It seems quite a few people feel that renting PC games over the internet is going to be the next hot thing. Yahoo has just recently announced that they will be launching technology to allow people to rent games like Civ3 to download/play over the net. You can rent a game for just a few days for a Blockbuster size fee, or pay like $10-$15/month for a larger package style thing giving you access to several games.

Success, however, will hinge on Yahoo's ability to attract hot content. Most of the 40 titles Yahoo offers at launch are games that have been available at retail for a year or more. Some, like ``Thief'' and ``Addiction Pinball,'' date back to 1998. For game publishers, Yahoo's service opens a fresh distribution channel -- and a way to collect revenue from titles, months after their retail launch. ``This is low-risk stuff from Activision, Infogrames, Take2 and Eidos,'' said P.J. McNealy, research director for GartnerG2, a San Jose technology research firm. ``It's a safe bet, and it gives some of their back catalog more shelf life.''

One would assume that if things go well, we might eventually see new titles showing up through this system. This is I believe the 4th company now that is getting in to this technology.

Over the years we've touched on the topic of advertisements featured within games as something that should/will happen. Hower there just really hasnt ever been a significant landmark deal in the PC space made between advertisers and a game publisher/developer to give a good test of the 'theory' until now, although there have certainly been a few small deals made. McDonalds and Intel have just signed on with EA to be featured in The Sims Online in a multi-million deal:

Detailed terms of EA's multimillion-dollar deal were not available but it will allow Intel's familiar jingle, its product logo, and computers using its Pentium 4 processor to appear in the game. Players in the game also will be able to buy a McDonald's kiosk and sell the company's branded food products, earning "simoleans," the game's currency. Eating that food will also improve their standing within the game. [snip]

Here is your scandal for the day. Apparently there is a bit of guerrilla marketing going on by Ubi Soft according to this story on Unknown Player. Not really much to say about this one except for... wow.

Now, imagine our surprise when we saw the latest marketing campaign by Ubi Soft for Shadowbane. Alongside the hip logo of 'Mercilessly Multiplayer' was a description for a contest where fans could win prizes from Ubi Soft if they just went onto the forums of their competitors and posted articles saying how 'Superior' Shadowbane was to all else. To prove you did it, you would have to cut/paste the text of what you wrote and send it to Ubi Soft's marketing department to be entered to win.

A few days back we had a story about some crazy law passed in Greece that pretty much outlawed all electronic gaming. That one pretty much boggled everyone, well here's some follow-up. According to BBC (Thanks Mick)  a court has just ordered a case thrown out against two internet cafe owners who were accused of breaking that new law. This of course contradicts the law passed and puts the "courts on a collision course with the state"

Legislation passed in July banned people from playing video games in public places like internet cafes as part of a drive to stamp out illegal gambling. The law has been criticised for not making a distinction between interactive gambling and computer games. The court, in its ruling, said the law was unconstitutional.

Officially making it the worst place in the world to be a gamer (worse than censorship-laden Germany, apparently), Greece recently passed a law making it illegal to have an "electronic game" in either public or private places. This includes PC games, arcade games, console games, handheld games and even cell phone games, and the penalties are a fine of 5,000 to 75,000 euros and imprisonment of one to 12 months if caught. Why was this passed? Apparently to discourage gambling. The ZDNet UK article points out that this puts a halt to the planned CPL qualifying event, and Blue's News posted a link to this petition where people can express their outrage over the law.

Play time hits crunch time is the latest CNN Money Game Over column, looking at weird advertising tactics by game companies. Naming yourself Turok, Nintendo's 1.5-ton bowl of pasta to launch Mario Sunshine, and a Warcraft 3 wine among other things.

Well here is something that will certainly boggle a few people. The CPL which plays host to the largest Counter-Strike LAN tournaments in North America as well as the CAL which every competitive Counter-Strike player is aware of is making a pretty major change. A new requirement for all teams who wish to compete in CPL LAN tournaments is that they either be incorporated or have a corporate sponsor according to AVault and the new policy page. The purpose of this being to expedite payments to the winning teams

"We believe this policy will initiate a significant change within the entire eSports industry that will give teams with defined corporate structures a better chance to receive sponsorships and enter into partnerships with other organizations," said Munoz. He added that the CPL also thinks the policy change might curtail the current trend of transitory teams.

Setting up a corporate account is surprisingly trivial, there are even online places you can do this at. I imagine most teams who dont have corporate sponsors will just go with an LP since there arent really many liability concerns I imagine. Of course, if you dont play Counter-Strike then you probably dont care.. then leave this thread alone. :)

Although it seems as though the whole video games making kids psycho killers being untrue point is slowly being made (recent story), we've still got a few people out there hanging on to that whole thing. Here's a really interesting article by Henry Jenkins who has testified in front of the Senate Commerce Committee and FCC among other places about media influence (or lack of) on younger kids. He pretty much blew it recently on a Donahue showing, but here's what he feels he should have said..

I was ready to tear them apart on the evidence. Despite all of the publicity about school shootings, the rate of juvenile violent crime in the United States is currently at a 30-year low. When researchers interview people serving time for violent crimes, they find that they typically consume less media than the general population, not more. A 2001 surgeon general's report concluded that the strongest risk factors for school shootings centered around the quality of the child's home life and their mental stability, not their media exposure.

It's one of the better collections of information about the topic I've seen in quite a while.

A federal court yesterday refused to reinstate a $33million lawsuit that was trying to pin the blame for a high school shooting spree on videogames and movies. This is the latest in a series of victories for the videogame industry which has certainly come under some heavy scrutiny in the past few years. id Software specifically was represented in this case as they defended Quake, Doom, and Castle Wolfenstein.

''We find that it is simply too far a leap from shooting characters on a video screen (an activity undertaken by millions) to shooting people in a classroom (an activity undertaken by a handful, at most),'' Judge Danny Boggs said in the ruling.

According to a news post on GameSpy Daily, the German division of Eidos has announced that all their games will come on DVD as of 2003. Apparently Eidos is unhappy with the failure of copy protection on normal CDs, though how this will be better on DVD is not mentioned. Of course you can also put a lot more content on DVDs, eliminating the need for two, three or more CDs. It's unknown if Eidos UK and US will follow this decision. Do you think there are enough DVD-ROMs out there already to make this a good decision, and should other publishers follow?

Looks like the long awaited Aliens versus Predator movie is finally happening. And it's actually being based on the games by Rebellion and Monolith. Heading the projecting is Paul Anderson (Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil) who will write and direct. Not much else is known right now but it's probably going to be a while before we see this movie, especially since Anderson is currently working on a second Resident Evil movie. Thanks Dimmona.

In other game related movie news, Columbia Pictures has announced plans for a Return to Castle Wolfenstein movie (thanks HomeLAN Fed). Again, not much info here and the news article only lists a description of the game.

Well here's your lengthy article to read for the day. Popular Science of all places has a great piece looking at the whole 'mod making' thingie for PC games and talks about the people making them, what they are after, and what developers and ex-modmakers think about the whole thing. Plus goofy pictures. They start way back in the early days before even DOOM and then talk about games that have never existed like TF2.

Will Wright, creator of The Sims, the game in which players manage the lives of simulated humans, noticed that hackers began to modify his game as soon as it was released in 1999, creating mods (or patches, as they're also called) that would, for example, render all the characters nude. "If you look at the amount of stuff fans have created for the game," says Wright, "it probably outnumbers the stuff we've created, 9 to 1. I think it's great." Diabolically, Wright introduced his own mod to The Sims in 2000, a wee Trojan horse in the shape of a guinea pig. If not properly cared for, the rodent spread a deadly virus to its owner, a plot twist that Wright did not disclose until many characters were in their virtual graves.

Mods are a fad, just like the internet.

The Dallas Morning news is carrying a story today about John Romero and Tom Hall heading off to teach a class at UT Dallas on game programming and design.

"If it turns out pretty good, we can maybe talk to some of our friends that are here in Dallas that are working at game companies to maybe help out with some new classes, maybe set up some kind of a degree," he said.
[snip]
Mr. Romero said he and Mr. Hall will probably sprinkle some of the business insights they learned over the years into their classes, but he said they'll mostly stay away from formal instruction on how to create and run a game development company.

This is your chance to be really clever and take cheap shots at the former ION Storm guys to show off how funny you are, or you can discuss how gaming and the creation of games is becoming more and more a part of American society.

Just had this PDF pointed out to me which evaluates the industry sales figures going through the past several months with some pretty interesting information. That is of course if you're really interested in the financials and stuff of the industry. Pretty good stuff and here's the spoiler of the evening, the Playstation2 has sold a lot.

For some fun of the day, the guys at MindArk who are working on Project Entropia 3D got raided by Microsoft with a team of 70 marshalls. Apparently the belief at MindArk is that Microsoft ordered the raid to harass the team since they are in direct competition with Microsoft's Acheron's Call 2 game that is also in production.

Microsoft has accused MindArk of infringement on their software rights, stating that MindArk is willingly and unlawfully using over 600 programs without license. The raid on the MindArk headquarters in Gothenburg is believed to be the largest operation ever conducted by a Swedish court involving court officials from several cities on the west coast of Sweden as well as external personnel recruited for the purpose. [snip]

The PR makes some simply stupid claims about their website being more popular than Yahoo and MSN which make me cry. As well as some goofy chest beating about how much better their unreleased game is than Microsoft's unreleased game.. But we'll try to overlook that.

Seems to be some more progress (Thanks Eric) on the bill being fronted by Rep. Joe Baca which intends to punish retailers for renting or selling mature rated games to younger kids. He's gotten 34 members of the House of Representatives to rally behind his cause so far. Here's what an IDSA (game industry) is saying:

"Leading retailers are actively implementing systems, with the strong support of the IDSA, to restrict the sale of M-rated games to minors,"
[snip]
Baca's response:
"Some are doing it, and I commend those," he said. "But others have no policy in place. It's about profit, money. It's a $59 billion industry."

Anyone out there under the M rating age minimum had experience with retailers checking IDs?

The E3 Expo awards have been awarded. Looks like a sweep for DOOM3 which was kind of expected. When the nominations went out we had a fun little debate on what exactly these awards mean. It means what looked the coolest! It's unpossible to judge actual gameplay at the show but feel free to get your panties up in a bunch anyways. Here you go:

Best of show - DOOM3
Best PC game - DOOM3
Best action game - DOOM3
Special commendation for sound - DOOM3
Special commendation for graphics - DOOM3
Best adventure game - Splinter Cell
Best console game - Zelda
Best fighter game - Tekken 4
Best RPG game - Neverwinter Nights
Best racing game - Auto Modellista
Best sim game - Sims Online
Best sports game - NFL 2K3
Best strategy game - C&C Generals
Best puzzle game - Super Monkeyball 2
Best online game - StarWars Galaxies
Best original game - Psychonauts

Since we certainly have a big portion of aspiring game developers out there or at least people who are interested in how things go in the industry, here's some numbers you guys may find interesting. From a recent GDC survey:

- The average game programmer salary is $66,000.
- A technical director with 6 or more years experience earns an average of $104,000.
- Game artists earn an average of $61,000.
- A game designer with one year of experience earns an average of $52,000, with the highest salary reported at $300,000.
- Game producers earn an average of $76,000.
- Developer salaries are highest in California and Texas, where game development studios tend to cluster.
- Women in the game industry fare better than women in other industries, earning 89 cents on the dollar, exceeding the national average of 76 cents.

A little pondering of the future of videogaming for you folks this morning. A story on Wired looks at the online plans for the different console and PC companies and how they are hoping to make the mad cash.

"The same analysts, who today talk of online games generating $1.5 billion by 2005, forecast five years ago that online games would generate, you guessed it, $1.5 billion by 2002," said Douglas Lowenstein, IDSA's president, at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles last May.
[snip]
Today, the market is so unpredictable that the broadband providers -- AT&T, Microsoft, Earthlink and America Online -- that would most benefit from increased online gaming have shied away from reaching out to gamers. The companies are wary of players who hog bandwidth while playing graphic- and sound-intensive games for long periods of time.

Jason has covered some of the XBox Live plans in the past which are also interesting, here's a good one.

Here's a little piece from Forbes talking about the booming game market as well as the looming consolidation of companies that control the big share of things.

"It will be hard for a company with $100 million to $300 in revenue to compete," says EA Chairman and Chief Executive Larry Probst. "There will be fewer companies in the industry in three to five years." That works out perfectly for the next round of new consoles, which should be on the market in 2005. In the nearer term, this Christmas should be a huge selling season.

It almost seems like this carries over to the website industry as well. Luckily Shacknews revenue is just over $300million though so we're doing fine.