Zoraptor

It isn't creative accountancy and it isn't an outright dismissal, it's just that SE gets its money 'now', based on shipments rather than actual sales, and that can come back to bite them if they overship- burying unsold copies of Daikatana in landfills, as an extreme example. Frankly, all companies spin statements, often in the same manner as, well, me being happy with the weather today. It's dull, cool and overcast rather than bright, warm and sunny; but hey! it ain't cold, windy and rainy so I'm happy with it.

Nope, to the pure part at least. It is based as much as possible on real numbers from the publishers and NPD, along with some comparison with similar titles. But yes, any discussion of this sort will be rife with conjecture as we don't have all the facts available. You should, of course, feel free to disagree with the conclusions drawn since it's unprovable as it stands, I was just presenting the case for DXHR being below expectations sales wise. I think it's reasonably convincing or I wouldn't have done it. YMMV.

I'd expect that is where Pidesco got the impression from. I'll still stand by the statement that it didn't sell to expectations*- more so considering how well received critically it was- no matter what Squeenix say. They are not a disinterested party and a lot of the investment made into the franchise, and the impetus from the good reviews, would be lost if they discontinued it now or labelled it an underperformer. To be fair, any game that makes money is a success in an industry where the vast majority of titles are cancelled or outright lose money, but I would have thought their expectation would be 2 million+ sold through by now. I'd put the dev team size, expectations, costings etc in roughly the Bioware class. As a comparison, ME2 sold about as much in 5 days as DXHR sold in 5 weeks, on 360 alone, and with an initial shipping size less than DXHR, while DXHR had a dev time not that much less than Dragon Age Original (2007-2011 vs 2004-2009). And it may well not even reach the sales of Baldur's Gate. Overall, there's simply no way I can see that DXHR was a cheap game to make unless the comparison is relative to something like GTA/ COD/ GoW. Comparing the 820k for DS3 vs 2.2 mill for DXHR is fine since they're both shipped figures from the publisher so it's comparing like with like, but they are shipped figures and thus of limited usefulness. Good lord it's depressing seeing how many 'games journalists' still don't know the difference and just say sold. *The main caveat now is the regional breakdown, since they apparently shipped 800k to NA and 1.3M to Europe. If they sold 75% of their shipped total it would be around 1.7M, edging towards their expectation. I'm not convinced though, not least because DS3 supposedly sold through a higher proportion than DXHR.

I never had any real problem getting any of the old LGS games running until recently, and that was completely unrelated to the game itself. Then again I don't think I've actually reinstalled them since 2000 and just copy the folders over all the time so the various accumulated fixes were done piecemeal and didn't need redoing.

They are going to release more newer games, apparently, at a slightly higher price point, but given SRt3 uses steamworks it won't ever get there. Because the Dark engine is crap and wouldn't want to run properly on XP/Vista/7. It's already available on other services and is easier to get to run than a lot of DOS games were out of the box. You should check out TTLG some time, apparently people there can tell you how to get it running.

Battlelog hasn't been cracked, iirc- I presume if a key is banned Battlelog itself will block access to MP. If so he would be limited to the rather underwhelming SP experience by a ban even if using the crack. Having forum and game accounts be the same is potentially pretty dumb and should be avoided for security reasons in any case. Even if EA takes very good precautions security wise lots of people are pretty blas

It's ironic that RPS has complained about not getting responses to its queries from EA when they've been big on the whole "Origin will upload your HD!!!" bandwagon. Due to EA's privacy policy- the one RPS apparently never bothered reading during the Origin EULA debacle- EA cannot comment on specific cases to 3rd parties like RPS, even if the complainers are actively lying about the reasons for their bans, because that would inevitably disclose personal information. For all we actually know the accusers could have all been using hax or the no-Origin crack.

I'm not sure people who think "12345" or "password" is the height of security really deserve to be saved from themselves, though I'm sure they'd find some way for it to be EA's fault if they got hacked.

ME3 box disclaimer, bolded part as there was some discussion about what if anything Origin would be needed for. Actually the full EULA is apparently already available, if anyone feels like being bored by legalese.

IIRC it's been in development for a long time and has had a spotty development record- IG Aus were working on it prior to the release (and well prior) of the first Bioshock, it got suspended/ backburnered/ reimagined while they did Bioshock 1&2, then got reanimated once the Firaxis project got cancelled in favour of... CivRev, I think. So it's potentially already been active in one form or another for something like 5+ years even if it has not been in full development for all that time. At some point someone is just going to decide to push release, or cut their losses. Delaying allows burying the writedown in a nice high turnover quarter when few Questions Will Be Asked; and many of the senior IG Aus people have already gone which suggests a fair amount of unhappiness either in the ranks, or among management with the ranks. I don't think the negativity is unwarranted, but there are ways it could still work out OK and the delay could be a good thing. If they were to rebrand or parabrand to Bioshock it could be released after Infinite, they could rework some of the more unnecessary changes to try and get a bit more traction from the traditional fans and more interest from newcomers. X-COM: Futuristic Warfare, or BioshoX-COM, maybe. [edit: decided that sounded a bit too definite at the beginning as I don't think anyone at 2k/ IG ever confirmed that directly]

I think they could have used x-com successfully, either through the more traditional Firaxis project that got canned, or by piggy backing Bioshock. Most of what has been seen of the fps xcom would fit fine with Bioshock- right era, similar(ish) art style, potentially reasonably similar enemies- and it actually seemed to have as much in common with Bioshock as Bioshock Infinite does. Have it as an origin story, whatever. As it stood though everything was done wrong. No Ken Levine equivalent to get publicity, rather underwhelming videos and screenshots, zero buzz and an all pervading sense of negativity brought about by shoehorning the xcom name onto something that had little to do with the original.

X-COM reboot has been delayed to fiscal 2012. Would not be surprised if it is quietly shelved, permanently, a lot of the senior people at IG Australia (pft, 2k Marin Australia) have left recently and its reception has been at best... mixed. They should have used Bioshock branding, really, else it's the perfect storm of old fans hating it and new prospective fans never having heard of it.

I have no idea whether that is accurate or not, but it's been a widely distributed speculation, often with some Biowarism attached . Given the religious overtones of calling someone "Shephard" it would hardly be a surprise.

It's entirely possible (or likely, even) that those are default choices and that any branching is not implemented properly in the beta. If everything were working properly it wouldn't be a beta, after all. I haven't seen any vids (stuck on dial up until friday...) but my presumption was that the trial at the beginning of ME3 would be used to set up those switches for a new player, ie you'd get a bunch of "Why did you allow one of your companions to die" type questions.

It is associated with Stalin in the 'real world' but is misattributed/ apocryphal. Whether Westwood knew that or not I do not know.

I'm perhaps a touch surprised to say I agree with Nepenthe, at least if it is as presented. The reservation would be if it's some sort of stalking horse for "only 5% of people used RPG mode so we're cutting it in future". So long as it remains formalising pre-existing game play choices I see no reason to object- people already click through dialogue or turn difficulty to easy to rush combat, or turn on auto-levelling, after all. Heh, read that at the codex, couldn't be bothered replying. Problem is that by that measure any program at all that connects to the internet is potentially dodgy; which is true, but only in the same sense as saying that 100% of people who breathe air will die. It may not have done anything nefarious yet but it might in the future!!1!!! is a hopelessly shonky argument. My neighbour owns a rifle, he hasn't shot me with it yet but he might in the future, etc. All that can be shown is that there is no evidence of malfeasance now and that the original accusation of reading tax records was rubbish from someone who didn't understand what his monitoring software was actually saying. And that is how it remains until someone actually proves otherwise.

http://boards.theforce.net/literature/b10003/31667765/p48 They don't seem to have direct post linking enabled, so you'll have to scroll to near the bottom.

Cerberus Network etc were prior to Origin though. No reason to expect them to go back and retroactively integrate them all, same as you don't get Cerberus Network for ME1. I'd presume that in future they'll be integrated if only to rationalise support and development costs.

They don't, because their EULA is subject to their Privacy Policy. Most relevantly "EA will never share your personal information with third parties without your consent. We may, however, share anonymous, non-personal, aggregated and/or public information with third parties." If you want to you can make any EULA/ Privacy Policy look bad though. Valve exempts 3rd parties from any and all provisions of its privacy policy, for example. And 90% of its business is selling 3rd party stuff... I should probably also repost the link I stuck in the Random News thread debunking the current "Origin uploads your entire HD to the internet!!!" scare. What it actually does.

The german Origin snooping stuff has been thoroughly debunked now. Dude was clueless, and Steam also does much the same sort of thing, perhaps worse You didn't have much problem using Cerberus Network, as I recall. That's about as 'bad' as Origin. Really though, the most likely scenario is that it will be basically the same as that, with Origin only really required for the MP and DLC handling.

What, I presumed it would be an open world game playing as a rodent eating alien!!! You just lost a sale, Rockstar.

I'd say that customers either have an obligation to be informed or an obligation to not get upset if they make bad decisions through ignorance. You, as a customer, have to know what is needed or at least ask if you don't know, if you don't and make a mistake then that really is Your Fault. That's mainly true for genuine service industries though- it is another way healthcare is rather different from a standard 'service' in that you can only reasonably expect that obvious symptoms be acted on ("I thought blood in my urine was normal! Had it for years!") and otherwise it is far more consultative than, say, buying petrol or a burger.

There have already been Facebook etc games done for Bioware stuff, just not by Bioware but by EA's specialist 2d group. More "get to level 10, send out x invites and get exclusive Awesome Item for core game x!", probably. They'll probably still largely be made by the 2d people, but described as being from Bioware. EA certainly seem to be trying to, heh, 'synergise' their studios- dismemberment in ME2 came from Visceral, DICE has had a hand in ME3's multiplayer etc.

Sorry Jaesun, but if ME3 does not require Origin for at least the MP parts I will eat my hat. Man, where does this stuff come from? Steam pulled it. How can you tell, objectively? Because they definitively are not Origin exclusives- you can buy BF3/ C2/ DA2 from pretty much any other DD retailer, just not steam. The only one who ejected toys from pram on the matter was steam, ironicly since they've been getting their client bundled into products sold by other DD vendors for ages and don't expect anyone to have a problem with that. The only current origin exclusive I know of is the digital version of TOR which has been specifically stated not to actually need Origin to run.

A point in sabotage is also needed to get the option to use EMP, isn't it?