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• Relevance (*) -- The games are talking about the world I live in, and the things that are happening in it. So in that sense, they're relevant to me.
• Insight -- I've learned a lot from these games that have kept me up at night, thinking. Mei Ling rocks my world.
• Authenticity -- The games strike me as authentic, somehow.
• Humor -- ...and they're fun. :)

Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. has announced that it has opened a new development studio under its 2K label in Shanghai, China. The new studio, 2K Shanghai, is completing development of the Chinese-language version of Sid Meier's Civilization: IV for the PC expected to be available later this summer.

Does this means that Jack Thompson eventually won? That can't be good...

I've linked to it once in this forum, but here's some Solid Snake clarification. Konami isn't concerened what system he appears on. Apparently they just didn't want it on the XBox. But he has already appeared on the Gamecube with Twin Snakes (a gorgeous remake of the orignal Metal Gear Solid).

In the third part of the article, Kojima states it's possible we'd see a Wii MGS. E3 this year definatly delivers!

Microsoft has sold about five million consoles in eight months.

They wouldn't be talking about a goal of 6M in 12 months then. I'd be surprised if they sold substantially more than half

And they aren't; they're talking 10 million

FF13 is a collaboration between the Kingdom Hearts and the Advent Children teams.

It will be one big cutscene. If you press X during the game, you will get a Game Over screen, with the traditional ff music and stars flying around.

Gamasutra had an interestng article about support desks for computergames a little while ago. You can read it here.
It gives an interesting list of what to do with which emails, when to press delete and when to press reply, what to do if somebody threatens to commit suicide and so on.

Gamasutra had an interestng article about support desks for computergames a little while ago. You can read it here.
It gives an interesting list of what to do with which emails, when to press delete and when to press reply, what to do if somebody threatens to commit suicide and so on.

on the hardware front, it was revealed that the Xbox 360 sold through just under 200,000 copies in North America in March, showing the continued shortages of the console, allegedly now ameliorated. Elsewhere, the PlayStation 2 still led the way with almost 275,000 sales, and the Xbox (just under 85,000) and GameCube (just under 65,000) brought up the rear.

This compares to 160k XBOX 360s sold in Februrary according to February game sales continue slide:

According to industry sources, more than 160,000 Xbox 360s were sold in February. That compares to more than 300,000 PlayStation 2's, more than 170,000 PlayStation Portables, and over 150,000 Nintendo DS units sold during the month of February.

The only really interesting number to me is that almost six months after the launch of the 360, PS2s are still moving off the shelves faster than 360s. But before one reads to much into that, it ought to be recognized that the 360 hasn't been introduced into all markets while the PS2 has pretty much gone into every geographic area where it will be sold. Hence when the March numbers were released, which included Australia for the first time, it wasn't the same comparison as for February. The flip side of that fact, though, is that XBOX sales in existing markets may have declined in March. I don't know how many units were sold in Australia and other new markets that ought to be subtracted from the 200k March figure to compare to the 160k Feb figure.

In any case, better numbers won't really be availible next year. IMO, the key numbers to watch for (assuming Revolution and PS2 launches this fall) will be the Q4 2006 reports. Although, it will be significant if the PS2 continues to outsell the 360 in Q2 and Q3 of 2006.

I agree with you about the UK sales chart. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only gamer in the UK who doesn't own a need for speed or FIFA game.There is some hope however, for example, Shadow of the Colossus was once top of the charts,http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index .php?story=8235. It was only for a week but it still shows that even mighty EA can be defeated once in a while.

Didn't see that. You're wrong though. Games are not a niche market.

For example:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?st ory=7563

5 million subscribers, and that's just a single game. I think more people game than you realize.

"The government is not a parent. The game store is not a parent. This is NOT parental control. This is government as 'father knows best' for everyone. The ESRB is enough to inform parents of the content of a game just as the MPAA rates films - there is no need for government involvement."

The govt doesn't decide what games get an M-rating, the game industry does. Why should game sellers get to decide if my 14yo can buy an M-rated game? That should be my choice.

Here's the correct link to Creating a Global MMO.

If you actually think that it is just "Japaneese RPGs" that are holding the XBox 360 down you should really look at this:

(Top 100 selling games in Japan in 2005)
http://the-magicbox.com/Chart-BestSell2005.shtml

You're right in pointing out that several of them are "Japaneese RPGs" but you'll notice that the vast majority of big sellers in Japan could be described as games that Microsoft isn't interested in Developing, doesn't encourage other people to Develop for the XBox, and would not advertize for a third party who produced a game like that.

If you take a look at the list, a large majority of the list is composed of Nintendo titles (many of them being Pokemon). Obviously MS (nor Sony) can't get any of those games. Also, I'm not sure where you get that MS isn't interested in developing those types of games, or wouldn't advertise for a third party that made those games. I think part of the problem may be that Nintendo and Sony are both primarily Japanese companies, and a large number of the games on that list are titles we don't even see in the US. Quite a few are anime-inspired (Naruto, DBZ, Gundam, etc.), for example. Nintendo and Sony have much better access to those types of games, and that's probably one large reason why those consoles fare better in Japan than the Xbox or 360.

Now there IS a MS game studio in Japan that's supposed to be focused on making games for the Japanese audience. So either it's not doing a good job, or they're just having a difficult problem acquiring developers, etc.

For the most part, if some developer approached Microsoft with Animal Crossing, Nintendogs, Brain Training, or Katamari and wanted Microsoft to publish it for the XBox, Microsoft would have replied "It's a cute game, but we really don't think that our audience (12-30 year old insecure North American Males) is all that interested in a game like that".

A few weeks ago, I would have agreed 100%. But it looks like that attitude is changing. See Viva Pinata, Rare's newest game. I think MS is finally understanding that it needs to do more than just appeal to the hardcore audience. (Xbox Live Arcade is certainly helping there ... I've heard of a lot of wives getting addicted to Zuma on the 360)

In order for Microsoft's XBoxes to survive in Japan they'd need exclusive support from several of Nintendo, Bandai, Namco, Capcom and Konami; and this point in time they don't have exclusive suport from any of those companies.

Well obviously they can't get support from Nintendo. ;)

But I agree. The key is getting exclusives. Currently they're doing a good job of at least getting multi-platform support from said companies, but they'll have a hard time beating Sony, as long as they keep getting titles like God of War, Tekken, Soul Calibur, Katamari, etc.

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060317/zelfden _01.shtml

The summary doesn't mention it and the article is really slow to load, but this is a joint project between Nvidia and Havok (the physics engine from Halo 2, Half-Life 2, and a bunch of other games).

There's some more information over at Gamasutra and Havok's site.

Um...no, no they're not. That article is from March 2005--it's over a year old. Marvel and NCSoft settled out of court in December.

More people agree with you than you may think. You may want to read this article on the MMO Rant at last year's Austin Game Conference. One of my favourite bits comes from former Sony Online VP Gordon Walton:

"We are herd animals. We are employing herd strategies in a creative business," he said, adding that everyone jumps on a successful idea, and makes a copy, but makes it worse. "Why do we do this? We do this because we're freaking mammals." Risk-mitigation, he claims, is a cause of our being mammals and more importantly, primarily herbivores who stick to the inside of the herd, for protection. "We're just a bunch of freaking mammals doing stupid stuff without thinking. And the thing that we're up to here is creativity. ... We're doing the same s--t over and over again. We're not taking risk with gamplay. We're not taking risks with genre. We're not taking risks with audience," [...] "We need to stop running down other people doing crazy s--t. We need to celebrate somebody who is nutty enough to try something new and fall flat on their face. If we can get a hundred people to do that, two of them won't fall flat on their face. Our dev cycles are too long, which means we're not interating fast enough," he said. "Our strength is innovation and we're blowing our strength in this particular market."

David Sirlin is a good friend of mine.

He recently wrote a Soapbox opinion piece on Gamasutra which prompted this /. story. The story summary highlighted the main point of the piece well and it drew a lot of comments, but of course, only a tiny fraction of even the highly-rated posts demonstrated understanding of the real arguments.

This problem was largely remedied over the past couple weeks in the discussion on Sirlin's blog where myself and other comment authors helped clarify the points that the casual reader habitually missed. Many interesting topics came up and I think your recognization of the "original twitch based videogame generation" being against the "new 'MMO' skill-less videogame-as-timesink generation" is wholly in line with the article and discussion.

The idea of lobbying for legal restrictions on games or their players is a distasteful one to me though. I would like to think marketers can make their proposed progress towards solving the political problems and intolerance the game industry faces... but I also feel the emphasis on marketing anything (over creating quality and superiority that speaks for itself) is the deeper issue. Salespeople are paid to convince and deceive others into becoming customers. In this interconnected information age we live in, the resentment towards advertisers telling us what to buy is on the rise. We'll see where it goes.

Anyway, you don't sound too nuts to me. Then again, a lot of people call me crazy so I'm maybe not the best judge. =)

-Pip

As far as I am aware Sony never actually announced a spring release for America.

But more to the point, it's not that Sony isn't hitting their announced ship date, it's that the ship date is so long after the 360 ship date. Until the PS3 ships, the entire console gaming market can't decide if they should (a) get a 360, (b) get a PS3, or (c) stick with what they got. And if you don't know what console you'll have in a year, you're not going to buy any games.

PS2 games absolutely can and will continue to sell briskly right up to the PS3 release...

You might be interested in this article from Gamasutra
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060222/sirlin_ 01.shtml

And reader respones to that article
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060224/qhong_0 1.shtml

You might be interested in this article from Gamasutra
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060222/sirlin_ 01.shtml

And reader respones to that article
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060224/qhong_0 1.shtml

How can I phrase this delicately... the character doesn't exist. The character doesn't do anything. It's just imaginary. We're on Slashdot, not some RPG WoW server so we can drop that facade right now.

The player either spent time playing the game or spent money buying gold. The availability of time to play WoW is just as disjoint from the game as the amount of real world USD available to buy virtual gold. One of the main reasons I don't play on-line RPGs is precisely this: it's obnoxious to me that I can't just sit down and play a fun game without some 12-year old who spends 4 or 5 hours a day coming around and squishing my character. Even if I'm smarter and a better gamer, even if I have more talent for the game it doesn't matter: the game gives preferential skills/stats/etc to people with an extreme excess of time on their hands (or no time management skills).

Remember that article about WoW teaching the wrong things? http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060222/sirlin_ 01.shtml

You're a perfect example of "1. Investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill." If you're going to give out virtual gold to any idiot with 5 hours to burn then why not let any idiot with $50 to burn get some too?

-stormin

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20040211/olsen_0 1.shtml

And yes, I said annual, and the most recent result I could find was 2003. I think the 2005 results are still being tallied? And 2004? Must have been a bad year...

And yes, I said annual, and the most recent result I could find was 2003. I think the 2005 results are still being tallied? And 2004? Must have been a bad year...

And yes, I said annual, and the most recent result I could find was 2003. I think the 2005 results are still being tallied? And 2004? Must have been a bad year...

And yes, I said annual, and the most recent result I could find was 2003. I think the 2005 results are still being tallied? And 2004? Must have been a bad year...

The device is clearly shown running a version of Halo...

The device is clearly shown running a version of Halo...

"The device is shown playing Halo..."

I hate to disappoint you, but that's certainly not the Halo I'm used to...

The author of TFA, David Sirlin, mentions several times how certain concepts from the game are "alien" to him, where at best some of the things he talks about are exaggerations of things I see all the time (time vs. skill, the clique-ish nature of guilds, etc). I wonder if it's because he has a job/background that would be alien to most people who live/work in less game-oriented environments?

No, seriously!

years ago there was this device by DigiScent called iSmell that could connect to your computer. By combining a mixture of base scents from a palette, the device could synthesize a number of different scents that would be aerated out. The human olfactory system can recognize far more distinct smells than what iSmell could mix, but DigiScent promised thousands of possible scent combinations.

The product became vaporware sure, but such a technology could increase sensory immersion in video games. It would be fun if different scents could be aerated to match game settings like the smell of a jungle in Splinter Cell. Surely someone at DigiScent imagined synthesizing the smell of gunpowder.

How about games that require players to use different scents during gameplay. For example, in Nintendo's Harvest Moon gamers can buy flowers for some of the game's female characters. One of the games puzzles could be to pick flowers based on scents that would be most pleasing to the recipient. Maybe in a murder mystery game, a player could sniff the scent of perfume and deduct that Ms. Peacock killed Mr. Body in the obvervatory with the new Nintendo controller.

iSmell was discussed at Wired.com too.

Apparently frolicking puppies are paying off for at least one company.

Looking at the picture in the referenced article it looks like Nintendo changed the controller a bit and it looks like that it may either be an analogue or a digital joystick. It also has two underside buttons, vs the one in the initial version. Compare:

    - original: http://things.wordherders.net/archives/revolution- controller-at-a-glance-20050915061358181-000.jpg
    - article: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060215/rev-con trol.jpg

This leads me to believe that Nintendo is still tweaking the controller and that we may see some more changes in the final version.

For those who missed it, Gamasutra's "Bad game designer, no twinkie!" article: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050603/adams_0 1.shtml

I work for a mobile games company. I will tell you that the market is not a mirage.

It's completely unsubstantiated to say that people in this industry are people who could not cut it in the console/PC world. Tell that to:
* Trip Hawkins (a founder of EA)
* John Carmack (from Quake fame)
* All the major publishers who release mobile games along with console counterparts (THQ, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, etc).
* All the major publishers who are re-releasing their famous console games (Konami, Capcom, Namco, etc).

Successful people in the console/PC games market are looking for the best ways to get into the mobile games market evidenced, of course, by EA's huge buyout of Jamdat.

Even giving thought that mobile games are limited to being bad versions of the console counterparts is plain wrong. Look at Yahoo Mobile Games. Yahoo Games has an unbelievably large gaming market that has no interest in playing console games. Many of them (who have computers) also have cell phones, and play those games as time fillers at home would play the same games as time fillers on a bus ride.

I can't stand it when people think of something as a potential "bubble" so they think it's something from which to stay away. There was a dot-com bubble, but the Internet is still here and a growing market. The mobile application industry may be a bubble in the sense that there are some uneducated investors throwing money at half-baked developers, but that does not mean that there are no developers with solid business models and evidence of growing revenue. It is impossible to ignore the numbers. 193 million mobile handsets sold in the US alone in 2004 with a $345 million gaming market. This is doubled from the previous year.

I will say that the industry will change many times in the next few years. Executives at major console publishers will have to learn to change their expectations in capabilities ("Why can't we make Need for Speed Underground on a device with 243 kB of RAM?"). Designers will have to come up with ideas to take advantage of networking/GPS capabilities unique to mobile. Independent developers will all die out without huge venture capital, big-name licenses, or big-name publishers to get carriers to put their games in their catalogs. The industry will think of better ways to sell games instead of "Pay me $5.99 for this game that you may only play once because it sucks," you'll see more of, "Thanks for buying the *INSERT NEXT BIG TOM CRUISE MOVIE* DVD/Theatre ticket, here is your link to download the mobile game! I hope you play it and other people see you playing it and give us more publicity for the movie!" Or in better networking environments, you'll see exactly what Flash game portals do and offer games for free if you look at an advertisement for 3 seconds.

Anyone who thinks the industry is limited has not enough exposure to the industry or is not imaginative enough.

>Just because they're saying it's being worked on doesn't mean that it'll ever be released.

Whatever has been going on all this time, it appears that now there is a 12/31/06 date with money attached, with millions already being paid.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?st ory=7993/

One other notable payment was the renegotiation of a $6 million charge due upon delivery of the final PC version of Duke Nukem Forever back in March 2005. The epic delay of 3D Realms' shooter has meant that $4.25 million of the final milestone payment has already been paid, alongside the promise of a final $500,000 upon the commercial release of Duke Nukem Forever prior to December 31, 2006.

from the previous story about Take Two's SEC 10K filing

maybe not worth the paper it's printed on, but this is way more detail than I've seen on this in years

Here is the link to the Gamasutra article:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?st ory=7993/

Market Capitalization-
Cisco= $114 billion- http://money.cnn.com/quote/snapshot/snapshot.html? symb=CSCO

Nintendo= $18.5 billion- http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?st ory=7930

I don't think Nintendo is going to buy Cisco.

This article states 600k units shipped. This article (from a previous story) states 1.5 million shipped worldwide. Now the 600k figure could just be domestic but I would except a higher ratio of domestic units to exports.

Last week Gamasutra asked our professional audience, "What hardware capabilities and software would be needed for a third company to create a competitive rival to the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP, and which companies might be capable of doing so? Should they try?"

[...] Of the cited companies who might possibly compete in this area, Apple and Microsoft were by far the most mentioned, with many readers citing Xbox Live and iTunes as superior distribution mediums.

When I was a 2nd year student we weren't this sort of stuff, makes me wish I went to Stanford.

You really don't need to go to some high-ranked CS university to do cool projects. I hear a lot of people on Slashdot griping about how they couldn't go to MIT/CMU/Stanford/CalTech/whatever. Okay, maybe you get some good lectures and have some bright people handy to work with, but that's really a drop in the bucket compared to what you choose to do yourself. If you read about the things you're interested in, work on some projects, you *will* know far more than the people that went to Ivy League U and didn't do anything themselves -- just went to class and read enough content to get their grades. You have powerful, inexpensive computers easily available. You have free high-quality development software (if you don't have Valgrind and gcc on your computer, you're really missing out). You have an Internet's worth of excellent resources available, along with research papers on every neat thing you can think of free for the downloading. You don't need a professor or a boss to say "okay, write me a Foobar" to write a Foobar -- as a matter of fact, if you're writing a Foobar for yourself, it's probably going to be a better Foobar than if you're writing it because someone else is making you do so. Same goes for reading an algorithms book or a research paper.

Plus, if you don't want to tackle a whole game, choose something that you *do* like doing -- AI, graphics, sound engine, networking -- and pick a random existing open-source project and put your ideas into it. Then you have a nice end result that you can show off to people ("That game you're playing? Yeah, I'm one of the authors"), you have encouragement to keep going (because it isn't just a lone you -- you get feedback when you do something cool), and if you want a good practical excuse, you have a resume item that shows that not only do you have the ability to work with people to produce neat things -- but you've done so simply because you like making neat things. Also, it's *fun* to add a new feature to a game and then play using said feature with the rest of the dev team.

Remember that Woz never got his college degree (well, until a few years ago, when he decided to go back and get it). He built cool things because he liked making cool things, not because someone in a suit told him to make something cool. The same's true of an awful lot of techie folks out there -- school is a convenient tool, but it's much less important than going out and actively learning about things, and the fact that your uni has "State" in its name doesn't have a heck of a lot to do with what you learn. Sure, your professor will assign a bunch of books to read, but you can write that final paper without learning all that much, and certainly with big gaps in what you know. On the other hand, you can read all you want about just about anything I can think of on that Internet-connected computer in front of you.

Universities enforce a lower bound on your knowledge at graduation. They have nothing to do with setting a ceiling.

I am more impressed by these guys: http://www.experimentalgameplay.com/ - 4 grad studens who created 50+ games in one semester.

The Experimental Gameplay Project began as a student pitched project at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. The project started in Spring 2005 with the goal of discovering and rapidly prototyping as many new forms of gameplay as possible. A team of four grad students, we locked ourselves in a room for a semester with three rules:

1. Each game must be made in less than seven days,
2. Each game must be made by exactly one person,
3. Each game must be based around a common theme i.e. "gravity", "vegetation", "swarms", etc.

As the project progressed, we were amazed and thrilled with the onslaught of web traffic, with the attention from gaming magazines, and with industry professionals and academics all asking the same questions, "How are you making these games so quickly?" and "How can we do it too?" Though we successfully met our goal of making over 50 games, we realized that this project had become much less about the games, and much more about the crazy development process - and how we could help others do the same thing. We wrote about this process in our whitepaper How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days.

How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20051026/gabler_ 01.shtml Recommended read.

Highbury publishing, the only independant games magazine publisher in the UK is going bust, the CEO has left and they're som 30 Million in Debt. Say hello to the Future publishing Monoculture. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?ss sdmh=dm4.160958&story=7491 Bastards!

I believe the article was in GD Magazine a few months ago, and as such doesn't exist online. However, there is a lot of great stuff on Game Developer's online site, Gamasutra.com, like this little gem about Half Life 1

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19991210/birdwel l_pfv.htm

I disagree with that assertion. But it may depend heavily on what our respective definitions of "computer scientist" and "software engineer" are.

How do you figure? As a developer of commercial embedded software, that hasn't been my experience. Teams usually consist of both...

Which is unusual. Software in many other application domains is developed almost exclusively by CS grads. Hence "embedded software [...] the software most likely to be written by people trained as engineers".

...but code written by Electrical Engineers, well, let's just say it's notorious.

Obviously, I can't speak to your personal experiences. I've seen some absolutely gawd-awful code written by graduates of "good" CS programmes and "good" engineering programmes.

Above all else, please save your judgement for the quality of particular education programs instead of blanketing an entire field with your views.

Fair enough. Perhaps I did generalize little much. In my defense, allow me to point out that these are not my views alone. See, for example, this article by Steve McConnell, or this article by David Parnas (I apologize for being unable to find a version available to non-IEEE members). Both of them make the same points about the differences between CS training and SE training that I have been attempting to make. It's not a question of whether or not CS grads can learn to do software engineering (they undoubtedly can, just as physicists can learn to be electrical engineers). It's a question of what the appropriate focus of the undergraduate programme is, and of whether we should assume that a CS programme is the correct preparation for industrial software developers.

It's important to note that these strong figures represent Nintendo hand-held units and games that consumers have purchased and are now enjoying at home or wherever they like to play.

Love the sexual definitions using community standards. It seems to include: "patently offensive to minors" Hell, there ain't no sexual content that most minors would find offensive ;)

True, but given how the USPTO isn't doing its job, some of the patents in video games would offend even a minor.