Square Enix reported their Q4 earnings and posted a 13.7 billion yen loss. SE cited “strategic initiatives such as a change in its development policy, organizational reforms, and redesign of some business models” for the extraordinary losses. Additionally, sluggish performance of arcade machines led to an operating loss for the Amusement segment of the business.
The SE report states that the company will revamp their strategy regarding the mobile space by targeting more development for tablets and smartphones.
The business environment surrounding the Group is in the midst of major changes, where smart devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs are spreading rapidly, while the console game markets in North America and Europe are increasingly competitive and oligopolistic. In light of such environmental changes, the Group is focusing all efforts on a substantial earnings improvement through driving reforms of business structure in order to establish new revenue base.
Strategic resource allocation will also see changes due to the company’s shift in focus. Less will be spent on new engine and technology development, while more money will be spent on marketing.
It’s a good thing Pinball FX 2 is so good, because I have a few complaints about its recent arrival to the PC. Imagine that. Someone complaining about the PC port of a fantastic console game.
Trion Worlds has announced that their MMO shooter Defiance will be getting five DLC offerings this year. The first pack, called Enter The Castithan, will enable new weapons for all players and access to Sieges which will be a new open-world game mode. People that pay $10 for the pack will additionally get access to play the Castithan Species as well as a new set of story missions. Nathan Richardsson, the executive producer, wrote that each DLC release will come with free benefits for everyone, as well as content only for players that buy the DLC.
We do our DLCs a bit differently with Defiance. Every time we do a DLC, of which we have 5 planned this year, we have a free component, a paid component and a store update. The free part is for everyone. We want people to be playing with their friends; we don’t like to isolate players.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be exclusive content in the DLCs, quite the contrary. The difference is that you can usually bring your friends with you. The catch is that they can’t directly benefit from all of it, like DLC specific loot or gain abilities.
In related news, the SyFy TV show has been picked up for another season. Thirteen new episodes will be created to air in 2014, which is good news for people that want their transmedia products to keep chugging along.
Wargaming has filed a lawsuit against Chinese companies Changyou.com Limited and Gamease for their Project Tank which seems to be a blatant copy of World of Tanks. Polygon reports that the complaint alleges that Project Tank (also known as Ground War Tanks and Tanks Ground War) “copied the plot, theme, dialogue, mood, setting, pace, and character of World of Tanks, in addition to copying specific features, items, tanks, and artwork.”
For their part, Gamease and Changyou claim that Wargaming is bullying them. No. I’m not kidding.
“We feel truly shocked and bullied by Wargaming. A giant company of the gaming industry who is apparently ‘threatened’ by a closed beta phase browser game aiming to provide a cheaper, fairer, and more accessible war game to players around the world.”
The filed documents point out examples of the copying. These include features unique to World of Tanks such as historical inaccuracies made for the sake of gameplay and specific tanks that never existed in reality. Wargaming also accuses Project Tank of violating their patent on dynamic matchmaking.
Too Human developer, Silicon Knights, has laid off almost all of their staff and sold most of their assets, but CFO Mike Mays told Polygon that the studio is “definitely alive” and “very busy.” Mays did not elaborate on what Silicon Knights is busy working on, or even where they are located, but an Ontario real estate agent confirmed that the offices in which Dennis Dyack’s former company used to work are empty and available for lease. Silicon Knights has not filed for bankruptcy as of yet.
Some of the old hardware (to include computers and desks) was sold to Dennis Dyack’s new studio Precursor Games, which is currently working on Shadow of the Eternals. Assets such as computers were wiped clean before the sale to ensure that no art or coding work from Silicon Knights would transfer to the new company as specified by the courts.
Silicon Knights still faces a $4.45 million judgment against it due to a successful lawsuit from Epic Games for breach of the Unreal Engine license agreement used during the development of Too Human.
Call it the little VR kit that could. The Oculus Rift virtual reality headset is getting support from all corners of gaming. Hobbyists to professional developers are coming forward with headset projects so we can watch videos of guys wearing a black box on their faces swing their heads around. Pretty good for a product that started out as a Kickstarter that still hasn’t actually been released for the general public.
After the jump, let’s check out some head-bobbin’ projects!Continue reading →
I played Metro 2033 on the Xbox 360, so maybe that’s why I don’t remember is looking nearly as good as Metro Last Light, which is often “why is this running at such an acceptable framerate??????” gorgeous. For instance, could Metro 2033 fit this many Nazis onto the screen at once? Not that I remember.
Balance is like the reverse of pornography: everyone can give you a definition, but no one seems to be able to know when they see it. Oh sure, they think they know. Plenty of people will tell you that this race is overpowered, or that class is imba, and people go on to repeat it until it takes on a life of its own. I’ve seen plenty of game reviews declare a game is balanced or imbalanced, often on release day when I’m not sure how anyone can know that for sure.
The problem with balance is that just because someone hasn’t won with a particular race, or strategy, or build, doesn’t mean they can’t. Likewise, just because you found a strategy that won a bunch of games early doesn’t mean there isn’t a much better strategy that someone just hasn’t figured out yet. Or more pointedly, that they haven’t used against you.
Sins of a Solar Empire developer Ironclad isn’t just working on Sins of a Dark Age, their upcoming contribution to the League of Legends genre. Today, they announced more DLC for their sci-fi RTS, which features equal parts smart gameplay and shamefully hot space porn. Okay, maybe it’s a 60/40 split, but I’m not sure which way.
Forbidden Worlds — a perfect name for more space porn — includes “four new planet types to colonize and exploit (Barren, Ferrus, Greenhouse, Oceanic), each created with beautiful high-res textures”. This will nicely round out the Earth, Hoth, and Tatooine planet types currently in the game. Settling the new planets types will require new techs, since you can’t very well build a city on the ocean without consulting scientists first. This means more techs on the already crowded tech trees. Science is hard work and boy, is there a lot of it!
But here’s the one that caught my eye.
New Planet Specialization System: Dedicate your worlds to either social or industrial output. Devoting your planet to social improvements will increase its population and culture, at the cost of trade income and ship production. Choosing an industrial path will limit your growth and culture, but make your planet a trading and ship building powerhouse.
Sins of a Solar Empire is mostly a fleet-based game of sci-fi naval combat. But if you want to get finicky (i.e. good), you have to master a touch of empire management by setting up trade routes, refineries, and culture centers. Planet specialization could fit neatly into that element of Sins.
And then there’s this:
Discover 40 new planet bonuses during your exploration of the galaxy, unlocking the dark past of the Sins’ universe.
New bonuses are great for empires who can spare the resources to explore worlds. I love that Sins expects me to decide whether to build a bigger fleet or buy another roll of the dice for an artifact. But what’s that bit about “unlocking the dark past”? Valley Without Wind was a mostly story-free game in which you unlocked rare shreds of backstory as you played. The universe of Sins of a Solar Empire is rich with gameplay; it’s about time the developers at Ironclad dribbled in bits of lore.
Forbidden Worlds will be available for $5 on June 5th.
The venture firms of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, The Mayfield Group, and others have invested more than $15 million towards OUYA, the $99 Android-powered console. The Wall Street Journal interviewed CEO Julie Uhrman for details about the new funding.
“The money’s going to be used predominantly for two things: one is to support game development. We’d love to bring exclusive titles to OUYA. We announced an exclusive game from Airtight Games last week, we have others coming from Tripwire Interactive and high-profile games from high-profile independent games like Fez from Phil Fish. Tim Schafer’s DoubleFine is bringing ‘A Broken Age,’ so it’ll allow us to do more of those things.”
“The second is to support demand. We’ve seen incredible demand from retail and from the website. Obviously it depends on the retailer. It’s gonna be no different than what any other product.”
OUYA also announced that although some early backer units were shipped, the official launch date of the console has been pushed back to June 25th to fix controller manufacturing issues. The OUYA initially created waves by raising over $8 million in its Kickstarter funding when the company had only asked for $950K.
Good news everybody! Epic’s Mark Rein told the audience of a roundtable discussion at the Game Horizon conference that Sony and Microsoft are investing in the kinds of gaming business models that core gamers rail against.
“The next-gen consoles are going to be fully embracing the free-to-play and these IAP-type business models,” Rein told the audience, “So in case you don’t know that I’m putting that out there. Sony and Microsoft are both going heavily in that area.”
Roundtable chair Matt Martin of GamesIndustry International said that’s what both platform holders are saying, but that “we still need to see some kind of evidence.”
Rein replied, “Well, I’m telling you. I’m telling you what they’re telling developers.”
The statement was immediately followed by the villainous guffaws of Ming the Merciless while gamers gnashed their teeth and wailed to the heavens.
That’s obviously a dog, right? Or is it? Uncle Misha’s shadow puppets are one of the early domestic scenes you’ll come across in Metro: Last Light. Well, as “domestic” as you can get given the survivors of an apocalypse huddled in subway tunnels. Since the Metro games largely take place in these tunnels, they get more of a pass than the usual corridor shooter for carefully parading you past scenes like this. A game like Mass Effect or Bioshock Infinite pretends to afford you the freedom to miss them.
I’m glad I didn’t miss Uncle Misha’s shadow puppets and particularly the reaction of the kids watching. Kids who don’t know what a bird is. Lovely bits of writing like this are part of what makes the Metro games worth playing. But then I watched the variety show just down the corridor from Uncle Misha. Two thumbs down. And I gave a stripper about twenty of my bullets to see if something interesting was going to happen. It didn’t. Not all domestic scenes are created equal.
Nothing beats rounding up your armies of cavalry and totally crushing your enemies in Civilization V. Take that Ghandi! But suppose you could create enough foofy statues and paintings to grind the other rulers under your heel? The Brave New World expansion doesn’t just add badass rulers like Shaka Zulu and Casimir, it also allows players to choke out their rivals with art!
Eurogamer sat down with Firaxis to look at how you can make Ghengis Khan cry over your culturally important works of art.
The way the new culture victory’s implemented may truly make it sing. Great works are stored in your cities in specific buildings – places like museums and amphitheatres – and many of these structures come with more than one slot. This leads to a compulsive little mini-game – the poker bit – where you get an additional boost to both culture and tourism when matching works that go together thematically
It’s not just about the avant-garde. Brave New World will also add a new wrinkle to the later game in the form of archaeology.
“What happens is that as the game starts up and you have initial battles with the barbarians in the early and classical era, we keep track of that, and it effectively gets written onto the map,” says Beach. “Then, when the first civilisation unlocks archaeology, we generate a new resource on the map – just like iron or uranium. But this new resource is antiquity sites, and it’s generated from the location data that’s been built up during the course of the game so far.”
I’ll finally be able to crush native barbarians and use the excuse that I’m just preserving their cultural history for future generations to learn about.
Also, if none of this does it for you, remember that Brave New World will let you create the XCOM squad (pictured) to destroy Paris.
Saints Row IV caps the Third Street Saints saga with gonzo craziness, random violence, and 100% pure wacky, if the trailer is any indication. The fourth installment promises to continue the descent into cartoon madness. Volition has made it very clear that their open-world crime game falls squarely on the juvenile side. (The GTA series is that way if you want serious.) The President of the United States happily kicks people in the balls and disintegrates aliens to a wub-wub soundtrack. I guess he ran as an Independent.
This week we consider the finer points of not starving in games like Minecraft, Terraria, and Don’t Starve. Then we discuss the latest and not-so-greatest in tower defense, why people are mad at Warren Spector, Diablo III’s Black Tuesday, how close we are and aren’t to getting to the heart of Peter Molyneux’s latest gimmick, who would win in a fight between Robin and Aqua Man, and why Victoria II is one of the Most Important Games of the 21st Century. Also, you haven’t heard Maureen Dowd’s name pronounced until you’ve heard it pronounced by Jason McMaster in this week’s message from our sponsor.
