General (41)
Events (9)
Guns of Icarus (8)
Game Development (6)
Games We Loved (6)
Games We're Playing (5)
Industry Update (5)
Elementia (4)
Extreme Sledding (3)
Industry Update is contributed by our friend and gaming junkie Alexander Liss
Big news last week as publishing giant Electronic Arts snapped up casual game start-up Playfish for a $300 million fee. Social games are hot these days so it’s a plus for EA’s bottom line, right? Don’t be so sure.
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Industry Update is contributed by our friend and gaming junkie Alexander Liss
This week the gaming blogosphere was rocked with multiple reports of skyrocketing piracy on the iPhone. Given Apple’s long and successful history with digital distribution, the last thing you expect to hear is that their system is apparently hackable.
Industry Update is contributed by our friend and gaming junkie Alexander Liss
The old saying goes that “Bigger is Better,” but lately we are seeing the opposite happen in casual gaming. Mobile is HOT right now — and getting a piece of the mobile space is how companies will be able to grow in this increasingly crowded and fragmented market. A couple of key things have really jumped out at me lately:
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Hi folks, welcome back to the Muse Games Industry Update. In our last issue we talked about the Big Three console makers’ hardware announcements coming out of E3. This time we’re gonna scope out a different kind of hardware announcement, by taking a closer look at the three new streaming game services announced recently. Here are the key players:
1) OnLive — console-killer?
o What is it: MAGIC! No seriously, it’s a box that looks like a cable modem, with a connection to the internet, as well as your TV, and has a gamepad controller. It is supposed to provide a seamless gameplay experience in your living room by streaming from the OnLive game servers, through the internet, to your TV.
o Why it’s too good to be true: If OnLive could deliver on its promises it would blow my mind, but I think in the real world it’s going to hit a brick wall. There are three huge obstacles in my opinion:
o Reliability. The best online game services still face huge server problems from time to time (Xbox Live). For OnLive, they are proposing to build a massive gaming infrastructure entirely from scratch. I can’t see how they could avoid the first two weeks of the launch being incredibly problematic, borderline broken. And then even after that I can’t imagine it functioning without a major LAG problem.
o Bandwidth. We are already on the brink of ISP’s going mental on the consumer — net neutrality is hanging by a thread. I think OnLive would push things over the edge, and ISP’s would start charging extra bandwidth fees for heavy users. Considering you are streaming 720p HD video that is going to be a lot of bandwidth.
o You don’t own the games. The only thing you have at your house is the gamepad and the magic streaming box. What if the connection goes down? And will you have permanent access to all games on the service? What if they take down a game that you really liked? It’s just not as good as having the physical media or at least a copy on your local hard drive.
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We’ve finally taken a look back at the many events of the recent months in the game industry. A recap:
MICROSOFT “Pre-Natal”
Project Natal got plenty of hype. It looked cool in the demo too — playing Burnout Paradise just by mimicking the motion of driving with your body. There’s always an excitement associated with new control paradigms - the presentations inevitably wow. But big companies often find themselves victim to “wouldn’t it be cool if…” thinking, without considering the real-life implications. Are you going to take on M. Bison in real-time in Street Fighter? How do you perform a summons in Final Fantasy? Many games require a greater level of control that can what be performed just by pantomiming actions with your body. Then there’s the issue of space in the living room to play games in that manner. Most people I know have their TV wedged onto their dresser just a few feet from the bed (nothing like Late Night studio). Really I suppose in the end it will be up to the developers to build games that utilize Natal correctly.
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