"Games that don't make it to market, probably shouldn't."
Can you keep your foot out of your mouth for one post? Games can fail to reach the market for a whole variety of reasons. Budgets get cut, schedules get shifted around, publishers make company-wide decisions to drop support for a specific platform or market sector, licenses fall through. Sometimes perfectly good, ready-to-ship games get mothballed for reasons completely beyond the developers' control.
Of course, most of the games that don't see the light of day the public gets to hear very little about, so I'll use as an example a game that reached retail by the skin of its teeth: Psychonauts. This game was dropped by Microsoft Game Studios, was very belatedly picked up by Majesco (not in the best of health as a publisher) and is still awaiting release in Europe through THQ. And yet it has been universally praised by critics, with Eurogamer naming it as their game of the year for 2005.
In future maybe you'll think for a second before issuing forth ill informed statements on the basis of worthless filler pieces on 1UP.com.
Do you think Bungie are a bunch of miracle workers? Halo 2 was just barely a year old at 360 launch (11/9/2004, compared to 11/22/2005). Consider that after Halo 2 I'm sure the guys took a nice long vacation, so scratch two months off of possible working time, and that the game would've needed to be completed by the beginning of November, so scratch of another month. So, Halo 3 designed and developed with high quality in 9 months (call it February to October)? I think not.
Of course, games companies don't start work on their next project before the current one hits retail. And they can have a two month vacation just for shipping. I'm sure a lot of developers reading this would like to live in your universe.
Perhaps you noticed the success of the Nintendo DS recently. Perhaps you read Nolan Bushnell's recent comments about how needlessly complex interfaces have scared away huge sections of the public over the last 15-20 years. A lot of people who don't play games now never will, true. But a great many people who don't play games now would do so if they were convenient and intuitive enough for them to buy into. Expect to see the Rev sold in non-specialist game shops, and advertised outside of the specialist press.
Furthermore, making games more accessible does not imply 'neglecting' traditional gamers in any way.
Oh, and go play Resident Evil 4 and re-evaluate your lazy views about the Gamecube accordingly, Mister self-proclaimed hardcore gamer.
I'm sure the above post sounds like standard griping against the slashdot editors to many readers. And taken alone, maybe it is. However, hundreds of slashdot readers with an interest in computer and video games have been voicing complaints about Michael 'Zonk' Zenke's editorship of this topic for months on end now.
Games.slashdot.org could be a useful channel for disseminating news (NOT rumour, puff-pieces, fanboy screeds and endless dupes) about games to a tech-savvy audience, not all of whom have the time or nous to seek out multiple dedicated games news sites and stay abreast of developments. It could nurture discussion between gamers with different (gaming and cultural) backgrounds. Maybe it could be a great platform for notable personalities in the industry (not just from the commercial side but also from the wild and woolly 'indie', fan-built, academic and hobbyist arenas) to answer questions, and get pertinent feedback.
Instead, by the application of apathy frequently flirting with outright incompetence, the editors seem happy to let slashdot's games coverage stagnate. It's useless to the games enthusiast, who will have read the news days ago, had the rumours debunked, and not had to suffer the constant mangling of truth and sentence structure that is the hallmark of a Zonk-approved post. It's even more useless to the more casual reader, who will wade through a few pages of misinformation and playground politics and will promptly filter the channel out.
No doubt Michael has a genuine enthusiasm for games (I understand he's a longtime pen-and-paper and MMO type of guy) but this isn't translating into useful or informative editorial work.
I think the parent comments explain the 'Zonk-hate' pretty clearly. He doesn't seem to read or understand most of the submissions he accepts. And he fishes for 'news' in contentless advertising channels like 1UP and IGN.
You're not alone. It defies belief that something so shallow, pretentious and trite is actually a commercial endeavour. There are a dozens of purely enthusiast-run fanzines, sites and fora that offer better informed, deeper and more entertaining writing about games.
Re "vested interest": It's not an issue of whether you stand to benefit financially. I don't think that you'd submit a news item one-sidedly criticising a Microsoft policy decision. But complaining about bias on Slashdot is kind of pointless, I guess.
"And claiming Live prevents entire genres of games has no basis in reality whatsoever."
How many MMORPGs are available on the Xbox again?
"You think they're making developers sign contracts that requires them to only make certain types of games on Xbox Live?"
I know for a fact that the third party contract makes it impossible to implement certain types of online game on the Xbox. They're not allowed to run games from their own servers without special dispensation. They're not allowed to connect to anything other than the Xbox Live servers or other Xboxes. They're not permitted to allow gamers on different platforms to play against Xbox users. The centralised subscription model makes it commercially suicidal to charge per-game subscription fees. This is why virtually all third party Xbox Live games run peer to peer. They're all FPS and driving games because they're cheap to put online, not persistent, and that's all that they can market to the incredibly homogenised 10% of the Xbox userbase that signed up to Live.
"Xbox Live is a framework that handles certain parts of online gaming so the developers don't have to worry about implementing it all over again - it doesn't prevent any types of games from being done over live."
See above. Developers can't cherry pick the beneficial features from the framework, they have to comply to the limitations as well. Xbox Live is an attempt to graft the product tying business model that works for traditional console games into the online space. It exists only to funnel revenue back to Microsoft. It won't work in a competitive environment, for the same reason the N64's expensive cartridges nuked third party support for the N64.
"Ask EA about that - you sign in through Live, but then you're on EA's servers doing things EA's way. And here's a hint - EA's way is pathetic. The largest game developer out there, and they can't even do a halfway decent service compared to Xbox Live."
If you thought about it for a second, you'd realise that EA's position is not one that they would choose to be in. They wanted to circumvent Live altogether, so that they could market online play to the whole of the Xbox user base, so that people who bought Madden on PS2 could play against people who bought it on Xbox (what with it being exactly the same game), and so that they didn't have to force their customers to pay an additional fee to take their games online. This would have been the ideal outcome for everyone involved.
Microsoft did not allow them to do this. The only reason EA games on Xbox have an online component at all (one that 90% of Xbox customers can't access) is because both MS and EA wanted EA's multiplatform titles to have identical feature lists on Xbox and PS2. It looked kind of stupid for MS to evangelise about online being the future when Madden and NHL only supported online play on PS2 and PC. They'll 'do it right' when it pays and when people can actually use it - which is why both Sony and Nintendo have chosen not to lock third parties into a closed system.
(Incidentally, they've drastically played down the "online is the future" spiel with the Xbox 360, for instance Robbie Bach said recently that they only expect 50% of Xbox 360 owners to ever take their machines online, let alone pay to play).
As for the actual EA/Live game experience, the only game that I've ever heard anyone complain about is Burnout 3, which is hardly a representative sample (having changed publishers midway through development and been rushed to market).
I know you're genuinely enthusiastic about XBL and there's no orchestrated FUD campaign going on. I still think it's unfortunate (and basically disingenuous, regardless of the intention) to not mention that you have a vested interest and aren't speaking from an unbiased position.
A closed system that locks in developers and prevents entire genres of games from being viable isn't the only way to make online console gaming work. Live is great at what it does, but not everyone just wants to play driving and shooting games against a userbase mainly made up of American teenagers who dictate the content that's available.
1. Hmm, is that the same Saige who posts on E2 and is a Microsoft employee? 2. The key difference between the PS2 and PS3 is that every PS3 is network ready out of the box. There won't be millions of offline legacy systems out there. As such it's meaningless to make a comparison between the way online play will be realised on the two systems. 3. Xbox Live still can't support non-trivial and persistent online games. Software support will go where the money and users are, not where the fanciest front end is. A lack of a unified gamertag doesn't stop 4.5m people playing WoW.
The status of the parent company isn't the issue. It's the timing and positioning of the product and the reasoning behind it that are uncannily similar to the DC. MS have been pretty frank that their strategy is to push the machine hard while it's not possible to make a like for like comparison between games running on the X360 and the PS3.
"Microsoft has realized that it really isn't even games that matter to a consoles success: it's culture."
If you genuinely think that a console can make headway without strong software support, you're insane. Even if you do subscribe to the theory that branding makes or breaks a console in the modern market, Sony have long since conquered that front anyway. The important indicator is unit sales, not paid placements on MTV.
You have some valid points there. Or rather, you might have had some about three years ago, before there was a thriving multi-million dollar global market for mobile games.
Your screen size argument is similarly broken. A standard sized phone can (and increasingly frequently, will) have a screen of at least Game Boy Micro quality. Games for phones, PDAs and handheld consoles are not striving for photorealism or immersion, they simply need visual clarity.
Congratulations on finally figuring out how to reply to comments.
So if a console makes its manufacturer a ton of money, and has a library of great games (that in many cases wouldn't have been possible on another format), under what criteria can it be classed as a failure, exactly?
The Xbox 360 still has minimal support from Japanese developers. Of the titles that have been announced, you can guarantee that anything worth playing will be ported to the PS3.
All of this talk about 'nationalism' and 'aesthetics' is dodging the issue. Endless Tom Clancy and Madden crap doesn't appeal to the majority of US gamers (just the same ~2m or so male teenagers), let alone those in Europe or Japan.
It's interesting that they will now openly admit that gaming isn't the focus of the device.
This only becomes a problem if the non-gaming plans for the device result in the system's gaming functions being compromised, as happened with Xbox Live.
$50 more than on any other platform. Which instantly makes the system uncompetitive for MMO games, as MS have discovered.
The larger issue is that there is no alternative route to playing online games on Xbox/360. Many third parties already have servers and infrastructure in place, and baulk at being forced to kludge their games into Microsoft's system. None of the system-level convenience features (chat, gamertags, etc) justify a subscription fee.
1. Considering the system has been running for over 2 and a half years, it's a pretty pathetic total. 2. It's not clear whether it includes trial subscriptions. 3. It represents less than one tenth of the Xbox user base, hardly the lynchpin of the system that MS hyped it to be. 4. More people worldwide play online games on PS2, even though you have to buy additional peripherals and there are only a scant number of online games available.
In the coming console generation, ALL the competing formats (including the PSP and DS) offer online gaming without subscription fees. Yet the Xbox 360 clings to this broken model.
It's time for MS to re-evaluate whether they want Xbox to offer a worthwhile, competitive platform for consumers and developers, or just keep blindly pursuing this 'content delivery' pipedream while Sony keep kicking their arses.
...is pretty clueless. Microsoft are the only console manufacturer rushing to get a machine out this year, as they see it as the only way to steal any market share from Sony. Sony and Nintendo are quite happy to keep pushing the five systems that they have on the market at present, and have no pressing need to rush out new systems to respond to Microsoft's stopgap.
And now linking to the non-story on Slashdot will lend this utterly baseless rumour more credence among idiots.
Zonk, please stop posting any garbage you are sent as news. A high proportion of/.'s readership probably isn't savvy enough to filter this nonsense out, so effectively you're running a news service that is leaving people LESS informed than before they visited. Just quit already.
Two things wrong with that article...
on
10 Gateway Games
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Firstly, it is, of course, hilariously sexist garbage.
Secondly, you don't want to introduce your s.o. to Animal Crossing if you ever want to get near your Gamecube again.
"Also, making all of the lazy, incompetent people in your player base want to quit is bad for business."
Translation: "We are too greedy, lazy and retrogressive to even consider solving this problem."
MMO designers will always rip out game elements in favour of lowest-common-denominator hacks. Richard Bartle tries to spin this by claiming MMO games shouldn't be treated as 'games' at all. Why? Because he (or Raph Koster, or whoever) can't design a fun game, but can just about manage a treadmill that can hold thousands of customers. So, of course, that's what should be done, and who cares if the resulting 'games' are tepid glorified chatrooms?
MMO games will continue to be a hateful, tedious, pinhead-sized niche as long as their development is guided by 'designers' and financiers who believe that their shitty, decades-old conventions are immutable laws of the universe.
Slashdot Mirror
"Games that don't make it to market, probably shouldn't."
Can you keep your foot out of your mouth for one post? Games can fail to reach the market for a whole variety of reasons. Budgets get cut, schedules get shifted around, publishers make company-wide decisions to drop support for a specific platform or market sector, licenses fall through. Sometimes perfectly good, ready-to-ship games get mothballed for reasons completely beyond the developers' control.
Of course, most of the games that don't see the light of day the public gets to hear very little about, so I'll use as an example a game that reached retail by the skin of its teeth: Psychonauts. This game was dropped by Microsoft Game Studios, was very belatedly picked up by Majesco (not in the best of health as a publisher) and is still awaiting release in Europe through THQ. And yet it has been universally praised by critics, with Eurogamer naming it as their game of the year for 2005.
In future maybe you'll think for a second before issuing forth ill informed statements on the basis of worthless filler pieces on 1UP.com.
Of course, games companies don't start work on their next project before the current one hits retail. And they can have a two month vacation just for shipping. I'm sure a lot of developers reading this would like to live in your universe.
No, that's not elitist, just extremely blinkered.
Perhaps you noticed the success of the Nintendo DS recently. Perhaps you read Nolan Bushnell's recent comments about how needlessly complex interfaces have scared away huge sections of the public over the last 15-20 years. A lot of people who don't play games now never will, true. But a great many people who don't play games now would do so if they were convenient and intuitive enough for them to buy into. Expect to see the Rev sold in non-specialist game shops, and advertised outside of the specialist press.
Furthermore, making games more accessible does not imply 'neglecting' traditional gamers in any way.
Oh, and go play Resident Evil 4 and re-evaluate your lazy views about the Gamecube accordingly, Mister self-proclaimed hardcore gamer.
I'm sure the above post sounds like standard griping against the slashdot editors to many readers. And taken alone, maybe it is. However, hundreds of slashdot readers with an interest in computer and video games have been voicing complaints about Michael 'Zonk' Zenke's editorship of this topic for months on end now.
Games.slashdot.org could be a useful channel for disseminating news (NOT rumour, puff-pieces, fanboy screeds and endless dupes) about games to a tech-savvy audience, not all of whom have the time or nous to seek out multiple dedicated games news sites and stay abreast of developments. It could nurture discussion between gamers with different (gaming and cultural) backgrounds. Maybe it could be a great platform for notable personalities in the industry (not just from the commercial side but also from the wild and woolly 'indie', fan-built, academic and hobbyist arenas) to answer questions, and get pertinent feedback.
Instead, by the application of apathy frequently flirting with outright incompetence, the editors seem happy to let slashdot's games coverage stagnate. It's useless to the games enthusiast, who will have read the news days ago, had the rumours debunked, and not had to suffer the constant mangling of truth and sentence structure that is the hallmark of a Zonk-approved post. It's even more useless to the more casual reader, who will wade through a few pages of misinformation and playground politics and will promptly filter the channel out.
No doubt Michael has a genuine enthusiasm for games (I understand he's a longtime pen-and-paper and MMO type of guy) but this isn't translating into useful or informative editorial work.
Actually, I'm just causing myself physical pain by reading this, now.
Whoa there, not just entirely - on the whole entirely.
I think the parent comments explain the 'Zonk-hate' pretty clearly. He doesn't seem to read or understand most of the submissions he accepts. And he fishes for 'news' in contentless advertising channels like 1UP and IGN.
You're not alone. It defies belief that something so shallow, pretentious and trite is actually a commercial endeavour. There are a dozens of purely enthusiast-run fanzines, sites and fora that offer better informed, deeper and more entertaining writing about games.
Re "vested interest": It's not an issue of whether you stand to benefit financially. I don't think that you'd submit a news item one-sidedly criticising a Microsoft policy decision. But complaining about bias on Slashdot is kind of pointless, I guess.
"And claiming Live prevents entire genres of games has no basis in reality whatsoever."
How many MMORPGs are available on the Xbox again?
"You think they're making developers sign contracts that requires them to only make certain types of games on Xbox Live?"
I know for a fact that the third party contract makes it impossible to implement certain types of online game on the Xbox. They're not allowed to run games from their own servers without special dispensation. They're not allowed to connect to anything other than the Xbox Live servers or other Xboxes. They're not permitted to allow gamers on different platforms to play against Xbox users. The centralised subscription model makes it commercially suicidal to charge per-game subscription fees. This is why virtually all third party Xbox Live games run peer to peer. They're all FPS and driving games because they're cheap to put online, not persistent, and that's all that they can market to the incredibly homogenised 10% of the Xbox userbase that signed up to Live.
"Xbox Live is a framework that handles certain parts of online gaming so the developers don't have to worry about implementing it all over again - it doesn't prevent any types of games from being done over live."
See above. Developers can't cherry pick the beneficial features from the framework, they have to comply to the limitations as well. Xbox Live is an attempt to graft the product tying business model that works for traditional console games into the online space. It exists only to funnel revenue back to Microsoft. It won't work in a competitive environment, for the same reason the N64's expensive cartridges nuked third party support for the N64.
"Ask EA about that - you sign in through Live, but then you're on EA's servers doing things EA's way. And here's a hint - EA's way is pathetic. The largest game developer out there, and they can't even do a halfway decent service compared to Xbox Live."
If you thought about it for a second, you'd realise that EA's position is not one that they would choose to be in. They wanted to circumvent Live altogether, so that they could market online play to the whole of the Xbox user base, so that people who bought Madden on PS2 could play against people who bought it on Xbox (what with it being exactly the same game), and so that they didn't have to force their customers to pay an additional fee to take their games online. This would have been the ideal outcome for everyone involved.
Microsoft did not allow them to do this. The only reason EA games on Xbox have an online component at all (one that 90% of Xbox customers can't access) is because both MS and EA wanted EA's multiplatform titles to have identical feature lists on Xbox and PS2. It looked kind of stupid for MS to evangelise about online being the future when Madden and NHL only supported online play on PS2 and PC. They'll 'do it right' when it pays and when people can actually use it - which is why both Sony and Nintendo have chosen not to lock third parties into a closed system.
(Incidentally, they've drastically played down the "online is the future" spiel with the Xbox 360, for instance Robbie Bach said recently that they only expect 50% of Xbox 360 owners to ever take their machines online, let alone pay to play).
As for the actual EA/Live game experience, the only game that I've ever heard anyone complain about is Burnout 3, which is hardly a representative sample (having changed publishers midway through development and been rushed to market).
I know you're genuinely enthusiastic about XBL and there's no orchestrated FUD campaign going on. I still think it's unfortunate (and basically disingenuous, regardless of the intention) to not mention that you have a vested interest and aren't speaking from an unbiased position.
A closed system that locks in developers and prevents entire genres of games from being viable isn't the only way to make online console gaming work. Live is great at what it does, but not everyone just wants to play driving and shooting games against a userbase mainly made up of American teenagers who dictate the content that's available.
1. Hmm, is that the same Saige who posts on E2 and is a Microsoft employee?
2. The key difference between the PS2 and PS3 is that every PS3 is network ready out of the box. There won't be millions of offline legacy systems out there. As such it's meaningless to make a comparison between the way online play will be realised on the two systems.
3. Xbox Live still can't support non-trivial and persistent online games. Software support will go where the money and users are, not where the fanciest front end is. A lack of a unified gamertag doesn't stop 4.5m people playing WoW.
This is lame even by Zonk's standards.
The status of the parent company isn't the issue. It's the timing and positioning of the product and the reasoning behind it that are uncannily similar to the DC. MS have been pretty frank that their strategy is to push the machine hard while it's not possible to make a like for like comparison between games running on the X360 and the PS3.
"Microsoft has realized that it really isn't even games that matter to a consoles success: it's culture."
If you genuinely think that a console can make headway without strong software support, you're insane. Even if you do subscribe to the theory that branding makes or breaks a console in the modern market, Sony have long since conquered that front anyway. The important indicator is unit sales, not paid placements on MTV.
You have some valid points there. Or rather, you might have had some about three years ago, before there was a thriving multi-million dollar global market for mobile games.
Your screen size argument is similarly broken. A standard sized phone can (and increasingly frequently, will) have a screen of at least Game Boy Micro quality. Games for phones, PDAs and handheld consoles are not striving for photorealism or immersion, they simply need visual clarity.
Congratulations on finally figuring out how to reply to comments.
So if a console makes its manufacturer a ton of money, and has a library of great games (that in many cases wouldn't have been possible on another format), under what criteria can it be classed as a failure, exactly?
The Xbox 360 still has minimal support from Japanese developers. Of the titles that have been announced, you can guarantee that anything worth playing will be ported to the PS3.
All of this talk about 'nationalism' and 'aesthetics' is dodging the issue. Endless Tom Clancy and Madden crap doesn't appeal to the majority of US gamers (just the same ~2m or so male teenagers), let alone those in Europe or Japan.
If 'unconfirmed reports from Walmart employees' say the price is $300, that means nothing.
If Walmart or any other retailer put the pre-order price at $300, that means nothing.
When MS announce the RRP, then you have a piece of news.
Games.Slashdot.org will remain a completely worthless fucking joke as long as Zonk continues to blindly run every submission he is sent.
It's interesting that they will now openly admit that gaming isn't the focus of the device.
This only becomes a problem if the non-gaming plans for the device result in the system's gaming functions being compromised, as happened with Xbox Live.
" $50 a YEAR? How much is that, really? "
$50 more than on any other platform. Which instantly makes the system uncompetitive for MMO games, as MS have discovered.
The larger issue is that there is no alternative route to playing online games on Xbox/360. Many third parties already have servers and infrastructure in place, and baulk at being forced to kludge their games into Microsoft's system. None of the system-level convenience features (chat, gamertags, etc) justify a subscription fee.
1. Considering the system has been running for over 2 and a half years, it's a pretty pathetic total.
2. It's not clear whether it includes trial subscriptions.
3. It represents less than one tenth of the Xbox user base, hardly the lynchpin of the system that MS hyped it to be.
4. More people worldwide play online games on PS2, even though you have to buy additional peripherals and there are only a scant number of online games available.
In the coming console generation, ALL the competing formats (including the PSP and DS) offer online gaming without subscription fees. Yet the Xbox 360 clings to this broken model.
It's time for MS to re-evaluate whether they want Xbox to offer a worthwhile, competitive platform for consumers and developers, or just keep blindly pursuing this 'content delivery' pipedream while Sony keep kicking their arses.
There are no mobile phones on the market that use Java to power the system UI. Please try harder.
...is pretty clueless. Microsoft are the only console manufacturer rushing to get a machine out this year, as they see it as the only way to steal any market share from Sony. Sony and Nintendo are quite happy to keep pushing the five systems that they have on the market at present, and have no pressing need to rush out new systems to respond to Microsoft's stopgap.
And now linking to the non-story on Slashdot will lend this utterly baseless rumour more credence among idiots.
/.'s readership probably isn't savvy enough to filter this nonsense out, so effectively you're running a news service that is leaving people LESS informed than before they visited. Just quit already.
Zonk, please stop posting any garbage you are sent as news. A high proportion of
Firstly, it is, of course, hilariously sexist garbage.
Secondly, you don't want to introduce your s.o. to Animal Crossing if you ever want to get near your Gamecube again.
"Also, making all of the lazy, incompetent people in your player base want to quit is bad for business."
Translation: "We are too greedy, lazy and retrogressive to even consider solving this problem."
MMO designers will always rip out game elements in favour of lowest-common-denominator hacks. Richard Bartle tries to spin this by claiming MMO games shouldn't be treated as 'games' at all. Why? Because he (or Raph Koster, or whoever) can't design a fun game, but can just about manage a treadmill that can hold thousands of customers. So, of course, that's what should be done, and who cares if the resulting 'games' are tepid glorified chatrooms?
MMO games will continue to be a hateful, tedious, pinhead-sized niche as long as their development is guided by 'designers' and financiers who believe that their shitty, decades-old conventions are immutable laws of the universe.
This game was announced many months ago. All that is being announced in the article is that Ignition will be publishing it. Also:
"The game is being done by the in-house Warner Bros. developers. From the article: "The game is a third-person action title developed by Warthog,"
Does Zonk actually read submissions before running them?