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A Path To Western Online Games Success in Asia

The author of this article, Tim Allison, mentions this very thing with regard to control schemes...

"In Asia the gamers want to have their right hand free to answer the mobile phone, smoke or drink while playing."

How interesting, actually Nintendo's Wii games do NOT sell well, if you look in to the attach rates for the Wii they are significantly lower than both the 360 and the PS3, there's a large large quantity of Wii owners out there with either one game (Wii sports) or perhaps one more)

Well the attach rate is lower, as expected if you believe that the Wii has had a wider appeal outside the usual young male market for computer games. But to say that Nintendo's games do not sell well is ludicrous, looking at VGChartz http://vgchartz.com/games/ best selling games for this week, out of the top ten FOUR are Nintendo games for the Wii! Last year Nintendo was the largest http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15779 publisher of computer games. I think this Christmas will be an interesting time for the Wii, by then the 3rd party developers should have been able to write some good games after initially ignoring the Wii.

You are correct. Apparently he was inspired by Risk, but it's obviously not based on it (unless you use the Hollywood "based on a true story" type definition I guess!).

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17549 "You are what you are at launch." WAR has been postponed a bunch of times. If they're going to launch with severely stunted *basic* content they're essentially crippling the game for the rest of its lifespan. Seriously, when MMOs launch there are always a bunch of bugs that need to be concentrated on in the first few weeks/months of the game's life. If they can't launch 4 of the 6 capital cities, how quickly can we expect to see those FOUR remaining cities given the other demands of the game's launch? Not good for them at all. They've been in development for a while and I'm sure that they have financial realities pressuring them but this isn't going to help the game at all.

ART AND GAME DESIGN (24 months)
Producer 10000 x 24 = 240000
Deisgner 3000 x 24 = 96000
3D Artist 3500 x 24 = 84000
Level Designer 3500 x 24 = 84000
Animator 1500 x 24 = 36000
2D Artist 1500 x 24 = 36000

That's over half the game's development budget to create textures, models, and levels, most of which the player will see only once. As it is, the industry's hits subsidize the misses. I think we'll be forced to look for ways to make individual artists more powerful in the next 5 years.

The History of Computer Role-Playing Games Part III: The Platinum and Modern Ages (1994-2004)

For you cheap folks, a version of this work was on Gamasutra last year:

* Part 1

* Part 2

* Part 3

Not sure if this is the entire book or not.

For you cheap folks, a version of this work was on Gamasutra last year:

* Part 1

* Part 2

* Part 3

Not sure if this is the entire book or not.

For you cheap folks, a version of this work was on Gamasutra last year:

* Part 1

* Part 2

* Part 3

Not sure if this is the entire book or not.

Technically you could say that Microsoft doesn't do anything profitably except OS and Office software.

Technically that would make them a two-trick pony, which is twice as good as a one-trick pony.

Xbox360 while considered a success is nearly $6billion in debt

Wrong.

The list goes on.

Go on then. The development tools division has been in the black for a long time, as has the server products division (outside of Windows Server, which is also on the black). Their hardware group (input devices and things like WiFi adapters) has also always turned a profit. The Mobile Devices and business solutions groups lost no more than $10 million last quarter, IIRC. MSN is also in the black (not at Google levels obviously), and Hotmal is part of that. So Zune and, outside of the XBox, the home entertainment division also lost money. What else?

A friend told me that a version of Spyro the Dragon had an excellent system in place if it detected you playing a pirated version. Apparently various key items would not be available (making the game unfinishable) but you wouldn't be aware of this until you had played quite a way into the game. There's a Gamasutra article talking about the steps Insomniac took to try and make life more difficult for pirates.

Firs off, the job posting you are looking for is "Game Designer". Depending on the company and the actual job the Game Designers duties will vary though. Sometimes it could be just story writing, other times they could be looking for level designers, game ballance, event scripters. Frequently the designer will be doing all of those things and more. Rarely is there a posting specificaly for story writer. Although, here are some exceptions.
Secondly, to get into the field you really just need to (come close) to the requirements posted in the job listing and apply by sending in a resumey and/or filling out the job aplication provided with the listing. For a writer, have a portfolio of your work handy if they want to see some samples. Most companies these days want you to have a degree, so if you do not have any college that would be the best place to start if you are having trouble getting picked up.
I could go on forever but this should help get you started. Good Luck.

CN: Is that the converse of "The PC market is dead?"

RK: Well, yeah. I'm one of the people who went out there and said, "Single-player gaming is doomed," and I actually used that phrase. An Xbox Live Achievement is a soul-bound item, and Gamerpoints are experience points, and BioShock is a one-man instance dungeon in the Xbox Live MMO. That is the direction that single-player gaming is going, frankly.

Spiro: Year of the dragon employed exactly this. But it was to stop piracy for a few weeks in order for sales to peak. The right idea is to not affect paying customers by delaying the availability of a pirate release - Not to stomp it out completely.

Movies, music, theme parks, vacations and restaurants are some of the activities consumers will likely scale back on, before they cut out their video game budget, especially in the core video game sector.

Slashdot isn't the place for any positive information about the 360. It's rather silly, because for any up-and-coming game coder, it's probably not a wise one to ignore or spit at.

Rather than advertising, the niche I'm focusing on is facilitating bargains between artist and audience, given these two parties seem most interested in an exchange of art for money.

I started thinking along these lines when wondering how on earth one could enable members of the public to sell 3D art in a virtual world if it was completely decentralised (lawless wild-west):
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/article_display.php?category=14

I then proposed an auction mechanism whereby an audience could haggle with an artist and all arrive at an agreeable price (that all successful bidders would pay), sooner or later.
http://www.digitalartauction.com/

I then decided something simpler would be better: http://www.quidmusic.com/

Convinced I was on the right track, but not convinced I was best placed to take quidmusic forward, I decided to create an engine that would support all manner of sites that needed to enable trading between artist and audience, i.e. http://www.contingencymarket.com/ . This, being commission free, would then enable anyone to use it in support of their own site.

I'm now working on an even simpler site than quidmusic: 1p2u.com . It's in very early stages of development, but this will test/debug/demonstrate the contingencymarket. I'll then use it to replace the engine in quidmusic, and finally implement digitalartauction, and others.

Do you mean like Accordian Hero?

At the Game Developer's Conference 2008 there was an inter species game design and Steve Meretzky's game idea helps further our bacterial/human relations.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17562

I for one will be pre-ordering a TrayStation to do my part in natural selection.

This "PC gaming is dying" meme is bullshit. If you count international sales, online sales and subscriptions, online games in flash and Java, PC gaming is much bigger than consoles, AND GROWING. Bloggers and developers who keep repeating that PC gaming is dying are talking out of their asses. See here for more:

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17744

Umm, corrected link, duh.

Market share for 360 is lowest amongst consoles, even in US.

Here is an opposing viewpoint from Doug Lombardi.

I tend to agree that PC gaming is not going away. PC game programming definitely has it's challenges. The console programmer is programming for known hardware so he can optimize much more easily than a PC game programmer who has to deal with unknown graphics capabilities, cpu speed, memory size, monitor resolution, etc. Good graphics APIs help, but do not take the problem away. OTOH, once you have programmed for this variability, you have a more portable game. When I buy a new PC, I don't mind paying a few hundred more for discrete graphics card (I don't buy consoles anyway), and I enjoy loading all my old games onto it and knowing they'll (usually) still work. Sometimes I even find that some group has created a modified version of the game that improves the experience on faster hardware (like open GL versions of doom or descent). Also, user created content (maps, characters, campaigns, etc) is an area where PC games outshine their console counterparts.

Likely here...

Be sure to enable the macros included and then Alt+F8, and run.

Here's the demos they show in the youtube videos.

Press ALT+F8 to run and press ESC to stop. They work in Office 2007 in addition to whatever they had in the youtube videos (2k3 I assume).

Yup, Gamasutra has a copy (word doc).

Bear in mind this is data from year one, and we're now a few years into station exchange. But still a good read.

RTFA - they already did write an article on the Commodore 64, but I can't find the Slashdot article for it.

FWIW, here's the link: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1991/a_history_of_gaming_platforms_the_.php

TFA much?

[Gamasutra's A History of Gaming Platforms series continues with a look at the Apple II system. Perhaps best-remembered for its ubiquity in U.S. classrooms in the 1980s, the computer was also a popular gaming system. Need to catch up? Check out the first two articles in the series, covering the Commodore 64 and the Vectrex.]

And yes, the Apple II series was the first kick-ass game system. I'm old enough to remember first-hand. What was the Apple's competition? The TRS-80? I had one... the games were meh at best. Certainly, in any game that was released on both of those platforms, the Apple's version looked and sounded better.

Oh, yeah. What did Commodore have at this time? The PET? I heard rumors it had games.

Now, contemporaneous with the C64 in the Apple stable was the IIGS. Amazing, but still basically trailing edge. Like the absolute technological pinnacle in steam locomotives at the time that the diesel-electric was becoming the mainstream rail propulsion system. The C64 and the Amiga pwn'd the IIGS in almost every meaningful way. (Yes, I know what I'm talking about. I have all three.)

TFA much?

[Gamasutra's A History of Gaming Platforms series continues with a look at the Apple II system. Perhaps best-remembered for its ubiquity in U.S. classrooms in the 1980s, the computer was also a popular gaming system. Need to catch up? Check out the first two articles in the series, covering the Commodore 64 and the Vectrex.]

And yes, the Apple II series was the first kick-ass game system. I'm old enough to remember first-hand. What was the Apple's competition? The TRS-80? I had one... the games were meh at best. Certainly, in any game that was released on both of those platforms, the Apple's version looked and sounded better.

Oh, yeah. What did Commodore have at this time? The PET? I heard rumors it had games.

Now, contemporaneous with the C64 in the Apple stable was the IIGS. Amazing, but still basically trailing edge. Like the absolute technological pinnacle in steam locomotives at the time that the diesel-electric was becoming the mainstream rail propulsion system. The C64 and the Amiga pwn'd the IIGS in almost every meaningful way. (Yes, I know what I'm talking about. I have all three.)

I think this was posted on Slashdot once, so you may have seen it before, but there is an excellent article by David Sirlin on Gamasutra that's about this very distinction.

David Sirlin's website is also full of great articles about game design and theory, if you're into that kind of thing it's definitely worth reading through.

Before the writing started, we met with Erik [Wolpaw] and discussed our list of narrative constraints. Since at the time we were using some Half-Life art assets, and because we wanted to leave ourselves the option of someday using the portal gun in a Half-Life game, we decided that the story should in some way connect to the Half-Life universe.

the scrappy, unethical scientific rival of Half-Life's Black Mesa.

Actually, if analysts are correct, Blizzard's average revenue per subscriber is still quite high, even with Asian players factored in.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16519

This article speaks to that. Even is they aren't bringing in $15 per subscriber per month, they're still doing surprisingly well. WOW is just a phenomenon plain and simple.

Consoles are actually an excellent example of the fact that people who buy cheap systems will avoid paying for software unless they absolutely have to. If this wasn't the case, then they wouldn't have increasingly complex internal DRM systems, there wouldn't have been enough of a market for "mod chips" that bypass said DRM systems for them to exist, and the console manufacturers wouldn't have regarded those "mod chips" as enough of a threat to their licensing revenue to bother doing everything in their power to prevent them being manufactured, sold, or installed.

Here are some links which show (a) piracy flourishes when people can bypass a system's internal DRM, and (b) all three major console manufacturers take this threat very seriously indeed:

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/28984/Piracy-drive-threatens-Nintendo-DS
http://www.thetanooki.com/2007/11/26/r4-chip-costing-nintendo-millions-in-ds-software-sales/
http://www.playnoevil.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/1355-Nintendos-success-is-breeding-Piracy-Problems.html
http://www.gamersevolved.com/nintendo-ds-tries-to-put-stop-to-piracy.html
http://www.gamingbits.com/content/view/2884/2/
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/emergingtech/0,1000000183,39161307,00.htm
http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/05/sony-busts-down-mod-chip-retailer-with-9-mil-lawsuit/
http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2003/07/31/sony-wins-australian-mod-chip-case
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/4407.cfm
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/13847/532/
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/3401.cfm
http://www.news.com/2100-1040-962797.html
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=6042
http://www.geek.com/three-people-facing-charges-for-xbox-piracy/

There are countless other similar links that prove how reluctant people are to pay for software on any low-cost platform if they can find a way of not doing so.

I never had a vectrex as a kid but my friend had one and got to play it a few times. What I've always wondered was how were those 3d glasses? I mean just look at those suckers
http://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/images/feature/3117/image011.jpg

As a kid i was dying to try it.

It's been said a couple of times, but I'll reiterate it. With the deal, Blizzard retains its operating independence. Source.

Erm, which I suppose I should link.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16457

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=14803

But you're right. I should read these a little closer. This was only for part of one year.

And yet, he really should be taking full responsibility for this mess. Read http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1552/the_subversion_game_an_interview_.php for an eye opener into how this guy thinks. It was also published in Game Developer mag a few months before. Especially pay attention to the things he starts saying about game development around page 3, and the fact that he mentions Deus Ex every other sentence or so in an article about his new game, and tries to railroad around actually talking about his new game. Never have I seen a game designer with his head stuck so far up his own ass.

"If patent claims continue to be asserted against us, we may be unable to sustain our current business models or profits, or we may be precluded from pursuing new business opportunities in the future."

Honestly, I find option #3 the most likely as well as the most potentially damaging. This form of corporate predation/extortion is likely to prevent the release of old source code, as well as stifling innovation among games. A disturbing trend of patents that cover not just specific technical processes, but actual gameplay, has the potential to really kill innovation among small to mid-sized developers, not just damaging large companies.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=8279

This kind of crap really has to be stopped.

Also, "failing" to crack a game? Even Starforce was cracked. Give me a break.

Give me a break.

Media has been devalued to the point of no return.

Second, the SDK is integrated with the game to act as a client to Massive's ad servers. It allows the game to fetch the ad, display it on a surface, and analyze how the player acts around it. Massive refers to this as "Phase II: Integration of the Software Development Kit (SDK)."

Bullshit. Sony is a hardware manufacturer. They make the whole thing from end to end. They create the price and take all the profit

Regardless, they are in fact selling the system at a loss...as the price of BlueRay comes down, I imagine they will start to make a profit on the hardware, but that's not currently where their money is coming from. The GP is correct, they make money off of licensing games to run on their system.

Gordon Walton, co-studio director at BioWare Austin, summed it up in a speech he gave last month at the Austin Game Developer's Conference. (a write up on the speech can be found here

"I think that quality was a true innovation on Blizzard's part. Nobody had done that before at that level of play. Because they did that, their game stood out night and day above everybody else's games. What's the biggest mistake? What everybody did without exception -- shoving it out the door.

"You have one chance to make a first impression; the brand value of an MMO is created within the first week of launch. End of story. You're done the first week... I say a week, but it might even be a day. It's a post-World Of Warcraft world. You better do that."

So I take this as a positive sign that Mythic wants to make a bunch of money, and realize that if they don't take the time to do it right the first time, it will not make the kind of money they want.

• You mentioned XBox Arcade ($280) getting 5 arcade games, but you didn't mention that the Pro ($350) and Elite ($450) are getting bundled with Forza 2 (normally $60 retail) and Marvel Ultimate Alliance ($26).
• You mentioned the Elite having an HDMI port, but the new Pro and Arcade (Core) packages will also be getting HDMI ports.

Printer friendly mah dawgz

I don't know why everyone's suddenly demanding citations and evidence and stuff for this. It's not like it should be news to geeks that there's a huge misogynist streak in geek culture! We've had articles here on /. before on the subject, but I guess some people like to pretend.
  Heck, I've noticed this nastiness going back decades. I remember hearing fellow geeks back in the late eighties make snide remarks about how Dona Bailey "didn't REALLY write Centipede, Atari only gave her credit for it as a marketing stunt aimed at liberals and women's groups."
  That reminds me, Gamasutra recently did an excellent interview with Dona Bailey: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1659/the_original_gaming_bug_centipede_.php?page=1
  - mantar