This is about two things. Kickstarter and Day Z. But it’s not really about them, it’s about the emergent culture that has appeared and these two are the most obvious indications that the culture exists. Kickstarter is a natural progression. Just like we saw with Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, folk who have become immensely … Continue reading “if you won’t make the games we want to play, we’ll make them ourselves”
This is about two things. Kickstarter and Day Z. But it’s not really about them, it’s about the emergent culture that has appeared and these two are the most obvious indications that the culture exists.
Kickstarter is a natural progression. Just like we saw with Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, folk who have become immensely successful using the traditional markets are able to pivot this success into the new non traditional marketplace. With the musicians I mention, they were able to sell their music directly. With Kickstarter projects, it’s all about pre-orders. Essentially the same. People tired of formula productions and so we see non-formula productions. Albums a traditional record label may not have published. Games a large publisher would have modified. Because of the faith of a few, many will get to see what the artist wanted to create.
Day Z still fascinates me because it’s a situation rather than a story. Ordinarily this should have writers of game backgrounds shaking in their boots – but this game is describing something new. A game which is borne of games. It’s not a toy or a puzzle. It’s not a grinding engine or a jury-rigged television or movie plot. It’s a sandbox: it has limits but within those limits you can do anything you want. It bears more homage to childhood games of Cops’n’Robbers than to the hyper-violent activities in Modern Warfare. I’ve not logged in for days and when I do I know I’ll be starving. And death just that one step closer. And death, as we know, is permanent.
It’s fair to say that my own thoughts for Conquest Dynamics are changing. And why not. I doubt I’ll ever go the Kickstarter route (I just don’t have the résumé – despite publishing The 23rd Letter, SpaceNinjaCyberCrisis XDO and Zombi a decade ago.). But I feel like any game designer can learn from what is happening now. Change is happening right now and it’s both exciting and unsettling.
Peter Molyneux at Eurogamer: What I love about cloud computing – and this hasn’t been explored yet – is that it allows for something that we as gamers haven’t had since the start of gaming, and that is persistence. We don’t have worlds or experiences that can continue and last for extended periods of time. … Continue reading “Another Life (persistence in games)”
What I love about cloud computing – and this hasn’t been explored yet – is that it allows for something that we as gamers haven’t had since the start of gaming, and that is persistence. We don’t have worlds or experiences that can continue and last for extended periods of time. We need to get rid of saved games.
I think game designers are afraid of persistence. You have to figure out the consequences of persistence or figure out a way to fudge it. You have to explain what is going to persist, why and what happens when the game is a year old.
Look at Call of Duty. Are the wars persistent? What about the damage to buildings? And what about the dead? Eventually the bodies will start to smell. How you add persistence to an FPS will change the game. Who’s making the ammunition? We’ve bombed all the factories?
Look at Warcraft. Eventually you’ll have chopped down every tree and mined every mine. Eventually the Undead will likely take over by amassing huge shambling armies. Adding persistence means thinking about the long term consequences.
And what happens in persistent worlds with clues and traps? Do you come across the body of previous players? Or do you brave the terrors of the dungeons only to find the burial chamber contains only the burned out campfire of the guys who looted it before you?
But I don’t think Mr Molyneux is being particularly prophetic. Persistence is the Next Big Thing in games. The challenge will be in not making it awful.
Some companies will deal with it in terms of expansions. More new places to go. Others will use resets. Once a year, everything gets ‘reset’ after a fashion. Others still will place their game in a sandbox. New resources will be supply drops.
What I’m interested in is a game where the structures are built by people playing Sim City or Minecraft. They’re destroyed by people playing Call of Duty and Warcraft. Supplies are generated by people playing FarmVille and shops are staffed by people playing Dead Hungry Diner. Bystanders in the street are Sims, crossed with GTA.
They don’t have to be playing the same game. But what’s to stop a Sim shopkeeper (in real life, a lawyer from Seattle) playing out an interaction with a grizzled CoD veteran (in real life, a 35 year old video store clerk from Miami). The CoD player is playing his favourite FPS and from his point of view is trying to track down the whereabouts of a possible insurgent in the area. The Sim player is interacting via SMS messages and emotes on his mobile phone. He’s dialled up the realism so later that day, he’s interacting with a GTA mugger (in real life, a 17 year old college student on her summer holidays) and escaping with his life but not his wallet.
From Gamasutra: Newsbrief: In the wake of Double Fine’s astonishingly successful Kickstarter campaign, industry trade body UKIE called for legislation changes that would allow UK video game companies to use crowd funding to finance their projects. UKIE explained that the UK’s current legal and regulatory framework puts too many restrictions on crowd funding, and the … Continue reading “Crowd funding Investment: I have a bad feeling about this.”
Newsbrief: In the wake of Double Fine’s astonishingly successful Kickstarter campaign, industry trade body UKIE called for legislation changes that would allow UK video game companies to use crowd funding to finance their projects.
UKIE explained that the UK’s current legal and regulatory framework puts too many restrictions on crowd funding, and the group promised to release a report that outlines the ways in which the laws should change to better suit game developers and the entertainment industry at large.
I view this with some discomfort. There is nothing stopping UK video game developers using crowd funding to finance their projects. Nothing. Beginning their position with a straw man argument sets the scene for a document filled with repetition and obfuscatory prose.
The restrictions of the UK’s current legal and regulatory framework are in place to protect people from shysters. It’s not always possible and some people get burned but it’s the best thing for everyone.
There is nothing stopping Kickstarter from being in the UK as-is. But this paper from UKIE is attempting to effect serious change in the way securities are dealt by permitting crowd funding from “small holders” to purchase securities in bulk and I’m extremely wary of it for two reasons:
they’re using Kickstarter as an example. This is disingenuous in my opinion as its saying “look what donations/pre-ordering can accomplish, now let us sell shares this way” and nearly every discussion seems to revolve around selling investments. Kickstarter proves this isn’t required. And their opening argument is utterly defeated.
in my own investment dealings (helping to advise local companies), I’ve had to deal with venture capitalists who have been nothing short of shysters. Term sheets which could drive their own truck through them, legals which are not only different to the terms laid out in the term sheet but actual opposites which, when discovered are resulting to more more than an apology.
So, the mother of all unintended consequences would be to permit this and allow investment managers to punt junk companies on the Internet for pennies. In effect, doing a pre-IPO IPO. With the number of companies out there and the number of potential investors, this becomes an administrative nightmare. While the fund managers laugh all the way to the bank, you have thousands of shareholders wondering why they bothered considering the bulk of the money goes on fees and you’ve got such a micro-percentage of the company that you can’t control anything anyway. Ending up with a heap of shares in a worthless company isn’t the only potential outcome. Are they seriously going to have shareholder meetings with thousands of shareholders when a company is worth £100K?
I might be spending too much time worrying about the motivations of strangers. In my opinion, these people are not to be trusted.
What’s also interesting is the spread of backers. Around half have donated the basic $15 pledge, which gets you a copy of the game plus video documentaries. A further 35% have gone for the $30 pledge, which gets you to the video in HD plus a soundtrack. 10% have pledged $100. 3% have pledged $250. 31 people have put up $1000 each, 5 people have put in $5000 a-piece and one intrepid soul has put $10,000 into the project.
Double Fine Productions previous had success with Psychonauts and Brutal Legend (among others) so this success is a little like the reported success of Radiohead and NIN in their independent efforts. It’s going to be a lot easier when everyone already knows you are awesome.
I’ve seen a lot of Kickstarter projects fail – both to get funding and also fail to deliver the end product. In many cases it’s because they are new to the market. I’ve considered using Kickstarter for my own games project but despite my background, I would be considered new to the market and I would need to collect a team of established professionals to my vision in order to be taken seriously.
So is success in Kickstarter going to require building a career first? Or tapping into a meme? Masterful use of social media and connections?
Saw this Tweet by @notch: Related posts: Jonathan Gems on the abolition of the UKFC Ten Apps I Want… Digital Circle going independent and my thoughts on the Future Stop the Big Brother State
A report on the boom in the media industry despite the worst recession in 70 years. Related posts: cultureTECH: What I did… Holidays in England All I needed to know about games… Humans FTW! Sky-Bully FTL!
A report on the boom in the media industry despite the worst recession in 70 years.
This was taken at 11:45 am UK time. That would be 06:45 in New York and 03:45 in California. Knowing that other people are playing your game means you’re more likely to play it. Would it be useful to include stats like this in every multiplayer game? Related posts: The Games Market is about to … Continue reading “Interesting Stats on Steam. How’s your multiplayer?”
This was taken at 11:45 am UK time. That would be 06:45 in New York and 03:45 in California. Knowing that other people are playing your game means you’re more likely to play it. Would it be useful to include stats like this in every multiplayer game?
Just before Xmas I was contacted by a PR agent for the new BT Onlive Service. Onlive is one of the “big two” cloud gaming services and happens to be the one having received investment from BT and being bundled with some of BTs other premium services with their broadband offering. (The other cloud gaming … Continue reading “Onlive: Gaming in the Cloud review”
Just before Xmas I was contacted by a PR agent for the new BT Onlive Service.
Onlive is one of the “big two” cloud gaming services and happens to be the one having received investment from BT and being bundled with some of BTs other premium services with their broadband offering. (The other cloud gaming service is Gaikai).
A few days after agreeing to post a review, I received a new Onlive Microconsole in the post. As it arrived just before Xmas day, there was much speculation on the service and how it would work. The requirements for Onlive are pretty basic:
minimum 2 Mbps internet connection (5 Mbps recommended)
and that’s pretty much it. My internet runs at 6.5 Mbps downstream (real world about 5 Mbps) and 700 Kbps upstream (real world about 600 Kbps) and with a latency of about 40 ms. So you’d think I should be fine for this. For a good discussion of the other sources of latency – including the latency of your TV display, see Eurogamer.
The lower the better, but if your “ping” result is much more than 25 ms, we do not recommend using it for online gaming.
Oh crap.
So I did a traceroute test:
mycomputer:~ me$ traceroute bt.com
traceroute to bt.com (62.239.237.1), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 skyrouter.home (192.168.0.1) 1.225 ms 0.689 ms 0.709 ms
2 bm5.niba-dhcp.isp.sky.com (94.9.207.62) 22.532 ms 23.585 ms 23.632 ms
3 10.245.166.241 (10.245.166.241) 22.570 ms 22.977 ms 22.726 ms
4 89.200.131.173 (89.200.131.173) 38.261 ms 39.105 ms 35.741 ms
5 linx7.ukcore.bt.net (195.66.224.56) 94.604 ms 35.891 ms 39.608 ms
...
So, really, I can’t even make it to the BT Core network without incurring over 35 ms of latency, which means my connection is too ‘laggy’ for Onlive. I checked with some friends on BT Infinity and their connections incur about 25-28 ms on BT Infinity to the BT core network. That’s much better and obviously the bulk of my latency is eaten up in the transition from the Sky network to the BT core network. I’m a bit annoyed because it is part of BT’s Wholesale ADSL offering. Bah.
Anyway.
The Microconsole requires a HDTV with a HDMI connection and there’s a client that can access the service which runs on Windows, Macintosh and Android. While there is an Onlive Viewer for the iPad, it’s not going to permit you to play games because Apple would demand 30% of any revenue. Yes, Onlive could work around it the way that Amazon has worked around the Kindle. Yes, Apple are being unreasonable. Let’s just leave it at that.
And then I was greeted by
You’ll note the setup is extremely simple. I have two bugbears.
The power socket is pretty much the same size as the hole for the sound jack. That flummoxed me for a minute. My own fault but still.
No WiFi built-in. What a pain in the ass. This means I have to either run CAT5 to my TV or use a PowerLine adapter. What sort of system doesn’t have WiFi?
This was followed by an email to support and this is the first real frustration; it took 24 hours to get a reply. Any enthusiasm for playing the console had completely deserted my son as soon as the initial excitement died. It took me a little troubleshooting but I figured out that my 14Mbps PowerLine adapters needed to be replaced with 200 Mbps adapters as the former weren’t transferring enough bandwidth.
So, eventually I got it running.
The selection is okay. For a family with a lot of consoles (we have PC, Mac, PS3, XBOX 350 and Wii as well as iOS devices) then the immediacy promised is an improvement over options like Steam or the XBOX Marketplace, PlayStation Store or other App Stores.
It eats bandwidth. Which means no Youtube for the wife when it’s running and I’d even discourage other less intensive uses of the network.
Latency issues mean that what you see is not timed with your reactions. For games where reaction time is important (i.e. most of them), I found this maddening.
They take payments by card but if a PIN is required, it’s not eligible. Which rules out pretty much every Debit card in the UK. Maybe they should sell cards at the checkout in Tesco?
No login, no play. This is a worse system than the extremely draconian Steam DRM (which means you can’t play two games you own at the same time on different computers) – it just means you can’t play at all.
Pros:
You can decide to ‘rent’ a new game like Arkham City for 3 days (for £3.99), 5 days (for £5.99) or permanently (for £34.99). That’s comparable to video game rentals and outright purchase. (Arkham City is cheaper at £29.95 from Amazon but you have to wait.)
There are free trials available for just about every game which allow you to pay the game instantly for 30 minutes. That’s better than a demo or crippleware.
The Playpack Bundle which provides 135 games for £6.99 a month is incredible value. You also get a 30% discount on all other games if you subscribe. It includes games like Fallout, Fallout 2, Supreme Commander, Bioshock, Borderlands.
Conclusion: it’s not really for me at the moment. I’m enough of a twitch-gamer that I need every second of latency to allow me to play the game properly. In shooters, this level of latency would just be unacceptable. Even Izaak, 10, whose reactions in games tend to be a little slower due to inexperience, found it irritating. It would, however, be an awesome service for a game publisher to tap into if you couldn’t be bothered putting out a demo level. And for gamers who don’t want to bother with downloading demos, why not try the full game for 30 minutes.
But I don’t think know if this is a permanent conclusion. I have standard BT Wholesale ADSL in the house because BT Infinity has not been rolled out to my area yet (the BT Exchange is enabled but … the doowhangle isn’t connected to the gazwhingie). Maybe Infinity has better latency? If it does, then I’d certainly re-consider.
Onlive has UK servers so if your ping latency is less than 25 ms then I think you should try Onlive with the Playpack Bundle. The console is £69.95 retail and you get free access to the Playpack for the first three months. You can also sign onto Onlive with a Mac or PC or Android tablet by just downloading a client. Give it a go and if you find the latency to be acceptable, then please let me know in the comments?
Just be aware: No Wifi so you have to run a cable. A bad connection means no games (use pingtest.net to check). Prices are not really cheaper.
Somewhat resigned to never seeing Myth II on an iPad any time soon* so I’m wondering what game out there most accurately captures the feel of the game? Not looking for a full RTS. An RTS is a mix of resource collection (Farmville), tower defence (PvZ) and real-time tactics (Myth). On the other hand if … Continue reading “So, name a game on iOS most like Myth II: Soulblighter”
Somewhat resigned to never seeing Myth II on an iPad any time soon* so I’m wondering what game out there most accurately captures the feel of the game?
Not looking for a full RTS. An RTS is a mix of resource collection (Farmville), tower defence (PvZ) and real-time tactics (Myth).
On the other hand if there are any people who’d like to throw in some time to create a new game, then I’ll show you my notes, design, writing etc. And we can go find some money.
*John Siracusa and Wil Shipley talked about porting Myth (the code was released to some and lives on in community sourced updates) and previous to that I had spoken to Take2 about who owned the rights. Both dead ends – the rights for this game are so heavily tied up that it would take a contortionist to unravel them.
I’m looking for resources for teaching young kids Spanish and French. In my ideal world these would be iPhone or iPad apps, with goal-based outcomes built-in. Seems like a missed opportunity. Of course, this is one of the things I’d like my new startup to build. Assisted Learning Experiences. Teaching by Asking. Learning through Play. … Continue reading “Language Learning for Kids?”
I’m looking for resources for teaching young kids Spanish and French. In my ideal world these would be iPhone or iPad apps, with goal-based outcomes built-in. Seems like a missed opportunity.
Of course, this is one of the things I’d like my new startup to build. Assisted Learning Experiences. Teaching by Asking. Learning through Play. Assessing by Doing.
That’s one of the reasons I’m pumped to be going to Learning Without Frontiers next week. I’d love to put together a group of folk interested in technology based learning and teaching. I even registered a domain for the grouping!
