Killzone: Mercenary shoots onto Vita on September 10
Trion Worlds hit with more layoffs, Defiance team impacted
Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault defending Vita next week
Game & Wario was originally going to be pre-installed on Wii U
The Last of Us digital download lets you start playing sooner
Evening Reading
by Garnett Lee, Feb 15, 2011 5:00pm PSTI received word today that the publisher of a fairly high profile video game due out shortly plans to handle pre-release reviews with an event. These "review events" give me great cause for concern, but not for the reason you might immediately think. Anyone at the level in the business to make the invite list for one of these things is well above the threshold of remotely being able to be bought off.
No, ironically, the real loser out of these deals is the game. On a AAA game--particularly of the sort prone to get the review event treatment--hundreds of people have worked months and months, often stretching into years, to create the game. In fact, on many of these games the last few months all those people will have been playing the game over and over, tweaking this and adjusting that to carefully craft the final experience.
And then it gets handed to a reviewer and the clock started on the brief few hours they are afforded at the event to play the game. Who does this sound like a good idea to? Wouldn't you want the person critiquing the game to have ample time to enjoy that content at their pace? On top of that, I can't count how many times I've gone back to a game while working on a review to replay a section or try something different or just double-check my impression from the first time through. And don't invoke the piracy defense because any outlet for which that would be a concern opens a much bigger issue to be addressed.
Tl;dr -- game review events are bad for all involved.
Now here are the top stories from today's video game news on the Shack:
http://2dboy.com/2011/02/08/ipad-launch/
Design
We found that the average iPhone/iPad gamer is more interested in pleasantly passing time than being intellectually engaged or challenged, at least when compared to the average PC or console player.
We playtested World of Goo extensively on six year olds, parents, grandmothers, and random people at coffee shops who either don’t play games or actively avoid playing them, so we know that the game is intuitive and self explanatory. We’ve also never received this type of complaint for either the PC or Wii version. What we neglected to consider is that the iOS audience might be looking for a different kind of fast-fun entertainment, where punishment for failure, no matter how slight, is not an option, and no matter how badly you play the game you always feel you have a reasonable chance of success. To address this, an updated version included a more prominently featured “skip level†button, and allows an unlimited number of skips.
Even after making it easy to skip levels, the game will likely still be too challenging for some players’ tastes, but we’re OK with that. It’s a puzzle game, not a scenic tour of Kyle’s artwork.
and
World of Goo’s launch on iPad gave us a new perspective on that discussion. In the first month of sales on the iPad App Store, World of Goo sold 125k copies (thanks to being prominently featured by Apple). In comparison, World of Goo’s best 31 day period on WiiWare was 68k copies (thanks to a mass mailing by Nintendo), and on Steam it was 97k copies (thanks to two promotions at discounted prices). So far, the iPad version is by far the fastest selling version of the game, both in terms of number of units sold and in revenue generated.
What makes this even more amazing is that this is a two year old game released on a platform that is less than a year old. The iPad doesn’t have the benefit of an install base built up over several years
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What we neglected to consider is that the iOS audience might be looking for a different kind of fast-fun entertainment, where punishment for failure, no matter how slight, is not an option, and no matter how badly you play the game you always feel you have a reasonable chance of success.
This is definitely true for me when I play iPad/iPhone games - the places and times that I play them means I have no interest in frustration or failure. That doesn't mean I want to same thing from 360 or PC games.
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