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Starcraft Ghost Put On Hold
After numerous previous delays, Blizzard has made the likelihood we'll ever play Starcraft: Ghost effectively nil. They've announced they're putting game development on hold indefinitely, as they're reconsidering options for the next generation of consoles. From the Gamespy article: "Like many in the industry, we've been impressed with the potential of the new consoles, and we're looking forward to exploring that potential further ... In addition to allowing us to determine the best course for StarCraft: Ghost, this review period will help us lay the groundwork for our future console games."
So instead of innovative games offering multifaceted gameplay we get online environments where people can yell at each other. Suck.
Remember that their parent company VU is one of the world's largest media companies now, has had losses in the range of Bill Gates's entire wealth, and the good chunk of one billion USD that Wow pulls in is the only thing keeping their gaming division afloat. Folks who play wow know that it's not getting alot of it's profits reinvested. Player theory is like Sony Games keeping Sony's other divisions up, VU is using Wow to get urgent hard cash. Because they're such fucking sad sacks of shit, instead of using enough to reinvest in the golden goose, they're forcing it to lay eggs on a starvation diet. VU is gonna kill wow, ghost was just the first fucking step.
I'd say more, but my guild is raiding.
I really think the problem with Ghost is that they know that it isn't going to whet any Starcraft fan's appetite. On the other hand, they've invested so much (as it seems) into building this that they can't axe it like they did Warcraft Adventures.
Unfortunately, having announced this before the Xbox was originally released and now with the XBox on its way to its deathbed I'm not entirely surprised to see this getting put on hold permenantly or for the next gen depending on which story you want to believe. With it's only target platforms getting phased out at the end of the year is not a good time to release especially if you want to get anything back on a title thats been in development as long as this has.
Let's not forget that its shifted development teams twice and then brought internal when they acquired the last development studio that was working on it. Also, I believe the gameplay and style was different at every E3 it was shown at (based on reports), which doesn't help either.
Sadly, the name is quite fitting now.
Insert Sig Here
No, seriously, that wasn't just a joke. Where is the higher return on investment for a couple million dollars and thousands of hours of programmer time -- improving WoW's sales by 5% or delivering a smash-hit console FPS? When you sell a box of FPS: The Killing for the PlayCube360, you have to split the pie with the console manufacturer (license fees) and the retail store. When you sell an auto-billed monthly subscription to MMORPG: The Farming, you send Mastercard their 50 cents and then the rest is almost pure profit directly in your pocket (we'll ignore Blizzard's China operations, where they get a very, very tiny slice of the pie relative to their Chinese partner -- its still Almost Free Money from their perspective). Add to that WoW is currently dominating its category and the FPS market is saturated by a bunch of name brands, none of which have "Blizzard" on the box...
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
"send 400 Zerglings hurtling towards the enemy base all at once" Don't you mean: Select 12 zerglings, send to enemy Select 12 zerglings, send to enemy Select 12 zerglings, send to enemy Select 12 zerglings, send to enemy... Starcraft is great in many ways, but awful in several others. Instead of Ghost can't we just have a version with better squad handling, order queues, and not locked to 640x480*? It'd take them a month to make, and me and half a million other fans would buy it. It's like they have so much money they don't care any more. *I appreciate that a locked resolution creates a level playing ground. So force the same resolution among all players in multiplay, just let it be higher...
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