Masterfade

The problem I see is not game companies want to spend that much money, rather it's the packaged-goods business model that's forcing developers and publishers to increase their budgets. I remember watching a video of one of John Carmack's Quakecon keynotes, in which Carmack said he enjoyed making smaller and simpler games and actually entertained the thought of breaking id Software into 10 small teams all working on low-budget stuff, but what kept him from doing that was the fact "the market was non-linear in its response". Spending half less on a project may cause it to have only one-tenth of sales, which is understandable as most people will only buy a few games per year. i think the attach rate for Xbox 360 by the end of last year was like 8 or something? Ironically DLCs, because of their different business model, allowed developers to set lower budgets on them. But then people began to cry foul because they felt not getting enough for their money.

Given the talk of "new digital model" and EA's recent fascination with social gaming, I wonder if C&C is going to be turned into a Facebook game.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/26120/E...neghem_Hire.php When I first read the headline I thought EA had decided to become a RPG empire and launch a first person RPG line and "spiritual successor" to Might & Magic. A shame EA got JVC to work on the next C&C instead, but in the end that's not entirely surprising given Might & Magic is mostly known for the strategy spin-off HoMM series nowadays. Still, Might & Magic III was my introductory course to CRPG, and I even consider M&M VIII to be a good game. A new RPG by Van Caneghem in the future would be wonderful news so I hope EA will eventually let him to do things he's best known for. Besides, Bethesda needs some competition in the first person RPG genre.

The world needs a new tile-based fantasy RPG with toolset.

If GT220 is a rebranded 8800 then it'd be offering terrific value, but sadly 220 is more like a 8600.

They're using Masthead's internal engine first developed for another post apocalyptic MMO called Earthrise. As for looking similar to Fallout 3, Interplay is probably following Fallout 3's art design so to attract newer Fallout fans.

True but I was comparing these screens with early Earthrise shots, which is also pre-alpha but looks much better IMO. Presumably Project V13 also benefits from addtional 2 years of engine development done by the Earthrise team, so I find those screens rather underwhelming.

Ethics aside, it appears Dragon Age DLCs have already made one million dollars for EA.

Yeah it's going to be monthly subscription based, as Interplay's Fallout MMO license doesn't allow the free-to-play model. As for the screens themselves, they looks rather bland comparing to Masthead's other game Earthrise which unlike Project V13 I'm actually looking forward to play. Earthrise was supposed to lanuch at the end of this year, but now even closed beta looks further and further away. Don't know if delays in Earthrise have anything to do with Masthead working on Project V13 but I would hate to see them dragged down by Interplay.

Another interesting read on MW2, this time Activision managed to track down a game pirate and have him arrested by the police: http://venturebeat.com/2009/11/06/how-inve...-2-cyber-thief/

PC gaming won't die, it'll just become overall more and more casual. The future of PC gaming is FarmVille. More on MW2 PC, D2D, Impulse and GamersGate are boycotting MW2 over its integration with SteamWorks: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25944

A lot of academics give out fully-indexed PDF files of their published books freely on their websites. I don't think that makes them stupid. But perhaps I shouldn't expect that much, even when the author is basing some of his arguments against the current copyright/patent regime on the benefits of spreading knowledge rapidly.

I usually don't bother reading books by corporate lawyers, but the Wired review got me interested. I decided to check out the author's blog where to my dismay I couldn't locate a PDF download. So in the end I'm not reading it as I prefer progressive writers who are actually progressive in practice. But I do have a question for those who have read the book (if there's any here). The author wrote (according to Ars Technica) "If stronger criminal laws are necessary to deter infringers, why not impose the death penalty, as China has done?", did he also consider the Chinese IP situation in his book? China is a major economy where copyright and patent laws are practically non-existent, does the author think such loose regulation helped Chinese companies to be more innovative?

The game runs silky smooth on my PC and implements multithreading exceptionally well. It has been a while since the last time I saw close to 100% CPU utilization while playing a game, but Dragon Age manages to do that and I'm impressed. The control scheme and gameplay mechanics are a lot like those of fantasy MMOs, and since the engine handles large crowd rather well I'm not surprised if BioWare decides to build its next MMO upon Dragon Age. The game is a bit on the difficult side, the first boss gave me quite a bit of headache until , then it became a cakewalk.

My friends think I'm weird because I've never hooked up my PC with my 55" HDTV after spending $20 or so extra for a gfx card with native HDMI output. But I blame Galaxy for not supplying me with a free HDMI cable!

I don't think they track PC sales anymore

I liked ToEE but not Arcanum. Maybe sometime I'll give Arcanum a second try since presumably its bugs should have been cleared up and balance fixed by the community now. As for metacritic, it's a fine tool to get an idea of how a game is received by critics, but issues arise once publishers begin to use metacritic to determine how much bonus should in-house developers get or make certain payment condition on a high metacritic when dealing with an external developer. I remember reading a blog post studying the correlation between metacritic scores and game sales and the conclusion was games with low metacritic scores almost never sell well but game with high score may flop in sales. Pretty much common sense.

Runic should have left out the whole items identification thing. It's annoying and serves zero gameplay purpose.

Like selling new shiny video card? I think CryEngine is a full engine with netcode, physics & other stuff.

It's unrelated to Fallout 3 game, but someone is making a post-apocalyptic film called "The Fallout": http://www.variety.com/article/VR111801044...yid=13&cs=1 Bethesda had already trademarked "Fallout" for films. Don't know if putting a "The" in the title is going to help them getting around it. I sense 2010 is going to be a busy year for ZeniMax lawyers.

After playing for about six hours, my impression with Torchlight can be summed up as: Light-hearted Diablo I clone with a little bit of Diabo II mechanics. Which is good for me since I had always preferred the original Diablo over its successor. I think the greatest strength of Torchlight is its lack of ambition. The choice of a Diablo I style, one hub, one major dungeon design is more suitable for a smaller developer than Diablo II's chapter-based, multi-hubs, open world design. Same for the choice of a clean, stylized low poly art direction over the pursuit for graphical fidelity. The end result is developers are a lot more focused on getting the bare-bones of ARPG right. Diablo I clones like Torchlight are rare comparing to those big and broken Diablo II clones (Titan Quest, Sacred series), probably due to the $50 boxed game mind-set a lot of publishers and developers seem to have. You just can't do a full price Diablo I game anymore.

I tried to buy Torchlight from Runic's website so developers will get most money, only to discover the countdown timer on the official site is tied to the local time on your computer and nobody seems to know which time zone is Runic using. What a mess. But I'm still excited about the game.

Because if digital distribution hits big, the market may no longer be dominated by services catering only to gamers. Look at Today's mega retail chains sells practically everything, is it that surprising once digital content delivery becomes mainstream we may witness the rise of mega content delivery sites that sell games, music, movies, TV shows, etc? A larger market grows larger companies, larger companies draws more public scrutiny. Why should digital distribution be different? As for Steam being "world-wide", many traditional retail chains are also international. After re-reading your post, I think I may have been a bit unclear when I wrote "if digital distribution grows bigger". By that I mean if digital distribution as an industry or business model grows bigger, I wasn't referring to any specific company growing bigger.

My concern with digital distribution once it becomes mainstream has little to do with shelf space. In fact I said quite clearly digital distribution will eliminate shelf space related problem like what happened to Muramasa in the U.K. If you guys bother to quote my entire post instead of just the first line you may see it When I wrote "But if digital distribution grows bigger, they may find themselves under the same public scrutiny as retailers" I was thinking about games like Fahrenheit or Witcher, and how they're censored because major retailers in NA refuse to carry AO titles. Now the public doesn't care what type of content is on Steam because it's a relatively low profile service. But once digital distribution grows big, they'll be much more visible to the public. Today digital distribution sites are offering AO games that Wal-Mart refuse to stock, but there's no guarantee they'll still do that once they become mega digital content delivery portals of tomorrow. Remember how Apple pulled Baby Shaker from App Store?

But if digital distribution grows bigger, they may find themselves under the same public scrutiny as retailers. Although if digital distribution does take over stories like UK retailers refuse to stock Muramasa because it's an original IP would be a thing of the past