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Insert Quarter: How Did 2014 Treat Indie Developers?
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
It is a precarious time to be an indie developer. Steam’s Greenlight and Early Access initiatives are producing just as many misses as hits and discoverability is still a problem on the Xbox Games Store, the PlayStation Store, and mobile storefronts. Matthew Handrahan examined the squeeze that indie developers are feeling from all sides as part of GamesIndustry.biz’s roundup of 2014’s major stories. The picture he paints is one of gloom and doom, but also one that can be overcome with the right level of talent and a genuinely groundbreaking idea:
So are indies heading towards a “mass extinction event”? Overcrowding is certainly a key aspect of the overall picture, but the act of making and releasing a game is only getting easier, and the allure of development as a career choice seems to grow with each passing month. It stands to reason that there will continue to be a huge number of games jostling for position on every single platform – more than even a growing market can sustain – but there’s only so much to be gained from griping about the few remaining gatekeepers. If the days when simply being on Steam or Kickstarter made a commercial difference are gone, and if existing discovery tools still lack the nuance to deal with all of that choice, then it just shifts the focus back to where it really belongs: talent, originality, and a product worth an investment of time and money.
The full article is available for your perusal at GamesIndustry.biz.
Insert Quarter: The Rise and Fall of THQ’s Empire
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
Gamers often didn’t know what to make of THQ. The publisher built its empire on the backs of tie-in games based on Nickelodeon and Pixar properties such as SpongeBob SquarePants and The Incredibles. But they also produced intriguing original games such as Saints Row: The Third and Darksiders. They were even the initial driving force behind Evolve, one of 2015’s most anticipated games. But that all changed when the company went bankrupt early last year.
So what happened? Tracey Lien, writing for Polygon, set out to discover the answer by talking to as many former THQ employees as she could including the charismatic (but possibly crazy) Danny Bilson. Her portrait of a publisher in free fall makes you wonder, could anything have been done?
Many blame the company’s fall on the licensed games well drying up. Some pin it on the commercial failure of the company’s uDraw tablet for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Others point to poor management and too many risky bets.
“There isn’t any one, isolated event that killed the company,” says a former THQ executive who asked to not be named. “This was one of the most successful video game businesses in America. We were a billion dollar company. It was complicated.”
THQ suffered a “death by a million spider bites,” the executive says.
The full article is available for your perusal at Polygon.
Posted in 3DS, DS, Insert Quarter, Mobile, PC, PS2, PS3, PSP, Retro, Wii, Wii U, Xbox 360
Tagged Darksiders, Evolve, Saints Row: The Third
Insert Quarter: A Classic Interview With Ralph “The Father of Video Games” Baer
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
Ralph Baer passed away this weekend at the age of 92. After spending all his life as a self-described “tinkerer,” Baer claimed more than 150 patents on various gizmos and doodads including the beloved handheld game Simon. But Baer will probably best be known as the man who invented the home video game console. Game Informer’s Matt Helgeson sat down for an interview with Baer in 2009 and the publication re-ran an expanded version of the conversation today as part of a celebration of the developer’s life.
It is an interesting look inside the mind of a man who contributed so much to the game industry:
Game Informer: What’s your opinion of what games have evolved into?
Baer: It’s utterly amazing. It’s simply the result of the semiconductor industry going sky-high over the last 20 years. I have an early Apple computer; it had 32K of memory. You can go to the store and for $50 buy 10 gigabytes of memory on a semiconductor stick that plugs into a USB. It’s like going from bows-and-arrows to the space age in 20 years.
The full article is available at Game Informer.
Posted in Insert Quarter, Retro
Insert Quarter: Unreleased Games and the People Who Trade Them
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
Unreleased games will always be of interest to gamers. Who among us wouldn’t be interested in Nintendo’s 64DD version of Mother 3 or Free Radical’s late, lamented Star Wars: Battlefront 3. But these games have managed to live on thanks to a shadowy network of collectors and archivists who trade and preserve the neglected pieces of gaming history. Kotaku UK’s Leon Hurley sought out some of these amateur historians to get the complete story on the trading of unreleased games:
You’ve probably seen videos of unannounced or cancelled games. Not necessarily the older retro stuff, but more recent things like Star Wars Battlefront 3 or Stranglehold 2. Did you know there’s a keen, and occasionally zealous, culture of collectors and traders passing these things around?
[…]
There are many levels to all this. Some simply collect and play the games, others code and and hack, extracting fresh info from old files or reinstating missing features. There’s even a community quite happily extracting and modding Halo maps. For others it’s about preserving the often transient world of video game history.
The full article is available at Kotaku UK.
Insert Quarter: Remembering the Best Instruction Booklets Ever
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
Creating a beautiful and engaging instruction booklet has become a lost art in today’s go-go world of downloadable games and extensive in-game tutorials. Some, like Yacht Club Games and their awesome booklet for Shovel Knight, are attempting to keep the practice alive. But it seems like a foregone conclusion that the instruction booklet will have breathed its last in the not-too-distant future.
Thankfully, Jason Dafnis of Game Informer took some time out of his day to honor ten of his favorite instruction booklets, manuals, and strategy guides:
Let me spin you a yarn. Times were, you’d open that brand-new cardboard (or plastic) box and there, nestled right next to your cartridge (or disc), would be a booklet. Yes, a booklet – paper pages stapled together that told you how to play the game (and sometimes more). Remember those?
Now the left (or right) side of your game case sits bare or thinly veiled with tie-in ads or DLC codes. Those clippies that once held your booklet are all but obsolete. Booklets might not be completely extinct, but they are on the way out. Here are ten of our favorites in no particular order.
The full article is available at Game Informer.
Insert Quarter: Should Assassin’s Creed: Unity Be Recalled?
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
Can you recall a video game because it’s too buggy? It’s an interesting question. For the most part, a software purchase is considered an “as is” piece of property by publishers, retailers, and most of the general public. Whether you prefer to use “Buyer Beware,” or the classier sounding “Caveat Emptor,” a software program is considered yours as soon as you break the seal. But the bugs found in Assassin’s Creed: Unity aren’t like the average glitches found in your average game. And Erik Kain of Forbes wonders if it’s time Ubisoft issued a full recall instead of resorting to patch after patch after patch:
At this point we sort of take it all for granted, however. Another buggy game release? Color me surprised. We’ve done this so many times before it hardly makes us bat an eye.
But we wouldn’t stand for it in any other industry.
The full article is available at Forbes.
Posted in Insert Quarter, PC, PS4, Xbox One
Tagged Assassin's Creed: Unity
Insert Quarter: Video Game Titles Have Gotten Ridiculous
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
Video game titles have gotten ridiculous. I think I really noticed it earlier this year when Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix decided use Rise of the Tomb Raider as the title of the next game in the series. I’d gotten my fill of the word “rise” (and its variants) after being subjected to The Dark Knight Rises, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Hannibal Rising, and many others at the movie theater. Especially because very few of the people or groups who are supposed to rise in those movies actually do!
Destructoid’s Steven Hansen shares my pain and has put together his own list of words that need to be stricken from game titles. Unsurprisingly, it all loops back to Call of Duty:
Lords of the Fallen and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare just came out and they should be laughed out the damn building for their horrible, generic videogames names.
I originally typed “Armored Warfare” and was confused when Google failed to bring up results for our “Call of Duty: Armored Warfare” review. Then I realized it was “Advanced Warfare” after remembering I kept getting it confused with Advance Wars originally.
DO YOU SEE THE PROBLEM?
You can read the rest of the article at Destructoid.
Insert Quarter: Should Games Have All Content Unlocked From the Outset?
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
Back in the NES era, many games included cheats or Game Genie codes to unlock some of the more difficult levels or fill our coffers with 1-Ups. How else were we supposed to beat Battletoads? But today’s games don’t do that, opting instead to lock much of their advanced content behind a scavenger hunt for baubles or a seemingly impossible boss fight. Most games, but not all. Halo: The Master Chief Collection is a rather notable exception. Ars Technica’s Kyle Orland writes that Microsoft’s decision to unlock every campaign level and multiplayer match type was a master stroke:
It doesn’t have to be this way, as Halo: The Master Chief Collection and its immediate unlocks show. Original campaigns aren’t going anywhere, and we’re not about to start skipping content by default. But there’s no reason to prevent players from deciding how and when they can access whatever content is in a game—from levels and items to weapons and costumes—at the moment they first launch it.
You can read the rest of the article at Ars Technica.
Posted in Insert Quarter, Xbox One
Tagged Halo: The Master Chief Collection