…in Dead Rising. They can’t take weapons and only get in the way. Not like Burt and Aaron, real men. *grunt*
Come on ladies, fight the Zombie hoards. You managed it perfectly well in the Resident Evil/Biohazard games.
Or maybe it’s just the few females I’ve come across so far couldn’t take a weapon. Further gameplay investigation is needed.
Previously I mentioned how much I loved Xbox Live Arcade – it’s great for gamers. But XBLA is also great for developers.
Games can cost millions of pounds to make, with teams of 100 people taking 2 to 3 years. These games sell for £40-50 a shot. If you screw up, that’s a load of cash you’ve just wasted. Developing a game for Xbox Live Arcade can take under 6 months, and cost a only few hundred thousand dollars. With less financial risk involved, companies will be prepared to take more risks with games, trying out new IP and ideas.
With these massivley reduced costs, selling at a lower cost is realistic, and you can still make a healthy profit. You also have a delivery system that is pushing your content to the gamers, rather than getting a boxed product into a shop and hoping that someone notices it. I couldn’t find any hard numbers for XBLA sales, but someone has done some good estimating:
From: Randomly Generated
- Frogger ($5 US) – 115,998 users = $580,000 in sales.
- Bejeweled 2 ($10 US) – 115,466 users = $1,150,000 in sales.
- Geometry Wars Evolved ($10 US) – 204,640 users = $2,046,000 in sales.
- Uno ($10 US) – 180,703 users = $1,807,000 in sales.
- Galaga ($5 US) – 43,560 users = $218,000 in sales.
- Street Fighter II ($10 US) – 17,914 users = $180,000 in sales.
Geometry Wars has pulled in over $2 million in under a year. That’s a lot of cash for what is a fairly basic (but very good) game. At the time those stats were generated, I think Frogger had been out for about 3-4 weeks, and Street Fighter II has only been out for a week.
XBLA also pushes the move to digital distribution of games – Steam has already proved that this can work for the distribution of PC games, meaning slightly more profit for the developer and a cheaper end product for the consumer. In spite of all the Blu-Ray hype, Sony have already said they expect this to be last generation physical media based machines, and that the PlayStation 4 will likely be download only.
Technorati Tags:xbox, arcade, developers
I’ve tried to find an introduction for this several times, but never knew where to begin until now. ‘Love’ is a strong word, and there must be a reason behind using it. There is.
Nostalgia.
Not nostalgia because I can now play Frogger (which I never really liked), or Pac Man, or Galaga (which I have on mame, but bought anyway) on my Xbox 360. No, this is nostalgia because it takes me back 20 years when 3 quid was enough to buy a great game.
On my Amstrad CPC 464, I could buy games at £10 or at £1.99 (then it shot up to 2.99). I remember going to the supermarket in Northern Irleand with my mother every few weeks (hey, she went every week, we weren’t that poor), and while she bought food and toilet roll, I spent the whole time looking at those 2 quid (then 3 quid) tapes that promised me hours of fun. 2 quid was nothing even back then – probably about the same price as 8 pints of milk around that time. These days a game cost 50 quid, and thats a whole lot of milk.
The £10 games were those such as Rambo, Batman, Operation Wolf, Robocop, but the little cheap ones were Dizzy and Chucky Egg and Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner and…and…and…
…and now this publishing model is back with us – where I can spend a few pounds and download a game. Thats why I love XBLA – it gives me the chance for a few quid to play games that are worth a few quid. These games are not worth £50, but they don’t pretend to be.
Consoles have never had this before. You had cover mounted demo disk, and budget label reissues of the top games (that you already owned), but Microsoft have provided us the consumer a delivery channel of cheap, fun games. Not only are they cheap to buy, but they also all have downloadable demos so you can try them out first, a system that harkens back to the PC shareware games from companies such as Apogee.
These downloadable games are of couse nothing new – this has been availble on the PC for years – but it’s been integrated into the XBL experience so well that people can’t help but looking.
These days, I’m not only excited about Gears of War – go Kev – (and of course, GTA4 – go me), but XBLA games such as Darwinia and Alien Hominid.
Next time – why XBLA is good for developers
Technorati Tags: consumers, Games, Gaming, gta, shareware, xbox 360, xbox arcade
According to Joystiq, the Xbox 360 and PS3 do not offer sufficient power for high quality Crysis action. Now, to my mind that’s just some sloppy engine optimisation. Both consoles are more powerful than an average home PC, so they are in effect saying that their game will only look good on a top end PC with the latest graphic card.
Who is this statement supposed to appeal to anyway? Is it to make PC gamers feel superior to consoles gamers, only for them to realise their PC won’t play it either, unless they shell out another £300 in upgrades?
I’ve worked on games with bugs – every game released has bugs. I remember developing at Ubisoft and we had a bug on Bear where the game would only work on Purple Gameboy Colours. No lie – and when you’ve had 10 hours sleep in 3 days at it’s 4am and you get a bug like that, you want pack it all in.
Gabriel the code monkey figured it out (I have no idea what it was), and the game shipped.
Console games usually have less bugs than PC games. Partly this is down to the standard hardware in the consoles, and party because each hardware vendor has it’s own internal test department who won’t let you release buggy games (although they differ from region to region, Nintendo USA passed Super Bubble Pop on the Gamcube and Nintendo Europe didn’t).
With all that in mind, I was surprised to see freezing issues with Major League Baseball 2k6. There are possible methods to fix it, and a patch is to be released, but I’m hoping this was a one off. Patches for console games? Please, let’s not go down this road.
Technorati Tags: bugs, Games, software patches
Today Electronic Arts released a list of online servers that have recently closed, or will be closing for some of the their older games. EA explains that servers for the games listed below will be shut down on the indicated dates. Gamers can continue to play the games online up until these dates, but certain community programs may begin to close down prior to the shutdown dates.
I remember EA refusing to join Xbox live for the about 2 years, claiming that they wanted to have full control of the servers and have control of their games. Is this how they exert that control, by forcing players to upgrade to the latest version of their online games?
Technorati Tags: EA, Games, Online play, Servers
First 4 Figures is proud to present Fierce Deity Link, the first collectible statue in the First 4 Figures highly anticipated Legend of Zelda collectible statue series. With inspiration taken from the official Majora’s Mask Fierce Deity Link artwork, the statue has faithfully recreated Fierce Deity’s powerful and mysterious character and pose. Raising his double helix sword high above his head, he is ready to take on any his enemies. Towering at over 14.5 inches to the tip of his sword hilt, Fierce Deity Link will be in scale with the others in the series.
Cast in high quality poly-stone, the statue is hand finished and hand painted. Comes packed in a foam interior full colored box with a card of authenticity. Highly limited at only 2,500 pieces available worldwide.
One of the nice things about Google Calendar is that it can link the location of an appointment to Googlemaps. I’ve just found out today that you can now ‘bookmark’ locations, name them “Home”, “Parents” whatever, and it will auto complete.
Yeah, it’s geeky to be into this stuff, but useful. I’d never have thought a calendar would be useful to me, but it is. I’ve even started to record work milestones on it. Now I have no excuse.
I REALLY miss the del.icio.us buttons now that I’m running Firefox beta.
I’ve updated a few of my Flickr photos with tags and descriptions.
Other Related Topics:
google caledar, flickr, link statue
Loco Roco is Racist. Hmm..
Ripped from Eurogamer:
A blogger has kicked up a right old storm of controversy after suggesting that PSP puzzler LocoRoco has racist overtones.
In a post on his 1UP blog, Alejandro Quan-Madrid argued that the Moja enemies in LocoRoco resemble the racist “blackface” caricature adopted by minstrel peformers at the start of the twentieth century. They remained commonplace for many years – in Britain, the BBC’s own Black and White Minstrel Show ran until 1978.
Still, in other news, Liberty City Stories takes the number 1 spot in the UK multi-format charts. Ding!
