Random thoughts on recent gaming news.
Tim Schafer gets $3million+ for pyschonauts 2
And I wonder how long it will take for Timmy to ask for more money? Honestly didn't anyone learn anything from double fine adventure & spacebase DF9? You know two projects that asked for a lot of Kickstarter cash and ended with an underwhelming game and an unfinished game?
Look I know that Tim is an industry legend of the 90s, but it's hard to deny that the past few years has shown the man up to be someone with talent for game creation but no skill at game management. Not to mention some of his antics that have be insane or arsehole grade, like the sock puppet incident, and throwing a party only a few hours after laying off a load of double fine staff.
I know that no one wants to feel like a chump, and he all played us with double fine adventure (which looking back we should have seen coming when you know that the key ingredient to make a good old school graphics adventure is time and effort, not money, see some Adventure Game Studio games), and that can make some people defensive, but are we so broken that we are willing to forgive him and give him a third crack of the whip? Because psychonaughts 2?
Well if he starts asking for more cash in 6 months time, or the game is underwhelming when it launches someday, I called it alright?
The oculus rift costing $600 (about £450).
Honestly that's a fair price for a very new tech product. I'm not going to get drawn into the further debate about it being over priced, or say that it will change gaming as there is a bit of truth to both the negative and positive arguments.
If I am peeved then it's because it's a lot more that we where expecting given the price compared to Dev kit units.
Origin launches a subscription service.
£3.99 a month? Ha! Ha! Ha! You are kidding me right? £3.99 a month to play a load of old games (that I already own BTW) and mind blowing discounts of 10% on new games that are already overpriced? £3.99? Really? £47.88 a year for that limp privilege? EA really have lost it haven't they?
Look as a service I can't knock the origin front end, it's got great presentation and (for the most part) works a bit better than steam, and the customer support terms it blows valve out of the water. However EA just can’t seem to get it’s head around how a business model for digital distribution on PC should work. It hardly has sale periods (and the percentage off is normally lame), and prices are nearly the same as the retail console editions. That’s the reason I hardly buy games via the service and to date I think I have only 30 odd games with it (compared to 150 on my GOG.com account and nearly 500 on my steam account).
It’s not that Subscriptions cant or don’t work they are fact of life for console users, but on console you are tired into a single service, and they can turn off your multiplayer privileges for non-subscribers. Things like bonus percentage off, and free back collections makes sense when it’s also the only store that you can visit. However on the same format EA has to compete with Steam, GOG, Uplay, Green man gaming, and the Humble bundle store (where you can get game bundles for less than a tenner a time, heck even from as little as 70p!). In it’s current form the subscription is interesting but bad VFM when lined up with the likes of steam sales, or offers at other competing store fronts. It’s not like this couldn’t work IMHO, £3.99 for a full “on demand” access to both EA’s back catalog and catalog of current and coming titles would be massive annual VFM that would be game changing, or even a change to EA sports from annual title releases to a constantly updating subscription package. Which would make sense when you consider how much teams change over the course of a season.
But hey those are good ideas, something that EA is rather allergic to.
And I wonder how long it will take for Timmy to ask for more money? Honestly didn't anyone learn anything from double fine adventure & spacebase DF9? You know two projects that asked for a lot of Kickstarter cash and ended with an underwhelming game and an unfinished game?
Look I know that Tim is an industry legend of the 90s, but it's hard to deny that the past few years has shown the man up to be someone with talent for game creation but no skill at game management. Not to mention some of his antics that have be insane or arsehole grade, like the sock puppet incident, and throwing a party only a few hours after laying off a load of double fine staff.
I know that no one wants to feel like a chump, and he all played us with double fine adventure (which looking back we should have seen coming when you know that the key ingredient to make a good old school graphics adventure is time and effort, not money, see some Adventure Game Studio games), and that can make some people defensive, but are we so broken that we are willing to forgive him and give him a third crack of the whip? Because psychonaughts 2?
Well if he starts asking for more cash in 6 months time, or the game is underwhelming when it launches someday, I called it alright?
The oculus rift costing $600 (about £450).
Honestly that's a fair price for a very new tech product. I'm not going to get drawn into the further debate about it being over priced, or say that it will change gaming as there is a bit of truth to both the negative and positive arguments.
If I am peeved then it's because it's a lot more that we where expecting given the price compared to Dev kit units.
Origin launches a subscription service.
£3.99 a month? Ha! Ha! Ha! You are kidding me right? £3.99 a month to play a load of old games (that I already own BTW) and mind blowing discounts of 10% on new games that are already overpriced? £3.99? Really? £47.88 a year for that limp privilege? EA really have lost it haven't they?
Look as a service I can't knock the origin front end, it's got great presentation and (for the most part) works a bit better than steam, and the customer support terms it blows valve out of the water. However EA just can’t seem to get it’s head around how a business model for digital distribution on PC should work. It hardly has sale periods (and the percentage off is normally lame), and prices are nearly the same as the retail console editions. That’s the reason I hardly buy games via the service and to date I think I have only 30 odd games with it (compared to 150 on my GOG.com account and nearly 500 on my steam account).
It’s not that Subscriptions cant or don’t work they are fact of life for console users, but on console you are tired into a single service, and they can turn off your multiplayer privileges for non-subscribers. Things like bonus percentage off, and free back collections makes sense when it’s also the only store that you can visit. However on the same format EA has to compete with Steam, GOG, Uplay, Green man gaming, and the Humble bundle store (where you can get game bundles for less than a tenner a time, heck even from as little as 70p!). In it’s current form the subscription is interesting but bad VFM when lined up with the likes of steam sales, or offers at other competing store fronts. It’s not like this couldn’t work IMHO, £3.99 for a full “on demand” access to both EA’s back catalog and catalog of current and coming titles would be massive annual VFM that would be game changing, or even a change to EA sports from annual title releases to a constantly updating subscription package. Which would make sense when you consider how much teams change over the course of a season.
But hey those are good ideas, something that EA is rather allergic to.