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Gamer Wins $1M For Pitching Virtual "Perfect Game"
A few months ago, 2K Sports announced a unique contest to promote a new game they were working on, Major League Baseball 2K10. They said whichever gamer was the first to pitch a perfect game and provide proof would win $1 million, with the contest running for two months. Reader yukk tips news that the two months have now passed, and 2K Sports has announced a winner. It turns out the prize was won on the very first day, by a player who had put less than an hour and a half of effort into it.
Fastest baseball game ever, that wasn't called due to weather.
The most boring possible video game genre.
Playing baseball - boring.
Watching baseball - very boring.
Playing a video game of baseball - even more boring.
Watching someone play a video game of baseball - kill me now.
Sent from my PDP-11
But apparently they researched how long to keep the contest open AFTER getting their first winner in less than 24 hours. It would be interesting to know how many copies of the game they sold on Day 1 and how many they sold from Day 2 to when they actually announced they had a winner.
"The funny thing is I haven't even come close since then," McGilberry said. "There must have been something special about that day."
Having actually played the game, getting a perfect game is not easy.
You have to get 27 straight outs. You get an out one of two ways: 1) you strike out the batter, or 2) the batter hits the ball and your defence gets the batter out. Complicating things further, it gets progressively harder to pitch accurately when your pitcher gets tired (after you hit about 80 pitches, you have less than half a second to complete the pitching gesture. After 100 pitches, good luck getting a good pitch off even if you pull off the gesture under a quarter of a second).
So you have to weigh whether you want to focus on strike outs and risk getting your pitch count too high to handle, or you focus on trying to get the batter to hit into the defence and keep your pitch count low. If you try to pitch to hit, you risk having a ball just dribble by your infield or having a blooper drop in between your infield and outfield, ruining your game. Adding to the frustration is a buggy infield AI that sometimes allows soft liners through, or the first baseman running for a ball that should've been the second baseman's thus leaving first base empty.
In any event, minus the buggy infield AI, the perfect game challenge highlighted something very important for MLB 2K10. When you're pitching, it is a pretty immersive experience. You really feel the pressure when you're delivering the pitch, and you have that split second of helplessness and frustration when the batter makes solid contact with the ball.
Pitching is definitely the highlight of the game, and the reward did a pretty good job to draw attention to that. Although we can't speak to the financial success of the campaign without any sales stats, it was at least a success in the sense that it was effective in showcasing the strongest aspect of the game.
Yeah, I'm jealous too :-)
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Sounds a bit low to me. If he were a real major league pitcher, he would get paid nearly $1 million just for showing up to a game, even if he lost.
I remember a similar situation with Virginia's scratch-off lottery tickets: a fixed number of tickets are printed with winning numbers, and once those prizes are all claimed, the Lottery Agency is supposed to pull the remaining tickets since they're all losers. But of course, they don't.
Ibid.
ummmm they probably are happy because first they got some attention when they first announced the contest, a lot of people went out and bought the game so the could participate in the contest, and now they get a lot of articles written about the contest and the happy winner of the game. People reading those articles will think more positively about 2K Sports, and the baseball game. They aren't looking at it like they're giving away a million dollars, they're looking at it like they're paying a million dollars for a lot of good publicity.
They could have spent that money on ads that most people would ignore. But instead the spent a million dollars on a contest which gets articles written about it on websites like slashdot and have people discussing it.
What he's saying is that the good publicity they got was worth more to them than $1 millon.