High School or Lower

An anonymous reader writes with this quote from PC Authority: “Over the years many voices have declared PC gaming dead. We have seen developers abandon the platform for consoles, citing piracy as the cause. Game stores have slowly relegated PC games from prime shelf position to one tucked away in the back corner — even Microsoft dumped AAA PC game developers from the company. It seems, though, that the demise of the PC as a games platform has been exaggerated, because until very recently sales data ignored digital distribution, with the latest data released by US company NPD revealing that 48% of PC unit sales in the US in 2009 were digital. That translates to 21.3 million games downloaded in the US. Interestingly, although 48% of games were sold online, it only worked out as 36% of the revenue. This highlights the fact that it isn’t just convenience that has PC gamers shopping online; it is also that games are generally cheaper than in stores.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

thsoundman sends in a blog post from Rahul Sood, CTO of HP’s gaming business, who claims there was once a project in development at Microsoft to let Xbox users compete against PC users playing the same game. According to Sood, the project was killed because the console players kept getting destroyed by their PC counterparts. He wrote, “Those of us who have been in the gaming business for over a decade know the real deal. You simply don’t get the same level of detail or control as you do with a PC over a console. It’s a real shame that Microsoft killed this — because had they kept it alive it might have actually increased the desire of game developers and gamers alike to continue developing and playing rich experiences on the PC, which would trickle down to the console as it has in the past.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes “Big news for Star Wars fans looking forward to BioWare’s upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG — space combat has been confirmed for the game. Players will be able to fly around the galaxy in their own personal starships, avoiding asteroid belts, landing in dangerous territory and battling other vessels. The initial news makes it sound like a cross between Mass Effect’s galaxy map and a traditional space fighting game, where players will have to find ‘hotspots’ on the galaxy map in order to enter a particular zone.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gamasutra’s Leigh Alexander recently wrote an editorial about the atmosphere of irritation and dissatisfaction that pervades all aspects of the video game industry. Developers are often overworked and unfulfilled, gamers have no qualms about voicing their disapproval (sometimes quite warranted, sometimes not), and the media, in trying to please both groups, often fails to satisfy either. Why is there so much strife in an industry ostensibly focused on having fun? From the article: “More and more developer sources I talked to suggested that fatigue, hostility, being at odds with one’s employer and questioning one’s career course is frighteningly common in the game industry. That being the case, it seems natural that elements like emotional detachment, anxiety and a lack of fulfillment make their way, even subtly, into the products the industry creates and into the ecosystem around the industry and its audience. ‘Because of the secrecy and competition, a lot of development teams end up having a siege mentality — batten down the hatches and refuse to come up for air until the game’s done,’ says [an] anonymous developer. ‘Game development has a way of taking over your life, because there’s always more that can be done to improve perceived quality. I’ve seen a lot of divorces in my time in the game industry. I feel like it’s much greater than average, but I have no statistical evidence.’” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Forbes: “Electronic Arts, one of the world’s largest games publishers, on Monday partnered with microtransactions platform Live Gamer to bolster its online game efforts. … THQ also announced a partnership with Live Gamer last week to facilitate microtransactions of its online PC and mobile games in North America. … Worldwide sales of virtual items are expected to reach $7 billion by 2015, according to online games research firm DFC Intelligence. Fast-growing social games companies like Zynga, the maker of FarmVille, are leading the charge. The company is estimated to be pulling in around $600 million in revenue annually, largely from the sale of virtual goods. Americans are also growing comfortable with the microtransactions model. Game companies point to the music industry, where consumers buy 99-cent digital tracks instead of full albums on CDs.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

hornedrat writes “Gamepro discusses the idea that modern games put too much emphasis on multiplayer, and that players aren’t as concerned about it as developers think. ‘The current environment encourages developers to unnecessarily toss multiplayer into their games without caring about it — or even considering whether anyone will bother playing it. It’s like they’re checking an invisible quota box that demands multiplayer’s inclusion.’ Personally I agree that too much emphasis is placed on competitive multiplayer. I play online, but only with my brother in games that allow co-operative modes, like Rainbow Six: Vegas and ARMA 2. ‘My point isn’t that developers shouldn’t try and conquer Halo or Call of Duty. We’d never have any progress in this industry if developers didn’t compete. Game companies, however, should think carefully about what they want their games to be, and more important, gamers should consider what they want. If a developer wants to eclipse Halo, then by all means, pour that effort into a multiplayer mode that’s different.’ I would be interested to know how many gamers really care about the multiplayer components of the games they buy.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eldavojohn writes “There’s been a movement to preserve virtual worlds but MIT’s Tech Review paints a dire picture of our video game memories rotting away in the attic of history. From the article: ‘Entire libraries face extinction the moment the last remaining working console of its kind — a Neo Geo, Atari 2600 or something more obscure, like the Fairchild Channel F — bites the dust.’ Published in The International Journal of Digital Curation, a new paper highlights this problem and explains how emulators fall short to truly preserve our video game heritage. The paper also breaks down popular SNES emulators to illustrate the growing problem with emulators and their varying quality. Do you remember any video consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey that are forever lost to the ages?” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CheShACat writes “A UK high court ruled today that R4 cards for the Nintendo DS are illegal, finding two vendors guilty of selling ‘game copiers.’ The ruling by Justice Floyd is quoted as saying, ‘The economic effect on Nintendo of the trade in these devices is substantial as each accused device can store and play copies of many Nintendo DS games The mere fact that the device can be used for a non-infringing purpose is not a defence.’ No word in the article as to what law in particular they were found to have broken, nor of the penalty the vendors are facing, but this looks like bad news for all kinds of hardware mod, on any platform, that would enable homebrew users to bypass vendor locks.” Nintendo won a related lawsuit in the Netherlands recently, in addition to the one in Australia earlier this year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

myshadows writes “Tech Review has an interesting article on how Tokyo Metropolitan University researchers have been able to give a sensory addition to gaming peripherals — namely, temperature. ‘As the range of interactions with digital environments expands, it’s logical to ask what’s next: Smell-o-vision has been on the horizon for something like 50 years, but there’s a dark horse stalking this race: thermoelectrics. Based on the Peltier effect, these solid-state devices are easy to incorporate into objects of reasonable size, i.e. video game controllers. In this configuration, just announced at the 2010 SIGGRAPH conference, a pair of thermoelectric surfaces on either side of a controller rapidly heat up or cool down in order to simulate appropriate conditions in a virtual environment.’” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Opposable Thumbs blog has an interview with Jerome McDonough of the University of Illinois, who is involved with the Preserving Virtual Worlds project. The goal of the project is to recognize video games as cultural artifacts and to make sure they’re accessible by future generations. Here McDonough talks about some of the technical difficulties in doing so: “Take, for example, Star Raiders on the Atari 2600. If you’re going to preserve this, you’ve got a couple of problems. The first is that it is on a cartridge that is designed to work on a particular system that is no longer manufactured. And as long as you’ve got a hardware dependency there, you’re really not going to be able to preserve this material very long. What we have been looking at is how feasible is it for things that fundamentally all have some level of hardware dependency there — even Doom has dependencies on DLLs with an operating system, and on particular chipsets and architectures for playing. How do you take that and turn it into something that isn’t as dependent on a particular physical piece of hardware. And to do that, you need information about that platform. You need technical specifications that allow you to basically reproduce a virtualization that may enable you to run the software in its original form in the future. So what we’re trying to do is preserve not only the games, but preserve the knowledge that you would need to create a virtualization platform to play the game.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.