Video Game Industry Thread: June-July is done, go to the next thread

Synthesis

Rakai wrote: »

The PS3 RAM looks the same. Upgrading those wouldn't be possible. And to create a slot like the N64 had, would mean using something that's much, much slower. I haven't looked at the most recent motherboards, but interestingly enough, MS cut the number of RAM chips from 8 to 4 while doubling the capacity after a few years. So it would seem it was cheaper to produce 8 64MB chips than to produce 4 128MB chips when they launched and at some point that changed. (Unless there was another reason for using 8 chips, but I don't know).

Edit: Actually, I wonder if heat is an issue. That is, higher capacity RAM needs more cooling, and without the reduction in the fabrication process that technology progress provides, it might just be too much for systems to handle. The 360 already had massive heat issues, and the launch PS3 burns like a space heater. This might be another concern when deciding how much memory to put in.

Hey man. What part of lightyears don't you understand? The unit of distance or the apparent unit of time?

Seriously, though, the speed benefit of a slot-fed RAM module (putting aside the problem of being totally optional) is what I'd most suspect. Then again, I wasn't aware of the changing capacity on the 360's main board. I can speak from experience though, early model PS3s (not even just launch ones--80 GB models included) run way hotter than I'd be comfortable with any console running, my launch 360 included. Granted, it's probably a reflection fo being able to put out that heat effectively, but watching the furniture around a PS3 get that hot is not really comforting.

vagrant_winds

Yeah. Australia is at least getting Xenoblade. America is the only region that's dropped the ball here.
(Facebook page at 1000+ comments and counting. If it worked for Tales of, perhaps the fan campaigns can work here.)

For those that don't know what the three games are:
- Xenoblade is an action rpg with over 100 hours of gameplay and perhaps the most critically well fan reviewed rpg game this gen by Monolith Soft (Xenosaga, Baten Kaitos, Namco x Capcom, Soma Bringer).
- The Last Story is Gears of Final Fantasy (action rpg with cover systems, destructable enviroments and attacks that use the enviroment, ranged weaponry, etc.) by Hironobu Sakaguchi (Final Fantasy's father, Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey).
- Pandora's Tower is an non-child friendly horror-themed action God of War/DMC like game by Ganbarion.

Peewi

harvest wrote: »

The main reason that I want more RAM in consoles is so that there are fewer load screens in the PC versions of games. Maybe the next gen will deliver.

What games are these? Most games have shorter loads on PC, but I haven't seen any that have fewer loads than their console versions.

harvest

Peewi wrote: »

harvest wrote: »

The main reason that I want more RAM in consoles is so that there are fewer load screens in the PC versions of games. Maybe the next gen will deliver.

What games are these? Most games have shorter loads on PC, but I haven't seen any that have fewer loads than their console versions.

I'm saying that with more RAM, the console games would have fewer loading screens, and since the console is the target platform for the majority of games that feature loading screens, the PC ports would have fewer as well.

fragglefart

We need

V Faction

Regarding Xenoblade, Destructoid has apparently picked up the torch on the letter campaign as well, along with Pandora's Tower and The Last Story.

Monolith Soft, Mistwalker, and Ganbarion. Three names that really should be memorized, if nothing else other than to bring more awareness to these titles ala a Shigeru Miyamoti game, a Kojima game, Suda51 game, or Mizuguchi game.

Dragkonias

I'm sure,it will do as well as any online petition.

vagrant_winds

Xeonblade / Monado on Amazon
#24 in Video Games
#3 in Video Games > Wii > All Games
15,608% increase from 24hrs ago. And counting.

Care to join in?

Dragkonias wrote: »

I'm sure,it will do as well as any online petition.

You mean, the main reason why Tales of Graces is coming over?

Couscous

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/45073/PS-Vita-to-miss-Xmas-in-UK

That's what the consumer press is reporting, but MCV isn't so sure

CVG has gone live with a report claiming that a retail source "close to SCE" reckons the PS Vita won't launch in the UK until January or February.

"Sony knows it's effectively gifting the festive handheld market to 3DS - but is still really confident of a success," the source is quoted as saying.

"The overall strategy is that they want the hardcore to buy first and then spread the word. It's a blow for us, but they think they can still do that in the UK without the Christmas sales boost."

There are two things to consider here.

Firstly, it's unlikely that even Sony is 100 per cent sure of its launch strategy at the moment. Nothing is yet in concrete.

Secondly, and most importantly, MCV has been lead to understand from several sources both with retail and publishing that key companies involved with the launch ARE gearing up for a pre-Christmas UK release.

But as stated, nothing is finalised as of yet. Still, MCV would recommend not ruling out a November or December launch just yet.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/45068/EA-losing-ground-in-casual-sector

Analyst predicts it will be overtaken by Wooga within weeks; Could The Sims on Facebook reverse slide?

Cowen & Company's Doug Creutz has predicted that EA will slip drop a place in the casual and social games market within the next few weeks, with German company Wooga overtaking it in terms of active monthly users.

"EA's user base continues to decline," a note to investors claims. "Over the next couple of weeks we expect the company to be overtaken by the rapidly growing European gaming company Wooga, and fall to number three in total Facebook gaming MAUs."

It remains to be seen if the arrival of The Sims on Facebook – which has not yet been given a release date – will reverse these trends.

Wooga recently overtook Disney's Playdom to claim fourth spot in the market behind only EA, Crowdstar and Zynga.

The first release to emerge since Disney's acquisition of Playdom, Gardens of Time, was recently released but has since waned after its initial popularity.

Creutz added: "Although we applaud Disney's success with Gardens of Time, we think Disney needs to come up with several more hits (and sustain existing hits) to begin to make headway against the significant losses being generated by their Interactive Media unit."

Wooga is a great name.

Henroid

I want to know what this guy is basing the claim on. EA's userbase declining, that is.

reVerse

Well, EA hasn't been squeezing out anywhere near the amount of licensed turds that they used to, so maybe that's a factor?

vagrant_winds

The article is about social games, people. You know, Facebook stuff.

reVerse

Oh those games.

Speaking of games that aren't really games or whatever, the PSP version of Angry Birds is pretty bad. The framerate goes down the shitter on the more complex levels.

Just wanted to share.

cloudeagle

Yeah, I've heard that the ports of Angry Birds can be pretty crappy.

Anyway, who wants to place bets on when Zynga decides to buy Wooga? I'm down for two months.

Henroid

cloudeagle wrote: »

Yeah, I've heard that the ports of Angry Birds can be pretty crappy.

Anyway, who wants to place bets on when Zynga decides to buy Wooga? I'm down for two months.

If that happens, I would start to put together an investigation for monopoly nonsense.

Henroid

Addendum: AWOOOOOOOOOGA

cloudeagle

In case anyone didn't hear the wailing from TSR, Yu Suzuki has left Sega.

Probably for the best, since he hasn't finished squat in the last eight years or so.

Santa Claustrophobia

Maybe he was working on Shenmue 3.

Haha. No.

UncleSporky

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar0KojxIvmQ

Santa Claustrophobia

Not gonna watch that. For the same basic reason I'm not going to read the Precipice of Darkness comics. They can't be bothered to finish the games? Then I can't be bothered to read about it.

Algertman

The video is a joke. Just watch it.

Maddoc

Wooga sounds like a name for a Pokemon

Undead Scottsman

Santa Claustrophobia wrote: »

Not gonna watch that. For the same basic reason I'm not going to read the Precipice of Darkness comics. They can't be bothered to finish the games? Then I can't be bothered to read about it.

Oh get over yourself. The Precipice games sold like shit and weren't financially viable to keep making them. At least Tycho is trying to get the fans the story in some fashion (and for free on top of that.)

enc0re

I'm hoping the next gen won't have disk drives, but be download only. That should reduce the frankly ludicrous load times of this generation. Of course that would also mean RIP Gamestop.

Maddoc

enc0re wrote: »

I'm hoping the next gen won't have disk drives, but be download only. That should reduce the frankly ludicrous load times of this generation. Of course that would also mean RIP Gamestop.

so win-win?

reVerse

It would also mean RIP sales, RIP reasonable prices. 69.99€ two years after release, no thanks.

SD cards, though. I could get behind that.

Santa Claustrophobia

Undead Scottsman wrote: »

Santa Claustrophobia wrote: »

Not gonna watch that. For the same basic reason I'm not going to read the Precipice of Darkness comics. They can't be bothered to finish the games? Then I can't be bothered to read about it.

Oh get over yourself. The Precipice games sold like shit and weren't financially viable to keep making them. At least Tycho is trying to get the fans the story in some fashion (and for free on top of that.)

Uh huh. The games weren't all that good in the first place. The story was pretty lame on top of that. Sound like something I need to bother with? Not to me.

It isn't worth completing, even for free. Get over yourself.

Synthesis

reVerse wrote: »

It would also mean RIP sales, RIP reasonable prices. 69.99€ two years after release, no thanks.

SD cards, though. I could get behind that.

Not to mention RIP second-hand markets, and RIP games should anything happen to the distribution servers, though it's not like major gaming corporations are the target of hackers...oh wait.

Yeah, no thanks. Besides, wouldn't download only require even larger hard drives for a library of any quality?

vagrant_winds

And the Xenoblade/Monado Amazon preorders just keep going. #4 in overall Video Game sales right now (#1 for Wii).

Call to Arms GAF thread if anyone's interested.

Couscous

http://kotaku.com/5815508/is-familyville-zyngas-answer-to-the-sims-on-facebook

Some URL sleuthing by the domain-watching site Fusible revealed that the domain familyville.com has changed hands and hosts in a manner similar to URLs for Zynga properties like Cityville.

What most ties familyville.com to Zynga was its brief ownership, in March, by IPCybercrime, which acquired the domain cityville.com on behalf of Zynga in June 2010 for $38,000. IPCybercrime's motto, "Your guys for undercover buys," advertises it as a discreet broker for such high profile acquisitions, among other intellectual property services.

In April, the registration switched to GoDaddy's Domains by Proxy; Fusible notes that Zynga uses the WHOIS privacy service for many of its domain names. Further, familyville.com has changed over to the name server used by many of Zynga's most popular domains.

If this is indeed Zynga's next move, it would make a lot of sense. At E3, Electronic Arts announced The Sims Social would be making its way to Facebook, an app that is directly competitive to Zynga's casual/social games dominance on the network. The Sims Social isn't out yet, but it might want to hurry up.

In more hilarious news, people are apparently doing some in game rioting over microtransactions (not really micro as a monocle costs 68 fucking dollars in Aurum) in EVE and a document named "Greed is good?."
http://kotaku.com/5815445/furious-over-microtransactions-eve-online-community-explodes-with-rioting
http://www.evenews24.com/2011/06/24/ccp-offers-an-apologise-disgruntled-eve-online-players-lock-down-jita-surrounding-systems-very-crowded-too/
MMOs are a really fucking weird business.

They even have a live stream.
http://es-es.justin.tv/deamosseraph#/w/1384130320/4

vagrant_winds

$68 real world dollars for a fucking virtual item?

Turkey

Aren't the Eve items vanity items? What's the problem then?

Rakai

Someone looked at Valve's pricing and decided they could go even higher.

Maddoc

Turkey wrote: »

Aren't the Eve items vanity items? What's the problem then?

I believe the rioting is more over the leaked internal document, and the fact that implementing the vanity items and tertiary currency caused the entire in-game economy to go batshit crazy.

Turkey

Maddoc wrote: »

Turkey wrote: »

Aren't the Eve items vanity items? What's the problem then?

I believe the rioting is more over the leaked internal document, and the fact that implementing the vanity items and tertiary currency caused the entire in-game economy to go batshit crazy.

What happened to the game economy? Did the game previously offer vanity items through ingame currency or something?

Couscous

The complaints lead to bans which just further inflamed the situation.

They sold 52 monocles in the first 40 hours, and that generated the most revenue in the store. Thta suggests people don't really care for this shit at these stupid prices.

Part of the problem is that PLEX is used to buy Aurum. This drives the price of PLEX up. PLEX is basically a 30 day pass for the game that you can get and buy in game.

The reaction from the company has been kind of stupid.
http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=932

People have been shocked by the price range in the NeX store, but you should remember that we are talking about clothes. Look at the clothes you are currently wearing in real life. Do you have any specific brands? Did you choose it because it was better quality than a no-name brand? Assume for a short while that you are wearing a pair of $1,000 jeans from some exclusive Japanese boutique shop. Why would you want to wear a pair of $1,000 jeans when you can get perfectly similar jeans for under $50? What do other people think about you when they see you wearing them? For some you will look like the sad culmination of vainness while others will admire you and think you are the coolest thing since sliced bread. Whichever it is, it is clear that by wearing clothes you are expressing yourself and that the price is one of the many dimensions that clothes possess to do that in addition to style and fit. You don't need to buy expensive clothes. In fact you don't need to buy any clothes. Whatever you choose to do reflects what you are and what you want others to think you are.

The leaked newsletter also suggested they were thinking about doing shit that is more than vanity items.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-06-23-ccp-greed-is-good

Kristoffer Touborg, lead games designer at developer CCP, argues for an increased use of micro-transactions.

"I would like virtual goods sales in Eve," he wrote.

"In fact, I'd like to sell a lot more than vanity items. Does this mean I'm an evil capitalist that, unless stopped, will cause the entire company to catch fire and be buried at sea by a secret team of Navy SEALs?

"Let 's hope not, although that's the impression I get sometimes when interacting with our customers. There is a pretty overwhelming perception amongst Eve players that these changes are bad. I think they're brilliant, but our players don't. We're going to face an uphill struggle, and the reason many of us never talk about this publicly is that we'd be burned at the stake by the players."

A lot of people see vanity items as a step towards non-vanity items.

Maddoc

Turkey wrote: »

Maddoc wrote: »

Turkey wrote: »

Aren't the Eve items vanity items? What's the problem then?

I believe the rioting is more over the leaked internal document, and the fact that implementing the vanity items and tertiary currency caused the entire in-game economy to go batshit crazy.

What happened to the game economy? Did the game previously offer vanity items through ingame currency or something?

They didn't have vanity items before.

Basically, before they had two forms of currency, Isk and PLEX

ISK is the standard in-game currency

PLEX is basically a secondary currency used to buy game time

You can buy PLEX using ISK, and there are people who for years now have sustained their account purely through in-game currency

So now they add in a third currency, Aurum, which can be purchased using PLEX

So now the game suddenly has added in a third form of currency which comprises an absolutely monstrous money sink, which in turn drives the cost of PLEX up, which basically turned the entire game on its head

Sigtyr

They are going to sell non-vanity items, the company said so themselves in the "Greed is good" newsletter thing they made.

Maddoc

Yeah, that's the other big part of the rioting

enc0re

Synthesis wrote: »

reVerse wrote: »

It would also mean RIP sales, RIP reasonable prices. 69.99€ two years after release, no thanks.

SD cards, though. I could get behind that.

Not to mention RIP second-hand markets, and RIP games should anything happen to the distribution servers, though it's not like major gaming corporations are the target of hackers...oh wait.

Yeah, no thanks. Besides, wouldn't download only require even larger hard drives for a library of any quality?

Delete and redownload. And all those things about second-hand markets etc vanishing would be a plus from the perspective of MS, Sony, etc.

Considering my very positive experience with Steam, I wouldn't be worried about prices staying too high too long. Seems Steam is the place where you can get the best sales considering they don't have to pay the 70% (or whatever ridiculous number it is) retail margin.