Masterfade

A constant stream of DLCs, to some degrees, keep players from trade-in their copies. I think publishers now begin to realize it's fruitless to fight piracy, so they're turning their attention to the second hand market. DLCs are particular important for single player games since they can not rely on multilayer mode to keep players playing (so they won't sell their game to GameStop). That's why DA:O comes with a free DLC instead of just putting the context on the disc, and why BioWare had gone out of its way to emphasize DLCs for DA:O. DLCs and episodic delivery are fine for me if they're the only ways to keep making single player games financially viable.

I don't think Fable is that popular, Square-Enix probably doesn't think so either. I'm sure even TES outsells Fable. But otherwise, yeah I agree with you. Although the concept of paying money to not playing the game may sound paradoxical, people are already doing that. A lot of people pay leveling services to play their MMO characters, for example. Some MMO companies even legitimize it by offering player the option of paying real world money for the access to a built-in bot mode (I think I've read a report about legal, in-game bot feature on Massively).

Yeah, me too. I was even under the impression those guys were still working on Mythos and sometimes wonder why I haven't heard anything new about that game. Shame it's not on Impulse though.

I started playing Sins of a Solar Empire again. Space battles with 200+ ships still make my computer cry.

Question for Obz: We all know Obsidian had incorporated community tweaks & stuff to NWN2 via official patches. Is there any chance you'll be looking into adopting features of some of the more successful Fallout 3 mods for New Vegas? I won't mind seeing some Weapon Mod Kits or some perks from Ultimate Perk Pack, for example

I would rather see and play an actual working game on Cryengine 3 before I would even think about licencing it. When is Crysis 2 even coming out and how badly will it run on normal computers and on Xbox360/PS3? Looks like Crytek managed to secure a MMO developer as the first announced licensee for CE3 http://www.crytek.com/news/ If my memory is right, the only original CryEngine title beside Farcry series is NCSoft's MMORPG Aion. You'd think license an engine with the reputation of having very high system requirements is not the smartest decision for a MMO.

Now EA, 2K and THQ all have their post-apocalyptic shooter, Bob Kotick must be afraid of a doomsday gap.

deja vu?

MPC (video) and Foobar (audio) for me. But I also have VLC for those weirdly coded videos MPC refuses to play.

Firaxis will win on production value though, they can blow Farmville out of water with art assets from Civ 4.

Quote from Gamasutra http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25747 So it's a free-to-play game, wonder if Firaxis will sell any gameplay-related virtual items. If a designer as prominent Sid Meier is to give up the old idea of fair play, it may change the perception of what is acceptable in a microtransaction-based game.

I'm curious, has any "ex-Blizzard company" ever done anything successful?

So, from the sales data it seems 30% of the buyers chose to pay 1 cent.

Yeah, I knew a Left 4 Dead sequel is coming up but I thought it's called Left 5 Dead. Thanks for the info!

Yeah, I find Interplay's tactics this time to be a bit too extreme. Don't know how Beth will react, but entering a out-of-court settlement with a company trying to rescind its last contract with you under some fairly shady arguments is, to my way of thinking, just begging for more trouble.

Just because a few power gamers can max out every skills doesn't mean skills do "essentially nothing". Maxing out every skill is a gameplay choice and not everybody choose it. It requires a different play style which may make your character weaker for much of the game unless you go out of your way to hunt down hundreds of skill books early on. I had a maxed out character, I won't build another again because such powergaming isn't fun for me. That's meaningful choice. Even if every character will end up maxing all skills(which isn't the case with FO3), it still doesn't mean numbers are meaningless. You still choose what skills to build up first and your choice will affect the gameplay until you actually max out everything. I don't think all our real life choices mean nothing just because in the end there will be a Big Freeze or Big Crunch or Big Whatever and all life will cease to exist. Do you?

You could - Obsidian. Even in the unlikely event Obsidian manages to outbid anyone else and secure the IP, Obz is still not a publisher, and probably won't be able/unwilling to self-fund an AAA title (let along self-publish). So in the end it's still subject to publisher's demands & supervisions. I failed to see the benefit of having a Obsidian-owned Fallout IP if that means Sega/Activision/THQ will have the final say in the new games.

PC gaming is so diversified nowadays it's hard to qualify it as 'rising' or 'declining' without a specific context. From what I've seen the core PC games market in developed markets of NA and Western Europe was declining, but the picture will possibly change if browser/social games are included. It will certainly change if emerging markets are included. People may not realize it, but the Chinese gaming market is worth around $4 billion a year, and it's entirely PC. On the other hand, those more inclusive data might be less relevant in a PC vs Mac discussion, since China (and possibly some other emerging markets) is not Apple's target market for Mac.

= prepare for disappointment. BioWare spent six years on DA:O. BG2 took them like two or three years? If BioWare fails to top BG2 this time I highly doubt they ever will. Buy the PC version then wait for an easygame mod? It would be a nice change from the Beth mod scene if the most popular DA:O mod end up being a easier difficulty fix.

CRPG is probably the only genre where gameplay people are not considered design staff

Not likely for AAA titles though. Serialization is natural in a hit-driven, billion-dollar business where sequels generally get better. We're rather lucky these years as BioWare is moving from licensed IPs to original IPs. Gaming will become even duller after BioWare finishes the transition and begins to fill its pipelines with Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age II (yeah it's my bet Bioware will use Roman numeral for DA!)

I should have been a bit more precise and said 'the decline of PC as a gaming platform with exclusive titles', as what I purposed was games are becoming less of a deciding factor in the choice of PC vs Mac, and such decline helped Apple in expanding Mac's market share without actively promoting Mac gaming. Personally, I wouldn't even consider buying a Mac in, say, 2000 partly because of most games I'd like to play are only available on the PC. Nowadays with 80% of games I'm interested in available on consoles, I sometimes entertain the thought of getting a Mac as my next primary computer. I wasn't aware that taking advantages of competitors' falling is only possible in a zero-sum game. True if you define 'rich' as 'rich in cash'. I happened to approach the word differently.

Yeah, but they sure have realized many home users may choose PC over Mac because of the availability of games. I don't have any data but it's a pet theory of mine that the recent rise in Mac's market share is related to the decline of PC as a gaming platform. I think it's in Apple's interest that hardcore, client-side gaming continues to fall on the mouse+keyboard front. so they can make availability of games irrelevant in the PC vs Mac choice without spending billions to promote Mac as a gaming platform. There's no way Apple is as rich as Microsoft. Apple's consumer electronics may have higher visibility but they're not as profitable as MS's enterprise software.

It's conceivable Beth then may decide licenses for another two games would be more profitable if they're reserved for in-house projects. But, really, Interplay has as big a chance in taking back the Fallout IP as Russians have in getting back Alaska. So those points are all pretty moot.

Not necessarily. Bethesda could circumvent that scenario by just calling it Fallout 4: New Vegas. No, Beth probably will just make Obsidian change the setting a bit and repackage it as an original IP.