Weekend Wrapup..

First off, I hope everyone had a Hoppy Easter.. and I promise, that is the last pun I will throw at you. It's Monday, and probably my readership's tolerance for puns is at the weekly ebb.

Let's see..

Nice to see Harmonix is still in the game, as they've secured funding for three new IP's from a capital venture firm. Not much is known about the new IP's, but they are not related to their existing franchises (Rock Band, Dance Central, etcetera). Nice to see the local group still in the game. BTW, Harmonix, would you grant somebody the right to make the classic five button guitars? I'm looking to replace my guitar, and everyone wants an arm and a leg for them.

This is Foz's Total Lack of Surprise: Gamestop recently announced that more then a third of gamers who bought Bioshock Infinite and Gears of War 3 during the midnight release party or the day of release also paid the extra $20 for the Season Pass which allowed players to get access to DLC (and in Gears Of War 3's case, a Pay to Win double XP mode for online multiplayer). With such things growing, I wouldn't be surprise to see it being built in to the game from the start. "Oh, it was $50 last year, and $75 this year, but it comes with the free Season Pass built in to the game cost."

I came across a very interesting article about the history of Uber Entertainment (Creators of Monday Night Combat).. the one part that I found interesting was the fact that Uber had to fight Microsoft tooth and nail to get their game a featured spot on the ever popular Summer of Arcade, how a Microsoft screwup tanked the future of the popular series and the sad state of Microsoft Q&A, taking five plus weeks to approve Monday Night Combat updates. You can read the story at Polygon here.

And finally, from the "Department of Video Game Stupidity".. Machinima has released the first episode of a new series called Player versus Pain, which features people playing video games while being.. harassed let's say in potentially painful ways. The first episode features people playing Mario Kart while getting atomic wedgied. Now that I think of it, that sounds way too much like a lot of video game fanatics lives while growing up.

Oh, and one more thing. Before you believe any news today, check the date. Don't be the April Fool in your group. That, and remember, chocolate cures cancer!

The (slightly Late) Friday Funspot:

I could blame it on Rio, or the rain, or a bunch of other things, but I will blame it on being tired. What can I say, blogging is hard *grins*. But that just means you get an extra-special holiday weekend Funspot.

First up: The transition to an all-digital environment is picking up pace.

Saw this article in GamesIndustry, which states that analysts project that digital content sales in the US and EU (that is, full game downloads, DLC, and mobile game sales) grew 33% year over year, and is worth about $10 Billion annually. With the next-gen consoles looking more and more like the disc will only be needed to hold the data (as Durango, the next-gen Xbox looks to install games from the disc to the drive as part of an initial playing, I'd say it's very likely that we're headed to an all-digital marketplace within the next 5-10 years tops.

Second: Tomb Raider: Where being a great game may not be enough.

By all accounts, Tomb Raider is a great game, and a worthy reboot to the series. However, in this age of massive games and marketing campaigns, that's not enough to make a profit, at least so far.. Tomb Raider has sold about 3.4 million copies, and according to industry analysts, they need to sell something in the order of "5 to 10 million" to make a profit. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, the linear progression of budgets for games is unsustainable and we've seen even rocks like EA and Square Enix take big hits lately. Where does it end?

Third up: Ouya arrives in June...

One of the big name kickstarter projects, the android-based games console Ouya has announced that it will sell for $99 in June when it's released. Also the first, unpolished units are heading to backers of the kickstarter now. Color me interested, but concerned. In an age where one of the major concerns of players is taking your game play anywhere, releasing a console who has one big selling point that you can play your mobile content on the TV screen seems, almost backwards at this point. But I'm rooting hard for it, more choice in the market is always good.

"Love Question Four......": KICKSTARTER ALERT!

Oh, and a special no-prize for anyone who recognizes where the title above comes from. Looks even with Hawken and MechWarrior Online chugging towards full releases, there's always more room for big f'n robots shooting each other with large caliber weaponry. At the recent Game Developers Conference, they showed off a game demo of Heavy Gear Assault, which, you guessed it, showed big f'n robots shooting each other with large caliber weaponry, in an arena environment. It looks like they're going to hit Kickstarter in April, with a goal of $800,000. The game will have a playable alpha phase open to Kickstarter backers, later this year. My advice? Budget for some stretch goals, developers. (and with all the kickstarted games looking to hit in the next 18 months, must invent a way to add an extra 8 hours or so to a single day)

And finally... Play Ball!

The 2013 major league baseball season begins with Opening Day on Monday. It's a crying shame that there aren't any new baseball games for 360 this year. No, I'm not ignoring MLB2K13, I'm just considering it warmed-up leftovers that were left in the fridge too long. Just think of it this way, despite the fact that one New York Yankee (A-Rod) makes more money then an entire team (the Houston Astros), both teams are tied in the standings. 

EA Labels Prez: "DRM is a failed strategy"

Wow. EA Labels President Frank Gilbeau had what would seem to be heretical words with regards to Digital Rights Management, the thing that tells you how and when you can play the game you purchased in an order to try to stop people from playing the game without paying for it.

"DRM is a failed dead-end strategy; it's not a viable strategy for the gaming business. So what we tried to do creatively is build an online service in the SimCity universe and that's what we sought to achieve."

Well, I like the words that acknowledge a very valid issue, after a certain point of restriction, DRM doesn't restrict pirates as much as it annoys your customer base.

But what he doesn't say is that SimCity deliberately made itself a game that didn't use DRM per se because they wanted it so tied in to online that the always on nature of the internet was de-facto DRM.. and that, quite frankly, failed horribly.

If there was two modes, an offline mode and an online mode, then you wouldn't see these issues, but for a lot of folks, the fact that this game could certainly played offline if not for the deliberate design decisions to make it online only, and the fact that EA did not adequately plot out the launch demand.. So it's good to see that a major company realizes DRM is dead, but the way to fix it is not making it DRM under another guise.

MGS V: The Phantom Pain announced

Not much happening today...

Unless you count the announcement of the long rumored and anxiously awaited latest game in the Metal Gear Solid series.

Looks pretty solid too, they had a trailer as part of the announcement, as well as some game footage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEuJ2q3uBYI - Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=52ngbRyoAPw - Gameplay

Supreme Court upholds "Right of First Sale".. what does it mean for video games?

I've been having a discussion via email with Bill Harris, who runs the most excellent Blog "Dubious Quality" on the recent Supreme Court decision that upheld the "Right of First Sale" in a case where a foreign student bought textbooks overseas (where prices were cheaper), and then imported them back into the US for resale (at lower than list price.). The court case found that the book publisher could not block the sale on copyright grounds.

Now, at first look, you may not think that this has a lot to do with the video game markets. More often than not, games are region locked for consoles, so you can't play a Japanese Playstation game on an American console, but there are signs that this discussion opens the door to looking at this deeper.

The video game industry has been paranoid about used game sales and their claimed effect on companies bottom line ever since the days Nintendo tried to bar renting of NES cartridges. And the right of first sale, established back in the day of the historic Betamax case says that once we buy something, we control what we do with it. We can sell it on to someone else (as long as we do not infringe the copyright by making an illegal copy of the product) without any consequences.

And the content industries have been wrong about this from the Betamax case. In hearings before Congress, the then-head of the MPAA, Jack Valenti said "The VCR is to the American film producer and the American Public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.". Wow, hyperbole much? Considering  the industries that sprang up from the VCR/DVD markets, and how much more money it made the content companies, you'd think they had learned their lessons.

But you see import issues even today. And sometimes, it's not even the US doing the importing! On Steam, it's not unusual to see someone from another country send money to someone to purchase and gift a game to someone else, just because it would cost more, sometimes significantly more to buy a game in countries like Australia (where sometimes a game will not even be allowed to be sold at all, due to not being issued a rating due to violence or something similar). This problem is so widespread in Australia that the Adobe, Microsoft and Apple recently got called on the carpet for price gouging in front of the Australian Senate.

If you want to see why publishers want digital downloads so much, it's because they can get away with calling this a license instead of a purchase. You can't sell a game you've finished on Steam. Should you? I'd say yes, but that's just me.

This will get looked at deeper, and I have a feeling sometime in the next two years or so, we'll start to see court cases trying to determine where the line is between licensing a video game and selling a video game, and if it determines that games are sold, not licensed, whether it's an illegal restraint of trade to region lock your DVD player or console system.

You can read a New York Times article (Minimal Paywall) on the court decision here

Just some various thoughts Post Pax

Well, the knee feels a bit better, but I'm assured that's solely because of the pain pills, so not much today..

It seems like we're in the retrenching period. Despite there being a lot on show at PAX East, it felt like things broke down into two main categories..

Either non-playable demos for the next generation of games (the Diablos on Console, Elder Scrolls Online, Watch_Dogs, etcetera), or playable lower level/indy games such as DuckTales, Organ Trail, etcetera (I met up with them and told them how much I appreciated the cleverness of the title)

As we get closer to the second quarter of the year, I have a feeling as we get closer to the 2013 holiday season we'll start to see more next-gen games announced and more importantly, footage. It seems like we're just in a holding pattern till the big two can get all their ducks in a row

Sunday thoughts..

Thanks to my good friend TK for getting me a ticket to PAX East, and a fun time was had by all, well, until my knee went several ways at the same time apparently.. so while I'm waiting for the pain killers to settle in, you get a new post.

Just saw a news bit that the DuckTales Remastered game brought back all the original voice actors from the show. That includes 94 year old Alan Young, who provided the voice for Scrooge McDuck. That is awesome.

Interesting to see that they're bringing the latest XCom game to Iphones and the like. They say it will be the full game, but you have to wonder how they can do that.

Also in Firaxis news, they're teasing a new XCom game or a DLC featuring a new threat at PAX today... going to be intrigued on where they take the series, which will apparently have a bit of a cross over with Civilization V (new expansion in July) where you can research the Xcom project and drop xcom troopers on your enemies..

And as a kind of a Post Mortem of the Mass Effect Trilogy, they released a graphic showing the breakdown of the game's stats. Amongst the things that jumped out at me was the breakdown between male and female Shepherd.. With the amount of "FemShep is the real Shepherd!" I've seen online, I was expecting FemShep to be played by more than the 18% that was recorded.

The coolest stat was that its players spent 88.3 million man-hours playing the game (that's 8,625 years).

I was going to joke that didn't even count the 25 million man-hours that players then spent online being angry at the ending, but that just may be the painkillers talking.