also get you early access, before everyone else! How early is this access that you pay a £30 premium for?

Precise dates will be revealed at a later time.

Via Preorder FAQs | Star Wars: The Old Republic. It’s time to find another hobby.

☰ My thoughts exactly

Eurogamer writes:

The community has also pointed out that SecuROM does nothing to stop piracy, as Spore was cracked before public release. Instead, they argue, the real target is the pre-owned, trade-in market.

☰ Piracy and pc gaming

Interesting article regarding piracy and pc gaming:

Recently there has been a lot of talk about how piracy affects PC gaming. And if you listen to game developers, it apparently is a foregone conclusion – if a high quality PC game doesn’t sell as many copies as it should, it must be because of piracy.

Now, I don’t like piracy at all. It really bugs me when I see my game up on some torrent site just on the principle of the matter. And piracy certainly does cost sales.  But arguing that piracy is the primary factor in lower sales of well made games? I don’t think so. People who never buy software aren’t lost sales.

Is it about business or glory: http://draginol.joeuser.com/article/303512/Piracy_PC_Gaming

☰ Games for Windows Live Marketplace likely

From Eurogamer: Unangst said Microsoft would "continue to invest" in Games for Windows, which apart from giving its games an Xbox Live-style service layer with friends lists, Achievements and the like, also insists that games be easy to install, support widescreen displays and include parental controls.

It all sounds promising. The one thing I was most impressed with on Xbox 360 is the whole integration and lack of configuration for games, if they can bring that to Windows Vista then a lot of people will be very happy.

Some ideas:
You can see how they could potentially take the experience index benchmarking framework and develop that into something that can adjust games visual quality, automatic updating and applying of patching without user intervention, matchmaking and the community features could all be very useful and add value to PC gaming. Even some sort of integrated anti piracy tool developed for Microsoft that doesn’t rootkit your machine which would be less painful to consumers would also be an improvement over the current situation.