Category: Uncategorized

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Stephen Totilo for Kotaku:

The Entertainment Software Association no longer supports the Stop Online Piracy Act, the controversial anti-piracy bill that was shelved earlier today in the House of Representatives after a week of fierce online protests.

The people who bring us E3 simply don’t want to bring us SOPA anymore. The bill’s got problems, they say.

Of course this only happens once the fight for these two pieces of legislation is essentially over (though Marco Arment is correct that a new one is always looming).

Penny-Arcade hit the weirdness of this right on the head. The ESA does good quite often, but in this case it was just plain wrong. One has to wonder if Red 5’s actions caused any other studios to threaten to take their E3 budgets elsewhere.

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Dennis Scimeca for Ars Technica:

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg for PC game developer Red 5 Studios. Not only has the studio blocked access to the beta of free-to-play open-world shooter Firefall for the day, but it also revealed last week that it is pulling out of the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) showcase, which is run by the SOPA-supporting Entertainment Software Association (ESA).

Red 5 will also use the $50,000 it would have spent on a promotional E3 booth to start The League For Gamers, a grassroots group it calls “a gathering place for gamers, developers and industry supporters who want to stand against legislation that’s detrimental to the games industry.”

Read the rest, including an interview with CEO Mark Kern. The ESA, like many other industry associations, can be a good thing. But it can also be a bad thing when it claims to speak for all its member organizations.

It’s refreshing to see a developer standing up for this.

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Tom Chick’s quick review of the Genki Bowl VII DLC for Saints Row: The Third has prompted me to write some thoughts I was saving for tomorrow.

He says:

The Genki Bowl DLC is weird for weird’s sake, and frankly, it’s not even that weird. A giant ball of rampaging pink yarn is just an immutable Katamari. The new pink catwomen homies are no stranger than the costumes you’ve probably been wearing all along. A pink convertible with mounted flamethrowers sure would be cool in a game without VTOL cycles, TRON tanks, and a moon buggy.

I want so much to disagree with this, but I have to say that I’m unfortunately disappointed with this first DLC pack in much the same way.

The Third was a great ride and definitely worth my money, and to support Volition for making it I dropped the money on the season pass for the DLC sight-unseen. But Genki Bowl VII is missing almost everything that I liked about the base game itself.

It’s a series of derivative diversions that aren’t as fun as the material that they are supposed to push to the next level of crazy.

Apocalypse Genki is a harder and more confusingly-laid-out version of Super Ethical Reality Climax. Super Ethical PR Opportunity is an Escort mission, just not as difficult or novel. Sexy Kitten Yarngasm is the Tank Mayhem diversion but without a cannon and with hangups on the world geometry. And Sad Panda Skyblazing—though a unique diversion that’s like nothing else in the game—is an exercise in frustration that’s over as soon as you figure it out.

The bonuses for completing these things aren’t even very interesting, especially if you are playing with a character that’s already reached the endgame. There’s little enjoyment to be had in running them co-op (though it does decrease the difficulty a bit). And there’s a moment in the closing cut scene where it’s blatantly obvious that they didn’t record lines with The Third‘s uniformly excellent voice talent.

I had high hopes for the DLC based on my experience with the base game—but it was such an over-the-top piece of performance art that perhaps anything they do at this point is going to fall short.

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Tycho:

There’s an incredibly short list of people I trust to tell me the truth about the industry, even if I don’t always want to hear it, and Ben Kuchera is on top of that list.  You may already be a reader of his at Ars Technica, where he’s been in charge of their gaming coverage for…  well, ever.  Until today, I guess, when I hired him.

We’re bringing him on to create industry coverage you can read without holding your nose, essentially; I want a perspective, I want a Curator for the Internet’s gaming content.  In a couple words, I want something less insulting and disposable.

Ben has ben one of the best voices in games news for a while now and I am extremely interested in seeing what he will be able to do with this move. This is a good thing for the state of games “journalism” and news reporting.

So like the opposite of the Kotaku Core announcement.

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Emeric Thoa of The Game Bakers:

Eighteen months ago, when I left Ubisoft to start an independent game studio and focus on making my own games, I looked online a bit to get an idea of how much income I could expect to make as an indie. At Ubisoft I used to work on big AAA console games, and I had some figures in mind, but I knew they wouldn’t be relevant for my new life: $20M budgets, teams of 200 hundred people, 3 million sales at $70 per unit… I knew being an indie developer would be completely different, but I had very little information about how different it would be.

Angry Birds had taken off, Plants vs. Zombies was already a model, Doodle Jump was a good example of success, and soon after I started my “indie” life, Cut the Rope was selling a million copies a week. But except for what I call the “jackpots,” there were very few public stories or numbers on the web, and this meant we were a bit in the dark when we started SQUIDS. I have been tracking figures since then, and I’m writing this article to share what I’ve learned with my fellow indie dev buddies who might be in the same position I was, a year and a half ago.

In this article, I will present all of the post-mortems and figures I’ve found interesting, and I will also explain how SQUIDS fits into the overall picture. But first, I would like to quickly give my opinion on few of the App Store myths you may believe if you’re not an experienced iOS developer. There are plenty of ways to view the App Store, but my point is that you might be a bit surprised by what the App Store really means in terms of money.

This is a great piece with some sharp analysis of how the App Store economy runs and what’s needed to create and make a living off a hit iOS game. If you’ve ever wondered how the business side of that $5 app you just downloaded runs you should give this a read.

(via Clint Hocking.)

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I bought the Season Pass for it as soon as it was in my hands, but the first DLC for Saints Row is released next week:

It is known by many names: “The greatest specatacle in sports,” “The most dangerous game,” and “Holy [redacted] I can’t [redacted] believe I [redacted] [redacted].” It is the one, the only, Genkibowl VII!!

As a special surprise, the Professor has allowed his very own Genki Girls to theme the new games after themselves. Sail through the skies with Sad Panda Skyblazing. Fight through dark, shark-infested jungles in Angry Tiger’s Apocalypse Genki. And crush your way to victory in Sexy Kitten Yarngasm. But don’t forget to help Professor Genki maintain his excitement before any public appearances in Super Ethical PR Opportunity.

I am hoping this is exactly the kind of insanity that I think it is going to be.

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I have had a great deal of fun with co-op games in the past few years, with highlights being the Covert Ops stuff in Call of Duty, the Gears of War series in campaign, and most recently with Saints Row: The Third.

When it comes down to it, I find that I would rather play a game that way than just about any other, so my lazyweb request for today:

Recommend to me an Xbox 360 game that has an amazing co-op experience.

Guidelines:

  • Not a Gears, Halo, or CoD title.
  • Not being a first-person shooter makes it better in my eyes but not required.
  • Has to be for Xbox 360.
  • Can’t be 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand (already covered and because it’s too awesome for mortal man).

Comment!