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Weekend Confirmed 103 - GDC 2012 special
by Garnett Lee, Mar 09, 2012 7:15pm PSTWeekend Confirmed goes on the road to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and finds some long-time friends of the show to make it a doubly excellent episode. John Davison of CBSi joins Jeff and Garnett for the show, with 8-4 Play's Mark MacDonald and videogame editorial ninja Billy Berghammer tag-teaming the fourth chair. Along with some of the topics of the day from the conference, the group catches up on a long list of games. Halo 4 and the newly announced Wreckateer highlight take top honors from Microsoft's recent Spring Showcase Event, the first look at Medal of Honor Warfighter also gets its due, SSX springs back to the forefront of the discussion again this week, and there's much more. Special thanks to CBSi and GameSpot for graciously opening the door and allowing Weekend Confirmed the space to record the show again this year.
Weekend Confirmed Ep. 103: 03/09/2012
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Special thanks to GameSpot for providing the space for Weekend Confirmed to record in San Francisco again this year.
Jeff Cannata 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!
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John Davison @jwhdavison
Mark MacDonald @markmacd
Billy Berghammer @louiethecat
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Original music in the show by Del Rio. Get his latest Album, The Wait is Over on iTunes. Check out more, including the Super Mega Worm mix and other mash-ups on his ReverbNation page or Facebook page, and follow him on twitter delriomusic.
Comments
I remember the old days of EGM, in the late 90s and early '00s, where I would take a specific interest in the games that got 'Bronze' or 'Silver' awards (Averages of 7 or 8 respectively, I think).
These were usually the games that tried something a little different, and even if they didn't pull it off perfectly, they were still worth playing, especially for fans of the genre, or just the concept.
Those are the types of games that seem to be dying. You either get a big-name, super conservative blockbuster, or you have tiny little indie or mobile games with great ideas that aren't really explored as deeply as they could be with a bigger budget.
It seems the mid-range game is now only found at the beginning of console cycles and at the very end. This is whern publishers take chances on new ideas and IPs. This is where we see experimentation with a budget. Where it's ok to score 7s or 8s, because you have a full generation's worth of time to build and perfect the formulas, or because the user-base is so large at the end of a gen, that even underperforming still nets a decent amount of revenue.
Toward the beginning of this console cycle and the end of the last (2005, 2006, 2007), we saw:
Assassin's Creed
Bioshock
Black
Bully
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
Condemned: Criminal Origins
Darkwatch
Dead Rising
Destroy All Humans
Gears of War
God of War
Guitar Hero
Gun
Indigo Prophecy
Mass Effect
Metal Arms: Glitch in the System
Odama
Okami
Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath
Portal
Psychonauts
Skate
Shadow of the Colossus
Stubbs The Zombie
Uncharted
Viva Pinata
Yakuza
Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure
This was also the period when companies like Atlus felt the market was large enough to chance bringing over the Shin Megami Tensei games (Persona, et all).
Basically a whole ton of new and creative IP. I guess we'll just have to wait until the end of this console generation and the beginning of the next one for the next batch of great ideas with a budget.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 8 replies.
I think the developers and publisher made a very smart move by releasing the game as an XBLA downloadable game. If they had gone to retail as a $60 boxed product, the game would have been forced to compete with the heavey hitters, and it would have been left to die. But as a downloadable game it became quite successful.
I think the `middle tier`games need to look at this approach.
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