(L-R) Innovative Leisure's Ed Logg, Rich Adam, Ed Rotberg, Owen Rubin and Seamus Blackley speak at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas on Thursday.
Photo courtesy AIAS

by Kyle Orland, Ars Technica

If there are any people who can make sense of the recent, meteoric rise of mobile and social games, it’s probably the people behind the golden age of arcade gaming in the early ’80s. Just such a group drew a lot of parallels between the two gaming eras at a DICE Summit session on Thursday, while also offering some cautionary warnings about following in the arcade’s footsteps.

“All this stuff is more or less cyclical,” said Seamus Blackley, a veteran game designer who’s worked on titles including Ultima Underworld and System Shock. His new company, Innovative Leisure, has gathered together some of the biggest names in arcade game history to draw from their experience to help recapture the appeal of those classics.

The New Arcade

The parallels between the arcade era and the current environment are striking. In much the way social and mobile games are drawing new audiences to gaming today, the launch of the arcade era was the last time absolutely everybody was able to identify themselves as a gamer. This huge audience brought in huge sums of money for the industry as well — in 1982, the industry drew the modern day equivalent of $19 billion in quarters from arcade games. One only needs to look at the huge market valuations for companies like Zynga and Rovio to see today’s version of those massive revenues.

Like the arcade gamers of old who could easily move on to a nearby cabinet if a game was boring, mobile gamers can drop a free or low-cost game incredibly quickly in favor of a new title. Asteroids and Centipede creator Ed Logg pointed out that, in the arcade days, the goal was to make a game “that you could play with a beer in one hand and be entertained within 90 seconds,” something we see in the simple, quick hit games of today.

“If you don’t grab the attention of player, give them fun early on, they’ll move on to something else, because there’s so much else out there,” Battlezone creator Ed Rotberg added.

The arcade games of old also relied heavily on field testing, putting cabinets in real arcades and spying on players as they tried them out. Today’s social games draw similar feedback from automated metrics that show which bits of the game are resonating with players in close to real time.

This kind of direct feedback is much more valuable than the kind of focus groups used by many larger publishers, where Missile Command developer Rich Adam said people are “generally predisposed to like what you’re showing them.” The kind of direct player observation used by arcade and social games allows small development teams the ability to quickly incorporate feedback into new designs, the panel pointed out.

Cautionary Tale

With all these similarities, Blackley warned that today’s mobile and social developers should watch that they don’t follow the precise arc of the arcade industry. First, there was a period of novelty, when the sheer newness of arcade games made them interesting to wide swaths of players. Then players “develop this thing called taste [and] expect a quality product, not just any product,” he said.

The arcade industry was slow to realize this desire for quality, glutting the market with repetitive and licensed products that exploited the audience. The end result was the massive crash of the mid-’80s, which decimated the entire videogame business.

The panelists said mobile and social games are still largely in the novelty section of the pattern right now, with players still largely wowed by things like multitouch displays and the ability to share games with their Facebook friends.

But they warned that things are moving rapidly toward that exploitation phase. “There are a hundred variations on Breakout on the App Store,” Major Havok developer Owen Rubin noted. “I don’t want to play that. I’ve played that before.”

(PRWeb February 09, 2012)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/2/prweb9182041.htm

WoW loses another 100,000 subscribers originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

• Source: Activision.com
• Via: WoW Insider

(PRWeb February 09, 2012)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/2/prweb9173634.htm

EVE Online's time dilation keeping game in sync originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

• Source: EVE Online #1, EVE Online #2

Continue reading The Perfect Ten: MMO prisons

The Perfect Ten: MMO prisons originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Photo courtesy AIAS

LAS VEGAS — Ninja Gaiden creator Tomonobu Itagaki almost quit making videogames when his company tricked him into releasing an unfinished title, he said on Thursday.

Itagaki, who has since left Tecmo and started an independent game studio called Valhalla, said in his speech at the annual DICE Summit that he only had two and a half months to port the fighting game Dead or Alive 2 to the PlayStation 2 in time for the home platform’s launch in March 2000.

“All of the staff, led by me, fought for a victory with all their energy,” Itagaki said through an onstage translator. “But unfortunately, the result wasn’t what we expected.”

As the deadline of the PlayStation 2′s launch grew closer, the company’s sales general manager approached Itagaki at his desk.

“Can I borrow a copy of this so I can play it a little?” Itagaki remembers the manager saying.

“I said, sure, yeah, go on, and I handed him the disc which was still under development,” Itagaki said. “But this disc was never played by them.”

Instead, Itagaki said to the crowd of game developers and executives, “it was taken into a factory for production on that day without me knowing it.”

Tecmo, Itagaki said, “made a huge profit.” But the release of what he called an unfinished game sent Itagaki into a spiral of depression.

“I thought I would quit making games,” he said. He started saying home, drinking from morning until night. He’d cry as he watched the movie Armageddon over and over again with his then three-year-old daughter, listening to Aerosmith’s theme song “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.”

Eventually, he went back to work with a renewed sense of purpose, creating the follow-up game Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore in the state that he and his team wanted it to be.

“No matter what anyone says, Aerosmith and Armageddon were the ones who saved my life, my company, my friends and my family,” Itagaki concluded.

(PRWeb February 09, 2012)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/2/prweb9181915.htm

At the DICE Summit, Addmired CEO Gabriel Leydon (R) tells Zebra Partners principal Perrin Kaplan that free-to-play games will destroy the traditional gaming console.
Photo courtesy AIAS

LAS VEGAS — The presentations at the annual DICE Summit are meant to be something like the videogame industry’s version of TED talks, big-think speeches meant to inspire gamemakers with new ideas. This year’s DICE Summit began on a considerably different note, with a pair of speakers who had no end of gloomy predictions.

“The only thing that saved Hollywood is that Sylvester Stallone is too old to make Rocky movies and Mel Gibson is too crazy to keep making Lethal Weapon movies,” said Wedbush Securities managing director Michael Pachter during a debate session called “Hot Topics” Wednesday evening.

Game publishers, he said, have no such incentive to stop cranking out sequels: “I think we’ll be playing Call of Duty 37 years from now; they’ll be up to two [games] a year by then.”

DICE (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) is the game industry’s first big conference of the year. Geared toward gaming executives, and put on by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, the gathering is normally characterized by an upbeat, optimistic tone.

This year, not so much. Pachter, a financial analyst who covers game-industry stocks, predicted that game publishers would start to die off and leave only a few major ones behind. “You’ll end up with two big publishers, Activision and [Electronic Arts],” plus the game hardware makers, he said, noting that Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two and Assassin’s Creed maker Ubisoft may also be able to stick around.

As an example of a publisher in serious jeopardy, Pachter named THQ, which recently went through massive layoffs and saw its CEO’s salary cut after disappointing financial results.

The ever-growing cost of producing big-budget videogames has the effect of “stifling creativity,” Pachter said, since publishers won’t take a risk on a non-sequel if it costs too much. One exception, he said, was Take-Two’s relationship with its Grand Theft Auto development unit Rockstar.

“There are enlightened publishers. They let their developers tell them what they’re going to make,” he said, naming Take-Two developers Rockstar, Sid Meier and Ken Levine (BioShock) as examples of creators who have “free rein.”

“They do come up with really interesting new [ideas] and it’s working for them,” Pachter said.

Free-to-Play Eating Consoles’ Lunch?

More firebombs were thrown at DICE by Gabriel Leydon, the CEO of Addmired, a company that makes games that are free to play and supported by in-game purchases.

Leydon was convinced that his company’s business model would mean the death of the Xbox, and made no bones about his disdain for the game console business.

“The console market is fueling the free-to-play market through their abuses of the consumer,” he said. The “abuses” Leydon described were the continuing churn of sequels, “online passes” that make games more difficult to sell back, and the possibility that new consoles may lock out used games entirely.

Leydon said that because free-to-play games don’t make money unless people continually play them, the designers of these games are motivated to keep people playing in a way that console developers are not.

“If you have legions of developers making games that have to have [players'] time to make money, how do [players] have time to play anything else?” he said.

While Leydon’s debate opponent Perrin Kaplan, a public relations executive formerly with Nintendo, agreed that mobile games were a threat to traditional handheld gaming, she disagreed that free-to-play games would “eat the lunch” of consoles. A game like The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is worth paying up front for because of its high quality, she said.

“That’s the exact same argument that coin-op [gamemakers] used for 15 years,” Leydon quickly shot back, noting that he had worked at Atari in the late eighties. “We can make prettier games. We’re gonna keep ratcheting up the prices of what we’re making to provide an alternative experience to the less-friction platform.”

Towards the end of the session, Kaplan asked perhaps the important question about free-to-play game design.

“Is it profitable?” she said.

Leydon paused his rapid-fire delivery for a moment. “It can be,” he said. Another pause. Then: “And you can also throw your money down a black hole, too.”

Continue reading You (yes, you) can expand Firefall's gameworld

You (yes, you) can expand Firefall's gameworld originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

• Source: YouTube

(PRWeb February 09, 2012)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/SWTORSecretsGuide/TonySandersTDub/prweb9182075.htm

(PRWeb February 09, 2012)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/2/prweb9182084.htm

(PRWeb February 09, 2012)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/pndcapital/2012/prweb9179438.htm

RIFT in China: 'biggest game deal ever' for a Western MMO originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

• Source: Gamasutra

(PRWeb February 09, 2012)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/2/prweb9173920.htm

The world of World of Warcraft recreated in Minecraft originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

• Source: Minecraft forums
• Via: Joystiq