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Microsoft reverses stance on 24-hour check-in, used games for Xbox One [update]
Weekend Confirmed Episode 50
by Garnett Lee, Mar 04, 2011 12:00pm PSTFrom the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the stars aligned perfectly for a tremendous 50th episode. Legendary podcast alumnus John Davison and Mark MacDonald return to the show along with Shacknews editor Xav de Matos and Q-Games producer Ariel Angelotti. Iwata's keynote provides the starting point for the conversation, which then quickly turns to the long lineup of games seen at and around the show. Some of the big titles include Batman: Arkham City, Battlefield 3, SOCOM 4, Brink, Guild Wars 2, PixelJunk Shooter 2, and many more. It's definitely a "must-have" show.
Weekend Confirmed Ep. 50: 03/04/2011
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If you're viewing this in the GameCenter application, you can play Weekend Confirmed Episode 50 directly.
Weekend Confirmed comes in four segments to make it easy to listen to in segments or all at once. Here's the timing for this week's episode:
- GDC Special Part 1: Start: 00:00:00 End: 00:31:55
- GDC Special Part 2: 00:32:42 End: 01:03:59
- GDC Special Part 3: Start: 01:04:56 End: 01:39:55
- Featured Music "Hiyah" by Knights Errant: 01:37:32 End: 01:39:58
- GDC Special Part 4: Start: 01:39:58 End: 02:17:39
Knights Errant serve up their track "Hiyah" in this week's Featured Music spot. The band consists of Ben Jendras, Conor Ryan, and Jerry Willoughby from Chicago. They have been playing together since the early years of traumatizing adolescence, and like their name sake, struck out to create some noise of their own, disregarding the constraints of genre/style, not caring as long as it rocked. Catch up with them on Facebook and MySpace.
Original music in the show by Del Rio. Get his latest single, Small Town Hero on iTunes. Check out more, including the Super Mega Worm mix and other mash-ups on his ReverbNation page or Facebook page.
Jeff can also be seen on The Totally Rad Show. They've gone daily so there's a new segment to watch every day of the week!
Remember to join the Official Facebook Weekend Confirmed Page and add us to your Facebook routine. We'll be keeping you up with the latest on the show there as well.
Comments
"I'm going to go on the record and say that I believe the middle-class game is dead. It needs to be either an event movie: day one, company field trip. Battlefield: LA -- we're there. Avatar -- we're there. The Other Guys starring Will Ferrell and Marky Mark? Nah, I'll fucking rent that, I don't really care -- right?
"Or it has to be an indie film. Black Swan -- I'll go and see that. I'll go to The Rialto or I'll go to the AAA Imax movie. The middle one is just gone, and I think the same thing has happened to games."
In response to that, Jim Sterling (yes, I know; I don't care; go read the article) wrote up this response editorial: http://www.destructoid.com/defending-the-middle-class-game-195661.phtml
First of all, if we agree that there is such a thing as a mid-range game, it should come with a mid-range price tag. A huge part of the reason for Deadly Premonition's success was its $20 MSRP, which was further reduced on Amazon to secure the title a #1 chart placement. Namco Bandai made a prudent decision with the release of Majin, universally lowering the price from $60 to $40 just prior to launch. It's rare for Namco to be the industry leader in anything other than DLC nickel-and-diming, but the reduction of Majin's price is something that I feel the industry as a whole needs to adopt.
Sixty dollars as a standard price tag just doesn't cut it anymore. Games are expensive, and quality titles are constantly being released. Something has to lose, and it's not going to be your Epics, your Rockstars or your Bungies. Value is determined by what people are willing to pay for an item, and if the middle-class game is dying, then the market has spoken -- most gamers aren't willing to pay $60 for the likes of Singularity. I'd say somewhere in the $30-40 price range is the sweet spot for middle-class games. If it's got half the hype of Gears of War, then make it cost half as much.
Release dates are also a huge consideration, and one that constantly frustrates me. Those three Namco games I mentioned earlier were all released in the months of October or November. Not only were the titles squashed together in a very tight window, that window also happened to be during the year's busiest release season.
I know that publishers really don't like delaying games into the next financial year, or even the next financial quarter, but if a game is not going to set the world on fire, they need to let go of the "we're releasing it for $60 in Q4!" mentality. There's a fate far worse than being "a middle-class game": there's the fate of middling sales; not enough for profitability, but too much to financially write off the project. Epic should know this well; it's what happened to UT3, and part of why they said, "Fuck this, we're going with Gears for the next few years!"
I know that publishers and developers have a lot of pride about the $60 price point, but if your game isn't truly going to set the world on fire, releasing for $50 or $45 in late July isn't a bad thing.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 27 replies.
For the price point, I think that one is pretty self explanatory; smaller cheaper games (though often making up with the sheer creativity and ideas) versus higher priced AAA titles. Basically a "dollar for quality idea" proposition.
However the gamer perception and the promotion to me, fall under the umbrella of the middle-class/AAA title differentiation. Let's start with gamer perception. Often this is something that comes after a particular game review. Just from reading the amount of "X game should be rated 5/5, not 4/5" or "3/5 (or 7/10)? Must mean the game sucks" type comments, there is that perception change of a game that either "came from nowhere" (and little promotion) and thus gets transformed into a AAA title through gamer reception (ie. Bioshock, Deus Ex, Fallout), or a heavily promoted "AAA" title that gets "downgraded" due to lackluster reception (ie. Kane and Lynch, Daikatana, Shadowrun). Games that didn't seem to have the heavy promotion but was of quality, is often remembered as a much bigger title than it was when it was released, whilst on the flipside you have the games that are regarded as a joke or mediocre despite the amount of heavy promotion behind them as a huge title.
Then comes the promotion aspect. Gears of War was already heavily promoted as one of the headline XBox 360 titles, along with Halo 3. A game is able to really sustain itself as a AAA title after promotion, IF the quality of the game is able to hold up to the hype.
What also affects the ability to notice the middle-class games is the promotion of the AAA title ahead of time (especially guaranteed ones), which combined with the price point of games, make it hard to purchase the games that come in between now and when the hotly anticipated titles come out, unless you have extremely cheap titles (Indies). Cheaper middle-class games like say, Blacklight Tango Down, isn't that much cheaper (40 bucks), thus a difficult purchase if anticipating COD:BLOPS, or Singularity where it is a full priced game, but again not a hard enough sell to sway from the anticipated title.
Though the movie industry doesn't have it as bad, I would see this as the equivalent of the "AAA" titles being like the "Oscar bait" or the summer flicks, and middle-class being the drama or rom-coms that appear between those times, where unless it is of superior quality, will find itself making the money in rentals and retail purchase.
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